National Network for Equitable Library Service

Vermont, 1972. Carole LaPorte has a satisfying, ordinary life. She cares for her children, balances the books for the family's auto shop, and laughs when her husband slow dances her across the kitchen floor. Her tragic childhood might have happened to someone else. But now her mind is playing tricks on her. The accounts won't reconcile and the murmuring she hears isn't the television. She ought to seek help, but she's terrified of being locked away in a mental hospital like her mother, Solange.

Originally published in a 1905 edition of The New York Sunday World, The Gift of the Magi tells the story of a young couple at Christmas when money is tight, offering important insight into the nature of gift-giving. A well-known example of comic irony, it has been widely adapted as everything from an Off-Broadway show to television episodes. This recording of The Gift of the Magi was recorded as part of Dreamscape's Classic Christmas Stories: A Collection of Timeless Holiday Tales.

Originally published in 1901, A Christmas Inspiration centers around a group of girls spending Christmas at a boarding-house. Once they realize that Miss Allen did not receive any gifts or letters, they come up with a plan to make her Christmas a happy one. This version of A Christmas Inspiration was recorded as part of Dreamscape's Classic Christmas Stories: A Collection of Timeless Holiday Tales.

This is the first complete English-language translation of a classic of Yiddish literature, one of the great comic novels of the 20th century. The Zelmenyaners describes the travails of a Jewish family in Minsk that is torn asunder by the new Soviet reality. Four generations are depicted in riveting and often uproarious detail as they face the profound changes brought on by the demands of the Soviet regime and its collectivist, radical secularism.

When Teresa was a little girl, she dreamed of dark-eyed, fearless heroes on white horses who would sweep her away. But now, as the grown-up Teresa negotiates life and love, she begins to understand that fairy tales don't always come true.

The matriarch of a Long Island clan with a suicidal son and a defiant granddaughter, Esther has hired a Russian landscaper to watch over the family and the grounds of their waterfront estate. But he has been watching Esther, too. And his love for her is growing wild enough to uproot them all.

One hundred fifty years of Roses' Tolivers, Warwicks, and DuMonts. We begin in the antebellum South, where Silas Toliver, deprived of his inheritance, joins up with his best friend Jeremy Warwick to plan a wagon train expedition to the promise of a new territory called Texas.

In this stand-alone sequel to The Mealworm Diaries, Aaron is anxiously waiting for his father to return for the first time since Aaron's mother's death eight years earlier. Aaron works hard with a counselor at school, but he still has problems getting along with and understanding other kids, and he's worried that his dad will think he's weird. As well as having to confront Tufan, the class bully, Aaron must find ways to cope with the fact that his dad now has a pregnant wife and his beloved Gran needs surgery.

Asia has lived with elderly Ira and his wife Maddy on their farm for as long as she can remember. When Ira has a heart attack Asia's world is turned upside down. Faced with the possibility of losing the only family she has ever known, Asia is frightened but fascinated by the appearance of a ghost that only she can see and hear.

When her mother died two years earlier, Izzy thought the world would change in some identifiable way, but it didn't. It didn't even slow down. Along with constantly watching her brother, Jason, to ensure he didn't repeat his involvement with drugs, Izzy has managed to get through school and the rest of her life using her mother's endless "rules" as guidance, even making up some of her own as she goes along. When her father starts dating again and then decides to get married, Izzy is unprepared.