Books published by Houghton Mifflin

Andy and Tamika can't wait for a weekend of fun in the big city, but Tamika's aunt Mandy has planned trips to boring museums and fancy restaurants. Even worse, someone is dropping hamsters off the top of Aunt Mandy's building, causing trouble everywhere . . . and getting Andy blamed. It's a big-city mystery that only Andy Russell can solve!

One of America's best loved and most distinguished poets has chosen from the vast treasure trove of his published work these verses, which he thinks are particularly suited to children, and to them he has added sixteen new poems. The reader may roam far and wide in this collection, among such groups of poems as "Corn Belt", "Blossom Themes", and "Wind, Sea, and Sky", yet never exhaust the riches of the mind and heart and imagination that Mr. Sandburg offers.Here is America, here is humor, here are the deep rolling cadences, the contagious delight in words and sounds, the imaginative fire that make Carl Sandburg's poetry outstanding. It is a collection to enchant both young and old.

A representative selection from the work of one of America's most distinguished writers.

Beyond the techniques and training, baseball begins with one player facing another and the psychological battle that they wage-the head game. In his critically acclaimed and bestselling new book, Roger Kahn presents the story of this supreme war of wits and the people who changed the course of baseball by playing, what he calls, chess at 90 miles an hour. In The Head Game, Kahn investigates not only grips, tactics, and physics, but also the intelligence, maturity, and competitive fire that has inspired some of the greatest hurlers in history.By covering renowned pitchers and pitching minds-from Christy Mathewson, Cy Young, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson, and Bruce Sutter to today's reigning pitching coach, Leo Mazzone-Roger Kahn sheds new light on baseball's most pivotal contest. A delightful and edifying tour of America's favorite pastime seen through the pitcher's eyes, The Head Game "is as lively and familiar and old-shoe as the game itself, even today" (Los Angeles Times).

Twelve stories about the African experience of slavery in America, by the National Book Award-winning novelist.Nothing has had as profound an effect on American life as slavery. For blacks and whites alike, the experience has left us with a conflicted and contradictory history. Now, famed novelist Charles Johnson, whose Middle Passage won the National Book Award, presents a dozen tales of the effects and experience of slavery, each based on historical fact, and each about those Africans who arrived on our shores in shackles. From Martha Washington's management of her slaves, bequeathed to her at the death of the first president, to a boy chained in the bowels of a ship plying the infamous passage from Africa to the South laden with human cargo, from a lynching in Indiana to a hunter of escaped slaves searching the Boston market for his quarry, from an early Quaker meeting exploring resettlement in Africa to the day after Emancipation-the voices, terrors, and savagery of slavery come vividly and unforgettably to life. These stories, told by a master storyteller, transcend history even as they present it, and retell the mythic proportions of a historical period with astounding realism and beauty, power, and emotion.

From the critically acclaimed author of The Odd Sea, a poignant and magical coming-of-age story that "deftly explores the mysteries of love and loss" (Time)It's the early 1980s and the suburban streets of New Jersey are filled with Bruce Springsteen-era teenagers searching for answers. Anthony Rubin is a rising high school hockey star faced with a family that is falling apart. His father has had an affair with Anthony's best friend's mother and his own mother has abandoned the family for Florida. Confronted with an overwhelming sense of loss, Anthony focuses on the one thing he feels he can save-the tough-talking daughter of a reputed Mafioso, a Juliet to his Romeo. Merging the commonplace and the mythological, Frederick Reiken's richly layered second novel presents unforgettable characters whose lives seem at once familiar and archetypal. Filled with joy as well as heartbreak, The Lost Legends of New Jersey is a rich, resonant tale of the extraordinary magic that can arise within ordinary lives.

Young wizards Nita and Kit face their most terrifying challenge yet: Nita's little sister, Dairine. Not only is Dairine far too smart for a ten-year-old, she also has recently become a wizard, and worse yet, a wizard with almost limitless power. When Dairine's computerized wizard's manual glibly sends her off on her novice adventure-her Ordeal-Kit and Nita end up chasing her across the galaxy, trying to catch up with Dairine before she gets into trouble so deep that not even her brains can rescue her.

A translation of the first two volumes of Uwe Johnson's Jahrestage.