Books published by Houghton Mifflin

What does a ten-year-old girl do when her mother's best friend moves into her room ? beauty products, sheepdog, pantyhose, and all? Angel springs into action, looking for a man to marry Alyce and take her away, out of Angel's hair, house, and family. But along the way, Angel learns that more changes are in store, and she can handle them much better than she thought.

Nobody believed Hugsy Goode when he prophesied that a tunnel lay beneath the alley until--generations later--Nicholas (alias Copin) and Timothy (alias Tornid) decide to explore. And lo and behold, right under the vine-covered hole outside the house where Hugsy Goode used to live, they find an entrance to adventures beyond their wildest dreams. A sequel to The Alley.

Jenna and Jeremy knew their parents' marriage was in trouble. But no one could have predicted what would come next. Now with Mom dead and Dad in jail, Jenna and Jeremy must re-create a family of their own. But each guards a secret that could send their fragile new lives into a tailspin. Newbery Honor winner Julius Lester paints a dramatic portrait of a family forced to confront the unimaginable. Reader's guide included.

The proprietor of a bowling alley whose artist daughter paints only phalluses. A ninth-grade girl who marries in haste only to be faced with her husband's impotence. A libidinous poet who learns the meaning of harassment. The life and loves of a professional lawn-mower. These are just a few of the distinctive stories that make up Mark Winegardner's remarkable debut short-story collection. Winegardner, whose rich and epic novel Crooked River Burning gave the much-maligned city of Cleveland a fresh and vibrant aspect, now returns to the Midwest that he knows so intimately and casts a piercingly compassionate eye on its denizens. The result is a kaleidoscopic picture of a people who are arrogant and humble, faithful and disloyal, driven and floundering-a people who are finally, America itself.

With The Playful Way to Knowing Yourself, the creativity coach Roberta Allen at last reveals a practical method for changing, or simply enhancing, the way you look at yourself -- and others. Employing her signature combination of verbal directives and visual cues, Allen has created a dynamic workbook that prompts you to look at yourself from angles and perspectives you would not otherwise see. When traditional barriers are broken down through these refreshing, unpretentious, and gently probing exercises, the results can range from subtle to astonishing. At the very least, you will get surprising glimpses of yourself. At best, you will have deep insights that lead you to action or to accepting yourself just as you are.Allen's "playful way" approach has elicited praise from all corners -- from graduate school professors to best-selling authors to therapists to high school teachers to hundreds of former students. Whether used as a journal or a keepsake or a serious self-help tool, The Playful Way to Knowing Yourself will take you on a delightful, illuminating, and inevitably fulfilling personal journey. In the end you will know yourself better than ever before.

Denis Johnson meets Flannery O'Connor in this luminous collection of short stories about the collision of cultures, genders, and generations in the American Southwest. Set mainly amid Indian reservations and uranium mills, these twelve stories create a kaleidoscopic view of family, myth, love, landscape, and loss in a place where infinite skies and endless roads suggest a world of possibility, yet dreams are deceiving, like an oasis, just beyond reach. Whether it's a young woman pushed quite literally to the edge on a desolate mountain pass, an orphaned brother and sister trying to patch together an existence one stitch at a time, a cop who suspects his kleptomaniac wife is stealing from other people - materially and emotionally - or a wily roadside hypnotist whose alleged power is both wonderful and strange, Ann Cummins's characters want to transcend the circumstances of their lives, to believe in the eventuality of change. Again and again, Ann Cummins generates imagery of white-hot intensity and pushes the limits of both the human spirit and the short story form. Gritty, seductive, and always daring, this unforgettable collection puts forth a haunting new vision of hope and heartache in contemporary America and confirms the arrival of an important new voice.

Patricia T. O'Conner, the bestselling language maven who charmed legions of readers into civilizing their grammar (Woe Is I) and their writing (Words Fail Me), now drags proper English kicking and screaming into the Age of E-Mail. Do the old truths still apply? Yes, insist O'Conner and co-author Stewart Kellerman, her journalist husband. In fact, good English and good manners are even more important online. Thanks to the computer, we're writing again, but we'll have to upgrade our lousy language and social skills or suffer the cyber-consequences. With chapters on etiquette (To E or Not to E), beefier writing (The E-Mail Eunuch), deconstructing a message (All's Well That Sends Well), and civilized English (Grammar à la Modem), You Send Me delivers everything you need to connect with real people in the virtual world.