"The Three Musketeers" is a novel by Alexandre Dumas. It recounts the adventures of a young man named d'Artagnan after he leaves home to become a musketeer. D'Artagnan is not one of the musketeers of the title; those are his friends Athos, Porthos, and Aramis-inseparable friends who live by the motto, "One for all, and all for one".

Stephen King's first published novel offers a warning to bullies in the person of Carrie White, a high school misfit who wreaks her revenge in a now-famous prom scene. While the story is no less fresh today than it was in 1974, this audio edition promises a "brand-new introduction from the author," which is not, in fact, included in the recording. The story is narrated by Sissy Spacek, who played the title role in the movie. While Spacek perfectly understands the protagonist and amply projects both her hopes and misery, this listener found it unsettling to hear a story about Maine natives in a Maine town read in a clear Texas drawl. Spacek's consistency and acting ability somewhat make up for this incongruity, but King's "Mainiacs" still sound more performed than real.

Misery touches on several large themes: the state of possession by an evil being, the idea that art is an act in which the artist willingly becomes captive, the tortured condition of being a writer, and the fears attendant to becoming a "brand-name" bestselling author with legions of zealous fans. And yet it's a tight, highly resonant echo chamber of a book--one of King's shortest, and best novels ever. --Fiona Webster

If any of King's novels exemplifies his skill at portraying the concerns of his generation, it's The Dead Zone (1979). Although it contains a horrific subplot about a serial killer, it isn't strictly a horror novel. It's the story of an unassuming high school teacher, an Everyman, who suffers a gap in time--like a Rip Van Winkle who blacks out during the years 1970-75--and thus becomes acutely conscious of the way that American society is rapidly changing. He wakes up as well with a gap in his brain, the "dead zone" of the title. The zone gives him crippling headaches, but also grants him second sight, a talent he doesn't want and is reluctant to use. The crux of the novel concerns whether he will use that talent to alter the course of history.

In The Sun Dog the source of terror is a simple Polaroid camera owned by a 15-year-old boy in the small town of Castle Rock, Maine. No matter where Kevin Delevan aims the camera, it produces a photograph of an enormous, ugly, vicious looking dog. In each successive picture, the menacing creature draws nearer to the flat surface of the Polaroid film as if it intends to break through. When old Pop Merrill, the town's sharpest trader, gets wind of this phenomenon, he envisions a way to profit from it—but the Sun Dog, a beast that shouldn't exist at all, turns out to be a very dangerous investment.

Different Seasons is a collection of four novellas, markedly different in tone and subject, each on the theme of a journey. The first is a rich, satisfying, nonhorrific tale about an innocent man who carefully nurtures hope and devises a wily scheme to escape from prison. The second concerns a boy who discards his innocence by enticing an old man to travel with him into a reawakening of long-buried evil. In the third story, a writer looks back on the trek he took with three friends on the brink of adolescence to find another boy's corpse. The trip becomes a character-rich rite of passage from youth to maturity.

"Once upon a time, there was a prostitute called Maria"-thus begins Coelho's latest novel, a book that cannot decide whether it wants to be fairy tale or saga of sexual discovery, so ends up satisfying the demands of neither. In his dedication, bestselling Brazilian novelist Coelho (The Alchemist) tells readers that his book will deal with issues that are "harsh, difficult, shocking," but neither his tame forays into S&M nor his rather technical observations about female anatomy and the sad but hardly new fact that many women are dissatisfied with their sex lives will do much to shock American readers.

More critical writing exists on The Great Gatsby than on any other work of American fiction. This Columbia Critical Guide introduces and contextualizes the key critical debates surrounding Fitzgerald?s novel. The extracts and essays included here reflect The Great Gatsby?s place as one of the first American novels to make significant use of modernist techniques and explore the influence of this "Lost Generation" work on later American writings. In considering secondary sources from the twenties to the present, this smart and sophisticated study guide offers readers an invaluable resource on this complex rendering of a moment in American history.

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The high-energy tale of how two socially awkward Ivy Leaguers, trying to increase their chances with the opposite sex, ended up creating Facebook. Eduardo Saverin and Mark Zuckerberg were Harvard undergraduates and best friends–outsiders at a school filled with polished prep-school grads and long-time legacies. They shared both academic brilliance in math and a geeky awkwardness with women. Eduardo figured their ticket to social acceptance–and sexual success–was getting invited to join one of the university’s Final Clubs, a constellation of elite societies that had groomed generations of the most powerful men in the world and ranked on top of the inflexible hierarchy at Harvard.

MediaMonkey is a music manager and media jukebox for serious music collectors and iPod users. It catalogs your CDs, OGG, WMA, MPC, FLAC, APE, WAV and MP3 audio files. It looks up missing Album Art and track information via Freedb and the web, and includes an intelligent tag editor and an automated file and directory renamer to organize your music library. It includes a CD ripper, CD/DVD Burner, and audio converter for saving music, and manual or automated playlist editors for creating music mixes. Its player automatically adjusts volume levels so that you don't have continually fiddle with the volume control and supports hundreds of Winamp plug-ins and visualizations; or if you prefer, it can use Winamp as the default player.It also includes portable audio device synchronization that allows you to synch tracks and play lists with devices such as the iPod and other portable audio devices.

Tolkien's masterpiece, and arguably the greatest fantasy work in Western literature, is a massive and complex epic simultaneously about the history of the imaginary kingdom of Middle Earth and the difficult quest of a group of adventurers as they strike out against the dark forces of Sauron, the Dark Lord.

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