Showing results for "The Gene" in Literary Fiction

FEBRUARY 29, 1916: After an unusually long pregnancy, war widow Lillian McKinley gives birth to a baby girl on leap day. Kit proves to be a healthy, happy, and intelligent child, but unnaturally slow to age—growing just one year older every four years. For decades, she and her family must stay on the move to protect her secret—from insatiable newshounds, from Nazi scientists, and from doctors and pharmaceutical companies. When Kit at last can pass for an adult, she must decide whether she wants to stay perpetually on the run or form lasting ties.

In The Lightkeepers, we follow Miranda, a nature photographer who travels to the Farallon Islands, an exotic and dangerous archipelago off the coast of California, for a one-year residency capturing the landscape. Her only companions are the scientists studying there, odd and quirky refugees from the mainland living in rustic conditions; they document the fish populations around the island, the bold trio of sharks called the Sisters that hunt the surrounding waters, and the overwhelming bird population....

A Girl of the Limberlost, a novel by the writer and naturalist Gene Stratton-Porter, was published in 1909 as the sequel to her earlier novel Freckles. The tale unfolds in and around the Limberlost Swamp of north-eastern Indiana and in the nearby town of Onabasha. The main character, Elnora Comstock, lives with her widowed mother, Katharine Comstock, on the edge of the wetlands. The embittered Katharine blames her daughter for the death of her husband, who was swallowed by quicksand.

The creator of the best-selling graphic novels American Born Chinese and Boxers & Saints, and now the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature, discusses the latest installment of Secret Coders with writer and illustrator Christopher Myers ( Fly!). Secret Coders: Paths & Portals is the second book in the wildly entertaining new series about a school whose mysteries are unraveled by a band of top-rate computer coding students.

While visiting his parents gravesite in the marshy mists of a village graveyard, Pip, a young orphan living with his older sister, encounters a shivering, limping convict on the run. In spite of his fear of the man, Pip befriends the convict and gives aid, an act that spells considerable consequences for Pip later in life. Fate intervenes and Pip is sent to the household of Miss Havisham, a wealthy and eccentric spinster. Pip shares the household with Miss Havisham and her beautiful, but cold, adopted daughter Estella.

Dracula begins with the journal of Jonathan Harker, a young solicitor on the way to Transylvania to give information to the mysterious Count Dracula about his new estate in London. Dracula takes the young man prisoner, and Jonathan sees many strange and evil things in the castle before escaping and fleeing into the night. He later decides that he must have been mad.

These 12 stories reflect the combat infantry experience of the Vietnam War--in the gritty “Tanks”, “Called of God”, and “Incubation Period”. There’s also the woman’s perspective of Arlene, a naive Red Cross volunteer or “Doughnut Dolly” in “A Man’s World".