"The Mayor of Casterbridge" is an 1886 novel by the legendary English writer Thomas Hardy. One of Hardy's "Wessex" novel (a fictional region of Britain that Hardy invented), the book is generally acknowledged as one of the author's masterpieces. The story, set in the town of Casterbridge, concerns a married young farmer named Michael Henchard who, one drunken night, auctions off his wife Susan and baby daughter Elizabeth-Jane to a passing sailor,...

An independent businesswoman and single mother offers support to her neighbor and secret crush during a holiday season shaped by a prickly daughter's pregnancy, a painful secret, difficult past mistakes, and an unexpected second chance at love.

"When 13-year-old Jolie Aspern drops her phone onto the subway tracks in the springtime of 2011, how can she imagine it might bring her estranged dad, Ethan, crashing back into her life? Ethan is an ex-con and recovering addict who even in his more honest moments has difficulty seeing outside himself. But now he's starting to fear that Jolie's in the kind of trouble her mom, Sarah, could never understand. Convinced that he is the only one who can...

As You Like It (1599) is a comedy by William Shakespeare. As You Like It was probably inspired by Thomas Lodge's Rosalynd, Euphues Golden Legacie (1587), a story based on "The Tale of Gamelyn," a Middle English romance. For its deconstruction of traditional gender roles and depiction of homoeroticism, As You Like It remains an important and frequently performed play in Shakespeare's oeuvre. "All the world's a stage, / And all the men and women merely...

The novel "Little Dorrit", published originally between 1855 and 1857, is a work of satire on the shortcomings of the government and society of the period. Much of Dickens' ire is focused upon the institutions of debtor's prisons-in which people who owed money were imprisoned, unable to work, until they have repaid their debts. The representative prison in this case is the Marshalsea where the author's own father had been imprisoned. Most of Dickens'...

"A 16-year-old who was raised by her father to be the perfect assassin is dispatched on a mission across Europe, tracked by a ruthless intelligence agent and her operatives"--from www.imdb.com.

It's been a year since Billie Flanagan--a Berkeley mom with an enviable life--went on a solo hike in Desolation Wilderness and vanished from the trail. Her body was never found, just a shattered cellphone and a solitary hiking boot. Her husband and teenage daughter have been coping with Billie's death the best they can: Jonathan drinks as he works on a loving memoir about his marriage; Olive grows remote, from both her father and her friends at the...

"A father is without the means to pay for his daughter's medical treatment. As a last resort, he partners with a greedy co-worker to rob a casino. When things go awry they're forced to hijack a city bus"--www.imdb.com.