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Is all our Life, then but a dream.Seen faintly in the goldern gleam.Athwart Time's dark resistless stream?

美国女作家弗朗西丝·霍奇森·伯内特创作的儿童文学作品。它是近百年来畅销不衰的经典儿童小说，多次被改编成影视作品，并在中国有多个图书版本。内容简介：庄园的主人克莱文先生在爱妻过世之后，变得阴郁古怪、消沉遁世，掩埋了花园的钥匙，十年不曾允许任何人出人花园，想借此阻断对亡妻的思念。他每次见到长着和妈妈一样漂亮面容的儿子柯林，都会引起更大的悲伤，于是他选择逃避，终年在外漂泊。霍乱中父母双亡的玛丽一夜之间变成孤儿，被从印度送往英国约克郡克莱文姑父的庄园生活，她从小性情乖戾，这个陌生的环境更使她倍感孤独落寞，她讨厌所有的人，当然也不知道自己被人不喜欢。她在知更鸟的指引下找到了尘封已久的秘密花园的钥匙。秘密花园里一片萧瑟。

 Anne Shirley was curled up on the window-seat of Theodora Dix's sitting-room one Saturday evening looking dreamily afar at some fair starland beyond the hills of sunset. Anne was visiting for a fortnight of her vacation at Echo Lodge where Mr. and Mrs. Stephen Irving were spending the summer and she often ran over to the old Dix homestead to chat for awhile with Theodora.

The Devil's Dictionary, by Ambrose Bierce, is a satirical book published in 1911. It offers reinterpretations of terms in the English language which lampoon cant and political double-talk. The Devil's Dictionary has inspired many imitations both in its day and more recently. Recent examples include The Computer Contradictionary, The Devil's Dictionary X and Lucifer's Lexicon. The origins of the Devil's Dictionary can be traced to when Ambrose Bierce was a columnist in the San Francisco-based News Letter, a small weekly financial magazine which had been founded by Frederick Marriott in the late 1850s. The News Letter, although a serious magazine aimed at businessmen, contained a page set aside for informal satirical content, entitled The Town Crier. Bierce was hired as this page's editor in December 1868, writing with satire, irreverence and a lack of inhibition, thus becoming known as the 'laughing devil' of San Francisco. Although the origins of the Devil's Dictionary are normally placed in 1881 (the point at which Bierce himself said it began) the idea started in August 1869 when Bierce, short of topics to write about and having recently bought a new copy of Webster's Unabridged dictionary, suggested the possibility of writing a "Comic Dictionary". He quoted the entry from Webster's for Viceregent and italicised the section, Kings are sometimes called God's viceregents. It is to be wished they would always deserve the appellation He then suggested how Noah Webster might have used his talent in a comic form and it was here that the idea of a Comic Dictionary was born. The idea manifested itself in 1875 when Bierce, who had resigned as the Town Crier and had spent 3 years in London, returned to San Francisco in the hope of regaining his earlier journalistic post in the News Letter. He sent two submissions to the editor of the News Letter, both written under aliases, one of which was entitled The Demon's Dictionary and contained 48 words with new definitions in Bierce's trademark style of acerbic wit. Although forgotten by Ambrose Bierce in his compiling of the Devil's Dictionary, these entries were made available in the Enlarged Devil's Dictionary, which was first published in 1967.　　Bierce,Ambrose，1842/1914，是一位美国记者和作家，他的短篇小说最为著名，这些小说为人们展示了一个刻薄、残酷和可怕世界。他的后半生是在无聊和悲伤中度过的，这在他的最著名的《魔鬼辞典》中有所验证。这本书在那些对世界拥有玩世不恭态度的人中相当流行。 　　《魔鬼辞典》里许多简明的定义都充满着智慧而又幽默的语调。该书最早是以《讽刺家词典》(The Cynic's Word Book)(1906)名称出版，并于1991年改为现名出版。使得词语的定义令人快愉的原因是它们反映了比尔斯那怀疑、悲观和幽默的深沉感情。苦涩的比尔斯，就象人们称呼他那样，写了许多作品，其中包括名为《战士与平民的故事》(1891)的故事精选集。在1913年，比尔斯声明说，他已经厌恶美国式的文明。他已经购置了一套马车，并驱车前往饱经战争创伤的墨西哥心脏，去寻找“真、善、美”。但没有人知道他的未来怎样。

伯斯东庄园的主人道格拉斯不幸惨遭杀害，死状奇惨无比，头颅几乎被枪击得粉碎，四周血肉模糊，惨不忍睹！除了死者左手上的结婚戒指和凶杀现场的一只哑铃不翼而飞外，现场并没有遗失什么东西。此外，尸体旁边留有卡片，上面潦草地写着“V.V.341”的字样。这令案子更为扑朔迷离：这张卡片难道是凶手留下来的吗？它代表什么意义？“恐怖谷”曾令道格拉斯惴惴不安。“恐怖谷”究竟是个怎样的地方？道格拉斯的死与“恐怖谷”有什么关系吗？就让福尔摩斯带你解开一个又一个谜团吧。

A Bend in the Road tells the story of Miles Ryan and Sarah Andrews. It is written in both first and third-person, the primary third-person narrative emphasis is equally split between Miles's and Sarah's stories. The first person narrator remains unknown through the majority of the novel; however, the first person narrator is somehow stated in the story to be the one who was the driver who killed Miles' wife, Missy Ryan. The majority of the story takes place in 1988. Miles Ryan, a deputy sheriff in the North Carolina town of New Bern, loses his wife Missy in a hit-and-run accident. He wants to bring the driver that killed his wife to justice. Miles meets his son's teacher Sarah Andrews, who moved to his town from Baltimore after a difficult divorce. Drawn together by Jonah's school troubles, the two start to date and eventually fall in love. The most significant date is when they go on the town's Ghost Walk and listen to a ghost story about a couple who lived in war times. The couple were forbidden to see each other, however, they communicated through the use of candles, which signified that they missed and loved each other. The man is killed by an order of the girl's father, sending the girl into depression. The night before, he had sent her a letter, asking her to marry him. Her response would be two candles for yes or one candle for no. She lights two candles and commits suicide over grief of her lost love. Everything is going perfect between the two. Miles and Jonah meets Sarah's entire family and is somewhat sure of his future with her.

When a new play was required at short notice for a court occasion in 1597, Shakespeare created The Merry Wives of Windsor, a warm-hearted and spirited "citizen comedy" filled with boisterous action, situational irony, rich characterization--and the likes of Falstaff, Pistol, Mistress Quickly, and Justice Shallow. In his introduction and commentary, Craik examines a wide range of topics, including the play's probable occasion, its relationship to Shakespeare's English history plays and to other sources, its textual history, with particular reference to the widely diverging 1623 Folio and 1602 Quarto, and its quality as drama. In light of various topical, critical, and theatrical interpretations of the play, Craik pays particular attention to defining the literal sense, proposing some new readings, and evoking the many aspects of the stage business.

One of nineteenth-century novelist George MacDonald's most important works, Phantastes tells the story of its narrator's dreamlike adventures in fairyland, masterfully recounted to convey a sense of profound sadness and a poignant longing for death. Introduced by C.S. "I was dead, and right content," the narrator says in the penultimate chapter of Phantastes. C.S. Lewis said that upon reading this astonishing 19th-century fairy tale he "had crossed a great frontier," and numerous others both before and since have felt similarly. In MacDonald's fairy tales, both those for children and (like this one) those for adults, the "fairy land" clearly represents the spiritual world, or our own world revealed in all of its depth and meaning. At times almost forthrightly allegorical, at other times richly dreamlike (and indeed having a close connection to the symbolic world of dreams), this story of a young man who finds himself on a long journey through a land of fantasy is more truly the story of the spiritual quest that is at the core of his life's work, a quest that must end with the ultimate surrender of the self. The glory of MacDonald's work is that this surrender is both hard won (or lost!) and yet rippling with joy when at last experienced. As the narrator says of a heavenly woman in this tale, "She knew something too good to be told." One senses the same of the author himself.