Here come the Cream Puffs!  Nate and his baseball team, saddled with the most embarrassing moniker in Little League history, want to show the world they're not just a bunch of cupcakes. But it won't be easy. Their opponents mock them. The local sports section misprints Nate's name—THREE TIMES. And now, on the day of the big game, illness and injuries have the team facing a crushing defeat . . . unless the unlikeliest Cream Puff of all can

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Sixth grade can be a tension convention for Nate Wright. His baseball team's just been given the lamest name in Little League history; he's on the verge of becoming know-it-all Gina's personal servant for a day; and Spitsy, the closest thing he has to a dog of his own, is in love with a CAT. Yup, Nate's up to his ears in stress.
Luckily, the perfect remedy is close at hand: an empty plastic soda bottle. All Nate has to do is drum it gently

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Nate Wright's a winner—in his own mind, anyway. So when things go wrong, he's at a loss to explain why. How does his soccer team manage to lose to a school with a sixty-game winless streak? What's he doing at the movies on a Friday night . . . with GINA? And why, oh why is one of his classmates (hint: she's Nate's dream girl) suddenly moving 3,000 miles away? It's all enough to make a sixth-grade superstar feel . . . well, not so super.

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This beautiful new edition features unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary mate- rial, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder. "On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714,the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." With this celebrated sentence Thornton Wilder begins The Bridge of San Luis Rey, one of the towering achievements in American fiction and a novel...

While Laura Ingalls grows up in a little house on the western prairie, Almanzo Wilder is living on a big farm in New York State. Almanzo and his brother and sisters help with the summer planting and fall harvest. In winter there is wood to be chopped and great slabs of ice to be cut from the river and stored. Almanzo wishes for just one thing--his very own horse--but he must prove that he is ready for such a big responsibility.

Sixteen-year-old Anne, mischievous and spirited as ever, returns to Avonlea to teach in the village school where she herself was taught.

Ma and the girls follow Pa west by train where they make their home at a rough railroad camp and plan for their own homestead.

Laura and her family move to Minnesota where they live in a dugout until a new house is built and face misfortunes caused by flood, blizzard, and grasshoppers.

At their holiday home in Cornwall, a distant lighthouse holds a haunting attraction for the members of an Edwardian family as disillusionment, turmoil, and a world on the brink of war plague the family's relationships.