A search for a missing church leads Homer to a century-old mystery Somehow, against all odds, Homer Kelly has become famous. After decades toiling in academic obscurity, the Harvard professor has a book on the bestseller list. To capitalize on his sudden fame, Homer's editor demands another book, and fast. Homer is working on Steeplechase, a tour of churches in and around his little patch of Massachusetts, and at his editor's request he goes searching...

In his scintillating debut, John Pipkin fictionalizes an ignoble event in noted naturalist Henry David Thoreau's life. One year before his historic retreat to the woods around Walden Pond, Thoreau struck a match and carelessly started a mammoth fire that would go on to consume 300 acres of forest and farmland.

Edison, named for its most famous resident, inventor Thomas Alva Edison, can be called the birthplace of modern life as we know it. It was here at his Menlo Park complex that Thomas Edison created the incandescent electric light bulb and 300 other inventions, providing residents with not only a place of employment but also a source of national pride. Known as Raritan Township until 1954, Edison was a slow-paced agricultural community until the twentieth...

Excerpts from Thoreau's Walden highlight his belief in the inherent value of living life in harmony with nature.

Austin Steward (1793—1869) was an African-American author and abolitionist. Born into slavery, he managed to escape from Virginia aged 21 and moved to Rochester, New York before settling in Canada. "Twenty-Two Years a Slave - And Forty Years a Freeman" is Steward's astonishing 1856 autobiography within which he recounts the travails of his harrowing life as a slave in America, as well as his experiences as a free man. A compelling and heart-breaking...