Watch your whiskers, Stilton: A mysterious one-eyed rat is trying to steal The Rodent's Gazette from under my nose! My manager came up with a plan to stop him. He arranged for me to appear on a TV quiz show. But if I lose I have to give up my tail! Shipwreck on the Pirate Islands: My sister, Thea, comes up with a new way to torment me. She's combined my two least favorite things: travel and ghosts! She heard rumors of a haunted pirate treasure buried...

Liana Finck's wonderful A Bintel Brief is a book about that lost world of pickle barrels and dybbcks, but it's more than that. It's also about how the ghostly past overlaps with and informs the present.

Variety lights: A beautiful and ambitious young woman joins a traveling troupe of third-rate vaudevillians and inadvertently causes jealousy and emotional crises. The white sheik: During a day in their honeymoon, a couple is separated by the city's lust and the desires it produces. I vitelloni: Details a year in the life of five young men lingering in post-adolescent limbo, dreaming of adventure and escape from their small town and struggling to...