"In the late 8th to early 7th century BC, Scythian steppe warriors conquered Central Eurasia and peripheral regions in Iran and China, revolutionizing the local cultures. A nomadic herding people who lived with their cats in felt-tent homes on wheels, the Scythians spread their complex, mobile, highly innovative culture into the frontiers of Southeast Europe, the Near East, Central Asia, South Asia, and East Asia. They produced the world's first "global"...

""Her immediate concern was money." So begins the first story in Manuel Muñoz's dazzling new collection. In it, Delfina has moved from Texas to California's Central Valley with her husband and small son, and her isolation and desperation force her to take a risk that ends in profound betrayal. These exquisite stories are mostly set in the 1980s in the small towns that surround Fresno. With an unflinching hand, Muñoz depicts the Mexican and Mexican...

An early classic of espionage fiction. Through the cafes, trains and nighttime cities of Europe, Charles Latimer follows a twisting trail of drug-smugglers, thieves and assassins that will lead him to Dimitrios.

Tonina lives an idyllic life on a small island in the Caribbean hundreds of years before Europeans discovered it. But she has always been an outsider among her people. Unlike them, Tonina is tall and lean and light skinned, and her origins remain a mystery. Her adoptive parents had found her floating in a basket in the sea -- a sacrifice? A shipwreck? No one knows. When Tonina turns nineteen, her parents know she must return to the sea so that the...

Traces the history of the struggle to decipher the Mayan language, describing the conflicting approaches and explaining what Mayan inscriptions reveal about their culture.

Fifteen-year-old Milly Kaufman is an average American teenager until Pablo, a new student at her school, inspires her to search for her birth family in his native country.