Susan Gates

A slapstick thriller set in Florida, featuring oddball characters. They include a homeless man who lives in a tree, a student with a squirt gun playing a game called Killer, a couple of real killers, and a terrorist with a nuclear bomb in a suitcase.

Viridian is Paul Hoover's sixth collection of poetry and the first since his book-length work The Novel: A Poem was published in 1990. While The Novel: A Poem dealt with the dilemma of postmodern authorship, the poems in Viridian are conceptual pieces varied in style and subject matter. The poems in the first of three sections comment on the world through language and simultaneously explore how subject matter, from baseball to death to highway signs, is transformed by language. The middle section consists of longer poems in which meaning emerges through a filter of language. In the final and most lyrical section, several poems are based on Hoover's screenplay for Joseph Ramirez's 1994 independent film, Viridian. Many of these poems were used as voice-overs for the film's main character, a single mother searching for permanence. Their language is incantatory, as if poetry could fix a place for her in the world.

Daniel's new pet dog turns out to be a robot.

Oxford Reading Tree: TreeTops All Stars

Famous explorer Jack Nelson has shut himself inside his own bio-dome on the polluted Wastelands. System reports state that everything is normal, yet in an email to his son, jack raves that he is being attacked by giant spiders.

After finding old photographs of miners and a gigantic water wheel, both involving the abandoned lead mines near her English village, fifteen-year-old Ellen is obsessed with dreams and mental images tempting her to reenact a tragedy from century ago.