English Text Books: Grade 10

Santiago, an Andalusian shepherd boy, sets out from his home in Spain to the Egyptian desert in search of buried treasure, but through his encounters with a Gypsy woman, a man who calls himself a king, and an Alchemist, he learns the value of the treasures found within himself.

Two boys, moved to the country for "re-education" as part of Mao's Cultural Revolution, find little to amuse them, but things change when they discover a stash of Western classics in Chinese translation and use the stories of Balzac to capture the attention of the beautiful daughter of the local tailor.

In this short story collection set in the Indian city of Kittur sometime between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991, Adiga creates a cast of characters--from a twelve-year old boy to a Marxist-Maoist Party member--who are immersed in class struggles and their own personal denouements.

After learning that books are a vital part of a culture he never knew, a book-burning official in a future fascist state clandestinely pursues reading until he is betrayed.

Loung Ung, one of seven children of a high-ranking government official in Phnom Penh, tells of her experiences after her family was forced to flee from Pol Pot's Khmer Rouge army, discussing her training as a child soldier in a work camp for orphans, and telling of how her surviving siblings were eventually reunited.

Presents the text of the 1881 play, set in a town on one of the fjords in Norway, in which Mrs. Helen Alving must confront her late husband's infidelity when her son, Oswald, falls in love with her maid, who is his half-sister, and starts showing signs of the venereal disease he inherited from his father.

After capturing a bank robber, nineteen-year-old cab driver Ed Kennedy begins receiving mysterious messages that direct him to addresses where people need help, which helps him start to get over his lifelong feeling of worthlessness.

Tells the story of Chris McCandless, a twenty-four-year-old who walked into the Alaskan wilderness on an idealistic journey and was found dead of starvation four months later. Attempts to discover what led the young man to that point.

A plane crashes on a desert island and the only survivors, a group of schoolboys, assemble on the beach and wait to be rescued. By day they inhabit a land of bright fantastic birds and dark blue seas, but at night their dreams are haunted by the image of a terrifying beast.

Fourteen-year-old LaVaughn, trying to earn the money for college, takes a job caring for the two children of Jolly, a single teenage mom, and must find the courage to make the right decision for all of them after Jolly is fired.

Presents Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald's translation of ancient Greek dramatist Sophocles' three Oedipus tragedies--"Oedipus Rex," "Oedipus at Colonus," and "Antigone"--and includes an index of names.

A novel in vignettes, in which Lakshmi, a thirteen-year-old girl from Nepal, is sold into prostitution in India.

'They think we are dirt because we clean their dirt' Bakha is a young man, proud and strong; even attractive. He is also an Untouchable in India's caste system. Sweeper and toilet-cleaner, the lowest of the low, he must warn others on the street so that he will not pollute them with his presence. As he seeks comfort in a wrapper of sweet jalebis, a violent encounter leads him to question his fate - and find an answer in the unlikeliest of places.

Balram Halwai is educated in the art of corruption when he is hired as the driver for the wealthiest man in his village in India, by witnessing his employers bribe and barter through his rear view mirror.