Deborah Noyes

"In this collection of linked stories, Deborah Noyes digs . . . into what is known about the people in Barnum's . . . life, imagining their inner worlds against the . . . backdrop of his American Museum and circuses"--Dust jacket.

Pearl, the daughter of Hester Prynne from Nathaniel Hawthorne's "The Scarlet Letter," tries to make sense of her life and her self while a young girl in 1649 Boston.

In long-ago China, as a young princess prepares to leave her parents' kingdom to travel to far-off Khotan where she is to marry the king, she decides to surreptitiously take with her a precious reminder of home.

In her classic ghost story "Kerfol," Edith Wharton tells the tale of Anne de Barrigan, a young Frenchwoman convicted of murdering her husband, the jealous Yves de Cornault. The elderly lord was found dead on the stairs, apparently savaged by a pack of dogs, though there were no dogs -- no live dogs -- at Kerfol that day. In this remarkable collection of intertwining short stories, Deborah Noyes takes us back to the haunted manor and tells us Anne...

"A biography of Nellie Bly, the pioneering journalist whose showy but substantive stunts skyrocketed her to fame"-- Nellie Bly had ambitious goals for a woman at the end of the nineteenth century, when the few female journalists were relegated to writing columns about cleaning or fashion. The journalistic stunt that skyrocketed her to fame was feigning insanity, being committed to the notorious asylum on Blackwell's Island, and writing a shocking...

"Tells the story of the feverish race between two ... competitive scientists--Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh--to uncover [dinosaur] fossils in the newly opened Wild West. Between them, they discovered dozens of major dinosaur species and established the new discipline of paleontology in America. But their bitter thirty-year rivalry--a 'war' waged on wild plains and mountains, in tabloid newsprint, and in Congress--dramatically wrecked...

A little girl seeks to regain her father's attention during the tulipomania craze in seventeenth-century Holland.

"Before Amelia Earhart, there was Sophie Blanchard, the first woman to earn her living in the air. While no one knows the fate of Earhart, a terrified crowd of thousands looked on as French aeronaut Sophie Blanchard met her end in a tragic blaze of glory over the streets of Paris in 1819. But first, Blanchard made nearly 70 spectacular flights, survived a revolution, and become a court favorite of the emperor Napoleon (who gave her the title, Aeronaut...