Dear Reader,
 
This month's Penguin Classic, The House Behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chesnutt, has arrived! This month I have Penguin Book Bags to give away to seven lucky readers.

Preview this month's book, share the Classics with a friend and give them a great summer recipe, too. I've designed some fun flyers that tell people how to join the Classics Book Club and it includes one of my favorite recipes, Skunk Beans.

Whenever I take Skunk Beans to a potluck or picnic I bring the casserole dish home empty, and everyone wants a copy of the recipe. So mix up some Skunk Beans, share them with friends and hand them a flyer. Or take a bunch of flyers into work, church, the hairdresser, dentist, or doctor. You get the idea. Thanks for sharing the Classics Club and as a thank you for sharing I have some Penguin Book Bags for readers.
 
To enter this month's drawing, simply print out some flyers, distribute them, then click here and I'll enter your name in the drawing for your own Penguin Book Bag.
 
To print copies of the recipe flyer, click here.
 
Thanks for reading with me. It's so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher

P.S. You can get a discount on the Classics all year long at the Penguin site. Use the code "Dreader09" when you purchase Classics. Be sure to enter the free giveaway while you're there, too!

The House Behind the Cedars by Charles W. Chesnutt   Purchase online and save 30%   Click to start reading...

CHAPTER ONE

Time touches all things with destroying hand; and if he seem now and then to bestow the bloom of youth, the sap of spring, it is but a brief mockery, to be surely and swiftly followed by the wrinkles of old age, the dry leaves and bare branches of winter. And yet there are places where Time seems to linger lovingly long after youth has departed, and to which he seems loath to bring the evil day. Who has not known some even-tempered old man or woman who seemed to have drunk of the fountain of youth? Who has not seen somewhere an old town that, having long since ceased to grow, yet held its own without perceptible decline?

Some such trite reflection—as apposite to the subject as most random reflections are—passed through the mind of a young man who came out of the front door of the Patesville Hotel about nine o'clock one fine morning in spring, a few years after the Civil War, and started down Front Street toward the market-house. Arriving at the town late the previous evening, he had been driven up from the steamboat in a carriage, from which he had been able to distinguish only the shadowy outlines of the houses along the street; so that this morning walk was his first opportunity to see the town by daylight. He was dressed in a suit of linen duck—the day was warm—a panama straw hat, and patent leather shoes. In appearance he was tall, dark, with straight, black, lustrous hair, and very clean-cut, high-bred features. When he paused by the clerk's desk on his way out, to light his cigar, the day clerk, who had just come on duty, glanced at the register and read the last entry:

"'JOHN WARWICK, CLARENCE, SOUTH CAROLINA.'

"One of the South Ca'lina bigbugs, I reckon—probably in cotton, or turpentine." The gentleman from South Carolina, walking down the street, glanced about him with an eager look, in which curiosity and affection were mingled with a touch of bitterness. He saw little that was not familiar, or that he had not seen in his dreams a hundred times during the past ten years. There had been some changes, it is true, some melancholy changes, but scarcely anything by way of addition or improvement to counterbalance them. Here and there blackened and dismantled walls marked the place where handsome buildings once had stood, for Sherman's march to the sea had left its mark upon the town. The stores were mostly of brick, two stories high, joining one another after the manner of cities. Some of the names on the signs were familiar; others, including a number of Jewish names, were quite unknown to him.

Click to continue reading . . .