Focus on Grammar is a good text with communicative and contextual grammar activities. It's sometimes not as detailed as other books, such as Azar's grammar series. However, it has the best balance of any. The explanations are easy for the students to understand. Finally, the CD-ROMs that go along with it, while not perfect, are the best that are currently available.

"There is no complete probable," as Marguerite Young once wrote, but surely this provocative tribute more than hints at the genius of Marguerite Young and her lifelong approximation to reform the question of our essential aloneness: is there no completion to probability? -- the question that posits the why of the search for sense in this veil of tears we call life? Why splinter our complacent acceptance of binary reality, if not to form the question over and over, which can never be complete in its formulation, for the key is that there is no answer but the never-ending incantation of the probable, there is no absolute, as she says, "in lonely items of the real." The quest is the answer. The only answer. Miss Macintosh, My Darling, which I have been reading for the past 15 years, and arguably the greatest American fictive "realization" of this in the last half of the 20th century, is in actuality the greatest fictive approximation of the dreamworld we all share every night until that completion that takes us all: it is the hypertext of our collective unconscious, an imagining few writers have attempted to engage in fictive "items of the real." The artistry here is more than in the attempt: "but they had both already known the darkness." Marguerite Young was a beacon to that darkness... and knew. Thank you, Ms. Fuchs, for sharing with us memories of and tributes to this most remarkable human being.