Amid the turmoil of modern Damascus, one teenage boy finds his political voice in a message of rebellion that echoes throughout Syria and as far away as Western Europe. Inspired by his dearest friend, old Uncle Salim, he begins a journal to record his thoughts and impressions of family, friends, life at school, and his growing feelings for his girlfriend, Nadia. Soon the hidden diary becomes more than just a way to remember his daily adventures; on its pages he explores his frustration with the government injustices he witnesses. His courage and ingenuity finally find an outlet when he and his friends begin a subversive underground newspaper. Warmed by a fine sense of humor, this novel is at once a moving love story and a passionate testimony to the difficult and committed actions being taken by young people around the world.

The space-faring Yherajk have come to Earth to meet us and to begin humanity's first interstellar friendship. There's just one problem: They're hideously ugly and they smell like rotting fish.

So getting humanity's trust is a challenge. The Yherajk need someone who can help them close the deal.

Enter Thomas Stein, who knows something about closing deals. He's one of Hollywood's hottest young agents. But although Stein may have just concluded the biggest deal of his career, it's quite another thing to negotiate for an entire alien race. To earn his percentage this time, he's going to need all the smarts, skills, and wits he can muster.

Madeleine Cost is working to become the youngest person ever to win the Archibald Prize for portraiture. Her elusive cousin Tyler is the perfect subject: androgynous, beautiful, and famous. All she needs to do is pin him down for the sittings.

None of her plans factored in the Spires: featureless, impossible, spearing into the hearts of cities across the world – and spraying clouds of sparkling dust into the wind.

Is it an alien invasion? Germ warfare? They are questions everyone on Earth would like answered, but Madeleine has a more immediate problem. At Ground Zero of the Sydney Spire, beneath the collapsed ruin of St James Station, she must make it to the surface before she can hope to find out if the world is ending.

When the affable owner of a checkered-tablecloth restaurant in Little Italy is cut down by the bullets of a pair of ski-masked thugs, Fifth Precinct Police Detective Reardon has his hands too full to give a damn about some odd things going on uptown. For instance, why does a noted Madison Avenue art lover suddenly decide to sell his entire collection in an effort to raise a cool million? And why was a well-known Arab oil magnate assassinated?

Almost too late, Reardon sees the connection between the deaths of a multi-millionaire and a smalltime restaurateur, and the fluctuations in the international markets for crude oil, fine art, and precious metals. And now that he knows the truth, just how long has he got to live?

ANOTHER PART OF THE CITY is a brilliant, hard-hitting foray into Manhattan’s tangled web of twisting downtown streets and crooked uptown lives.

The acclaimed author of Eternity offers a compelling sequel to his visionary Forge of God. Earth is gone, completely destroyed by a ruthless alien. Hundreds of years away, a handful of exiles hurtles through the galaxies in a quest for revenge, armed with powers they do not understand—and determined to find and punish the killers who murdered their world.

The Mayor?

"Yes", Smith said, "he's taken over the city. He has given an open invitation to organized crime to move its operations into Bay City. He's opening the piers so that contraband can move in and out easily, so drugs can flow freely. Mob interests are coming from all over the country..setting up cutting rooms and jewelry factories for stolen diamonds..printing facilities for counterfeit stock certificates and securities..major counting rooms for what may become the nation's biggest illegal gambling operations. It'll be the crime capital of the U.S. within a few months!"

"Well, there's capitalism at work again. Proving that our system works best," said Remo.

"..And we want you and Chiun to keep him alive. Of course, he won't know who you are or who you work for," said Smith.

"Or why. Which includes us, as usual. But that's O.K., if we can't kill him with kindness, then we'll CURE him," said Remo.

"Let's not get into that," gasped Smith.

“I really don’t know why I’m surprised anymore to find that the quality of every story is so good!”

A dozen science fiction writers, including New York Times and USA Today bestselling authors, offer remarkable tales in this third collection of space opera stories presented under the Beyond the Stars banner.

These twelve stories showcase strange new worlds, alien life forms, and deep space battles.

Come with us to where the legends are born… at galaxy’s edge.

A young woman’s heady encounter with the new Russia, as she and the country thrill to their first taste of freedom

It is September 1991 and the dismantling of the Soviet Union is under way. In Voronezh, a provincial town famous for its loamy black earth, a sense of lightheartedness—part fear, part exhilaration—pervades. The people conquer uncertainty, hunger, and -20 degree temperatures by drinking huge quantities of black-market vodka and reveling in their new-found sexual freedom.

Black Earth City is Charlotte Hobson’s record of this tumultuous time. An irresistible guide, she brings us into the cramped, rundown Hostel No. 4, where international students and locals congregate. We meet Yakov, who blows half-a-million rubles on a taxi to see a girl in Minsk; Lola, who sleeps with her peers for a share of their dinner; Viktor, with his brutal memories of military service; and Mitya, Hobson’s wild and optimistic lover whose gradual disillusion—and dissolution—mirrors his country’s dramatic lurch from euphoria to despair.

At once loving and sharp-edged, tender and brave, Black Earth City reveals a world and a woman as they open up to life.

The tragicomedy of a young man in NYC, struggling with the reality of his mother's death, alienation and the seductive pull of drugs.

***

All messed up and no place to go. It's six a.m., the party's over and reality is threatening to intervene in the frenetic, powder-fuelled existence of a young man who should have everything but might just end up with nothing at all…

His wife, a famous model, has left him. His job at a Prestigious Magazine can't last much longer. And the life he's been living in Manhattan's fast lane as if he owned it is about to end. Even a bright young man eventually has to face the biggest question of them all: which is worse, living an illusion – or losing it?

Broken Stars, edited by multi award-winning writer Ken Liu—translator of the bestselling and Hugo Award-winning novel The Three Body Problem by acclaimed Chinese author Cixin Liu—is his second thought-provoking anthology of Chinese short speculative fiction. Following Invisible Planets, Liu has now assembled the most comprehensive collection yet available in the English language, sure to thrill and gratify readers developing a taste and excitement for Chinese SF.

Some of the included authors are already familiar to readers in the West (Liu Cixin and Hao Jingfang, both Hugo winners); some are publishing in English for the first time. Because of the growing interest in newer SFF from China, virtually every story here was first published in Chinese in the 2010s.

The stories span the range from short-shorts to novellas, and evoke every hue on the emotional spectrum. Besides stories firmly entrenched in subgenres familiar to Western SFF readers such as hard SF, cyberpunk, science fantasy, and space opera, the anthology also includes stories that showcase deeper ties to Chinese culture: alternate Chinese history, chuanyue time travel, satire with historical and contemporary allusions that are likely unknown to the average Western reader. While the anthology makes no claim or attempt to be “representative” or “comprehensive,” it demonstrates the vibrancy and diversity of science fiction being written in China at this moment.

In addition, three essays at the end of the book explore the history of Chinese science fiction publishing, the state of contemporary Chinese fandom, and how the growing interest in science fiction in China has impacted writers who had long labored in obscurity.

The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta.

Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels — a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity.

Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.

Owen and Duncan are childhood friends who’ve grown up in picturesque Niagara Falls — known to them by the grittier name Cataract City. As the two know well, there’s more to the bordertown than meets the eye: behind the gaudy storefronts and sidewalk vendors, past the hawkers of tourist T-shirts and cheap souvenirs live the real people who scrape together a living by toiling at the Bisk, the local cookie factory. And then there are the truly desperate, those who find themselves drawn to the borderline and a world of dog-racing, bare-knuckle fighting, and night-time smuggling.

Owen and Duncan think they are different: both dream of escape, a longing made more urgent by a near-death incident in childhood that sealed their bond. But in adulthood their paths diverge, and as Duncan, the less privileged, falls deep into the town’s underworld, he and Owen become reluctant adversaries at opposite ends of the law. At stake is not only survival and escape, but a lifelong friendship that can only be broken at an unthinkable price.

About the Author

CRAIG DAVIDSON was born and grew up in the bordertown of St. Catharines, Ontario, near to Niagara Falls. He has published two previous books of literary fiction, Rust and Bone (Penguin Canada), which has been made into a major feature film of the same name, and The Fighter (Penguin Canada). He is a graduate of the famed Iowa Writers’ Workshop, and his journalism and articles have been published in The Globe and Mail, Esquire, GQ, The Paris Review, and the Washington Post, among other venues. He lives in Toronto, Canada, with his partner and child. The author lives in Toronto, Ontario, Canada.

As a practised reporter until her newspaper went to that great pressroom in the sky, PI Tess Monaghan knows and loves every inch of her native Baltimore. It's a quirky city where baseball reigns, but lately homicide seems to be the second most popular local sport. Business tycoon 'Wink' Wynkowski is trying to change all that by bringing pro basketball back to town, and everybody's rooting for him – until a devastating, muckraking expose of his lurid past appears on the front page of the Baltimore Beacon Light. It's a surprise even to the newspaper's editors, who thought they'd killed the piece. Instead, the piece killed Wink, who's found in his garage with the car running. Tess is hired to find the unknown computer hacker who planted the lethal story – but it doesn't take long for her to discover deeper, darker secrets…

Tanner Mirabel, einst hochdekorierter Elitesoldat und jetzt Leibwächter im Dienst des Waffenschmugglers Cahuella, macht Jagd auf den reichen Aristokraten Reivich, der für den Tod seines Chefs verantwortlich sein soll. Er hat bereits die Raumstation lokalisiert, in der sich Reivich aufhalten soll, als ein Anschlag auf den Orbitallift verübt wird. Tanner überlebt nur knapp, und durch den Kälteschlaf in seinem Gedächtnis stark beeinträchtigt, findet er sich schließlich in der Umlaufbahn um den Planeten Yellowstone wieder. Er erfährt, dass Reivich offenbar mit dem gleichen Raumschiff nach Yellowstone gekommen ist, doch die Suche nach ihm gestaltet sich von nun an äußerst schwierig — denn die Hauptstadt des Planeten, Chasm City, hat sich durch die geheimnisvolle »Schmelzseuche« in ein gefährliches Labyrinth verwandelt: die ehemaligen High-Tech-Gebäude haben sich zu einem biokybernetischen Netzwerk verbunden, das sich ständig wandelt und immer wieder neue bizarre Formen hervorbringt. Die Seuche ist allerdings nicht das einzige Geheimnis, das mit Chasm City zusammenhängt — auch die Bewohner der Stadt, die ihr Leben mit Hilfe von Nanotechnologie verlängert haben, haben einen Persönlichkeitswandel durchgemacht, der daran zweifeln lässt, ob sie überhaupt noch Menschen sind. Niemand in Chasm City ist das, was er zu sein vorgibt — und auch Tanner muss sich schließlich fragen, ob er noch der Tanner Mirabel ist, als der er auf Yellowstone ankam…

The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.

Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.

Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.

Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.

A collection of masterfully written tales spanning generations of one family.

Questo libro narra la storia dell’Uomo e del suo pianeta, la Terra, attraverso i secoli futuri, in una progressione abbagliante di visioni. indimenticabili e poetiche; è l’opera che moltissimi considerano il momento più intensamente poetico di tutta la storia della fantascienza. Con la sua quieta, serena filosofia, con la sua magica capacita di evocare situazioni e paesaggi allo stesso tempo grandiosi e a perfetta,’ misura umana, Simak ci descrive dapprima il graduale abbandono delle citta, per una più serena vita nelle campagne; e poi ci accompagna nella descrizione della lenta espansione verso gli spazi cosmici, ci mostra la comparsa dei Mutanti, enigmatici figli della razza umana che di umano conservano solo una spietata, folle ironia, ci descrive il lento passaggio dell’eredita umana ai Cani, fedeli compagni dell’Uomo per millenni, ci parla dei robot che l’uomo ha creato a propria: immagine, e degli alieni che popolano i suoi sogni cosmici. E, attraverso la rivelazione di un nuovo e totalmente inaspettato piano di, esistenza su Giove, il gigantesco pianeta che sarà il nuovo Paradiso… o il nuovo Nirvana?… per tutto il genere umano, Simak si proietta nel buio dei millenni, quando l’intera razza umana sarà ricordata con il nome di una sola famiglia, i Webster, e l’antica casa sulla collina sarà un tempio e un memoriale lentamente dimenticato. E su tutto questo grandioso affresco di figure indimenticabili, gigantesca, si staglia la figura del più grande personaggio creato da uno scrittore di fantascienza: Jenkins, il robot antico, che nei suoi circuiti elettronici si aggrappa disperatamente al ricordo dell’umanità desiderata e perduta.

Недовольный всем, что вышло из-под его пера, Алессандро Барикко погрузился в современность и освоил профессию градостроителя. Так возник «City» — роман-город, с кварталами — сюжетными линиями и улицами-персонажами. Как и полагается уважающему себя городу, в нем есть все для увлекательной жизни: боксеры, футболисты, профессора, парикмахер, генерал, гениальный подросток, девушка на первом плане. А если этого покажется мало, — за углом демонстрируют захватывающий вестерн. Барикко не изменяет своему обыкновению — приговаривать к смерти полюбившихся ему героев. Так легче расставаться с ними...

The pleasant little American city of Middletown is the first target in an atomic war—but instead of blowing Middletown to smithereens, the super-hydrogen bomb blows it right off the map—to somewhere else! First there is the new thin coldness of the air, the blazing corona and dullness of the sun, the visibility of the stars in high daylight. Then comes the inhabitant’s terrifying discovery that Middletown is a twentieth-century oasis of paved streets and houses in a desolate brown world without trees, without water, apparently without life, in the unimaginably far-distant future.

Hamilton’s novel inspired Robert A. Heinlein’s survivalist novel “Farnham’s Freehold”.

A enchanting new short story from Hugo Award-winning author Will McIntosh.

Enter a world of moving cities. The war is over and Hitler is dead, but rumors are flying that Chicago has just attacked Boston. That Moscow has crossed into the US and attacked Chicago. And New York is on the way to chase down the Windy City. Some cities are rumbling that they don’t feel like part of the USA anymore.

But what form of energy is giving them the power of locomotion?

Clary Fray just wishes that her life would go back to normal. But what's normal when you're a demon-slaying Shadowhunter, your mother is in a magically induced coma, and you can suddenly see Downworlders like werewolves, vampires, and faeries? If Clary left the world of the Shadowhunters behind, it would mean more time with her best friend, Simon, who's becoming more than a friend. But the Shadowhunting world isn't ready to let her go — especially her handsome, infuriating, newfound brother, Jace. And Clary's only chance to help her mother is to track down rogue Shadowhunter Valentine, who is probably insane, certainly evil — and also her father.

To complicate matters, someone in New York City is murdering Downworlder children. Is Valentine behind the killings — and if he is, what is he trying to do? When the second of the Mortal Instruments, the Soul-Sword, is stolen, the terrifying Inquisitor arrives to investigate and zooms right in on Jace. How can Clary stop Valentine if Jace is willing to betray everything he believes in to help their father?

In this breathtaking sequel to City of Bones, Cassandra Clare lures her readers back into the dark grip of New York City's Downworld, where love is never safe and power becomes the deadliest temptation.

When the bones of a 12-year-old boy are found scattered in the Hollywood Hills, Harry Bosch is drawn into a case that brings up the darkest memories from his own haunted past. The bones have been buried for years, but the cold case doesn't deter Bosch. Unearthing hidden stories, he finds the child's identity and reconstructs his fractured life, determined that he not be forgotten. At the same time, a new love affair with a female cop begins to blossom for Bosch-until a stunningly blown mission leaves Bosch in more personal and professional trouble than ever before in his turbulent career. The investigation races to a shocking conclusion, leaving Bosch on the brink of an unimaginable decision-one that will leave readers breathless and hungry for Michael Connelly's next masterpiece.

When fifteen-year-old Clary Fray heads out to the Pandemonium Club in New York City, she hardly expects to witness a murder — much less a murder committed by three teenagers covered with strange tattoos and brandishing bizarre weapons. Then the body disappears into thin air. It's hard to call the police when the murderers are invisible to everyone else and when there is nothing — not even a smear of blood — to show that a boy has died. Or was he a boy?

This is Clary's first meeting with the Shadowhunters, warriors dedicated to ridding the earth of demons. It's also her first encounter with Jace, a Shadowhunter who looks a little like an angel and acts a lot like a jerk. Within twenty-four hours Clary is pulled into Jace's world with a vengeance, when her mother disappears and Clary herself is attacked by a demon. But why would demons be interested in ordinary mundanes like Clary and her mother? And how did Clary suddenly get the Sight? The Shadowhunters would like to know. . . .

Exotic and gritty, exhilarating and utterly gripping, Cassandra Clare's ferociously entertaining fantasy takes readers on a wild ride that they will never want to end.

Once, dragons ruled the Rain Wilds, tended by privileged human servants known as Elderlings. But a series of cataclysmic eruptions nearly drove these magnificent creatures to extinction. Born weak and deformed, the last of their kind had one hope for survival: to return to their ancient city of Kelsingra. Accompanied by a disparate crew of untested young keepers, the dragons embarked on a harsh journey into the unknown along the toxic Rain Wild River. Battling starvation, a hostile climate, and treacherous enemies, dragons and humans began to forge magical connections, bonds that have wrought astonishing transformations for them all. And though Kelsingra is finally near, their odyssey has only begun.

Because of the swollen waters of the Rain Wild River, the lost city can be reached only by flight—a test of endurance and skill beyond the stunted dragons’ strength. Venturing across the swift-running river in tiny boats, the dragon scholar Alise and a handful of keepers discover a world far different from anything they have ever known or imagined. Immense, ornate structures of black stone veined with silver and lifelike stone statues line the silent, eerily empty streets. Yet what are the whispers they hear, the shadows of voices and bursts of light that flutter and are gone? And why do they feel as if eyes are watching them?

The dragons must plumb the depths of their ancestral memories to help them take flight and unlock the secrets buried in Kelsingra. But enemies driven by greed and dark desires are approaching. Time is running out, not only for the dragons but for their human keepers as well.

Grace Ozmian, missing daughter of a tech billionaire has been found.

Most of her, anyway. Her head is still missing.

Lieutenant CDS Vincent D'Agosta knows his investigation will attract fierce media scrutiny, so he's delighted when his old acquaintance FBI Special Agent A.X.L. Pendergast is assigned to the case.

But neither man is prepared for what lies ahead. A diabolical presence is haunting New York City and Grace is only the first of many victims to be murdered… and decapitated.

As mass hysteria sweeps the city, it will take all of Pendergast's skill and strength to unmask this most dangerous foe — let alone survive to tell the tale.

The Mortal War is over, and sixteen-year-old Clary Fray is back home in New York, excited about all the possibilities before her. She's training to become a Shadowhunter and — most importantly of all — she can finally call Jace her boyfriend. But nothing comes without a price. Someone is murdering the Shadowhunters who used to be in Valentine's Circle, provoking tensions between Downworlders and Shadowhunters that could lead to a second, bloody war. And when Jace begins to pull away from her without explaining why, Clary is forced to delve into the heart of a mystery whose solution reveals her worst nightmare: she herself has set in motion a terrible chain of events that could lead to her losing everything she loves. Even Jace.

A late-night phone call from a stranger involves Quinn, a mystery writer, in a baffling murder case stranger than his novels.

To save her mother's life, Clary must travel to the City of Glass, the ancestral home of the Shadowhunters — never mind that enter-ing the city without permission is against the Law, and breaking the Law could mean death. To make things worse, she learns that Jace does not want her there, and Simon has been thrown in prison by the Shadowhunters, who are deeply suspicious of a vampire who can withstand sunlight.

As Clary uncovers more about her family's past, she finds an ally in mysterious Shadow-hunter Sebastian. With Valentine mustering the full force of his power to destroy all Shadow-hunters forever, their only chance to defeat him is to fight alongside their eternal enemies. But can Downworlders and Shadowhunters put aside their hatred to work together? While Jace realizes exactly how much he's willing to risk for Clary, can she harness her newfound powers to help save the Glass City — whatever the cost?

Love is a mortal sin and the secrets of the past prove deadly as Clary and Jace face down Valentine in the final installment of the New York Times bestselling trilogy The Mortal Instruments.

He was a fully grown man, alone in a dense forest, with no trail to show where he had come from and no memory to tell who—or what he was.

His eyes were not human eyes.

The forest people took him in and raised him almost as a child, teaching him to speak, training him in forest lore, giving him all the knowledge they had. В But they could not solve the riddle of his past, and at last he had to set out on a quest to Es Toch, the City of the Shing, the Liars of Earth, the Enemy of Mankind.

There he would find out the truth about himself…and a universe of danger.

An Ace Book. All Rights Reserved.

Printed in the U.S.A.

Scanned & proofed by Binwiped 10/11/02 v1, then released in #bookz by MollyKate, downloaded from http://torrents.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?t=463754 and after that imported to fb2 by soshial (20.05.2008)

The demon Lilith has been destroyed and Jace has been freed from her captivity. But when the Shadowhunters arrive to rescue him, they find only blood and broken glass. Not only is the boy Clary loves missing — but so is the boy she hates, Sebastian, the son of her father Valentine: a son determined to succeed where their father failed, and bring the Shadowhunters to their knees.

The bestselling Mortal Instruments continues — and so do the thrills and danger for Jace, Clary, and Simon. Can the lost be reclaimed? What price is too high to pay for love? Who can be trusted when sin and salvation collide? Love. Blood. Betrayal. Revenge. Darkness threatens to claim the Shadowhunters in the harrowing fifth book of the Mortal Instruments series.

In Sin City, a little girl suffers from a strange and terrible malady. If she dies, the Light will die along with her.

Warrior, avenger, Joanna Archer has survived countless otherworldly terrors – and has found her rightful place among the agents battling the all-pervasive evil of Shadow… even as she struggles against the darkness within herself.

A war is raging for Las Vegas – a city without a heart – one that catapults Joanna into a new world hidden from mortal sight. In this lethally seductive alternate dimension the lines blur between good and evil, love and hate, and here lies the last hope for the Light. But Joanna's price of admission is a piece of her own soul – and the odds of her escaping are slim… to none.

Four years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, East Germany was preparing for war. A series of exercises were conducted simulating an invasion of West Berlin. But what if one of these operations was no exercise?

In 1985, Border Troop officer Hans Brandt rises to the inner circle of the East German government, where leaders have begun to fear the country’s inevitable collapse. Hans discovers Stasi colonel Karl Scharf’s audacious plan to save the GDR—actually conquer West Berlin. Wanting to prevent a war, Hans moves to stop the invasion. But when Scharf uses a mole hunt to leverage his plan, Hans is drawn into a battle of espionage that will cost him more than he can know.

Using actual secret East German invasion plans and real locations, City of Spies is a historical thriller that brings modern insight into a pivotal world era. Seen through the eyes of Hans Brandt, the struggle to peacefully end the Cold War presents a precarious balance of power, escalating tension between rival factions, and ultimately a race for personal survival. Like many world events that hinge on a few actions, City of Spies shows the peaceful revolution in Eastern Europe was anything but inevitable. Twenty-five years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, City of Spies finds startling relevance.

A high-stakes thriller which weaves Turkey’s war-torn past with action, adventure and conspiracy.

A TERRIFYING ATTACK

Southern Turkey. Business intelligence operative Iain Black, having survived the hotel bombing that killed his friend and partner, vows to find out who was responsible — then make them pay.

A PAST THAT WON’T STAY BURIED

Historian Karin Visser, who also lost friends in the blast, teams up with Iain to uncover secrets hidden deep within the region’s past, from the bloody division of Cyprus all the way back to the Trojan War.

AN EXPLOSIVE SECRET

Piecing the puzzle together, Iain and Karin discover the shocking conspiracy behind the blast. But now they’re running out of time to reveal it — before they’re silenced for good.

Who do you trust, who do you love, and who can be saved?

It is 1943—the height of the Second World War—and Berlin has essentially become a city of women.

Sigrid Schröder is, for all intents and purposes, the model German soldier’s wife: She goes to work every day, does as much with her rations as she can, and dutifully cares for her meddling mother-in-law, all the while ignoring the horrific immoralities of the regime. But behind this façade is an entirely different Sigrid, a woman who dreams of her former lover, now lost in the chaos of the war. Her lover is a Jew.

But Sigrid is not the only one with secrets.

A high ranking SS officer and his family move down the hall and Sigrid finds herself pulled into their orbit.  A young woman doing her duty-year is out of excuses before Sigrid can even ask her any questions. And then there’s the blind man selling pencils on the corner, whose eyes Sigrid can feel following her from behind the darkness of his goggles.

Soon Sigrid is embroiled in a world she knew nothing about, and as her eyes open to the reality around her, the carefully constructed fortress of solitude she has built over the years begins to collapse. She must choose to act on what is right and what is wrong, and what falls somewhere in the shadows between the two.

In this page-turning novel, David Gillham explores what happens to ordinary people thrust into extraordinary times, and how the choices they make can be the difference between life and death.

Amazon.com Review

Amazon Best Books of the Month, August 2012: While the world hardly lacks for novels about WWII, David R. Gillham’s City of Women is extraordinary for what it does not do. It does not detail the events or imagined conversations of Hitler’s Reich, and it has not a single scene of life in the death camps. Instead, it chronicles—in detail so specific that it’s mesmerizing, but not so obviously researched as to be annoying—life for “ordinary” Berliners at a time that was anything but. Through Heroine Sigrid Schroder, a German wife drawn into an affair with a Jew, Gillham shows us a world in which not all Germans are bad, not all Jews are victims, and loyalty is a fiction, the grimmest of fairy tales.

—Sara Nelson

The all-too-human individuals who live within this extraordinary first novel are: Regan and William Hamilton-Sweeney, estranged heirs to one of the city's biggest fortunes; Keith and Mercer, the men who, for better or worse, love them; Charlie and Sam, two Long Island teenagers seduced by downtown's nascent punk scene; an obsessive magazine reporter; his spunky, West Coast-transplant neighbor; and the detective trying to figure out what they all have to do with a shooting in Central Park. From post-Vietnam youth culture to the fiscal crisis, from a lushly appointed townhouse on Sutton Place to a derelict squat on East 3rd Street, this city on fire is at once recognizable and completely unexpected. And when the infamous blackout of July 13th, 1977 plunges it into darkness, each of these entangled lives will be changed, irrevocably.

In a mind-bending odyssey through a world rife with tyranny, a rebel group schemes to harness a radical new energy source—plasm.

Clement Mansell knows how easy it is to get away with murder. The seriously crazed killer is already back on the Detroit streets -- thanks to some nifty courtroom moves by his crafty looker of a lawyer -- and he's feeling invincible enough to execute a crooked Motown judge on a whim. Homicide Detective Raymond Cruz thinks the "Oklahoma Wildman" crossed the line long before this latest outrage, and he's determined to see that the hayseed psycho does not slip through the legal system's loopholes a second time. But that means a good cop is going to have to play somewhat fast and loose with the rules -- in order to maneuver Mansell into a wild Midwest showdown that he won't be walking away from.

CITY SURGEON, SMALL-TOWN MIRACLE Marion Lennox Dr Maggie Croft-s decision to have her late husband-s baby has left her combining pregnancy with caring for a small town community! Dr Max Ashton had been heading back to his glamorous city life – but Maggie makes him remember another time, before he locked his heart away- BACHELOR DAD, GIRL NEXT DOOR Sharon Archer Single dad Dr Luke Daniels has come home to heal his heart. Dr Terri Mitchell remembers Luke from growing up in Port Cavill – maybe too well! The twinkle in the new doctor-s eyes makes her shiver, just the way it always did! Terri can-t stop herself falling for Luke and his young daughter. But Luke only sees her as the girl next door-doesn-t he?

When Dr Maggie Croft decided to have her late husband's baby, she never envisioned combining pregnancy with caring for a small-town community! Chasing her dreams seems to have led her to a dead-end-but all that changes when she crashes into glamorous doctor Max Ashton, rounding the corner in his Aston Martin…Max had been heading back to the distraction of city life, but there's something about red-haired, irrepressible Maggie which grabs him and won't let go. Under her warm influence, he remembers another time, another Max-before he deliberately locked his heart away…

Vampire Anna Strong never expected to find the witch Sophie Deveraux on her doorstep, asking for a favor. But Sophie needs help, even if it's from the vampire who killed her sister. Anna, driven both by guilt and obligation, agrees to help Sophie and her psychic alter-ego Jonathan. So begins an adventure that takes them to Leadville, Colorado. All too soon, Anna wonders whether Sophie is truly a victim of circumstance . . . or the author of a clever plot to rid herself of her unwanted psychic twin.

A novel about death and grieving, about Afro-Caribbean culture and Voodoo and about the four waves of Nanotechnology development. The world of Crescent City Rhapsody is a world that is being changed by the day by advances in nanotechnology; it is a world where radio has died, of vastly increased lifespans and where extra terrestrials will play a pivotal role in everyone’s life.

Dead Stars is Bruce Wagner’s (I'm Losing You) most lavish and remarkable translation yet of the national zeitgeist: post-privacy porn culture, a Kardashianworld of rapid-cycling, disposable narrative where reality-show triumph is the new American narcotic.

At age thirteen, Telma is famous as the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor until threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old Canadian who’s just undergone a mastectomy … Reeyonna believes that auditioning for pregnant-teen porn online will help fulfill her dream of befriending Jennifer Lawrence and Kanye West … Biggie, the neurologically impaired adolescent son of a billionaire, spends his days Google Map-searching his mother-who abandoned home and family for a new love … Jacquie, a photographer once celebrated for taking arty nudes of her young daughter, is broke and working at Sears Family Portrait Boutique … Tom-Tom, a singer/drug dealer thrown off the third season of American Idol for concocting a hard-luck story, is hell-bent on creating her own TV series in the Hollywood Hills, peopled by other reality-show losers … Jerzy, her sometime lover, is a speed-freak paparazzo who “specializes” in capturing images of dying movie and television stars … And Oscar-winning Michael Douglas searches for meaning in his time of remission. While his wife, Catherine, guest-stars on Glee, the actor plans a bold, artistic, go-for-broke move: to star in and direct a remake of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz…

There is nothing quite like a Bruce Wagner novel. His prose is captivating and exuberant, and surprises with profound truths on spirituality, human nature, and redemption. Dead Stars moves forward with the inexorable force of a tsunami, sweeping everyone in its fateful path. With its mix of imaginary and real-life characters, it is certain to be the most challenging, knowing, and controversial book of the year.

James Lee Burke has frequently been praised for the superb writing and strong suspense of his Dave Robicheaux mysteries. Now in this powerful new novel, he enters the front ranks of contemporary ficiton writers and mainstream bestsellers. When a Nazi submarine is discovered off the coast of Louisiana it soon becomes clear that the dark forces it represents are alive and all too well. Neo Nazi's are on the march in New Orleans and their leader, icy psychopath Will Buchalter, will stop at nothing to get his hands on the submarines mysterious cargo. Only detective Dave Robicheaux and his family stand between Buchalter and his terrifying ambitions.

T.C. Boyle has proven himself to be a master storyteller who can do just about anything. But even his most ardent admirers may be caught off guard by his ninth novel, for Boyle has delivered something completely unexpected: a serious and richly rewarding character study that is his most accomplished and deeply satisfying work to date.

It is 1970, and a down-at-the-heels California commune has decided to relocate to the last frontier-the unforgiving landscape of interior Alaska-in the ultimate expression of going back to the land. The novel opposes two groups of characters: Sess Harder, his wife Pamela, and other young Alaskans who are already homesteading in the wilderness and the brothers and sisters of Drop City, who, despite their devotion to peace, free love, and the simple life, find their commune riven by tensions. As these two communities collide, their alliances shift and unexpected friendships and dangerous enmities are born as everyone struggles with the bare essentials of life: love, nourishment, and a roof over one's head.

Drop City is not a satire or a nostalgic look at the sixties, though its evocation of the period is presented with a truth and clarity that no book on that era has achieved. This is a surprising book, a rich, allusive, and nonsentimental look at the ideals of a generation and their impact on today's radically transformed world. Above all, it is a novel infused with the lyricism and take-no-prisoners storytelling for which T.C. Boyle is justly famous.

Fat City is a vivid novel of allegiance and defeat, of the potent promise of the good life and the desperation and drink that waylay those whom it eludes. Stockton, California, is the setting: the Lido Gym, the Hotel Coma, Main Street lunchrooms and dingy bars, days like long twilights in houses obscured by untrimmed shrubs and black walnut trees. When two men meet in the ring — the retired boxer Billy Tully and the newcomer Ernie Munger — their brief bout sets into motion their hidden fates, initiating young Munger into the company of men and luring Tully back into training. In a dispassionate and composed voice, Leonard Gardner narrates their swings of fortune, and the stubborn optimism of their manager, Ruben Luna, as he watches the most promising boys one by one succumb to some undefined weakness; still, “There was always someone who wanted to fight.”

Le gonzier qui passe sa vie dans ses charentaises, à concocter d'illusoires tiercés et quintés plus, ne peut pas s'imaginer tous les amphigouris de ce monde.

Je te prends « la fête du banc », dans l'Utah, tu savais qu'elle existait, toi ?

Moi non plus.

Ben, elle existe, mon vieux, et j'ai failli m'y faire lyncher.

Béru, M. Félix, le Marquis ont eu des avaries de paf si terrifiantes que leur trompes de l'émisphère sud, mondialement réputées, filaient la gerbe aux coyotes.

Si t'as pas peur d'affronter le bizarre, lis ce book d'extrème urgence. Tu y rencontreras d'inoubliables personnages : Roy, dit « Petit Gibus », qui, à six ans, pilote une dépanneuse ; Ivy, la femme du pasteur qui raffole de la levrette ; Le cow-boy suisse qui tire plus vite que son ombre. Sans parler du shérif, un drôle de pourri qui m'a viandé de première !

Non, franchement, t'as pas le droit de passer à côté de cette histoire.

Si tu négligeais la lecture de Foiridon à Morbac City, tout le monde se foutrait de la gueule.

T'as pas besoin de ça !

The night Johnny Danetello drove a dying girl through the streets of Brooklyn in his cab, he was trying to save her life. Instead he ran down a cop and lost her and his freedom. Every day in prison, Johnny knew that Angie Monticelli's family blamed him for her death, and that going home would be suicide. But Johnny has unfinished business with his former friend turned mob boss, Vinny Monticelli.

Now Johnny has returned to converse with the doomed and the dead-and wait for Vinny to make his move. Survivors of a long-ago freak accident, the two men share access to alternate realities no one else can know-and to a past and present that will all become the same in a city only one of them can leave alive…

Введите сюда краткую аннотацию

Pineville – sometime in the future. A man awakes in the desert, clueless on his whereabouts and how he got to his location. His questions about his situation stir his soul. With some unexpected assistance, he finds the path that may lead to answers. The path to Hock City. A place unlike anywhere he has ever seen. Before this moment, his world was small and peaceful, but now – everything has changed. After a string of encounters, he has a new sense of direction. He hopes that the direction leads to one place: home.

“Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children” was the surprise best seller of 2011—an unprecedented mix of YA fantasy and vintage photography that enthralled readers and critics alike. Publishers Weekly called it “an enjoyable, eccentric read, distinguished by well-developed characters, a believable Welsh setting, and some very creepy monsters.”

This second novel begins in 1940, immediately after the first book ended. Having escaped Miss Peregrine's island by the skin of their teeth, Jacob and his new friends must journey to London, the peculiar capital of the world. Along the way, they encounter new allies, a menagerie of peculiar animals, and other unexpected surprises.

Complete with dozens of newly discovered (and thoroughly mesmerizing) vintage photographs, this new adventure will delight readers of all ages.

I, City is a novel about the city of Most in north Bohemia, an ancient city founded on a primeval wetland that was literally "relocated" to get to the brown coal beneath it. The city is the narrator, telling its own story through its inhabitants, who make their "appearances" in fleeting, ghost-like vignettes, Joycean epiphanies straight out of a Bohemian Dubliners. The "I" that purports to be Most seems to be an entire consciousness, at enough of a remove from the town itself that he, she or it can see and can know seemingly everything, past and present. As Most's inhabitants emerge from the pollution, or from the swamp of the town's founding, we find not individuals but representatives. Theirs are historical lives that mistrust history, or that live it at least with typical Czech irony. This abstraction, Brycz's making of archetypes, isn't accomplished in a spirit of abuse. Brycz obviously loves his "small" people, and has more than sympathy — he is one of them. As Brycz makes fictional people say factual things and factual people (Kafka, the Pope, the last president of Communist Czechoslovakia, Gustav Husak) say fictional things, post-modernity via Marquez and other so-called Magical Realists makes its almost requisite — though noiseless — appearance.

I, City is many things: a novel-in-stories, a series of lyrical prose sketches in the best easterly European tradition of Danilo Kiš, or Isaac Babel.

A curious little man attempts to hire PI Tess Monaghan to unmask the Visitor (also known as the Poe Toaster), who has been visiting the Baltimore grave of Edgar Allan Poe every year on 19 January for the past fifty years, leaving three red roses and a half-empty bottle of cognac. The man is committing no crime, and Tess refuses the assignment, but she worries that a less scrupulous private detective may take it on. So she goes to the 19 January vigil as an observer. In the freezing darkness she watches as two cloaked figures approach the grave, appear to embrace and then part. As they walk off in different directions, there's a gunshot and one is killed. Tess quickly learns that the dead man is not the regular Visitor. So who is he? And why was he there? When it turns out that Tess's would-be client had given her a fake name, she knows she must try to find him. And when an old friend from her past surfaces, claiming that the shooting was a homophobic hate crime, things only get more complicated…

The man on the moon was dead. They called him Charlie. He had big eyes, abundant body hair and fairly long nostrils. His skeletal body was found clad in a bright red spacesuit, hidden in a rocky grave. They didn't know who he was, how he got there, or what had killed him. All they knew was that his corpse was 50,000 years old -- and that meant that this man had somehow lived long before he ever could have existed!

"An absolutely cracking, unputdownable mystery told by a narrator with one big, booming voice. I loved it." – Gillian Flynn

Just months after Rebekah Roberts was born, her mother, an Hasidic Jew from Brooklyn, abandoned her Christian boyfriend and newborn baby to return to her religion. Neither Rebekah nor her father have heard from her since. Now a recent college graduate, Rebekah has moved to New York City to follow her dream of becoming a big-city reporter. But she's also drawn to the idea of being closer to her mother, who might still be living in the Hasidic community in Brooklyn.Then Rebekah is called to cover the story of a murdered Hasidic woman. Rebekah's shocked to learn that, because of the NYPD's habit of kowtowing to the powerful ultra-Orthodox community, not only will the woman be buried without an autopsy, her killer may get away with murder. Rebekah can't let the story end there. But getting to the truth won't be easy-even as she immerses herself in the cloistered world where her mother grew up, it's clear that she's not welcome, and everyone she meets has a secret to keep from an outsider.In her riveting debut "Invisible City," journalist Julia Dahl introduces a compelling new character in search of the truth about a murder and an understanding of her own heritage.

Das Jahr des Herrn 1863 ist eine düstere, hoffnungslose Zeit in Deutschland. Das einfache Volk ist verarmt. Wer Arbeit hat, schuftet für Groschen. Menschen sterben an Hunger und Epidemien.

In dieser Zeit ist »Amerika« ein Wort der Hoffnung und Sehnsucht - ein Land, wo jeder sein Glück machen und zu Wohlstand kommen kann. Ein magisches Wort auch für den jungen Handwerksgesellen Jacob Adler, der zu Unrecht des Mordversuchs beschuldigt wird und aus Deutschland fliehen muss.

Doch sein Leben in Amerika wird härter und gefahrvoller sein, als er es sich in seinen ärgsten Träumen vorzustellen vermag. Ein Abenteuer wartet auf Jacob Adler, wie es kaum ein zweiter je erlebt hat...

After inheriting a farm on New Zealand’s South Island, Lewis Harding tries his best to keep it running. The financially strapped farmer is forced to forage his new land for implements, eliciting the help of his son, Gary. But when they go too close to the entrance of an old deserted gold mine, catastrophe strikes in more ways then one. When Gary’s older brother, Dr. Cecil Harding shows up at the farm, Nekenhalle, he discovers that his brother and father had gone missing.

A spate of livestock mutilations plague the local area, forcing Dr. Harding, a veterinarian, to call in the help of the Australian Wilderness Society. Ironically, this coincides with their current investigation of culling by poison, because, according to Harding, the New Zealand livestock are dying of snakebites. Knowing that New Zealand does not have snakes, the Wilderness Society obtains the help of Scottish explorer, David Purdue, during a legal debate.

Purdue and his associates, journalist Sam Cleave and historian Dr. Nina Gould, accompany the Wildlife Society under the pretense of making a documentary, while actually seeking the location of the Lost City. Similar poisonings in the remains of Nazi soldiers prompted Purdue’s pursuit into the Lost City’s secret, but Nekenhalle has a reputation for evil.

Inside the bowels of the farm, the expedition party finds the source of the killings, but at the same time, they venture into a forbidden place they do not know the way out from…

James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, has managed to get out of Hell - again - renounce his title as the new Lucifer, and settle back into life in LA. But he's not out of trouble yet. Somewhere along the way he misplaced a weapon from the banished older gods who now want it back.

The hunt leads Stark to an abandoned shopping mall — a multi-storey copy of LA — infested with Lurkers and bottom-feeding Sub Rosa families, squatters who have formed tight tribes to guard their tiny patches of territory. Somewhere in the kill zone of the former mall is a dead man with the answers Stark needs. All Stark has to do is find the dead man, get back out alive, and outrun some angry old gods — with a few killers on his tail. 

For ten years, Norma has been the on-air voice of consolation and hope for the Indians in the mountains and the poor from the barrios — a people broken by war's violence. As the host of Lost City Radio, she reads the names of those who have disappeared — those whom the furiously expanding city has swallowed. Through her efforts lovers are reunited and the lost are found. But in the aftermath of the decadelong bloody civil conflict, her own life is about to forever change — thanks to the arrival of a young boy from the jungle who provides a cryptic clue to the fate of Norma's vanished husband.

The nation's capital that serves as the setting for the stories in Edward P. Jones's prizewinning collection, Lost in the City, lies far from the city of historic monuments and national politicians. Jones takes the reader beyond that world into the lives of African American men and women who work against the constant threat of loss to maintain a sense of hope. From "The Girl Who Raised Pigeons" to the well-to-do career woman awakened in the night by a phone call that will take her on a journey back to the past, the characters in these stories forge bonds of community as they struggle against the limits of their city to stave off the loss of family, friends, memories, and, ultimately, themselves.

Critically acclaimed upon publication, Lost in the City introduced Jones as an undeniable talent, a writer whose unaffected style is not only evocative and forceful but also filled with insight and poignancy.

'[A] giant of modern Chinese literature' – The New York Times

"With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." – Ang Lee

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction – tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

'[A] giant of modern Chinese literature' – The New York Times

"With language as sharp as a knife edge, Eileen Chang cut open a huge divide in Chinese culture, between the classical patriarchy and our troubled modernity. She was one of the very few able truly to connect that divide, just as her heroines often disappeared inside it. She is the fallen angel of Chinese literature, and now, with these excellent new translations, English readers can discover why she is so revered by Chinese readers everywhere." – Ang Lee

Eileen Chang is one of the great writers of twentieth-century China, where she enjoys a passionate following both on the mainland and in Taiwan. At the heart of Chang's achievement is her short fiction – tales of love, longing, and the shifting and endlessly treacherous shoals of family life. Written when Chang was still in her twenties, these extraordinary stories combine an unsettled, probing, utterly contemporary sensibility, keenly alert to sexual politics and psychological ambiguity, with an intense lyricism that echoes the classics of Chinese literature. Love in a Fallen City, the first collection in English of this dazzling body of work, introduces American readers to the stark and glamorous vision of a modern master.

'Marcovaldois an enchanting collection of stories, both melancholy and funny, about an Italian peasant's struggle to reconcile country habits with urban life. Oblivious to the garish attractions of the town, Marcovaldo is the attentive recorder of natural phenomenon. The reader's heart bleeds for Marcovaldo in his tenacious pursuit of lost domains, but the stories are full of mirth and fun. They lie between farce and fantasy, combining comical disasters with a surrealistic view of city life through the eyes of an outsider…Nothing, as always with Calvino, is quite as it seems. Books and Bookmen

Brand-new stories by: Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Eugenio Aguirre, Eduardo Antonia Parra, Bernardo Fernández Bef, Óscar de la Borbolla, Rolo Díez, Victor Luiz González, F.G. Haghenbeck, Juan Hernández Luna, Myriam Laurini, Eduardo Monteverde, and Julia Rodríguez.

Paco Ignacio Taibo II was born in Gijón, Spain, and has lived in Mexico since 1958. He is the author of numerous works of fiction and nonfiction, which have been published in many languages around the world, including a mystery series starring Mexican Private Investigator Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. He is a professor of history at the Metropolitan University of Mexico City.

Lord of the Flies meets War of the Worlds in J. Barton Mitchell’s alien-invaded post-apocalyptic world where two teens and a young girl with amazing powers must stop the aliens’ mysterious plan

Earth has been conquered by an alien race known as the Assembly. The human adult population is gone, having succumbed to the Tone—a powerful, telepathic super-signal broadcast across the planet that reduces them to a state of complete subservience. But the Tone has one critical flaw. It only affects the population once they reach their early twenties, which means that there is one group left to resist: Children.

Holt Hawkins is a bounty hunter, and his current target is Mira Toombs, an infamous treasure seeker with a price on her head. It’s not long before Holt bags his prey, but their instant connection isn’t something he bargained for. Neither is the Assembly ship that crash-lands near them shortly after. Venturing inside, Holt finds a young girl who remembers nothing except her name: Zoey.

As the three make their way to the cavernous metropolis of Midnight City, they encounter young freedom fighters, mutants, otherworldly artifacts, pirates, feuding alien armies, and the amazing powers that Zoey is beginning to exhibit. Powers that suggest she, as impossible as it seems, may just be the key to stopping the Assembly once and for all.

Midnight City is the breathtaking first book of the Conquered Earth series.

Adam Day is the recipient of fellowships from the Poetry Society of America and Kentucky Arts Council, and a PEN Emerging Writers Award. His work has appeared in Boston Review, the Kenyon Review, American Poetry Review, AGNI, the Iowa Review, and others.

This stellar collection of Jewish science fiction and fantasy carries on in the tradition of its companion volume—the enduring classic Wandering Stars—breaking new ground with every story.

Trouble with mothers; invading aliens and demons; the arrival of the long-awaited Messiah… all these phenomena and more are tackled in these tales from a creative group of extraordinary writers. We go to the edges of the universe, finding humor, pain and humanity in the unlikeliest of places and situations. Filled with wit, vigor and sharp insight, this is a fantastic feast for the imagination that will intrigue and delight everyone who picks it up, Jew and non-Jew alike.

Willie Bledsoe, once an idealistic young black activist, is now a burnt-out case. After leaving a snug berth at Tuskegee Institute to join the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, he has become bitterly disillusioned with the civil rights movement and its leaders. He returns home to Alabama to try to write a memoir about his time in the cultural whirlwind, but the words fail to come.

The surprise return of his Vietnam veteran brother in the spring of 1967 gives Willie a chance to drive a load of smuggled guns to the Motor City — and make enough money to jump-start his stalled dream of writing his movement memoir. There, at Tiger Stadium on Opening Day of the 1968 baseball season — postponed two days in deference to the funeral of Martin Luther King, Jr. — Willie learns some terrifying news: the Detroit police are still investigating the last unsolved murder from the bloody, apocalyptic riot of the previous summer, and a white cop named Frank Doyle will not rest until the case is solved. And Willie is his prime suspect.

These stories are linked by humor, setting, themes and recurring characters — cat lovers, murderers, gamblers, ghosts and fools — but mostly by the movie stars, gods and goddesses who look down on us struggling mortals with a mixture of benevolence and wrath. From Scarlett Johansson to Joan Crawford, Clint Eastwood to Jerry Lewis, they represent the impossible ideals to which lesser beings turn for hope in an otherwise baffling world.

In this thrilling collection of original stories some of today's hottest paranormal authors delight, thrill and captivate readers with otherworldly tales of magic and mischief. In Jim Butcher's ' Curses' Harry Dresden investigates how to lift a curse laid by the Fair Folk on the Chicago Cubs. In Patricia Briggs' 'Fairy Gifts,' a vampire is called home by magic to save the Fae who freed him from a dark curse. In Melissa Marr's 'Guns for the Dead,' the newly dead Frankie Lee seeks a job in the afterlife on the wrong side of the law. In Holly Black's 'Noble Rot,' a dying rock star discovers that the young woman who brings him food every day has some strange appetites of her own.

Featuring original stories from 20 authors, this dark, captivating, fabulous and fantastical collection is sure to have readers coming back for more.

Tom Harding only wants the truth. But the truth is becoming more dangerous with every passing minute.

As a reporter for his high school newspaper, Tom Harding was tracking the best story of his life—when, suddenly, his life turned very, very weird. He woke up one morning to find his house empty… his street empty… his whole town empty… empty except for an eerie, creeping fog—and whatever creatures were slowly moving toward him through the fog.

Now Tom’s once-ordinary world has become something out of a horror movie. How did it happen? Is it real? Is he dreaming? Has there been a zombie apocalypse? Has he died and gone to hell?

Tom is a good reporter—he knows how to look for answers—but no one has ever covered a story like this before. With the fog closing in and the hungry creatures of the fog surrounding him, he has only a few hours to find out how he lost the world he knew. In this bizarre universe nothing is what it seems and everything—including Tom’s life—hangs in the balance.

A Japanese detective agency in Midwest America; a sex triangle with the vampish Angela at its apex, and love-sick Pohl and lust-warped Burnett at the receiving ends; a Fat Man devouring a huge luncheon amidst the splendors of his garden; and has-been vixen Violet seeking justice and revenge. Just some of the elements of No. 22 Pleasure City, a novel that ranges in flavor between Japanese manga, pulp fiction and tongue-in-cheek pornography. The novel is a story of betrayal, obsession, rejection, friendship, and—ultimately—redemption.

Science and progress has turned inward, creating new realities and entire new worlds. Fletcher works as a virtual reality tester to escape to the past, and longs for a bygone era when humankind could still gaze into space.

In 1943, during the German occupation of Denmark, ten-year-old Annemarie learns how to be brave and courageous when she helps shelter her Jewish friend from the Nazis.

On January 26, 1948, a man posing as a public health official arrives at a bank in Tokyo. He explains that he’s there to treat everyone who might have been exposed to a recent outbreak of dysentery. Soon after drinking the medicine he administers, twelve employees are dead, four are unconscious, and the “official” has fled. Twelve voices tell the story of the murder from different perspectives including a journalist, a gangster-turned-businessman, an “occult detective,” and a well-known painter. Each voice enlarges and deepens the portrait of a city and a people making their way out of a war-induced hell. Told with David Peace’s brilliantly idiosyncratic and mesmerizing voice, Occupied City is a stunningly audacious work from a singular writer.

More than human and less that a god, John O’Ryan is Orion, made by the Creators who rule outside of time. His purpose is to do their bidding. Now, Orion has becomee a key piece in a cosmic game between two of the Creators—Anya, the goddess he loves, and Aten, the god who toys with his destiny.

Meredith West

Likes: coffee shops, nice shoes, London

Dislikes: spiders, the Outback, Hal Granger!

Hal Granger

Dislikes: cool, unflappable, distracting city girls

Likes: one city girl in particular-

Meredith's been forced to take a job on a remote cattle station, with a boss she can't stand! It should be easy to keep things professional-except their office is under the blistering Outback sun, and Hal's work attire is a bare chest and thigh-hugging jeans! Although they're worlds apart, it's getting harder to keep things strictly business…

Big mouth.

Big heart.

Big city.

Big problems.

Lizzie Nichols is back, pounding the New York City pavement, looking for a job, a place to live, and her proper place in the universe (not necessarily in that order).

When summer fling Luke uses the L-Word (Living Together), Lizzie is only too happy to give up her plan of being post-grad roomies with best friend Shari in a one-room walk-up in exchange for co-habitation with the love her life in his mother's Fifth Avenue pied-a-terre, complete with doorman and resident Renoir.

But Lizzie's not so lucky in her employment search. As Shari finds the perfect job, Lizzie struggles through one humiliating interview after another, being judged overqualified for the jobs in her chosen field?vintage gown rehab—and underqualified for everything else. It's Shari's boyfriend Chaz to the rescue when he recommends Lizzie for a receptionist's position at his father's posh law firm. The non-paying gig at a local wedding gown shop Lizzie manages to land all on her own.

But Lizzie's notoriously big mouth begins to get her in trouble at work and at home almost at once—first at the law firm, where she becomes too chummy with Jill Higgins, a New York society bride with a troublesome future mother-in-law, and then back on Fifth Avenue, when she makes the mistake of bringing up the M-Word (Marriage) with commitment-shy Luke.

Soon Lizzie finds herself jobless as well as homeless all over again. Can Lizzie save herself — and the hapless Jill — and find career security (not to mention a mutually satisfying committed relationship) at last?

Space wasn’t half so scary, half so strange, or even half so alien, as what Hal Bregg returned to. He had been away from Planet Earth for ten years space-time. But that was 127 years back home and a lot of things had changed. Sex. Money. Transit. Violence. There’s no more violence. Everyone gets it “betrizated” out of them in childhood. And that’s just the beginning…

Naturally, Hal refuses to be acclimated by the “Adapt” people. He prefers to figure it out all by himself, be a stranger in a strange land, draw his own conclusions. And he does.

“In the unlikely event that a science-fiction writer is deemed worthy of a Nobel Prize in the near future, the most likely candidate would be a Pole named Stanislaw Lem,” states THE NEW YORK TIMES. And FANTASY & SCIENCE FICTION writes, “One of the world’s finest writers… Lem has accomplished the difficult illusion of showing us a future world which may be distasteful to us, but which may be seen as quite legitimate and even desirable by its own people, and by us, if we were to change certain ways of seeing and understanding.”

When originally published in 1993, Ruined City (Fei Du) was promptly banned by China’s State Publishing Administration, ostensibly for its explicit sexual content. Since then, award-winning author Jia Pingwa’s vivid portrayal of contemporary China’s social and economic transformation has become a classic, viewed by critics and scholars of Chinese literature as one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Howard Goldblatt’s deft translation now gives English-speaking readers their first chance to enjoy this masterpiece of social satire by one of China’s most provocative writers.

While eroticism, exoticism, and esoteric minutiae — the “pornography” that earned the opprobrium of Chinese officials — pervade Ruined City, this tale of a famous contemporary writer’s sexual and legal imbroglios is an incisive portrait of politics and culture in a rapidly changing China. In a narrative that ranges from political allegory to parody, Jia Pingwa tracks his antihero Zhuang Zhidie through progressively more involved and inevitably disappointing sexual liaisons. Set in a modern metropolis rife with power politics, corruption, and capitalist schemes, the novel evokes an unrequited romantic longing for China’s premodern, rural past, even as unfolding events caution against the trap of nostalgia. Amid comedy and chaos, the author subtly injects his concerns about the place of intellectual seriousness, censorship, and artistic integrity in the changing conditions of Chinese society.

Rich with detailed description and vivid imagery, Ruined City transports readers into a world abounding with the absurdities and harshness of modern life.

Dante Valentine has just about had it. First, she's hired by the Devil to hunt down four demons who escaped from Hell. Then, she finds out one of those demons is Eve, a child she swore to protect.

To top it all off, her lover Japhrimel thinks that the Devil is right. And that all the demons, including Eve, belong in hell.

It doesn't matter what she thinks is best for Eve. Because once you make a deal with the Devil, there is no going back.

SEX and the CITY

Old ways are pitted against new horrors in this compellingly crafted dystopian tale about a girl who is both healer and seer.

Two hundred years from now, blood has become the most valuable commodity on the planet – especially the blood of aboriginal peoples, for it contains antibodies that protect them from the Plague ravaging the rest of the world.

Sixteen-year-old Cassandra Mercredi might be immune to Plague, but that doesn't mean she's safe – government forces are searching for those of aboriginal heritage to harvest their blood. When a search threatens Cassandra and her family, they flee to the Island: a mysterious and idyllic territory protected by the Band, a group of guerilla warriors – and by an enigmatic energy barrier that keeps outsiders out and the spirit world in. And though the village healer has taken her under her wing, and the tribal leader's son into his heart, the creatures of the spirit world are angry, and they have chosen Cassandra to be their voice and instrument…

Incorporating the traditions of the First Peoples as well as the more familiar stories of Greek mythology and Arthurian legend, Shadows Cast by Stars is a haunting, beautifully written story that breathes new life into ancient customs.

Captured by his archenemy, Dr. Dismas, the remarkable young man known as Yama fights a dual battle against an internal and an external enemy in order to achieve his true destiny. Set in a far future in which humans have abandoned the known worlds, leaving behind them a plethora of created races, McAuley's conclusion to his galactic trilogy, “The Books of Confluence,” reveals the cyclic nature of the universe and the infinite variety of creation. Richly detailed and lyrically told, this volume belongs in most sf collections.

When the Dom's away...the subs will play! Jack and Sam married Abby. It was supposed to be for forever, but lately Abby wonders where her alpha male has gone. Jack has retreated, and life has become decidedly vanilla. It isn't the true threesome she and Sam wanted. Sam and Abby know the time has come to fight for what they need.

A call from his mentor forces Jack to revisit the club where discovered his sexuality. Jack's half-brother is in the city and interested in a little blackmail. Can Jack handle two defiant subs and a brother in need of tough love?

Sometimes all it takes to find the way home is a little love and a lot of bondage.

Taking place during World War II, Somewhere in the Stars is the story of three young men from San Francisco—Nick Spataro, his cousin Paolo, and friend Nathan Fein—and their adventures as members of an American tank battalion chasing the Germans up the Italian peninsula, while Nick’s Sicilian dad is interned as an “enemy alien” back in the USA. Despite encountering prejudice both at home and during their tank training, the three show uncanny skill in outmaneuvering and destroying German tanks, until their own tank is blown up. Tragic events both on and off the battlefield, bravery, guilt in the loss of friends, romance, trauma, feelings of regret, daring rescues and eventual re-union with loved ones make for a powerful and explosive mix.

Чтобы написать эту книгу, Лене Лениной - автору пятнадцати книг на русском и французском языках, из которых три бестселлера, пришлось познакомиться со звездами мировой величины и не только познакомится, но и попасть к ним домой. Ведь всем хочется знать, каковы звезды в жизни, с кем они спят, где и как живут, что едят и какого цвета у них туалетная бумага. Итак, герои этой книги: Пьер Ришар, Жерар Депардье, Клод Лелуш, Соня Рикель, Кристофер Ламберт, Патрисия Каас, Роберто Кавалли, Дима Билан, Гарик Мартиросян, «Гости из будущего», Игорь Николаев и другие.

Sharply observed and brilliantly plotted, Stars and Bars is an uproarious portrait of culture clash deep in the heart of the American South, by one of contemporary literature’s most imaginative novelists.

A recent transfer to Manhattan has inspired art assessor Henderson Dores to shed his British reserve and aspire to the impulsive and breezy nature of Americans. But when Loomis Gage, an eccentric millionaire, invites him to appraise his small collection of Impressionist paintings, Dores's plans quite literally go south. Stranded at a remote mansion in the Georgia countryside, Dores is received by the bizarre Gage family with Anglophobic slurs, nausea-inducing food, ludicrous death threats, and a menacing face off with competing art dealers. By the time he manages to sneak back to New York City — sporting only a cardboard box — Henderson Dores realizes he is fast on the way to becoming a naturalized citizen.

Acclaimed for his historical knowledge and his literary craftsmanship, the author of The Hammer and the Cross imagines what history might have been like if Great Britain had attacked America at the height of the Civil War.

This title follows a what if path of the British Empire pitted against her American colonies. The second title in the trilogy, only a brilliant plan by General Robert E. Lee enables the USA to attack the British forces where they least expect it and broaden the war for independence.

In Stars and Stripes Forever, Harry Harrison began the story of the war that never was, but might so easily have happened: the war of the 1860s between the United States of America and the British Empire. It began with an ill-considered seizure of a British ship, escalated with an ill-considered letter to Abraham Lincoln, and continued with an ill-starred invasion of the territory of the USA by an incensed British government. The first modern war — with iron-clad ships, rapid-firing guns, trenches, mass armies and massive casualties, was taking place, not between the industrial northern states and the agricultural southern ones, but between the two great English-speaking nations. Who happened also to be the two most powerful nations on the planet. In the stunning conclusion to this series, the Irish become involved and a most surprising ending is the culmination of the ill-fated war.

In a stately West Village townhouse, a wealthy socialite and her secretary are murdered. In the 24 hours that follow, a flurry of activity circles around their shocking deaths: The head of one of the city’s last tabloids stops the presses. A cop investigates the killing. A reporter chases the story. A disgraced hedge fund manager flees the country. An Iraq War vet seeks revenge. And an angry young extremist plots a major catastrophe.

The City is many things: a proving ground, a decadent playground, or a palimpsest of memories- a historic metropolis eclipsed by modern times. As much a thriller as it is a gripping portrait of the city of today, TABLOID CITY is a new fiction classic from the writer who has captured it perfectly for decades.

International best-selling author Linda Fairstein returns with a breathless, explosive thriller exploring the dark side of New York City.

When the body of a woman is found in one of the most prestigious hotels in Manhattan, Assistant DA Alex Cooper and Detective Mike Chapman find themselves hunting for an elusive killer whose signature is carving a symbol, bearing a striking resemblance to train tracks, into his victims' bodies. Alex and Mike must contend with the city's expansive underground tunnels to find a killer who is heading straight to the heart of the city…

In a city of the dead, long since ruined and far from human civilization, lives a single human child. His name is Will, and he's being raised by three undead: the hearty skeletal warrior, Blood; the graceful mummified priestess, Mary; and the crotchety spectral sorcerer, Gus. The three pour love into the boy, and teach him all they know. But one day, Will starts to wonder: "Who am I?"

Will must unravel the mysteries of this faraway dead man's land, and unearth the secret pasts of the undead. He must learn the love and mercy of the good gods, and the bigotry and madness of the bad. And when he knows it all, the boy will take his first step on the path to becoming a Paladin.

"I promised you. It's gonna take a while, but I'll tell you everything. This is the story of the deaths of many heroes. It's the story of how we died, and it's the reason you grew up here."

Review from Animenewsnetwork: "Fans of fantasy by not necessarily light novels should give this a chance, as it is good simply as a fantasy book and has the most potential to reach beyond the otaku niche of any LN thus far published in English. By turns exciting, heartwarming, and heartbreaking, The Faraway Paladin is a book that is worth your time."

The city is Beszel, a rundown metropolis on the eastern edge of Europe. The other city is Ul Qoma, a modern Eastern European boomtown, despite being a bit of an international pariah. What the two cities share, and what they don't, is the deliciously evocative conundrum at the heart of China Mieville's The City & The City. Mieville is well known as a modern fantasist (and urbanist), but from book to book he's tried on different genres, and here he's fully hard-boiled, stripping down to a seen-it-all detective's voice that's wonderfully appropriate for this story of seen and unseen. His detective is Inspector Tyador Borlu, a cop in Beszel whose investigation of the murder of a young foreign woman takes him back and forth across the highly policed border to Ul Qoma to uncover a crime that threatens the delicate balance between the cities and, perhaps more so, Borlu's own dissolving sense of identity. In his tale of two cities, Mieville creates a world both fantastic and unsettlingly familiar, whose mysteries don't end with the solution of a murder.

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shutout the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it held powers that rules the stars. But then, as legend had it, the Invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, a Unique to break through Diaspar’s stifling inertia, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders.

Men had built cities before, but never such a city as Diaspar; for millennia its protective dome shutout the creeping decay and danger of the world outside. Once, it held powers that rules the stars. But then, as legend had it, the Invaders came, driving humanity into this last refuge. It takes one man, a Unique to break through Diaspar’s stifling inertia, to smash the legend and discover the true nature of the Invaders.

From the author of The Death of Vishnu, “a big, pyrotechnic… ambitious… ingenious” (Wall Street Journal) novel.

Mumbai has emptied under the threat of imminent nuclear annihilation; gangs of marauding Hindu and Muslim thugs rove the desolate streets; yet Sarita can think of only one thing: buying the last pomegranate that remains in perhaps the entire city. She is convinced that the fruit holds the key to reuniting her with her physicist husband, Karun, who has been mysteriously missing for more than a fortnight.

Searching for his own lover in the midst of this turmoil is Jaz—cocky, handsome, and glib. “The Jazter,” as he calls himself, is Muslim, but his true religion has steadfastly been sex with men. Dodging danger at every step, both he and Sarita are inexorably drawn to Devi ma, the patron goddess who has reputedly appeared in person to save her city. What they find will alter their lives more fundamentally than any apocalypse to come.

A wickedly comedic and fearlessly provocative portrayal of individuals balancing on the sharp edge of fate, The City of Devi brilliantly upends assumptions of politics, religion, and sex, and offers a terrifying yet exuberant glimpse of the end of the world.

‘Where Itäranta shines is in her understated but compelling characters.’

–Red star review (for MEMORY OF WATER), Publishers Weekly.

Emmi Itäranta’s prose combines the lyricism of Ishiguro’s NEVER LET ME GO. This is her second novel, following the award-winning MEMORY OF WATER.

The tapestry of life may be more fragile than it seems: pull one thread, and all will unravel.

In the City of Woven Streets, human life has little value. You practice a craft to keep you alive, or you are an outcast, unwanted and tainted. Eliana is a young weaver in the House of Webs, but secretly knows she doesn’t really belong there. She is hiding a shameful birth defect that would, if anyone knew about it, land her in the House of the Tainted, a prison for those whose very existence is considered a curse.

When an unknown woman with her tongue cut off and Eliana’s name tattooed on her skin arrives at the House of Webs, Eliana discovers an invisible network of power behind the city’s facade. All the while, the sea is clawing the shores and the streets are slowly drowning.

Emmi Itäranta’s second novel was published as The City of Woven Streets on June 2nd 2016 in the UK by by HarperVoyager. The US version, titled The Weaver, will follow in November 2016.

A cartographic thriller with so many twists and turns it requires its own map

A cartography-obsessed misfit clerk from an antique map store in a district that’s not quite trendy yet. A bold young woman chasing the answer to a question she can’t quite formulate. A petty criminal hoping the parking lot he’s just purchased is the ticket to a new life of respectability with his school-age daughter. A ruthless but vulnerable killer and his disgruntled accomplice. In The City Under the Skin, it’s not fate that will bind these characters together but something more concrete and sinister: the appearance of a group of mysterious women, their backs crudely and extensively tattooed with maps.

They have been kidnapped, marked, and released, otherwise unharmed. When one turns up on the doorstep of the map shop and abruptly bares her back, only to be hustled away by a man in a beat-up blue Cadillac, it’s the misfit clerk Zak, pushed by his curious new friend Marilyn, who finds himself reluctantly entering a criminal underworld whose existence he’d prefer to ignore.

In this haunting literary thriller, Geoff Nicholson paints a deft portrait of a city in transition. His sharply drawn characters are people desperate to know where they are but scared of being truly seen. A meditation on obsession and revenge, a hymn to the joys of urban exploration, The City Under the Skin is a wholly original novel about the indelible scars we both live with and inflict on others.

When The Princess of Burundi was published last year by Thomas Dunne Books, American critics hailed Kjell Eriksson as Sweden's Ed McBain, and they compared him to Henning Mankell. Now The Cruel Stars of the Night, the next in this internationally acclaimed crime series, unveils a spellbinding new tale again featuring police inspector Ann Lindell.

The Cruel Stars of the Night opens one snowy day when thirty-five-year-old Laura Hindersten goes to the police to report that her father, a local professor, is missing. Inspector Ann Lindell and her colleagues can find no motive for the man's disappearance. And when the corpses of two elderly men do turn up, neither of the dead men is the missing academic.

Unexpectedly, the police get help from one of the professor's colleagues, who believes there is an astonishing link between the murders and the disappearance of Professor Hindersten. But as the pressure on Lindell increases dramatically, she is shocked to discover that the killer has many more diabolical schemes in store.

Combining heart-pounding suspense with brilliant psychological insight, The Cruel Stars of the Night moves like a comet as it approaches the cliff-hanging climax. It is sure to win Kjell Eriksson a whole new galaxy of American fans.

Arkady and Boris Strugatsky are widely considered the greatest of Russian science fiction masters, and their most famous work, Roadside Picnic, has enjoyed great popularity worldwide. Yet the novel that was their own favorite, and that readers worldwide have acclaimed as their magnum opus, has never before been published in English. The Doomed City was so politically risky that the Strugatsky brothers kept its existence a complete secret even from their best friends for sixteen years after its completion in 1972. It was only published in Russia in the late 1980s, the last of their works to see publication. It was translated into a host of major European languages, and now appears in English in a major new translation by acclaimed translator Andrew Bromfield.

The Doomed City is set in an experimental city bordered by an abyss on one side and an impossibly high wall on the other. Its sole inhabitants are people who were plucked from Earth’s history and left to govern themselves under conditions established by Mentors whose purpose seems inscrutable. Andrei Voronin, a young astronomer plucked from Leningrad in the 1950s, is a diehard believer in the Experiment, even though he’s now a garbage collector. And as increasingly nightmarish scenarios begin to affect the city, he rises through the political hierarchy, with devastating effect.

Dorothy's aunt and uncle get acquainted with Oz after they lose their farm and Ozma invites them to live with her.

It is 1943, and the Second World War is ravaging Europe. Mussolini decides to pull out of his alliance with the Nazis, and withdraws the Italian troops occupying Albania. Soon after, Nazi forces invade Albania from occupied Greece. The first settlement in their path is the ancient stone city of Gjirokastër, an Albanian stronghold since the fourteenth century. The townsfolk have no choice but to surrender to the Nazis, but are confused when they see that one of the town’s residents, a certain Dr. Gurameto, seems to be showing the invading Nazi Colonel great hospitality. That evening, strains of Schubert from the doctor’s gramophone waft out into the cobbled streets of the city, and the sounds of a dinner party are heard. The sudden disappearance of the Nazis the next morning leaves the town wondering if they might have dreamt the events of the previous night. But as Albania moves into a period of occupation by the Nazis, and then is taken over by the communists, Dr. Gurameto is forced to answer for what happened on the evening of the Nazi’s invasion, and finally explain the events of that long, strange night.

Dealing with themes of resistance in a dictatorship, and steeped in Albanian folklore and legend, The Fall of the Stone City shows Kadare at the height of his powers.

A world that exists in the shadow of our own… the thrilling conclusion to John Twelve Hawks's Fourth Realm trilogy, The Golden City is packed with the knife-edge tension, intriguing characters, and startling plot twists that made The Traveler and The Dark River international hits.

John Twelve Hawks's previous novels about the mystical Travelers and the Brethren, their ruthless enemies, generated an extraordinary following around the world. The Washington Post wrote that The Traveler 'portrays a Big Brother with powers far beyond anything Orwell could imagine…' and Publishers Weekly hailed the series as 'a saga that's part A Wrinkle in Time, part The Matrix and part Kurosawa epic.' Internet chat rooms and blogs have overflowed with speculation about the final destiny of the richly imagined characters fighting an epic battle beneath the surface of our modern world.

In The Golden City, Twelve Hawks delivers the climax to his spellbinding epic. Struggling to protect the legacy of his Traveler father, Gabriel faces troubling new questions and relentless threats. His brother Michael, now firmly allied with the enemy, pursues his ambition to wrest power from Nathan Boone, the calculating leader of the Brethren. And Maya, the Harlequin warrior pledged to protect Gabriel at all costs, is forced to make a choice that will change her life forever.

A riveting blend of high-tech thriller and fast-paced adventure, The Golden City will delight Twelve Hawks's many fans and attract a new audience to the entire trilogy.

For two years, Oriana Paredes has been a spy among the social elite of the Golden City, reporting back to her people, the sereia, sea folk banned from the city’s shores....

 When her employer and only confidante decides to elope, Oriana agrees to accompany her to Paris. But before they can depart, the two women are abducted and left to drown. Trapped beneath the waves, Oriana’s heritage allows her to survive while she is forced to watch her only friend die.

 Vowing vengeance, Oriana crosses paths with Duilio Ferreira—a police consultant who has been investigating the disappearance of a string of servants from the city’s wealthiest homes. Duilio also has a secret: He is a seer and his gifts have led him to Oriana.

 Bound by their secrets, not trusting each other completely yet having no choice but to work together, Oriana and Duilio must expose a twisted plot of magic so dark that it could cause the very fabric of history to come undone....

After a decades-long apocalypse, the United States has become the Seven Cities of America.

Chicago, cut off from the other cities, ruled in darkness, is home to the scientist who created the virus. Hateful of humanity, hateful of himself, the dying scientist passes his knowledge on to his apprentice, who he believes will use it to damn all life to everlasting misery.

The apprentice, Harold, his own past stained with unforgivable acts, does not share his master’s hatred. But he wants this knowledge, and would shamelessly kill innocents to get it. But to what end, he struggles to realize—all the while wondering if humanity, worthless as it seems, deserves compassion more than he deserves omniscience.

As Harold struggles with his future and his identity, Chicago’s ruler, the host, learns of the knowledge he has. Harold is has to flee his home.

The host, Grakus, is on a journey of his own—to prove that humanity should never have existed, to guide it to its destiny of self-destruction. He will not allow Harold to thwart his delicate plan to do so.

But Harold will not allow the host to steal his decision before he’s had the chance to make it.

The Last City of America is a character-driven epic touching every corner of America, exposing every level of its beauty. The individual emulates humanity, and humanity’s faults are written in the individual. The two walk with one another into the final decision. Cities fall one-by-one to man’s ignorance. The world is ending. This time forever. Good and evil are reaching out to save it.

This is the story of how we will be remembered.

The Lost City is the eighth part of the high-octane, heavy-action Joe Hawke series. Reeling from the terrible losses they suffered in their quest to locate Atlantis, the surviving members of the decimated ECHO team have no time to grieve when a long-lost artefact connected to the Lost Treasure of the Incas is found off the coast of Colombia.

With ECHO leader Sir Richard Eden deep in a coma, Ryan Bale missing-presumed-dead and their island sanctuary of Elysium reduced to smoking ruins, Joe Hawke must lead an exhausted and diminished team against an enemy intent on snatching the greatest treasure on earth and something far more sinister that has been lurking within it for centuries.

As ECHO struggle against the odds, only the deep friendship they have forged can keep them together at this most desperate of times. From Cartagena to the backstreets of Lima, from the ancient mystery of Machu Picchu to extinct Peruvian volcanoes and beyond, Hawke must work harder than ever to hold their world together.

Joe Hawke will return in THE SWORD OF FIRE.

A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve “the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century:” What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?

In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization—which he dubbed “Z”—existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.

Fawcett’s fate—and the tantalizing clues he left behind about “Z”—became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle’s “green hell.” His quest for the truth and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and “Z” form the heart of this complex, enthralling narrative.

A grand mystery reaching back centuries. A sensational disappearance that made headlines around the world. A quest for truth that leads to death, madness or disappearance for those who seek to solve it. The Lost City of Z is a blockbuster adventure narrative about what lies beneath the impenetrable jungle canopy of the Amazon.

After stumbling upon a hidden trove of diaries, acclaimed New Yorker writer David Grann set out to solve "the greatest exploration mystery of the twentieth century:" What happened to the British explorer Percy Fawcett and his quest for the Lost City of Z?

In 1925 Fawcett ventured into the Amazon to find an ancient civilization, hoping to make one of the most important discoveries in history. For centuries Europeans believed the world’s largest jungle concealed the glittering kingdom of El Dorado. Thousands had died looking for it, leaving many scientists convinced that the Amazon was truly inimical to humankind. But Fawcett, whose daring expeditions helped inspire Conan Doyle’s The Lost World, had spent years building his scientific case. Captivating the imagination of millions around the globe, Fawcett embarked with his twenty-one-year-old son, determined to prove that this ancient civilization-which he dubbed “Z”-existed. Then he and his expedition vanished.

Fawcett’s fate-and the tantalizing clues he left behind about “Z”-became an obsession for hundreds who followed him into the uncharted wilderness. For decades scientists and adventurers have searched for evidence of Fawcett’s party and the lost City of Z. Countless have perished, been captured by tribes, or gone mad. As David Grann delved ever deeper into the mystery surrounding Fawcett’s quest, and the greater mystery of what lies within the Amazon, he found himself, like the generations who preceded him, being irresistibly drawn into the jungle’s “green hell.” His quest for the truth and his stunning discoveries about Fawcett’s fate and “Z” form the heart of this complex, enthralling narrative.

A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees.

Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis.

In the distant future, a medieval system rises from the ruins of a technology that destroyed itself. Armored knights ride their horses across dunes of rust, battling for the honor of the Queen. But the knights find more to menace them than mere swords and lances. A brave quest leads them face to face with the awesome power of a complex, lethal technology that has been erased from the face of the Earth--but lives on, underground.

Three star travelers—Ming, Ari, and Angel—become enmeshed in a vicious blood-feud between an evil genius and Jeremiah Wong Kincaid, the man who has vowed to destroy him.

The Serpent of Stars (Le serpent d'étoiles, 1993; reprinted 1999 Grasset) takes place in rural southern France in the early part of the century. The novel’s elusive narrative thread ties landscape to character to an expanse just beyond our grasp. The narrator encounters a shepherding family and glimpse by glimpse, each family member and the shepherding way of life is revealed to us. The novel culminates in a large shepherds’ gathering where a traditional Shepherd’s Play — a kind of creation myth that includes in its cast The River, The Sea, The Man, and The Mountain — is enacted. The work’s proto-environmental world view as well as its hybrid form — part play, part novel — makes The Serpent of Stars astonishingly contemporary. W.S. Merwin’s "Green Fields" begins, "By this part of the century few are left who believe/in the animals for they are not there in the carved parts/of them served on plates and the pleas from slatted trucks…" This novel leaves the reader believing not only in the animals, but the terrain they are part of, the people who tend them, and the life all these elements together compose.

“The Squares of the City” is a tour-de-force, a disciplined exercise peopled originally by wooden or ivory or jade figurines, now fleshed and clothed and given dramatic life in a battle as ald as the classic conflict of chess. But these are real people. When heads roll, blood gounts out and drenches the remaining players while they watch in horrified fascination—until their turn comes.

For it is a real game.

And the players—especially the players—cannot tell the outcome. Even when their lives depend upon it.

Set in Nicaragua in 1984, The Stars at Noon is a story of passion, fear, and betrayal told in the voice of an American woman whose mission in Central America is as shadowy as her surroundings. Is she a reporter for an American magazine as she sometimes claims, or a contact person for Eyes of Peace? And who is the rough English businessman with whom she becomes involved? As the two foreigners become entangled in increasingly sinister plots, Denis Johnson masterfully dramatizes a powerful vision of spiritual bereavement and corruption.

First published in 1935, The Stars Look Down tells the story of a North Country mining community as its inhabitants make their way through the various social and political challenges of the early 20th century. Digging into workers’ rights, social change, and the relationship between labor and capitalism, the struggles of the novel’s trifecta of protagonists — politically minded miner David Fenwick, ambitious drifter Joe Gowlan, and frustrated yet meek mining-baron’s son Arthur Barras — remain compelling and relevant to readers in the 21st century.

The Stars Look Down is one of many tales of the hardships of coal-mining communities during the industrial pre-war, World War I, and interwar periods in Britain, but stands out for its unflinching prose, universal themes, and keen storytelling. The novel was adapted into a 1940 film starring Michael Redgrave as Davey Fenwick, is a New York Times Critics’ Pick, and is included in The New York Times Guide to…

The Stars My Destination (originally called Tiger! Tiger!, from William Blake's poem "The Tyger") is a science fiction novel by Alfred Bester, first published in Galaxy magazine as a 4-part serial, beginning in the October 1956 issue.

The Stars My Destination is, in one sense, a science-fiction adaption of Alexandre Dumas' The Count of Monte Cristo. It is the study of a man completely lacking in imagination or ambition, Gulliver Foyle. Fate transforms "Gully" Foyle in an instant; shipwrecked in space, then abandoned by a passing luxury liner, Foyle becomes a monomaniacal and sophisticated monster bent upon revenge. Wearing many masks, learning many skills, this "worthless" man pursues his goals relentlessly; no price is too high to pay.

Ned Maddstone has it all. He's handsome and talented; he has the love of a beautiful woman and in 1980, he stands at the brink of a glittering future. He rounds off an outstanding public school career with a sailing trip to Scotland, which is where his fortunes enter a terrifying tailspin. Determined to honour the dying wish of his sailing instructor, Ned returns to London, where the schemes of jealous classmates catapult him into a 10-year nightmare. Confined to a solitary Hell, believed dead by all those who loved him, Ned transforms from a terminally nice guy into a creature bent on revenge, a revenge both satisfying and apocalyptic. Few writers can deliver so much in one package, but here Stephen Fry combines a riotous satire of the privileged classes with elements of the darkest thrillers. While the plot bounces from the sublime to the surreal, his characters remain acutely real. Ned's classmates, slow-witted hedonist Rufus Cade, and the Machiavellian climber Ashley Barson-Garland – who is aroused by the sight of straw boaters – are masterful creations. This novel has nothing to do with tennis, and everything to do with the cruel logic of Fate. Game, set and match to Mr Fry. – Matthew Baylis

730 — THAT’S HOW MANY DAYS I'VE BEEN TRAPPED.

18 — THAT’S HOW MANY DAYS I HAVE LEFT TO FIND A WAY OUT.

Jin, Mei Yee, and Dai live in the Walled City, a lawless labyrinth overrun by crime lords and street gangs. Jin hides under the radar, afraid that her biggest secret will be discovered: She passes as a boy to stay safe. But when Dai, a boy with a secret of his own, offers Jin the only chance she has to find her kidnapped sister, Mei Yee, she begins a race against the clock to save everyone she loves — and escape the Walled City itself.

“The Walled City grabbed me by the throat from page one. From the very first chapter to the last, my heart loved and feared for these characters. BRILLIANTLY AND BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN — a true triumph.” —Beth Revis, New York Times bestselling author of the Across the Universe series.

“The Walled City is DARK and GRIM and INTENSELY COMPELLING. It is a book you cannot easily forget, a book you will want to read again and again.” —Ellen Oh, author of Prophecy.

Award-winning author Simon Morden’s stunning quest continues, unravelling magic and uncovering secrets on the way…

LET’S FACE IT, NONE OF US DESERVE TO BE SAVED.

Since escaping London’s inferno, Mary and Dalip have fought monsters and won◦– though in the magical world of Down, the most frightening monsters come from within.

Now they hold the greatest of treasures: maps that reveal the way to the White City, where they can find the answers they’re looking for, and learn the secrets of Down.

But to get there they must rely on Crows, who has already betrayed them at every turn. As they battle their way towards the one place in all of Down without magic, they must ask themselves how far they will go to find their way home.

After all, if there’s one thing the White City offers those brave enough to enter, it’s more than they bargained for.

SIMON MORDEN’S DOWN STATION WAS AN EXTRAORDINARY QUEST FOR MEANING AND IDENTITY. NOW HE’S LEADING US TO THE KIND OF TRUTHS THAT LEAVE US CHANGED.

Locals usually have mixed feelings about tourists—for good reasons!

Not all people calling themselves ecologists see things the same way—and the real problem may be bigger than any of them suspects!

Lucky Jimmy Armstrong and his friend Claire find themselves deserted by the new Titanic on an unfamiliar shore. With normal life changed forever, the world is left in the hands of cannibals, murderers and gangs. They are back to fighting for survival. Well, that, and running . . . fast! Then after overhearing a group of survivors with a starting story they stumble upon the one thing that has become a real rarity — hope.

JACEN and JAINA

When the Empire died, they were born—a new hope for the New Republic. The young twins of Han Solo and Princess Leia have grown strong with the Force, thwarting the evil Nolaa Tarkona and destroying the Emperor’s plague. Now, with their friends Lowbacca the Wookiee and Tenel Ka, the future heroes of an already legendary saga continue their training.

Lando Calrissian offers the young Jedi Knights a rare opportunity—a vacation on Cloud City. They jump at the chance—as long as their new friend, the mysterious Anja Gallandro, can come along. Anja is happy to be included. But little do the twins know that they are actually helping Anja hatch her sinister plan. A plan that goes far deeper than simple revenge…

INTRODUCTORY—ANCESTRY—THE NORTHUP FAMILY—BIRTH AND PARENTAGE—MINTUS NORTHUP—MARRIAGE WITH ANNE HAMPTON—GOOD RESOLUTIONS—CHAMPLAIN CANAL—RAFTING EXCURSION TO CANADA—FARMING—THE VIOLIN—COOKING—REMOVAL TO SARATOGA—PARKER AND PERRY—SLAVES AND SLAVERY—THE CHILDREN—THE BEGINNING OF SORROW.

THE TWO STRANGERS—THE CIRCUS COMPANY—DEPARTURE FROM SARATOGA—VENTRILOQUISM AND LEGERDEMAIN—JOURNEY TO NEW-YORK—FREE PAPERS—BROWN AND HAMILTON—THE HASTE TO REACH THE CIRCUS—ARRIVAL IN WASHINGTON—FUNERAL OF HARRISON—THE SUDDEN SICKNESS—THE TORMENT OF THIRST—THE RECEDING LIGHT—INSENSIBILITY—CHAINS AND DARKNESS.

PAINFUL MEDITATIONS—JAMES H. BURCH—WILLIAMS' SLAVE PEN IN WASHINGTON—THE LACKEY, RADBURN—ASSERT MY FREEDOM—THE ANGER OF THE TRADER—THE PADDLE AND CAT-O'-NINETAILS—THE WHIPPING—NEW ACQUAINTANCES—RAY, WILLIAMS, AND RANDALL—ARRIVAL OF LITTLE EMILY AND HER MOTHER IN THE PEN—MATERNAL SORROWS—THE STORY OF ELIZA.

ELIZA'S SORROWS—PREPARATION TO EMBARK—DRIVEN THROUGH THE STREETS OF WASHINGTON—HAIL, COLUMBIA—THE TOMB OF WASHINGTON—CLEM RAY—THE BREAKFAST ON THE STEAMER—THE HAPPY BIRDS—AQUIA CREEK—FREDERICKSBURGH—ARRIVAL IN RICHMOND—GOODIN AND HIS SLAVE PEN—ROBERT, OF CINCINNATI—DAVID AND HIS WIFE—MARY AND LETHE—CLEM'S RETURN—HIS SUBSEQUENT ESCAPE TO CANADA—THE BRIG ORLEANS—JAMES H. BURCH.

ARRIVAL AT NORFOLK—FREDERICK AND MARIA—ARTHUR, THE FREEMAN—APPOINTED STEWARD—JIM, CUFFEE, AND JENNY—THE STORM—BAHAMA BANKS—THE CALM—THE CONSPIRACY—THE LONG BOAT—THE SMALL-POX—DEATH OF ROBERT—MANNING, THE SAILOR—THE MEETING IN THE FORECASTLE—THE LETTER—ARRIVAL AT NEW-ORLEANS—ARTHUR'S RESCUE—THEOPHILUS FREEMAN, THE CONSIGNEE—PLATT—FIRST NIGHT IN THE NEW-ORLEANS SLAVE PEN.

FREEMAN'S INDUSTRY—CLEANLINESS AND CLOTHES—EXERCISING IN THE SHOW ROOM—THE DANCE—BOB, THE FIDDLER—ARRIVAL OF CUSTOMERS—SLAVES EXAMINED—THE OLD GENTLEMAN OF NEW-ORLEANS—SALE OF DAVID, CAROLINE AND LETHE—PARTING OF RANDALL AND ELIZA—SMALL POX—THE HOSPITAL—RECOVERY AND RETURN TO FREEMAN'S SLAVE PEN—THE PURCHASER OF ELIZA, HARRY AND PLATT—ELIZA'S AGONY ON PARTING FROM LITTLE EMILY.

THE STEAMBOAT RODOLPH—DEPARTURE FROM NEW-ORLEANS—WILLIAM FORD—ARRIVAL AT ALEXANDRIA, ON RED RIVER—RESOLUTIONS—THE GREAT PINE WOODS—WILD CATTLE—MARTIN'S SUMMER RESIDENCE—THE TEXAS ROAD—ARRIVAL AT MASTER FORD'S—ROSE—MISTRESS FORD—SALLY, AND HER CHILDREN—JOHN, THE COOK—WALTER, SAM, AND ANTONY—THE MILLS ON INDIAN CREEK—SABBATH DAYS—SAM'S CONVERSION—THE PROFIT OF KINDNESS—RAFTING—ADAM TAYDEM, THE LITTLE WHITE MAN—CASCALLA AND HIS TRIBE—THE INDIAN BALL—JOHN M. TIBEATS—THE STORM APPROACHING.

FORD'S EMBARRASSMENTS—THE SALE TO TIBEATS—THE CHATTEL MORTGAGE—MISTRESS FORD'S PLANTATION ON BAYOU BŒUF—DESCRIPTION OF THE LATTER—FORD'S BROTHER-IN-LAW, PETER TANNER—MEETING WITH ELIZA—SHE STILL MOURNS FOR HER CHILDREN—FORD'S OVERSEER, CHAPIN—TIBEAT'S ABUSE—THE KEG OF NAILS—THE FIRST FIGHT WITH TIBEATS—HIS DISCOMFITURE AND CASTIGATION—THE ATTEMPT TO HANG ME—CHAPIN'S INTERFERENCE AND SPEECH—UNHAPPY REFLECTIONS—ABRUPT DEPARTURE OF TIBEATS, COOK AND RAMSAY—LAWSON AND THE BROWN MULE—MESSAGE TO THE PINE WOODS.

THE HOT SUN—YET BOUND—THE CORDS SINK INTO MY FLESH—CHAPIN'S UNEASINESS—SPECULATION—RACHEL, AND HER CUP OF WATER—SUFFERING INCREASES—THE HAPPINESS OF SLAVERY—ARRIVAL OF FORD—HE CUTS THE CORDS WHICH BIND ME, AND TAKES THE ROPE FROM MY NECK—MISERY—THE GATHERING OF THE SLAVES IN ELIZA'S CABIN—THEIR KINDNESS—RACHEL REPEATS THE OCCURRENCES OF THE DAY—LAWSON ENTERTAINS HIS COMPANIONS WITH AN ACCOUNT OF HIS RIDE—CHAPIN'S APPREHENSIONS OF TIBEATS—HIRED TO PETER TANNER—PETER EXPOUNDS THE SCRIPTURES—DESCRIPTION OF THE STOCKS.

RETURN TO TIBEATS—IMPOSSIBILITY OF PLEASING HIM—HE ATTACKS ME WITH A HATCHET—THE STRUGGLE OVER THE BROAD AXE—THE TEMPTATION TO MURDER HIM—ESCAPE ACROSS THE PLANTATION—OBSERVATIONS FROM THE FENCE—TIBEATS APPROACHES, FOLLOWED BY THE HOUNDS—THEY TAKE MY TRACK—THEIR LOUD YELLS—THEY ALMOST OVERTAKE ME—I REACH THE WATER—THE HOUNDS CONFUSED—MOCCASIN SNAKES—ALLIGATORS—NIGHT IN THE "GREAT PACOUDRIE SWAMP"—THE SOUNDS OF LIFE—NORTH-WEST COURSE—EMERGE INTO THE PINE WOODS—THE SLAVE AND HIS YOUNG MASTER—ARRIVAL AT FORD'S—FOOD AND REST.

THE MISTRESS' GARDEN—THE CRIMSON AND GOLDEN FRUIT—ORANGE AND POMEGRANATE TREES—RETURN TO BAYOU BŒUF—MASTER FORD'S REMARKS ON THE WAY—THE MEETING WITH TIBEATS—HIS ACCOUNT OF THE CHASE—FORD CENSURES HIS BRUTALITY—ARRIVAL AT THE PLANTATION—ASTONISHMENT OF THE SLAVES ON SEEING ME—THE ANTICIPATED FLOGGING—KENTUCKY JOHN—MR. ELDRET, THE PLANTER—ELDRET'S SAM—TRIP TO THE "BIG CANE BRAKE"—THE TRADITION OF "SUTTON'S FIELD"—FOREST TREES—GNATS AND MOSQUITOS—THE ARRIVAL OF BLACK WOMEN IN THE BIG CANE—LUMBER WOMEN—SUDDEN APPEARANCE OF TIBEATS—HIS PROVOKING TREATMENT—VISIT TO BAYOU BŒUF—THE SLAVE PASS—SOUTHERN HOSPITALITY—THE LAST OF ELIZA—SALE TO EDWIN EPPS.

PERSONAL APPEARANCE OF EPPS—EPPS, DRUNK AND SOBER—A GLIMPSE OF HIS HISTORY—COTTON GROWING—THE MODE OF PLOUGHING AND PREPARING GROUND—OF PLANTING—OF HOEING, OF PICKING, OF TREATING RAW HANDS—THE DIFFERENCE IN COTTON PICKERS—PATSEY A REMARKABLE ONE—TASKED ACCORDING TO ABILITY—BEAUTY OF A COTTON FIELD—THE SLAVE'S LABORS—FEAR ON APPROACHING THE GIN-HOUSE—WEIGHING—"CHORES"—CABIN LIFE—THE CORN MILL—THE USES OF THE GOURD—FEAR OF OVERSLEEPING—FEAR CONTINUALLY—MODE OF CULTIVATING CORN—SWEET POTATOES—FERTILITY OF THE SOIL—FATTENING HOGS—PRESERVING BACON—RAISING CATTLE—SHOOTING-MATCHES—GARDEN PRODUCTS—FLOWERS AND VERDURE.

THE CURIOUS AXE-HELVE—SYMPTOMS OF APPROACHING ILLNESS—CONTINUE TO DECLINE—THE WHIP INEFFECTUAL—CONFINED TO THE CABIN—VISIT BY DR. WINES—PARTIAL RECOVERY—FAILURE AT COTTON PICKING—WHAT MAY BE HEARD ON EPPS' PLANTATION—LASHES GRADUATED—EPPS IN A WHIPPING MOOD—EPPS IN A DANCING MOOD—DESCRIPTION OF THE DANCE—LOSS OF REST NO EXCUSE—EPPS' CHARACTERISTICS—JIM BURNS REMOVAL FROM HUFF POWER TO BAYOU BŒUF—DESCRIPTION OF UNCLE ABRAM; OF WILEY; OF AUNT PHEBE; OF BOB, HENRY, AND EDWARD; OF PATSEY; WITH A GENEALOGICAL ACCOUNT OF EACH—SOMETHING OF THEIR PAST HISTORY, AND PECULIAR CHARACTERISTICS—JEALOUSY AND LUST—PATSEY, THE VICTIM.

DESTRUCTION OF THE COTTON CROP IN 1845—DEMAND FOR LABORERS IN ST. MARY'S PARISH—SENT THITHER IN A DROVE—THE ORDER OF THE MARCH—THE GRAND COTEAU—HIRED TO JUDGE TURNER ON BAYOU SALLE—APPOINTED DRIVER IN HIS SUGAR HOUSE—SUNDAY SERVICES SLAVE FURNITURE, HOW OBTAINED—THE PARTY AT YARNEY'S IN CENTREVILLE—GOOD FORTUNE—THE CAPTAIN OF THE STEAMER—HIS REFUSAL TO SECRETE ME—RETURN TO BAYOU BŒUF—SIGHT OF TIBEATS—PATSEY'S SORROWS—TUMULT AND CONTENTION—HUNTING THE COON AND OPOSSUM—THE CUNNING OF THE LATTER—THE LEAN CONDITION OF THE SLAVE—DESCRIPTION OF THE FISH TRAP—THE MURDER OF THE MAN FROM NATCHEZ—EPPS CHALLENGED BY MARSHALL—THE INFLUENCE OF SLAVERY—THE LOVE OF FREEDOM.

LABORS ON SUGAR PLANTATIONS—THE MODE OF PLANTING CANE—OF HOEING CANE—CANE RICKS—CUTTING CANE—DESCRIPTION OF THE CANE KNIFE—WINROWING—PREPARING FOR SUCCEEDING CROPS—DESCRIPTION OF HAWKINS' SUGAR MILL ON BAYOU BŒUF—THE CHRISTMAS HOLIDAYS—THE CARNIVAL SEASON OF THE CHILDREN OF BONDAGE—THE CHRISTMAS SUPPER—RED, THE FAVORITE COLOR—THE VIOLIN, AND THE CONSOLATION IT AFFORDED—THE CHRISTMAS DANCE—LIVELY, THE COQUETTE—SAM ROBERTS, AND HIS RIVALS—SLAVE SONGS—SOUTHERN LIFE AS IT IS—THREE DAYS IN THE YEAR—THE SYSTEM OF MARRIAGE—UNCLE ABRAM'S CONTEMPT OF MATRIMONY.

OVERSEERS—HOW THEY ARE ARMED AND ACCOMPANIED—THE HOMICIDE—HIS EXECUTION AT MARKSVILLE—SLAVE-DRIVERS—APPOINTED DRIVER ON REMOVING TO BAYOU BŒUF—PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT—EPPS' ATTEMPT TO CUT PLATT'S THROAT—THE ESCAPE FROM HIM—PROTECTED BY THE MISTRESS—FORBIDS READING AND WRITING—OBTAIN A SHEET OF PAPER AFTER NINE YEARS' EFFORT—THE LETTER—ARMSBY, THE MEAN WHITE—PARTIALLY CONFIDE IN HIM—HIS TREACHERY—EPPS' SUSPICIONS—HOW THEY WERE QUIETED—BURNING THE LETTER—ARMSBY LEAVES THE BAYOU—DISAPPOINTMENT AND DESPAIR.

WILEY DISREGARDS THE COUNSELS OF AUNT PHEBE AND UNCLE ABRAM, AND IS CAUGHT BY THE PATROLLERS—THE ORGANIZATION AND DUTIES OF THE LATTER—WILEY RUNS AWAY—SPECULATIONS IN REGARD TO HIM—HIS UNEXPECTED RETURN—HIS CAPTURE ON RED RIVER, AND CONFINEMENT IN ALEXANDRIA JAIL—DISCOVERED BY JOSEPH B. ROBERTS—SUBDUING DOGS IN ANTICIPATION OF ESCAPE—THE FUGITIVES IN THE GREAT PINE WOODS—CAPTURED BY ADAM TAYDEM AND THE INDIANS—AUGUSTUS KILLED BY DOGS—NELLY, ELDRET'S SLAVE WOMAN—THE STORY OF CELESTE—THE CONCERTED MOVEMENT—LEW CHENEY, THE TRAITOR—THE IDEA OF INSURRECTION.

O'NIEL, THE TANNER—CONVERSATION WITH AUNT PHEBE OVERHEARD—EPPS IN THE TANNING BUSINESS—STABBING OF UNCLE ABRAM—THE UGLY WOUND—EPPS IS JEALOUS—PATSEY IS MISSING—HER RETURN FROM SHAW'S—HARRIET, SHAW'S BLACK WIFE—EPPS ENRAGED—PATSEY DENIES HIS CHARGES—SHE IS TIED DOWN NAKED TO FOUR STAKES—THE INHUMAN FLOGGING—FLAYING OF PATSEY—THE BEAUTY OF THE DAY—THE BUCKET OF SALT WATER—THE DRESS STIFF WITH BLOOD—PATSEY GROWS MELANCHOLY—HER IDEA OF GOD AND ETERNITY—OF HEAVEN AND FREEDOM—THE EFFECT OF SLAVE-WHIPPING—EPPS' OLDEST SON—"THE CHILD IS FATHER TO THE MAN."

AVERY, OF BAYOU ROUGE—PECULIARITY OF DWELLINGS—EPPS BUILDS A NEW HOUSE—BASS, THE CARPENTER—HIS NOBLE QUALITIES—HIS PERSONAL APPEARANCE AND ECCENTRICITIES—BASS AND EPPS DISCUSS THE QUESTION OF SLAVERY—EPPS' OPINION OF BASS—I MAKE MYSELF KNOWN TO HIM—OUR CONVERSATION—HIS SURPRISE—THE MIDNIGHT MEETING ON THE BAYOU BANK—BASS' ASSURANCES—DECLARES WAR AGAINST SLAVERY—WHY I DID NOT DISCLOSE MY HISTORY—BASS WRITES LETTERS—COPY OF HIS LETTER TO MESSRS. PARKER AND PERRY—THE FEVER OF SUSPENSE—DISAPPOINTMENTS—BASS ENDEAVORS TO CHEER ME—MY FAITH IN HIM.

BASS FAITHFUL TO HIS WORD—HIS ARRIVAL ON CHRISTMAS EVE—THE DIFFICULTY OF OBTAINING AN INTERVIEW—THE MEETING IN THE CABIN—NON-ARRIVAL OF THE LETTER—BASS ANNOUNCES HIS INTENTION TO PROCEED NORTH—CHRISTMAS—CONVERSATION BETWEEN EPPS AND BASS—YOUNG MISTRESS M'COY, THE BEAUTY OF BAYOU BŒUF—THE "NE PLUS ULTRA" OF DINNERS—MUSIC AND DANCING—PRESENCE OF THE MISTRESS—HER EXCEEDING BEAUTY—THE LAST SLAVE DANCE—WILLIAM PIERCE—OVERSLEEP MYSELF—THE LAST WHIPPING—DESPONDENCY—THE COLD MORNING—EPPS' THREATS—THE PASSING CARRIAGE—STRANGERS APPROACHING THROUGH THE COTTON-FIELD—LAST HOUR ON BAYOU BŒUF.

THE LETTER REACHES SARATOGA—IS FORWARDED TO ANNE—IS LAID BEFORE HENRY B. NORTHUP—THE STATUTE OF MAY 14, 1840—ITS PROVISIONS—ANNE'S MEMORIAL TO THE GOVERNOR—THE AFFIDAVITS ACCOMPANYING IT—SENATOR SOULE'S LETTER—DEPARTURE OF THE AGENT APPOINTED BY THE GOVERNOR—ARRIVAL AT MARKSVILLE—THE HON. JOHN P. WADDILL—THE CONVERSATION ON NEW-YORK POLITICS—IT SUGGESTS A FORTUNATE IDEA—THE MEETING WITH BASS—THE SECRET OUT—LEGAL PROCEEDINGS INSTITUTED—DEPARTURE OF NORTHUP AND THE SHERIFF FROM MARKSVILLE FOR BAYOU BŒUF—ARRANGEMENTS ON THE WAY—REACH EPPS' PLANTATION—DISCOVER HIS SLAVES IN THE COTTON FIELD—THE MEETING—THE FAREWELL.

ARRIVAL IN NEW-ORLEANS—GLIMPSE OF FREEMAN—GENOIS, THE RECORDER—HIS DESCRIPTION OF SOLOMON—REACH CHARLESTON—INTERRUPTED BY CUSTOM HOUSE OFFICERS—PASS THROUGH RICHMOND—ARRIVAL IN WASHINGTON—BURCH ARRESTED—SHEKELS AND THORN—THEIR TESTIMONY—BURCH ACQUITTED—ARREST OF SOLOMON—BURCH WITHDRAWS THE COMPLAINT—THE HIGHER TRIBUNAL—DEPARTURE FROM WASHINGTON—ARRIVAL AT SANDY HILL—OLD FRIENDS AND FAMILIAR SCENES—PROCEED TO GLENS FALLS—MEETING WITH ANNE, MARGARET AND ELIZABETH—SOLOMON NORTHUP STAUNTON—INCIDENTS—CONCLUSION.

David Miller is in a funk. He recently slumped down the journalistic food chain from the Wall Street Journal to a finance rag called Manhattan Business. The reason for Miller's fall: his unhealthy obsession with his sister only increased after she died of cancer. In addition, the young reporter lost his friends after rejecting their prescient assessment of his girlfriend as "psychotic"-and she's repaid his loyalty by partying the nights away with another man. So when Miller's lost wallet leads to a shakedown by a junkie hooker, he figures it's just another bad episode in the bleak sitcom of his life. But then the hooker's jealous boyfriend dies, potentially putting Miller on the hook for a murder rap. Flames licking at his heels, Miller grimly soldiers through a squalid story that takes on his flattened affect as it navigates the usual sordid twists and dares readers to give a damn. It's the literary equivalent of a Big Mac or Snickers bar: satisfying to devour but immediately forgotten-save for a familiar pang of guilt about straying from healthier fare.

The official novelization of the blockbuster movie, written and directed by visionary Luc Besson (Lucy, The Fifth Element).

In the 28th century, Valerian (Dane DeHaan) and Laureline (Cara Delevingne) are a team of special operatives charged with maintaining order throughout the human territories. Under assignment from the Minister of Defense, the two embark on a mission to the astonishing city of Alpha—an ever-expanding metropolis where species from all over the universe have converged over centuries to share knowledge, intelligence and cultures with each other.

There is a mystery at the center of Alpha, a dark force which threatens the peaceful existence of the City of a Thousand Planets, and Valerian and Laureline must race to identify the marauding menace and safeguard not just Alpha, but the future of the universe.

Who says a vamp can't have it all?

Darcy Newhart thought it was a stroke of genius — the first-ever reality TV show where mortals vie with vampires for the title of The Sexiest Man on Earth. As the show's director, Darcy's career would be on track again. And she can finally have a life apart from the vampire harem. Okay, so she's still technically dead, but two out of three's not bad. Now she just has to make sure that a mortal doesn't win. If only she wasn't so distracted by a super-sexy and live contestant named Austin…

But Darcy doesn't know the worst of it. Austin Erickson is actually a vampire slayer! And he's got his eye on the show's leggy blond director. Only problem is, he's never wanted any woman — living or dead — as badly. But if he wins her heart, will he lose his soul? And if it means an eternity of hot, passionate loving with Darcy, does that really matter anyway?

With Venice: Pure City, Peter Ackroyd is at his most magical and magisterial, presenting a glittering, evocative, fascinating, story-filled portrait of the ultimate city.

“Ackroyd provides a history of and meditation on the actual and imaginary Venice in a volume as opulent and paradoxical as the city itself. . . . How Ackroyd deftly catalogues the overabundance of the city’s real and literary tropes and touchstones is itself a kind of tribute to La Serenissima, as Venice is called, and his seductive voice is elegant and elegiac. The resulting book is, like Venice, something rich, labyrinthine and unique that makes itself and its subject both new and necessary.” —Publishers Weekly

The Venetians’ language and way of thinking set them aside from the rest of Italy. They are an island people, linked to the sea and to the tides rather than the land. This lat¬est work from the incomparable Peter Ackroyd, like a magic gondola, transports its readers to that sensual and surprising city.

His account embraces facts and romance, conjuring up the atmosphere of the canals, bridges, and sunlit squares, the churches and the markets, the festivals and the flowers. He leads us through the history of the city, from the first refugees arriving in the mists of the lagoon in the fourth century to the rise of a great mercantile state and its trading empire, the wars against Napoleon, and the tourist invasions of today. Everything is here: the merchants on the Rialto and the Jews in the ghetto; the glassblowers of Murano; the carnival masks and the sad colonies of lepers; the artists—Bellini, Titian, Tintoretto, Tiepolo. And the ever-present undertone of Venice’s shadowy corners and dead ends, of prisons and punishment, wars and sieges, scandals and seductions.

Ackroyd’s Venice: Pure City is a study of Venice much in the vein of his lauded London: The Biography. Like London, Venice is a fluid, writerly exploration organized around a number of themes. History and context are provided in each chapter, but Ackroyd’s portrait of Venice is a particularly novelistic one, both beautiful and rapturous. We could have no better guide—reading Venice: Pure City is, in itself, a glorious journey to the ultimate city.

The first time in a science fiction and fantasy collection that the Jewish People—and the richness of their particular points of view—appear without a mask. A showpiece of Jewish wit, culture, and lore, blending humor and sadness, cynicism and faith.

Both coming-of-age story and cautionary tale. In her mother's absence, Jean is torn between the adult world and her surreal fantasies of escape as she and Fender build a fort to survey the rumors of their town.

Annie DeWitt is a fiction writer, essayist, and critic. She holds a BA from Brown University and an MFA in fiction from Columbia University School of the Arts. She teaches in the Undergraduate Creative Writing Program at Columbia University. Her writing has appeared in Granta, the Believer, Tin House, Guernica, Esquire, NOON (where an excerpt of this novel first appeared), BOMB, Electric Literature, and the American Reader, among others. Her story "Influence," which first appeared in Esquire's Napkin Fiction Project, was recently anthologized in Short: An International Anthology, edited by Alan Ziegler (Persea, 2014). DeWitt was a co-founding editor of Gigantic, a literary journal of short prose and art carried throughout the United States and abroad. She currently pens a bimonthly nonfiction column about art, literature, film and criticism for the Believer, called "Various Paradigms."

A warm, funny, and heartfelt novel about a tight-knit group of twentysomethings in New York whose lives are upended by tragedy — from the widely acclaimed author of The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards.

December, 2008. A heavy snowstorm is blowing through Manhattan and the economy is on the brink of collapse, but none of that matters to a handful of guests at a posh holiday party. Five years after their college graduation, the fiercely devoted friends at the heart of this richly absorbing novel remain as inseparable as ever: editor and social butterfly Sara Sherman, her troubled astronomer boyfriend George Murphy, loudmouth poet Jacob Blaumann, classics major turned investment banker William Cho, and Irene Richmond, an enchanting artist with an inscrutable past.

Amid cheerful revelry and free-flowing champagne, the friends toast themselves and the new year ahead — a year that holds many surprises in store. They must navigate ever-shifting relationships with the city and with one another, determined to push onward in pursuit of their precarious dreams. And when a devastating blow brings their momentum to a halt, the group is forced to reexamine their aspirations and chart new paths through unexpected losses.

Kristopher Jansma’s award-winning debut novel, The Unchangeable Spots of Leopards, was praised for its “wry humor” and “charmingly unreliable narrator” in The New Yorker and hailed as “F. Scott Fitzgerald meets Wes Anderson” by The Village Voice. In Why We Came to the City, Jansma offers an unforgettable exploration of friendships forged in the fires of ambition, passion, hope, and love. This glittering story of a generation coming of age is a sweeping, poignant triumph.

In 1955, Look magazine called Phenix City, Alabama, “The Wickedest City in America,” but even that may have been an understatement. It was a stew of organized crime and corruption, run by a machine that dealt with complaints forcefully and with dispatch. No one dared cross them – no one even tried. And then the machine killed the wrong man.

When crime – fighting attorney Albert Patterson is gunned down in a Phenix City alley in the spring of 1954, the entire town seems to pause just for a moment – and when it starts up again, there is something different about it. A small group of men meet and decide that they have had enough, but what that means and where it will take them is something they could not have foreseen. Over the course of the next several months, lives will change, people will die, and unexpected heroes will emerge – like “a Randolph Scott western,” one of them remarks, “played out not with horses and Winchesters but with Chevys and.38s and switchblades.”

Peopled by an extraordinary cast of characters, both real and fictional, Wicked City is a novel of uncommon intensity – rich with atmosphere and filled with sensuality and surprise.

The teenage tennis star had a frighteningly brutal trainer-her father. So nobody cried when he got strangled in the women's locker room. Now V.I. Warshawski wants to clear the number one suspect-who was showering alone at the time in "Strung Out". And in "Skin Deep", after his trip to the salon the stranger wasn't looking so good. Maybe it was the poison facial. V.I. Warshawski tries a few new creams herself while she looks for somebody, anybody connected to this guy.

Zinzi has a talent for finding lost things.

To save herself, she’s got to find the hardest thing of all: the truth.

Книга является биографией одного из видных чекистов, занимавшего ответственные посты в ВЧК—ОГПУ, Артура Христиановича Артузова. Он был беззаветно предан своему делу, возглавлял проведение крупнейших операций, имевших поистине историческое значение, но был расстрелян в годы разгула террора.

Книга рассчитана на массового читателя.

Новая книга военного историка Ю. С. Ленчевского повествует об одном из умнейших и опытнейших профессионалов контрразведки периода становления молодого российского государства — Артуре Христиановиче Артузове (Фраучи). Благодаря его работе прекратило существование движение Бориса Савинкова, была поставлена точка в карьере супершпиона Сиднея Рейли (Соломона Розенблюма), был захвачен атаман Борис Анненков. При непосредственном участии отца советской контрразведки были разработаны и проведены легендарные операции «Трест», «Синдикат-2», «Синдикат-4», «Тарантелла» и др.

При Артузове разведка обзавелась большим и разветвленным аппаратом за границей. Именно этот период историки отечественных спецслужб называют «эпохой великих нелегалов». Под руководством Артузова работали такие знаменитые разведчики, как Шандор Радо, Рихард Зорге, Теодор Малли, Георгий Косенко, Борис Гудзь, Дмитрий Быстролетов.

В книге рассказывается не только об удачах, но и о провалах советской разведки, это хроника не только успехов, но и ошибок А. X. Артузова, расстрелянного в 1937 году и реабилитированного в 1956 году.

Підступності жорстокого Упиря немає межі. Він не зупиниться ні перед чим, на цей раз вже заради завоювання реального світу. Чи зможе відважний Артур кинути виклик лиходієві і поборотися з ним за межами світу мініпутів? Ворог сильний, але любов принцеси Селенії підтримає героя в його прагненні відновити справедливість…

Хочете дізнатися як? Прочитайте цю чарівну казку, повну таємниць, чудес і неймовірних пригод. А в ролі казкаря виступить знаменитий Люк Бессон, великий майстер створювати дивовижні історії. Правда, на цей раз не на широкому екрані, а на папері…

Артур возвращается домой с тренировки, прогуливаясь по ночному парку и вдыхая аромат бесподобного городского смога. Вдруг он слышит женские крики о помощи. В нем включается режим "слабоумие и отвага" и... он вляпывается в смертельно опасную историю в далеком мире, полном добра, света, магии и прочих смертельно опасных вещей...

Артура, принцесу Селенію і принца Барахлюша, героїв першої книжки Люка Бессона «Артур і мініпути», чекають нові пригоди. Щоб позбавити мініпутів від їхнього заклятого ворога, Жахного Упиря і звільнити Артурового дідуся, друзям доведеться зазнати багатьох випробувань: приручити гігантського павука, обдурити підступного Темрякоса і врятуватись від потопу, що загрожує змести все на своєму шляху. Допомоги сподіватися їм годі, розраховувати можна лише на власну кмітливість, спритність і хитрість…

Мастер фантазии, иллюзии, головокружительных сюжетов, Люк Бессон, режиссер «Пятого элемента», «Никиты», «Голубой бездны» и других замечательных кинофильмов, создает новую сказку. Это его дебют в детской литературе, и в этой сказочной повести есть все ― тайны, загадки, погони, клады, волшебство...

Какие дьявольские планы собирается осуществить Урдалак, чтобы завоевать новый мир, в который он переместился обманным путем? Как Артур, оставшийся в мире минипутов, сможет победить жестокого Ужасного У?

Чтобы сохранить любовь прекрасной принцессы Селении, Артур готов вступить в бой против Урдалака как в мире минипутов, так и в большом реальном мире...

Лауреат Букеровской премии Джулиан Барнс – один из самых ярких и оригинальных прозаиков современной Британии, автор таких международных бестселлеров, как «Шум времени», «Предчувствие конца», «Англия, Англия», «Попугай Флобера», «Любовь и так далее», «История мира в 10 1/2 главах» и многих других. Возможно, основной его талант – умение легко и естественно играть в своих произведениях стилями и направлениями. Тонкая стилизация и едкая ирония, утонченный лиризм и доходящий до цинизма сарказм, агрессивная жесткость и веселое озорство – Барнсу подвластно все это и многое другое.

В романе «Артур и Джордж» – вошедшем, как и многие другие книги Барнса, в шорт-лист Букеровской премии – следствие ведет сэр Артур Конан Дойл собственной персоной. Литературный отец Шерлока Холмса решает использовать дедуктивный метод в расследовании самого скандального дела поздневикторианской Англии – дела о таинственном убийстве скота на фермах близ Бирмингема. Его цель – доказать, что обвиняемый в этом преступлении провинциальный юрист Джордж Эдалджи невиновен. Так насколько же действенны методы Шерлока Холмса в реальности?

В 2015 году на телеканале Би-би-си вышла одноименная экранизация (режиссер Стюарт Орм, в ролях Мартин Клунес, Аршер Али, Чарльз Эдвардс, Хэтти Морахэн, Эмма Филдинг).

Роман публикуется в новом переводе.

Следствие ведет… сэр Артур Конан Дойль!

«Литературный отец» Шерлока Холмса решает использовать дедуктивный метод в расследовании самого скандального дела поздневикторианской Англии — дела о таинственном убийстве скота на фермах близ Бирмингема.

Его цель — доказать, что обвиняемый в этом преступлении провинциальный юрист Джордж Идалджи невиновен.

Конан Дойль и его друг и ассистент Вуд отправляются в Стаффордшир.

Так насколько же действенны методы Шерлока Холмса в реальности?

Приключенията на смелия Артур, своенравната принцеса Селения и симпатичния Бетамеш продължават…

В търсене на скритото съкровище и дядото на Артур, те проникват в сърцето на злото — Забранения град, наречен Некрополис. Там обаче ги очаква самият му властелин — Малтазар Прокълнатия. Злодеят има коварен план — да се ожени за Селения, за да стане пълновластен господар на Седемте земи. Дали обаче дръзката принцеса не е дала вече сърцето си на някой друг?

Приключения Артура, принцессы Селении и принца Барахлюша продолжаются. Чтобы избавить минипутов от их злейшего врага, Ужасного Урдалака, и освободить дедушку Артура, друзьям предстоит пройти через множество испытаний: приручить гигантского паука, обмануть коварного Мракоса и спастись от потопа, грозящего смести все на своем пути. Помощи им ждать неоткуда, рассчитывать можно только на собственную сообразительность, ловкость и хитрость…

Аннотация.

Но именно в этот момент отец объявляет о своем решении возвращаться домой, в город.

Мастер фантазии, иллюзии, головокружительных сюжетов, Люк Бессон, режиссер «Пятого элемента», «Никиты», «Голубой бездны» и других замечательных кинофильмов, создает новую сказку. Это его дебют в детской литературе, и в этой сказочной повести есть все – тайны, загадки, погони, клады, волшебство,…

Артур получает послание с просьбой о помощи, доставленное ему паучком-почтальоном. Мальчик встревожен: он уверен, что его могли написать только минипуты.

Мальчик успевает предупредить своего дедушку о полученном письме: возможно, Арчибальд что-нибудь придумает. Ведь как раз сегодня ночью лунный луч коснется волшебной подзорной трубы и откроется проход в страну минипутов.

Но небо затягивают тучи…

Дядото на десетгодишния Артур е изчезнал загадъчно преди четири години. Единственият начин да бъде намерен е някой да разчете скритите послания. За да успее обаче, трябва да е умен, съобразителен и много смел…

Артур е точно такъв. Решен на всичко, за да открие дядо си, той тръгва на чудно и опасно пътешествие в страната на малките същества минимои и става един от тях. В това приключение Артур ще срещне добри приятели, ще търси скрито съкровище, ще влезе в битка с воини, яздещи комари, ще пътува в орехова черупка и ще спечели сърцето на красива принцеса…

Мастер фантазии, иллюзии, головокружительных сюжетов Люк Бессон, режиссер «Пятого элемента», «Никиты», «Голубой бездны» и других замечательных кинофильмов создает новую сказку. Это его дебют в детской литературе, и в этой сказочной повести есть все – тайны, загадки, погони, клады, волшебство…

Читая старинную книгу, юный Артур узнает о загадочной стране крохотных существ – минипутов. Только дед Артура, великий путешественник, таинственно исчезнувший несколько лет назад, умел проникать туда, но знания свои зашифровал.

Бабушке Артура грозит беда: ее большой дом могут отобрать за долги, и внук решает проникнуть в страну минипутов, найти там деда и зарытый им клад. Ему удается разгадать загадку перехода, и… начинаются невероятные приключения, во время которых он знакомится с принцессой Селенией и ее братом, принцем Барахлюшем.

Для среднего и старшего школьного возраста.

«Помощ!», гласи посланието, написано бърху оризовото зърно, което паяк вестоносец донася на Артур. Минимоите са в голяма опасност, няма и секунда за губене, а Селения може би се намира между живота и смъртта. С помощта на кучето си Алфред Артур ще избяга под носа на родителите си и ще се върне посред нощ в къшата на баба си и дядо си, за да отвори отново вратата на прехода към света на минимоите. Но дали ще стигне навреме, за да осуети коварния план на Малтазар и да спаси любимата си Селения…

Эта книга – прекрасный подарок всем почитателям знаменитого Шерлока Холмса. Написанная в стиле, напоминающем манеру его создателя, Артура Конан Дойла, она рассказывает поистине детективную историю о том, как молодой шотландский доктор стал писателем с мировым именем, а его герой – величайшим сыщиком всех времен и народов.

Погрузив читателя в атмосферу викторианской Англии, Майкл Симс вводит его в литературный и научный мир конца XIX века, знакомит с ближайшим окружением Артура Конан Дойла, с его лабораторией – медицинской и писательской.

«Нет ничего важнее мелочей», – пишет автор. И их в этой книге немало: многочисленные неизвестные факты из жизни Конан Дойла, детали деятельности прототипа Шерлока Холмса, разбор «маркетинговых» приемов, использовавшихся в «продвижении» революционных для своего времени повестей и рассказов о великом сыщике и многое другое.

Из книги вы также узнаете:

• Как звали Шерлока Холмса и Джона Ватсона изначально

• Чем отличается дедукция от индукции и дедуктивный ли метод на самом деле использовал великий сыщик

• Какие семейные тайны Артура Конан Дойла легли в основу его произведений

• Когда Холмс впервые появился «на публике» в своем знаменитом «охотничьем кепи» и почему это было совершенно неприлично

• Почему Артур Конан Дойл поссорился с первым издателем историй о великом детективе

• С кого самый известный иллюстратор книг о Шерлоке Холмсе Сидни Пэйджет списал «каноническое» изображение сыщика.

Тема смертной казни, ее правомерности либо неправомерности как меры наказания человека за преступление, является одной из наиболее общественно значимых юридических и этических проблем для государств современного мира. Известный английский писатель и публицист Артур Кёстлер был едва ли не первым европейским интеллектуалом, который, со всей остротой и актуальностью поставил перед обществом проблему правомерности такого вида наказания.

Введите сюда краткую аннотацию

В книге представлена беллетризованная биография английского писателя Артура Конан Дойла… Все мы знаем этого автора по детективным рассказам о Шерлоке Холмсе и увлекательным историческим романам. Здесь же перед нами открывается достойная жизнь достойного человека, великого труженика и патриота, аристократа и рыцаря, врача, мыслителя и спортсмена… Биографические рассказы об Артуре Конан Дойле иллюстрированы редкими фотографиями, сделанными в разные периоды его жизни.

– М.: Издательство «Менеджер», 2006. – 360 с.

ISBN 5-8346-0082-4 Серия: Мифы и герои

Король Артур – первый рыцарь среди королей и первый король среди рыцарей, образ и деяния которого составили огромную эпоху в истории европейской литературы. Артур продолжает и сегодня быть неотъемлемой частью историко-культурного наследия британского мира, считаясь основателем и столпом британской нации. Кем был Артур в действительности, что скрывается под наслоениями исторической и литературной традиции – этим вопросом на протяжении столетий задаются сотни исследователей. Книга Говарда Рида переворачивает устоявшиеся представления, предлагает попытку принципиально нового взгляда на истоки артурианского мифа.

Анализируя образы и мотивы сказаний об Артуре, автор приходит к выводу, что их истоки уходят далеко за пределы туманного Альбиона и связаны с кругом скифо-сарматских народов, создавших одну из наиболее ярких и самобытных культур Древнего Мира. Меч Экскалибур, Святой Грааль, драконы и подвиги странствующих рыцарей – все это Говард Рид обнаруживает в эпосе скифо-сарматов и их потомков. Известно, что во II веке римский император Марк Аврелий нанес поражение вторгшимся в пределы империи сарматам (языгам). В качестве контрибуции Рим потребовал от побежденных 8000 всадников, 5500 из них были поселены на северной границе римской Британии, которой постоянно угрожали набеги воинственных варваров. С прибывшими в Британию сарматами и принесенной ими культурой связывает Говард Рид зарождение рыцарства и артурианской традиции.

Автор приглашает читателя в потрясающее странствие во времени и пространстве, щедро делясь радостью своих находок. Некоторые интерпретации, предлагаемые Говардом Ридом, могут быть спорными, однако блестящая аргументация изложения и масса интересных фактов увлекают не меньше, чем старинные романы о рыцарях короля Артура и поисках Святого Грааля.

В издании представлены четыре пьесы американского драматурга Артура Миллера "Все мои сыновья", "Смерть коммивояжера", "Суровое испытание", "Вид с моста". Автор поднимает в них актуальные вопросы современности, стремится донести до читателя идеи, которые волнуют многих.

Прижизненное издание.

Юний Артур заради порятунку своєї бабусі має проникнути у дивовижний паралельний світ крихітних істот — мініпутів. Але як це зробити, де знайти вхід до загадкової країни? Відповідь він знаходить у старовинній книзі, написаній його дідусем, великим мандрівником, який кілька років тому зник при загадкових обставинах. Артур розшифровує секрет переходу із одного світу в інший, і… тут починаються дивовижні пригоди, під час яких він знайомиться з принцом Барахлюшем і закохується в його сестру, принцесу Селенію…

Павук-листоноша доставив особисто Артурові тривожний заклик, написаний на крихітному рисовому зерняткові. Хлопчик занепокоївся: «Мініпутам загрожує небезпека — не можна гаяти ні хвилини!» Проте саме в цей час Артурів батько вирішує, що канікули скінчилися, пора їхати додому. Артур встигає попередити дідуся про одержане послання: а що як Арчибальд зможе щось придумати? З допомогою вірного пса Альфреда Артуру вдається вислизнути з-під пильного батьківського нагляду і повернутися до дідусевого будинку. Незабаром настане північ, місячний промінь торкнеться чарівної далекоглядної Арчибальдової труби і відкриється прохід до країни мініпутів. Але, на жаль, небо вкривають хмари, місяць потопає в них, і ні про жоден промінь не може бути й мови…

Гуляя вечером по парку, Артур Светлаков услышал крики о помощи. И как настоящий "рыцарь" сразу врубил режим "Слабоумие и отвага" — бросился спасать незнакомку. А в благодарность за "героизм" угодил в далекий мир, полный добра, света и прочей мерзости. Маги, эльфы, демоны и вся королевская рать жаждут его поймать и голову ему оторвать. Но удастся ли им совладать с простым пареньком из подмосковных Люберец?

не предал своего искушенного и очень немолодого соблазнителя, хотя прекрасно понимал, что в жизни сэра Конвея встреча в папоротниках не более, чем случайный эпизод.

Эти биографические очерки были изданы около ста лет назад в серии «Жизнь замечательных людей», осуществленной Ф.Ф.Павленковым (1839–1900). Написанные в новом для того времени жанре поэтической хроники и историко-культурного исследования, эти тексты сохраняют ценность и по сей день. Писавшиеся «для простых людей», для российской провинции, сегодня они могут быть рекомендованы отнюдь не только библиофилам, но самой широкой читательской аудитории: и тем, кто совсем не искушен в истории и психологии великих людей, и тем, для кого эти предметы – профессия.

Серия «Лики великих» – это сложные и увлекательные биографии крупных деятелей искусства – эмигрантов и выходцев из эмигрантских семей. Это рассказ о людях, которые, несмотря на трудности эмигрантской жизни, достигли вершин в своей творческой деятельности и вписали свои имена в историю мирового искусства. Артур Рубинштейн (1887 – 1982) – выдающийся польский и американский пианист, творческое наследие которого огромно. Он признан лучшим исполнителем музыки эпохи романтизма. «Он проник в душу и сердце Фредерика Шопена,– никто не понимает и не исполняет произведения этого великого польского композитора лучше чем Артур Рубинштейн»,– написала The New York Times. Иллюстрации Александра Штейнберга.

Александр Борянский любит вставлять в свои произведения реально существующих писателей-фантастов. Здесь это Лайк Александр. А в «Белом солнце Одессы» — Лев Вершинин.

Элрик Мелнибонийский пытается отомстить злодею-кузену, захватившему власть: он прибегает к помощи пиратов из Молодых королевств и своего Меча. А Меч жаждет новой крови… и за жизнью врага последуют другие — в том числе и те, которые дороги Элрику…

Понемногу он начинает прозревать — и осознавать, что отмечен роком…

«Отличная книга. Показывает атмосферу гоночной эпохи, в которую он жил» (Дэн Гарни)

Кому сегодня не известны Sony, Honda, Apple Computer, Microsoft? А что мы знаем о людях, их создавших? Чем отличаются гении от обычных людей? Врожденными качествами или талантом, как принято считать? Действительно ли природа важнее воспитания, а наследственность преобладает над социальными факторами? Может показаться, что нет, если вы рассмотрите историю жизни таких великих людей, как Эдисон, Пикассо, Эйнштейн. Альберт Эйнштейн был гениальным ученым ядерной эры, Пабло Пикассо – самым культовым художникомXX века, а Томас Эдисон – наиболее плодовитым в истории изобретателем. Сходство жизненного опыта и поведенческих характеристик этих трех титанов прогресса поразительно. Эта совершенно обособленная группа личностей кроме общих черт имеет и различия. Об этом и многом другом интересном идет речь в увлекательной книге Джин Н. Ландрама "Тринадцать мужчин, которые изменили мир".

Артур Джонс самостоятельно разработал новую стратегию маркетинга. Он поставил первые экземпляры “Наутилуса” в “Канзас Сити Чифс” и “Бостон Ред Соке”. Эта стратегия имела два преимущества. Он продавал свое оборудование потребителям, имеющим хорошее финансовое положение. И, кроме того, успехи, быстро достигнутые профессиональными атлетами, создавали хорошую рекламу его оборудованию. Джонсу удалось создать своей продукции имидж благодаря тому, что он избрал правильную тактику распространения продукции и смог создать новую рыночную нишу. Он разрушил старое и создал новое.

Король Артур — один из самых известных и в то же время самых загадочных героев мировой истории. Все знают, что он правил Британией на рубеже античности и средних веков, основал рыцарское братство Круглого Стола, был связан с чародеем Мерлином, Авалоном и Святым Граалем. Однако ученые давно опровергли все эти утверждения, поставив под сомнение даже само существование Артура. Для этого есть основания — источники раннего средневековья говорят о нем мало и невнятно, а последующая обширная артуриана насквозь фантастична. Тем не менее в разных странах не прекращаются попытки отыскать на страницах истории подлинного Артура. Одну из таких попыток предпринял историк Вадим Эрлихман, воссоздавший биографию легендарного монарха на основе сведений, разбросанных по страницам старинных хроник, генеалогий и романов. Кропотливый анализ фактов и версий помогает понять, каким был (или мог быть) Артур и почему «артуровской» иногда называют всю европейскую цивилизацию.

Король Артур — один из самых известных и в то же время самых загадочных героев мировой истории. Все знают, что он правил Британией на рубеже античности и средних веков, основал рыцарское братство Круглого Стола, был связан с чародеем Мерлином, Авалоном и Святым Граалем. Однако ученые давно опровергли все эти утверждения, поставив под сомнение даже само существование Артура. Для этого есть основания — источники раннего средневековья говорят о нем мало и невнятно, а последующая обширная артуриана насквозь фантастична. Тем не менее в разных странах не прекращаются попытки отыскать на страницах истории подлинного Артура. Одну из таких попыток предпринял историк Вадим Эрлихман, воссоздавший биографию легендарного монарха на основе сведений, разбросанных по страницам старинных хроник, генеалогий и романов. Кропотливый анализ фактов и версий помогает понять, каким был (или мог быть) Артур и почему «артуровской» иногда называют всю европейскую цивилизацию.

Книгу составили легенды о короле бриттов Артуре и рыцарях Круглого стола. Сочетание древнейших мифологических верований, исторических реалий и литературной фантазии обеспечило этим текстам долгую жизнь. И поныне трудно не удивиться, следя за приключениями рыцарей и их подвигами, за вмешательством чудесных сил и одолением козней злых волшебников.

Книга представляет собой переложение цикла легенд о знаменитом короле бриттов Артуре и о подвигах рыцарей Круглого стола. Чарующий язык повествования увлечет читателей любого возраста, а великолепные иллюстрации американского художника Говарда Пайла (1853–1911), увидевшие свет в 1903 году, несомненно обогатят восприятие.

Впервые на русском языке полное издание романов о Короле Артуре (в оригинале Король былого и грядущего) знаменитого английского писателя Теренса Хэнбери Уайта (1906-1964). Наряду с эпопеей Джона Рональда Руэла Толкина "Властелин Колец" и трилогией "Горненгаст" Мервина Пика - это одна из самых знаменитых и необычных книг жанра "фэнтези".

Легенда о храбром и мудром Короле Артуре и благородных рыцарях Круглого Стола пережила немало веков. О Короле Артуре писали много и охотно. Однако слава лучшего романиста досталась 33-летнему англичанину Теренсу Хэнбери Уайту. Это он заставил миллионы пламенных сердец вспыхивать жаром, наслаждаясь чтением книг о дворе Короля Артура: тайных дворцовых заговорах и интригах, погонях и схватках на мечах, ядах роковых красавиц, любовных чарах и клятвах на крови. 

Перевод с английского

Современный французский писатель, отдавая дань традиции философской сказки, создает свою оригинальную версию сказаний о Круглом Столе. Романы трилогии дополняют друг друга подобно частям головоломки; известная легенда предстает в разных ракурсах и по-разному осмысляется с точки зрения трех центральных персонажей — Мерлина, Морганы и Артура, олицетворяющих созидание, мятеж и власть.

Человек вышел в космос, начались полеты к звездам. Но на земле —  катастрофа, катастрофа в умах людей. И произошел регресс в дикость и варварство. Технологическая цивилизация исчезла, развитие общества прекратилось.

И вот, благодаря невероятным совпадениям и приключениям главного героя и его спутников, впервые за долгие полторы тысячи лет у землян появился лучик надежды на возрождение, на подъем из пропасти, в которую рухнул мир.

Очнувшись в больнице, Даша узнала, что осталась совсем одна. Мать, муж, сын – все погибли в сгоревшем доме. Выжила лишь она. Да и то, выходит, затем, чтобы в конце концов погибнуть от руки неведомого убийцы, который прокрался в больницу и попытался убить ее... Но кто пожелал смерти Даши и ее близких? Кому могла перебежать дорожку рядовая журналистка, никогда не занимавшаяся сенсационными расследованиями? Может быть, преступники мстили ее мужу? Но зачем – ведь он не бизнесмен, не политик, а всего лишь хирург военного госпиталя... А между тем убийца продолжает охоту за жизнью Даши. Молодая женщина на грани нервного срыва. Как же быть? И она обращается за помощью к единственному, кто у нее остался, – другу семьи Артуру Ивановичу...

Джейн влюбилась в него с первого взгляда. Сколько ночей она провела без сна, мечтая о том, что когда-нибудь Кендалл полюбит ее! Но между ними лежит непреодолимая пропасть – пропасть сословного, социального и материального свойства.

И вот у нее созревает план – как взмыть ввысь, вырвавшись за пределы собственных возможностей. Путь долгий, приключений немало, и, пока Джейн движется, ей можно лишь мечтать о призе, который, она надеется, ждет ее на финише…

Перевод на русский язык самого популярного пособия для творческих мастерских и литклубов научной фантастики, созданного в ставшей колыбелью киберпанка литмастерской Turkey City. Печатается с разрешения составителя.

Перевод Рины «Фрези» Грант, http://zhurnal.lib.ru/f/frezi_g/