In fourteen sweeping and sublime stories, five of which have been published in The New Yorker, the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Known World shows that his grasp of the human condition is firmer than ever.

Returning to the city that inspired his first prizewinning book, Lost in the City, Jones has filled this new collection with people who call Washington, D.C., home. Yet it is not the city's power brokers that most concern him but rather its ordinary citizens. All Aunt Hagar's Children turns an unflinching eye to the men, women, and children caught between the old ways of the South and the temptations that await them further north, people who in Jones's masterful hands, emerge as fully human and morally complex, whether they are country folk used to getting up with the chickens or people with centuries of education behind them.

In the title story, in which Jones employs the first-person rhythms of a classic detective story, a Korean War veteran investigates the death of a family friend whose sorry destiny seems inextricable from his mother's own violent Southern childhood. In "In the Blink of God's Eye" and "Tapestry" newly married couples leave behind the familiarity of rural life to pursue lives of urban promise only to be challenged and disappointed.

With the legacy of slavery just a stone's throw away and the future uncertain, Jones's cornucopia of characters will haunt readers for years to come.

One Saturday night in Las Vegas, twelve-year-old Newell Ewing goes out with a friend and doesn't come home. In the aftermath of his disappearance, his mother, Lorraine, makes daily pilgrimages to her son's room and tortures herself with memories. Equally distraught, the boy's father, Lincoln, finds himself wanting to comfort his wife even as he yearns for solace, a loving touch, any kind of intimacy.

As the Ewings navigate the mystery of what's become of their son, the circumstances surrounding Newell's vanishing and other events on that same night reverberate through the lives of seemingly disconnected strangers: a comic book illustrator in town for a weekend of debauchery; a painfully shy and possibly disturbed young artist; a stripper who imagines moments from her life as if they were movie scenes; a bubbly teenage wiccan anarchist; a dangerous and scheming gutter punk; a band of misfit runaways. The people of Beautiful Children are urban nomads; each with a past to hide and a pain to nurture, every one of them searching for salvation and barreling toward destruction, weaving their way through a neon underworld of sex, drugs, and the spinning wheels of chance.

In this masterly debut novel, Charles Bock mixes incandescent prose with devious humor to capture Las Vegas with unprecedented scope and nuance and to provide a glimpse into a microcosm of modern America. Beautiful Children is an odyssey of heartache and redemption; heralding the arrival of a major new writer.

The third book in Frank Herbert's original Dune series

Mary Doria Russell's debut novel, The Sparrow, took us on a journey to a distant planet and into the center of the human soul. A critically acclaimed bestseller, The Sparrow was chosen as one of Entertainment Weekly's Ten Best Books of the Year, a finalist for the Book-of-the-Month Club's First Fiction Prize and the winner of the James M. Tiptree Memorial Award. Now, in Children of God, Russell further establishes herself as one of the most innovative, entertaining and philosophically provocative novelists writing today.

The only member of the original mission to the planet Rakhat to return to Earth, Father Emilio Sandoz has barely begun to recover from his ordeal when the So-ciety of Jesus calls upon him for help in preparing for another mission to Alpha Centauri. Despite his objections and fear, he cannot escape his past or the future.

Old friends, new discoveries and difficult questions await Emilio as he struggles for inner peace and understanding in a moral universe whose boundaries now extend beyond the solar system and whose future lies with children born in a faraway place.

Strikingly original, richly plotted, replete with memorable characters and filled with humanity and humor, Chil-dren of God is an unforgettable and uplifting novel that is a potent successor to The Sparrow and a startlingly imaginative adventure for newcomers to Mary Doria Russell's special literary magic.

Daring and original stories set in New Testament times, from a rising young Norwegian author

Lars Petter Sveen’s Children of God recounts the lives of people on the margins of the New Testament; thieves, Roman soldiers, prostitutes, lepers, healers, and the occasional disciple all get a chance to speak. With language free of judgment or moralizing, Sveen covers familiar ground in unusual ways. In the opening story, a group of soldiers are tasked with carrying out King Herod’s edict to slaughter the young male children in Bethlehem but waver in their resolve. These interwoven stories harbor surprises at every turn, as the characters reappear. A group of thieves on the road to Jericho encounters no good Samaritan but themselves. A boy healed of his stutter will later regress. A woman searching for her lover from beyond the grave cannot find solace. At crucial moments an old blind man appears, urging the characters to give in to their darker impulses.

Children of God was a bestseller in Norway, where it won the Per Olov Enquist Literary Prize and gathered ecstatic reviews. Sveen’s subtle elevation of the conflict between light and dark focuses on the varied struggles these often-ignored individuals face. Yet despite the dark tone, Sveen’s stories retain a buoyancy, thanks to Guy Puzey’s supple and fleet-footed translation. This deeply original and moving book, in Sveen’s restrained and gritty telling, brings to light stories that reflect our own time, from a setting everyone knows.

A searing, indelible love story of two ravaged spirits-a screenwriter and an actress- played out under the merciless, magnifying prism of Hollywood.

A Romanian infant who flourishes when given the wrong blood transfusion could hold the key to a cure for AIDS and cancer, but he also shares an intimate link to a clan of vampires.

Bram Stoker (nominee)

A disgraced college lecturer is found murdered with £5,000 in his pocket on a disused railway line near his home. Since being dismissed from his job for sexual misconduct four years previously, he has been living a poverty-stricken and hermit-like existence in this isolated spot.

The suspects range from several individuals at the college where he used to teach to a woman who knew the victim back in the early '70s at Essex University, then a hotbed of political activism. When Banks receives a warning to step away from the case, he realises there is much more to the mystery than meets the eye — for there are plenty more skeletons to come out of the closet...

"Searing and original and done just right… Inspector Darko Dawson is relentless, and I look forward to riding with him again." – Michael Connelly

In the slums of Accra, Ghana's fast-moving, cosmopolitan capital, teenagers are turning up dead. Inspector Darko Dawson has seen many crimes, but this latest string of murders – in which all the young victims bear a chilling signature – is the most unsettling of his career. Are these heinous acts a form of ritual killing or the work of a lone, cold-blooded monster? With time running out, Dawson embarks on a harrowing journey through the city's underbelly and confronts the brutal world of the urban poor, where street children are forced to fight for their very survival – and a cunning killer seems just out of reach.

Curt Newton, in quest of a friend lost inside Vulcan, faces the most insidious dangers he has ever known in his entire galactic career!

WHO WILL INHERIT THIS NEW EARTH?

The last remnants of the human race left a dying Earth, desperate to find a new home among the stars. Following in the footsteps of their ancestors, they discover the greatest treasure of the past age – a world terraformed and prepared for human life. But all is not right in this new Eden. In the long years since the planet was abandoned, the work of its architects has borne disastrous fruit. The planet is not waiting for them, pristine and unoccupied. New masters have turned it from a refuge into mankind's worst nightmare. Now two civilizations are on a collision course, both testing the boundaries of what they will do to survive. As the fate of humanity hangs in the balance, who are the true heirs of this new Earth?

_{[Contain tables.]}

Meet Mike. Mike wants to be a responsible human, but he's buried in student loans and job prospects are bleak in the down economy. What he needs is a well-paying job that provides health care. This is what leads Mike to accepting a job at NEOTAP, a government-run prison.

But NEOTAP is unlike any other prison. NEOTAP is a place where the employees are treated no better than the prisoners. Where your personal conversations are monitored. Wait, do you feel that? That's not the ever-loving presence of God you feel. It's NEOTAP, watching you right now. Worst of all, employees and prisoners alike are disappearing from NEOTAP. People who show up for work one day might be gone the next, their existence erased from all NEOTAP records.

After becoming aware of the string of disappearances, Mike and Monica Whitten, a fellow NEOTAP employee, team up to discover the truth behind NEOTAP. But before Mike and Monica discover the violent uprising on the horizon, they will drink pumpkin spice lattes from Starbucks, they will watch movies on Netflix, they will form a meaningful relationship in hopes of one day achieving the five pillars of a happy life.

Repeat after me:

Go to work and do your job. Care for your children. Pay your bills. Obey the law. Buy products.

Named a Fall Pick by Boston Globe, ELLE, Library Journal and MyDomain

An eerie debut collection featuring missing parents, unrequited love, and other uncomfortable moments

A man hangs from the ceiling of an art gallery. A woman spells out messages to her sister using her own hair. Children deemed “bad” are stolen from their homes. In Hardly Children, Laura Adamczyk’s rich and eccentric debut collection, familiar worlds—bars, hotel rooms, cities that could very well be our own—hum with uncanny dread.

The characters in Hardly Children are keyed up, on the verge, full of desire. They’re lost, they’re in love with someone they shouldn’t be, they’re denying uncomfortable truths using sex or humor. They are children waking up to the threats of adulthood, and adults living with childlike abandon.

With command, caution, and subtle terror, Adamczyk shapes a world where death and the possibility of loss always emerge. Yet the shape of this loss is never fully revealed. Instead, it looms in the periphery of these stories, like an uncomfortable scene viewed out of the corner of one’s eye.

A mysterious island.

An abandoned orphanage.

A strange collection of very curious photographs.

It all waits to be discovered in Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, an unforgettable novel that mixes fiction and photography in a thrilling reading experience. As our story opens, a horrific family tragedy sets sixteen-year-old Jacob journeying to a remote island off the coast of Wales, where he discovers the crumbling ruins of Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children. As Jacob explores its abandoned bedrooms and hallways, it becomes clear that the children were more than just peculiar. They may have been dangerous. They may have been quarantined on a deserted island for good reason. And somehow—impossible though it seems—they may still be alive.

A spine-tingling fantasy illustrated with haunting vintage photography, Miss Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children will delight adults, teens, and anyone who relishes an adventure in the shadows.

The critically acclaimed novel from a master of contemporary American fiction — now available as an ebook

A loving satire of new parenthood and its attendant joys and blunders

The Golds and the Hummels live in the same wealthy Manhattan neighborhood, but as both couples prepare for the arrival of their first child, they share little in terms of parenting philosophy. The Golds plunge into natural birth without bothering to first set up a nursery. The Hummels schedule a C-section and fill out hospital admissions paperwork weeks in advance. Both couples, however, are grappling with the transformations they know parenthood will immediately bring.

Set in a milieu of material excess and limitless ambition, Only Children skewers new parents who expect perfect lives, but also offers an intimate look at the trials all new parents face as they learn how to nurture.

This ebook features a new illustrated biography of Rafael Yglesias, including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection.

From Publishers Weekly

With insight and candor, Yglesias recounts five years in the lives of two yuppie couples, to whom parenthood occasions typical tribulations and discouraging self-assessments. Byron’s birth exacerbates the problems between Diane and Peter Hummel (she’s a Yale-educated corporate lawyer, he’s a wealthy fundraiser for the arts). While she foolishly tries to be super-mom, wife and professional, she also puts pressure on Byron to excel, attempting to enroll him in an elite school and forcing him to play the violin. Peter withdraws from them both after Byron’s presence activates long-dormant memories of his icily aloof mother. Investment counselor Eric Gold, obsessed by the humiliation of his father’s business failures, frantically pushes himself to produce substantial earnings for his wife Nina and their son Luke. Her imagined inadequacies torment Nina, especially when she cannot soothe Luke, whose colic makes him infuriatingly uncontrollable. This is a vivid description of how rearing a first child can conjure up neurotic fears, which must be resolved before parents can nurture their offspring. Yglesias has abandoned the cynicism that infused Hot Properties; this new novel is deeply felt and thought-provoking. $75,000 ad/promo; Doubleday Book Club main selection; Literary Guild featured alternate.

Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

"The joys of Motherhood. Are they all one great lie?" In carefully orchestrated, parallel stories of two New York couples and their sons from birth through age five, Yglesias explores this and other contemporary parenting issues. The story moves carefully between the Golds and the Hummels in a sort of literary counterpoint that becomes more staccato in the second half of the book. Educated professionals with good incomes, both sets of parents have excellent intentions but are crippled by emotional "baggage": they are adult children ("only children") themselves. The children are unusually bright, but their development, like their parents’, is impeded by complex psychological issues. Yglesias writes with insight, showing how true adulthood comes with self-awareness, pain, and understanding. Definitely recommended.Ellen R. Cohen, Rockville, Md.

Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

For eight-year-old Rufus, life has become complicated. His mother and father, Josie and Tom, have divorced amicably enough, and are set to pursue their separate paths. But other people have had to become involved - like Matthew, who has just married Josie, and Elizabeth, Tom's new friend. And even worse, there are the other children - Matthew's three resentful teenagers, who have been conditioned by their own mother Nadine to hate Josie. Rufus is supposed to regard them as family now, although he doesn't see why he should. Most of the time Matthew's children live with Nadine, in a slum-like cottage in the depths of the country. Nadine is determined that they should hate their new life as much as she does. They come to their father for weekends, and make it clear how much they loathe their new stepmother. Rufus secretly prefers to be with his father in his quiet house in Bath, and realises that he does not necessarily hate the idea of a stepmother - not if she was like Elizabeth, sane and friendly and welcoming. But where other people's children are concerned, neat solutions seldom occur.

Eleanor and Fulbert Sullivan live, with their nine children ranging from nursery to university age, in a huge country house belonging to Fulbert's parents, Sir Jesse and Lady Regan. Sir Jesse sends Fulbert, his only son, on a business mission to South America. News comes of Fulbert's death, and his executor, Ridley Cranmer, plans an impulsive marriage to Eleanor… but is Fulbert really dead? And what is the mystery surrounding the parentage of the three strange Marlowes living in genteel penury on the fringe of the great estate?

Parents and Children is less savage in theme than some of Ivy Compton-Burnett's fiction and, with its richly funny scenes with the children and happily resolved ending, makes a perfect introduction to this distinguished author's highly individual world — a closed world of intense relationships within late Victorian upper-class families, a world in which the normally unspoken is stated and the unthinkable enacted, with dark revelations blandly emerging from formal speeches of great subtlety.

Ringworld’s Children returns series protagonist Louis Wu to the titular world. Louis and his friend The Hindmost, an alien of the Pierson’s puppeteer race, are prisoners of the Ghoul protector Tunesmith, a Ringworld native, who is deliberately provoking the warships that surround his world. All the star-faring races of Known Space have sent warships to the Ringworld, and they are already at the brink of war. If fighting breaks out, the near-indestructible Ringworld will be destroyed: dissolved by antimatter weapons.

The Ringworld series is so complex and ambitious that Ringworld’s Children opens with a glossary and a cast of characters, inclusions that even many Known Space fans will need. Newcomers to Niven’s artificial planet should start with Ringworld.

Sex oozes from every page of this erotic futuristic thriller. In a far-future class-driven android society, most of the populace are slave-chipped and owned by wealthy aristos. When low-caste but unenslaved android Freya offends an aristo and needs to get off-world, she takes a courier position with the mysterious Jeeves Corporation, but the job turns out to have dangers of its own. Designed as a pleasure-module, Freya isn’t quite as obsolete as she could be, as androids have sex with each other incessantly. Hugo-winner Charles Stross has a deep message of how android slavery recapitulates humanity’s past mistakes, but he struggles to make it heard over the moans and gunshots. Readers nostalgic for the SF of the ’60s will find much that’s familiar (including Freya’s jumpsuit-clad form on the cover), but that doesn’t quite compensate for the flaws.

Someone is stealing America's children, and the disappearances are shattering the structure of U.S. Society, leaving families in total despair.

With the police and federal agencies handcuffed by laws and procedures, the situation is critical.

Mack Bolan fears for these innocent lives at the hands of human predators. The Executioner searches high and low for targets in Chicago — and finds them: from a high-profile politician to a Mafia kingpin.

Long before the One Ring was forged in the fires of Mount Doom, one man—Húrin—dared to defy Morgoth, the first and greatest of the dark lords to plague Middle-earth. Thus did he and his children, Túrin and Niënor, earn the enmity of a merciless foe that would shape the destiny of all the ages to come.

Only J.R.R. Tolkien, the undisputed master of the fantastic, could have conceived this magical tale of Elves and Men united against a brutal foe. And only Christopher Tolkien, the master’s son and literary heir, could have fit the pieces of his father’s unfinished work together with such deep understanding and consummate artistry. With an introduction and appendiCes by Christopher Tolkien, who has also contributed maps and genealogy tables, and eight stunning paintings and twenty-five pencil drawings by Oscar-winning artist Alan Lee, The Children of Húrin at last takes its proper place as the very cornerstone of J.R.R. Tolkien’s immortal achievement.

In her 12th book, the British author of the two series featuring Adam Dalgleish and Cordelia Gray (Devices and Desires and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman, respectively) poses a premise that chills and darkens its setting in the year 2021. Near the end of the 20th century, for reasons beyond the grasp of modern science, human sperm count went to zero. The last birth occurred in 1995, and in the space of a generation humanity has lost its future. In England, under the rule of an increasingly despotic Warden, the infirm are encouraged to commit group suicide, criminals are exiled and abandoned and immigrants are subjected to semi-legalized slavery. Divorced, middle-aged Oxford history professor Theo Faron, an emotionally constrained man of means and intelligence who is the Warden's cousin, plods through an ordered, bleak existence. But a chance involvement with a group of dissidents moves him onto unexpected paths, leading him, in the novel's compelling second half, toward risk, commitment and the joys and anguish of love. In this convincingly detailed world—where kittens are (illegally) christened, sex has lost its allure and the arts have been abandoned—James concretely explores an unthinkable prospect. Readers should persevere through the slow start, for the rewards of this story, including its reminder of the transforming power of hope, are many and lasting. 125,000 first printing; BOMC main selection. Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

First publiched in L. Ron Hubbard Presents Writers of the Future anthology (vol. VI) in 1990. Published in 2005 as part of Gravity Wells short stories collection.

A masterful literary talent explores the treacherous, often violent borders between war and sex, love and art.

With the flash of a camera, one girl’s life is shattered, and a host of others altered forever. .

In a war-torn village in Eastern Europe, an American photographer captures a heart-stopping image: a young girl flying toward the lens, fleeing a fiery explosion that has engulfed her home and family. The image wins acclaim and prizes, becoming an icon for millions — and a subject of obsession for one writer, the photographer’s best friend, who has suffered a devastating tragedy of her own.

As the writer plunges into a suicidal depression, her filmmaker husband enlists several friends, including a fearless bisexual poet and an ingenuous performance artist, to save her by rescuing the unknown girl and bringing her to the United States. And yet, as their plot unfolds, everything we know about the story comes into question: What does the writer really want? Who is controlling the action? And what will happen when these two worlds — east and west, real and virtual — collide?

A fierce, provocative, and deeply affecting novel of both ideas and action that blends the tight construction of Julian Barnes’s The Sense of an Ending with the emotional power of Anthony Marra’s A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, Lidia Yuknavitch’s The Small Backs of Children is a major step forward from one of our most avidly watched writers.

Nancy Harmon had fled the heartbreak of her first marriage, the macabre deaths of her two little children, the hostile front-page newspaper stories and the shocking charges against her. She changed her name, dyed her red hair sable brown, and left California for the wind-swept peace of Cape Cod. Now she was married again, had two more beautiful children, and the terrible pain had begun to heal…until the morning when she looked in the back yard for her little boy and girl, found only one red mitten, and knew that the nightmare was beginning again…

The village of Hemmersmoor is a place untouched by time and shrouded in superstition: There is the grand manor house whose occupants despise the villagers, the small pub whose regulars talk of revenants, the old mill no one dares to mention. This is where four young friends come of age—in an atmosphere thick with fear and suspicion. Their innocent games soon bring them face-to-face with the village’s darkest secrets in this eerily dispassionate, astonishingly assured novel, evocative of Stephen King’s classic short story “Children of the Corn” and infused with the spirit of the Brothers Grimm.