Summary (From the publisher):
The 22nd Century. Mankind is free from the age-old misery and poverty that have kept it in bondage, free to create a new world, to explore the universe, to confront the mysteries of human existence. Russia's greatest S-F writeres, Arkday and Boris Strugatsky, have produced a futuristic masterpiece of epic proportions and breathtaking vision.
Two interplanetary adventurers hurtle through space at a speed faster than light, and are flung a hundred years into the 22nd century. They find themselves on a planet both like and unlike the earth they abandoned so very long ago--and so recently.
It is a planet ruled by wisdom, where automated farms feed tens million inhabitants, where a complete system of moving roads brings the farthest outposts into close communion, where an advanced science in mechanization approaches the mysterious complexity of life itself. Here all effort is bound to the exhilarating art if discovery--way below the planet's waters, deep into the endless reaches of space and far beyond the boundless zones of the human mind.
Contents:
Night on Mars
Almost the Same
Old-timer
The Conspirators
Chronicle
Two from the Taimyr
The Moving Roads
Cornucopia
Homecoming
Langour of the Spirit
The Assaultmen
Deep Search
The Mystery of the Hind Leg
Candles Before the Control Board
Natural Science in the Spirit World ilgrims and Wayfarers
The Planet with all the Conveniences
Defeat
The Meeting
What You Will Be Like Views: 546
With prose that is every bit as raw, intense and bitingly honest as the world it depicts, Barry Hines's A Kestrel for a Knave contains a new afterword by the author in Penguin Modern Classics.
Life is tough and cheerless for Billy Casper, a troubled teenager growing up in the small Yorkshire mining town of Barnsley. Treated as a failure at school, and unhappy at home, Billy discovers a new passion in life when he finds Kes, a kestrel hawk. Billy identifies with her silent strength and she inspires in him the trust and love that nothing else can, discovering through her the passion missing from his life. Barry Hines's acclaimed novel continues to reach new generations of teenagers and adults with its powerful story of survival in a tough, joyless world.
Ken Loach's renowned film adaptation, Kes, has achieved cult status and in his new afterword Barry Hines discusses his work to adapt the novel into a screenplay, and reappraises the legacy of a book that has become a popular classic.
Barry Hines (b. 1939) was born in the mining village of Hoyland Common, near Barnsley, South Yorkshire. Leaving Ecclesfield Grammar School without any qualifications, Hines worked as an apprentice mining surveyor for the National Coal Board before entering Loughborough Training College to study Physical Education. Working as a teacher in Hoyland Common, he wrote novels in the school library after work, later turning to writing full-time.
If you enjoyed A Kestrel for a Knave, you might like The Call of the Wild, White Fang, and Other Stories by Jack London, published in Penguin Classics. Views: 545
by John Lange, Michael Crichton Political radical John Wright is plotting an act of mass destruction – and federal agent John Graves has him under surveillance, trying to figure out what the plot is. When a government computer is hacked and a high-security shipment of nerve gas gets hijacked, Graves puts the pieces together – but can he stop Wright from unleashing his weapon before it kills a million people . . . including the President of the United States? Views: 545
Are you happy? If not, consult Mr Parker Pyne, 17 Richmond StRetired after 35 years in UK London civil service statistics, large bald Pyne reassures clients that all unhappiness classifies under five main heads. He hires secretary Miss Lemon (next with Poirot), former gigolo Claude Lutrell, vamp Madeleine de Sara, and successful novelist Ariadne Oliver to write plots when match-making. 12 cases of romance, theft, danger, murder and mystery.1 Middle-Aged Wife2 Discontented Soldier3 Distressed Lady4 Discontented Husband 5 City Clerk 6 Rich Woman7 Have You Got Everything You Want?8 Gate of Baghdad9 House at Shiraz10 Pearl of Price11 Death on the Nile12 Oracle at Delphi Views: 545
Paul Madvig was a cheerfully corrupt ward-heeler who aspired to something better: the daughter of Senator Ralph Bancroft Henry, the heiress to a dynasty of political purebreds. Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.
A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Dashiell Hammett virtually invented the hard-boiled crime novel. This classic Hammet work of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 545
"The current volume of posthumous stories is the work of a master, a writer's writer-- but a reader's too-- an incomparable craftsman who wrote, let it be said, some of the finest stories in our language." -- Newsweek
"All in all they comprise the best collection of shorter fiction to have been published in America during the past twenty years." -- Theodore Solotaroff, Book Week
"When I read Flannery O'Connor, I do not think of Hemingway, or Katherine Anne Porter, or Sartre, but rather of someone like Sophocles. What more can you say for a writer? I write her name with honor, for all the truth and all the craft with which she shows man's fall and his dishonor." -- Thomas Merton
Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else. Views: 545
At the age of 14 Georg Koves is plucked from his home in a Jewish section of Budapest and without any particular malice, placed on a train to Auschwitz. He does not understand the reason for his fate. He doesn’t particularly think of himself as Jewish. And his fellow prisoners, who decry his lack of Yiddish, keep telling him, “You are no Jew.” In the lowest circle of the Holocaust, Georg remains an outsider.
The genius of Imre Kertesz’s unblinking novel lies in its refusal to mitigate the strangeness of its events, not least of which is Georg’s dogmatic insistence on making sense of what he witnesses–or pretending that what he witnesses makes sense. Haunting, evocative, and all the more horrifying for its rigorous avoidance of sentiment, Fatelessness is a masterpiece in the traditions of Primo Levi, Elie Wiesel, and Tadeusz Borowski. Views: 544
Young, beautiful, and adventurous Nicola Ferris loves her life as a secretary at the British Embassy on the lush island of Crete. Then on her day off, she links up with two hiking companions who have inadvertently stumbledupon a scene of blood vengeance. And suddenly the life Nicola adores is in danger of coming to an abrupt, brutal, and terrifying end . . Views: 544
Hercule Poirot must solve a perplexing case of midair murder in Death in the Clouds when he discovers that the woman in seat two of the airborne aeroplane he’s traveling on is quite unexpectedly—and unnaturally—deceased.
From seat No. 9, Hercule Poirot was ideally placed to observe his fellow air passengers on the short flight from Paris to London. Over to his right sat a pretty young woman, clearly infatuated with the man opposite; ahead, in seat No. 13, sat a countess with a poorly concealed cocaine habit; across the gangway in seat No. 8, a writer of detective fiction was being troubled by an aggressive wasp.
Yes, Poirot is almost ideally placed to take it all in, except what he did not yet realize was that behind him, in seat No. 2, sat the slumped, lifeless body of a woman. Murdered, and likely by someone in Poirot’s immediate proximity. Views: 544
Marking the thirtieth anniversary of Theophilus North, this beautiful edition features Thornton Wilder's unpublished notes for the novel and other illuminating documentary material, all of which is included in a new Afterword by Tappan Wilder.
The last of Wilder's works published during his lifetime, this novel is part autobiographical and part the imagined adventure of his twin brother who died at birth. Setting out to see the world in the summer of 1926, Theophilus North gets as far as Newport, Rhode Island, before his car breaks down. To support himself, Theophilus takes jobs in the elegant mansions along Ocean Drive, just as Wilder himself did in the same decade. Soon the young man finds himself playing the roles of tutor, spy, confidant, lover, friend, and enemy as he becomes entangled in the intrigues of both upstairs and downstairs in a glittering society dominated by leisure.
Narrated by the elderly North from a distance of fifty years, Theophilus North is a fascinating commentary on youth and education from the vantage point of age, and deftly displays Wilder's trademark wit juxtaposed with his lively and timeless ruminations on what really matters about life, love, and work at the end of the day—even after a visit to Newport. Views: 544
The Bay tells the story of Luke Mangan, who begins to have an adulterous affair with a woman who soon dies. Crippled by guilt for the part he played in her demise, Mangan decides to atone by marrying humbly, with the help of a Parish priest.Written in his inimitable style, Strong deals with elemental passions in a thoughtful, and sensitive way. Views: 543
After the early death of her philandering husband, Etsuko moves into her father-in-law's house, where she numbly submits to the old man's advances. But soon she finds herself in love with the young servant Saburo. Tormented by his indifference, yet invigorated by her desire, she makes her move, with catastrophic consequences. Views: 541
These four Stefan Zweig stories newly translated by the award-winning Anthea Bell, are among his most celebrated and compelling work. The titular tale is a devastating depiction of unrequited love, which inspired a classic Hollywood film, directed by Max Ophüls and starring Joane Fontaine.
Elsewhere in the collection, a young man mistakes the girl he loves for her sister, two erstwhile lovers meet after an age spent apart, and a married woman repays a debt of gratitude to her childhood sweetheart. Expertly paced, laced with the acutely accurate psychological detail and empathy that are Zweig's trademarks, this is a powerful addition to Pushkin's growing collection of his work. Views: 540
