It’s a jacket; it’s a mattress; it’s a fortune! Mullaney staked his life on it. The way it all worked out was that Mullaney finally figured he had to take the big gamble; he’d never get rich selling encyclopedias. Consequently, he left his wife and went off to make a killing at cards, horses, dice — you name it. But here he is at the end of the year with a single subway token in his pocket and the hottest, sure-thing tip he’s ever heard on the second race at Aqueduct... So he’s standing at Fourteenth Street and Fourth Avenue wondering where he can promote some coin, who he can put the bite on, when this long black limousine pulls up and out hops a big guy with a beard and a gun and says, “Get in!” That’s how A Horse’s Head , Evan Hunter’s hugely funny new novel, starts. It never lets up as it races back and forth across Manhattan, Brooklyn, and Queens, diving into some very odd places indeed — such as the locked stacks of the Library’s Main Branch and an East Side cellar synagogue — and introducing some of the strangest gunsels, moon-struck kooks, and pliant lovelies in the entire metropolitan area. The laughs, the bodies, the girls come tumbling one on top of the other as Mullaney smooth-talks, wheedles and deals his way out of one dangerous situation into the next in his mad chase after the crummy, magical black jacket that doesn’t even fit him but which he’s sure is worth half a million dollars. Wild, wonderful, zany — A Horse’s Head is another surprise from the versatile author of The Paper Dragon, The Blackboard Jungle , and the 87th Precinct mysteries. Views: 422
At a small marine institute off the coast of Connecticut, only marine biologist Simon Chase realizes that a sixteen-foot pregnant Great White is feeding in the area. But even Simon doesn't know that a far deadlier creature is about to come out of the deep and threaten everything he cares for. A creature whose malevolence is unthinkable. Whose need to feed is insatiable. And whose relentless hunt for prey is unstoppable.
Twenty years after his huge bestseller Jaws, the master of the deep has done it again, letting loose a chilling new predator that only he could create. Drawing on his singular knowledge of the sea, science, and history, Peter Benchley masterfully spins a suspense-filled novel that hits you on a primal level, makes your heart pound, and leaves your blood running cold.
White Shark is Peter Benchley at his best. Read it at your own risk. Views: 421
Franz Kafka's letters to his one-time muse, Milena Jesenska - an intimate window into the desires and hopes of the twentieth-century's most prophetic and important writerKafka first made the acquaintance of Milena Jesenska in 1920 when she was translating his early short prose into Czech, and their relationship quickly developed into a deep attachment. Such was his feeling for her that Kafka showed her his diaries and, in doing so, laid bare his heart and his conscience. While at times Milena's 'genius for living' gave Kafka new life, it ultimately exhausted him, and their relationship was to last little over two years. In 1924 Kafka died in a sanatorium near Vienna, and Milena died in 1944 at the hands of the Nazis, leaving these letters as a moving record of their relationship. Views: 420
What could an omnipresent and seemingly omnipotent entity want with a humble pot-healer? Or with the dozens of other odd creatures it has lured to Plowman's Planet? And if the Glimmung is a god, are its ends positive or malign? Combining quixotic adventure, spine-chilling horror, and deliriously paranoid theology, Galactic Pot-Healer is a uniquely Dickian voyage to alternate worlds of the imagination.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 420
"She’ll never be a racehorse,” murmurs the crowd as Black Minx is led into the sales ring. But Alec Ramsay thinks differently and buys the Black’s first filly to train her for the Kentucky Derby. But Black Minx, like her sire, has a mind of her own. This fast-paced racing story follows a great horse’s journey through training and preliminary races to the opening gate at America’s most famous racetrack: Churchill Downs.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 420
"Scribbled secret notebooks, and wild typewritten pages for yr own joy." Many of Ginsberg's most famous poems.
Wake-up nightmares in Lower East Side, musings in public library, across the U.S. in dream auto, drunk in old Havana, brooding in Mayan ruins, sex daydreams on the West Coast, airplane vision of Kansas, lonely in a leafy cottage, lunch hour on Berkeley, beer notations on Skid Row, slinking to Mexico, wrote this last night in Paris, back on Times square dreaming of Times Square, bombed in NY again, loony tunes in the dentist chair, screaming at old poets in South America, aethereal zigzag Poesy in blue hotel room in Peru—a wind-up book of dreams, psalms, journal enigmas & nude minutes from 1953 to 1960 poems scattered in fugitive magazines here collected. Views: 420
Review‘Authentic seeming, grim, but fascinating.’ Sunday Telegraph‘A well-told, documentary-type tale of how the Stockholm police slog away…There is something of Ed McBain's “87th Precinct” novels about it, but with less of a factory finish.’ Spectator‘They changed the genre. Whoever is writing crime fiction after these novels is inspired by them in one way or another.’ Henning Mankell‘If you haven’t read Sjöwall/Wahlöö, start now.’ Sunday Telegraph‘Pick up one book…and you become unhinged. You want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another.’ ObserverReview‘Authentic seeming, grim, but fascinating.’ Sunday Telegraph‘A well-told, documentary-type tale of how the Stockholm police slog away…There is something of Ed McBain's “87th Precinct” novels about it, but with less of a factory finish.’ Spectator‘They changed the genre. Whoever is writing crime fiction after these novels is inspired by them in one way or another.’ Henning Mankell‘If you haven’t read Sjöwall/Wahlöö, start now.’ Sunday Telegraph‘Pick up one book…and you become unhinged. You want to block out a week of your life, lie to your boss, and stay in bed, gorging on one after another.’ Observer Views: 420
After 50,000 years, a small squad of men return to Earth, supposedly deserted all those years. But all the thoughts, myths and legends of Men have been busy. Can Man return and accept his own creations? Views: 419
In the small Oxfordshire village where Ken and Meg Clifton spend their school holidays, the Fair is the most exciting thing that ever happens - that is, until a double murder is committed. The general opinion is that the village contains a homicidal maniac. Mrs. Bradley, called in by her friend Mrs. Kempson, thinks otherwise.About the AuthorCalled "the great Gladys" by reviewers during the Golden Age of Detection, she was considered, along with Christie and Sayers, to be on eof the "big three" of English female mystery writers. Views: 419
Dr. Tom More has created a stethoscope of the human spirit. With it, he embarks on an unforgettable odyssey to cure mankind's spiritual flu. This novel confronts both the value of life and its susceptibility to chance and ruin. Views: 419
"He was precocious, alert, intelligent, brash, challenging, irreverent, literary, self-conscious, insecure, often ostentatiously crude, sometimes insufferable," Wallace Stegner says of Bernard DeVoto, who, in the words of a childhood acquaintance, was also "the ugliest, most disagreeable boy you ever saw." Between the disagreeable boy and the literary lion, a life unfolds, full of comedy and drama, as told in this definitive biography, which brings together two exemplary American men of letters.
Born within a dozen years of one another in small towns in Utah, both men were, as Stegner writes, "novelists by intention, teachers by necessity, and historians by the sheer compulsion of the region that shaped us." From this unique vantage point, Stegner follows DeVoto's path from his beloved but not particularly congenial Utah to the even less congenial Harvard where, galvanized by the disregard of the aesthetes around him, he commenced a career that, over three and a half decades, would embrace nearly every sort of literary enterprise: from modestly successful novels to prize-winning Western histories, from the editorship of the Saturday Review to a famously combative, long-running monthly column in Harper's, "The Easy Chair." A nuanced portrait of a stormy literary life, Stegner's biography of DeVoto is also a window on the tumultuous world of American letters in the twentieth century. Views: 419
This is the story of two prodigal sons. Henry returns from a self-imposed exile in America to an unforeseen inheritance of wealth and land in England and to his mother. His friend Cato is struggling with two passions, one for a God who may or may not exist, the other for a petty criminal who may or may not be capable of salvation. Cato's father and sister Colette wait anxiously to welcome Cato back to sanity. Views: 419
Leon Garfield and Edward Blishen retells some of the most famous Greek myths in this classic of children's literature. This is the epic history of the Greek Gods told from their violent beginnings to the creation of man. Views: 419
First they cracked the codes. The big electronic calculators that handled math codes, production lines, found it simple to decipher the small but racy vocabularies of the animals.
Then man had achieved the age-old dream: He could respond when his dog struggled to tell us something, and he could tell that foolish sheep that if he didn't act right he'd be mutton; and, being a man, he could create the wildest, craziest secret weapon for the war that's man's heritage but not that of the new, now-articulate minorities. Views: 419
