In a dramatic climax Nancy outwits her enemy in an eerie mansion and traps him in the fantastic Room of Skulls. This unusually intriguing story will delight all Carolyn Keene fans. Views: 351
Introduced by Seamus Heaney. David Thomson’s travels in the Gaelic world of the Hebrides and the west coast of Ireland brought him into contact with a people whose association with the sea and its fertile lore runs deep. They told of men rescued by seals in stormy seas, of babies suckled by seal-mothers, and of men who took seal-women for wives – stories centuries old, handed down to them by their forefathers. These mysterious and fascinating legends retain their spell-binding enchantment through the luminous quality of David Thomson’s prose. From an early age, he was fascinated by the mysterious interaction between man and the sea. In the Selkie legends he found the perfect expression of a Celtic world where truth and fiction intertwine, and his book is a window onto that vanished world. ‘The People of the Sea survives not as a period piece but as a poetic achievement . . . readers will be carried away on successive waves of pleasure . . . these stories have an irresistible... Views: 351
Under the hot desert sun nothing is quite as it seems. Howard Ingham, an American writer, is sent to Tunisia to gather material for a movie, a love story too sordid to be set in America. But his director fails to arrive as scheduled and the erratic mails bring news of infidelities and suicide.
Ingham, for reasons obscure even to himself, decides to stay on and work instead on a novel. Gradually, however, a series of peculiar events, a hushed-up murder, a vanished corpse, and secret broadcasts to the Soviet Union, lures him inexorably into the deep, ambivalent shadows of this Arab town; into deceit and away from conventional morality. And when Ingham finds an accomplice to murder, or perhaps something more, what is in question is not justice or truth, but the state of his oddly quiet conscience. Views: 350
The exhilarating dystopian novel that inspired George Orwell's 1984 and foreshadowed the worst excesses of Soviet Russia
Yevgeny Zamyatin's We is a powerfully inventive vision that has influenced writers from George Orwell to Ayn Rand. In a glass-enclosed city of absolute straight lines, ruled over by the all-powerful 'Benefactor', the citizens of the totalitarian society of OneState live out lives devoid of passion and creativity - until D-503, a mathematician who dreams in numbers, makes a discovery: he has an individual soul. Set in the twenty-sixth century AD, We is the classic dystopian novel and was the forerunner of works such as George Orwell's 1984 and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World. It was suppressed for many years in Russia and remains a resounding cry for individual freedom, yet is also a powerful, exciting and vivid work of science fiction. Clarence Brown's brilliant translation is based on the corrected text of the novel, first published in Russia in 1988 after more than sixty years' suppression. Views: 350
This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as an army officer, is the author's surpassing achievement as a novelist. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war overwhelming. Though often somber, Sword of Honor is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh's early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his gifts with extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric. Sword of Honor comprises the three acclaimed novels Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender. Views: 350
ONE—The redheaded secretary lay crumpled on the office floor, her blouse ripped to the waist. Blood trickled from her mouth.TWO—The redheaded divorcee sprawled across the bed, the black silk sheet baring her lovely body—and her gaping throat.THREE—The black-haired B-girl lay broken across the steering wheel of the bomb-shattered car. Her open eyes stared sightlessly at the tilted floor.AND OUT!Each had walked into a trap meant for private eye Johnny Liddell, set by the crime syndicate out to get him. Each was a score Johnny had to settle—if he could live long enough to see the end of three brutal bouts with murder! Views: 350
Jim Parsons is a talented doctor, skilled at the most advanced medical techniques and dedicated to saving lives. But after a bizarre road accident leaves him hundreds of years in the future, Parsons is horrified to discover an incredibly advanced civilization that zealously embraces death. Now, he is caught between his own instincts and training as a healer and a society where it is illegal to save lives. But Parsons is not the only one left who believes in prolonging life, and those who share his beliefs have desperate plans for Dr. Parsons' skills, and for the future of their society. Dr. Futurity is not only a thrilling rendition of a terrifying future but it is also a fantastic examination of the paradoxes of time-travel that could only have come from the mind of Philip K. Dick.
Winner of both the Hugo and John W. Campbell awards for best novel, widely regarded as the premiere science fiction writer of his day, and the object of cult-like adoration from his legions of fans, Philip K. Dick has come to be seen in a literary light that defies classification in much the same way as Borges and Calvino. With breathtaking insight, he utilizes vividly unfamiliar worlds to evoke the hauntingly and hilariously familiar in our society and ourselves. Views: 350
The first novel of Samuel Beckett's mordant and exhilirating midcentury trilogy intoduces us to Molloy, who has been mysteriously incarcerated, and who subsequently escapes to go discover the whereabouts of his mother. In the latter part of this curious masterwork, a certain Jacques Moran is deputized by anonymous authorities to search for the aforementioned Molloy. In the trilogy's second novel, Malone, who might or might not be Molloy himself, addresses us with his ruminations while in the act of dying. The third novel consists of the fragmented monologue - delivered, like the monologues of the previous novels, in a mournful rhetoric that possesses the utmost splendor and beauty - of what might or might not an armless and legless creature living in an urn outside an eating house. Taken together, these three novels represent the high-water mark of the literary movement we call Modernism. Within their linguistic terrain, where stories are taken up, broken off, and taken up again, where voices rise and crumble and are resurrected, we can discern the essential lineaments of our modern condition, and encounter an awesome vision, tragic yet always compelling and always mysteriously invigorating, of consciousness trapped and struggling inside the boundaries of nature. Views: 350
The ninth Scott Jordan mystery, in which our attorney hero investigates a murder over theatre stock syndication.** Views: 349
Blind Date is a spectacular and erotically charged psychological novel that shows Jerzy Kosinski, author of Being There and The Painted Bird, at the height of his power. George Levanter is an idea man, a small investor, an international playboy, and a ruthless deal-maker whose life is delivered in a series of scorching encounters, each more incredible than the last. From Moscow to Paris, from a Manhattan skyscraper to a California mass murder, Blind Date is a dizzying vision of life among the beautiful people and the thrill-seekers. Views: 349
"A towering landmark of postwar Realism. . . . A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved." — David Foster WallaceOtto and Sophie Bentwood live childless in a renovated Brooklyn brownstone. The complete works of Goethe line their bookshelf, their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. But after Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a half-starved neighborhood cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague their lives. The fault lines of their marriage are revealed — echoing the fractures of society around them, slowly wrenching itself apart. First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature — a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day." Views: 349
Witness? Murder? Or Sucker? Views: 349
Frederick, Earl of Ickenham, remains young at heart. So it is for him the act of a moment to lean out of the Drones Club window with a catapult and ping the silk top hat off his grumpy in-law, the distinguished barrister Sir Raymand Bastable.
Unfortunately things don’t end there.
The sprightly earl finds that his action has inspired a scandalous bestseller and a film script—but this is as nothing compared with the entangled fates of the couples that surround him and which only his fabled sweetness and light can unravel. Views: 349
A handful of humans and a multitude of robots create a new society on a mysteriously abandoned Earth in this breathtaking science fiction classic from one of the genre's acknowledged mastersWhat if you woke up one morning on Earth . . . and no one else was there? That is the reality that greeted a handful of humans, including Jason Whitney, his wife Martha, and the remnants of a tribe of Native Americans in the year 2135. Their inexplicable abandonment had unexpected benefits: the eventual development of mental telepathy and other extrasensory powers, inner peace, and best of all, near-immortality. Now, five thousand years later, most of the remaining humans live a tranquil, pastoral life, leaving technological and religious exploration to the masses of robot servants who no longer have humans to serve. But the unexpected reappearance of Jason's brother, who had teleported to the stars many years before, threatens to change everything yet again—for... Views: 349
