Classic works by one of North America's greatest storytellers brought back to print in a new paperback series Inspiration for the major motion picture from Infinity Media and First Look International Central to Farley Mowat's writing is his quest to understand the often-forgotten native people of the vast arctic wilderness. In this moving collection, he allows these people to describe in their own words the adventures they experience as they struggle to survive in an isolated, untamed land. Stories of survival and courage, of superstition and fate, of uncompromising loyalty to family and tribe are presented here, offering a vivid portrait of a people whose existence is often beyond the comprehension of modern man. Views: 1 118
The Age of Faith surveys the medieval achievements and modern significance of Christian, Islamic, and Judaic life and culture. Like the other volumes in The Story of Civilization, this is a self-contained work, which at the same time fits into a comprehensive history of mankind. It includes the dramatic stories of St. Augustine, Hypatia, Justinian, Mohammed, Harun al-Rashid, Charlemagne, William the Conqueror, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Richard the Lion-Hearted, Saladin, Maimonides, St. Francis, St. Thomas Aquinas, Roger Bacon, and many others, all in the perspective of integrated history. The greatest love stories in literature—of Héloise and Abélard, of Dante and Beatrice—are here retold with enthralling scholarship. Views: 1 118
The Oak Openings is one of James Fenimore Cooper's late novels that never got included among his classics but is regarded by some as a classic. Perhaps best known for his novel The Last of the Mohicans, Cooper wrote extensively about the American Indians, and that idea is alive in this book as well, with the theme of the Indians as the lost tribe of Israel. It is the only novel he ever wrote that is set in Michigan. It's also a story about raising bees, and is alternately known as The Bee-Hunter Views: 1 117
Orphaned by a tragic accident at sixteen, Tommy Burwell's been scraping out a meager existence working dead-end jobs for years. When he and fellow nomad Four Trey Whitey get jobs working with dynamite, making way for a new pipeline across the deserted plains of Far West Texas, disaster ensues. In a matter of days, Tommy is brutally beaten and witness to an act of cold-blooded murder the law can't be bothered to investigate.
When Carol, a knockout beauty, shows up looking to follow the caravan of workers, Tommy falls for her almost immediately. There aren't any jobs for women on the pipeline, but Carol knows a few things she could do for the workers to keep afloat--an arrangement that Tommy can't bear for long. As Tommy's about to find out, when you're South of Heaven, you're far from grace--and sometimes the only way out is down. Views: 1 116
Eloise Drew asks her niece to investigate the disappearance of her neighbor, a young university student. In New York, Nancy, Bess and George are drawn into the intrigue and danger of a smuggling ring. Nancy plans a clever ruse: George is disguised as the missing Chinese girl! The girl detective is also suspicious of an unpleasant bookstore owner and his loud, overbearing female customer. A series of clues lead the girls to Hong Kong. Ned, who is studying in Hong Kong, joins them. The amateur detectives follow more clues to the international smuggling ring. This book is the original text. A revised text does not exist. Views: 1 116
The eleven stories in this volume are drawn from Dahl's popular adult short stories and were chosen for their quirky, twisted, and haunting plots -- sure to please Dahl teenage fans.
Contents
vii • Introduction (Skin and Other Stories) • (2000) • essay by Wendy Cooling
1 • Skin • non-genre • (1952) • short story by Roald Dahl
22 • Lamb to the Slaughter • non-genre • (1953) • short story by Roald Dahl
35 • The Sound Machine • (1949) • short story by Roald Dahl
53 • An African Story • (1946) • short story by Roald Dahl
71 • Galloping Foxley • non-genre • (1953) • short story by Roald Dahl
90 • The Wish • (1948) • short story by Roald Dahl
95 • The Surgeon • non-genre • (1988) • novelette by Roald Dahl
129 • Dip in the Pool • non-genre • (1952) • short story by Roald Dahl
144 • The Champion of the World • non-genre • (1959) • novelette by Roald Dahl
179 • Beware of the Dog • non-genre • (1944) • short story by Roald Dahl
195 • My Lady Love, My Dove • non-genre • (1952) • short story by Roald Dahl Views: 1 116
Barabbas is the acquitted; the man whose life was exchanged for that of Jesus of Nazareth, crucified upon the hill of Golgotha. Barabbas is a man condemned to have no god. "Christos Iesus" is carved on the disk suspended from his neck, but he cannot affirm his faith. He cannot pray. He can only say, "I want to believe."
Translated from the Swedish by Alan Blair
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 1 116
This groundbreaking retrospective collection features the classic science fiction stories of Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988). When the Science Fiction Writers of America began bestowing their Grand Master awards, Simak was the third writer so honored. Only Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson preceded him, and he received his award before such luminaries as Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. Simak earned this distinction by producing, over a long period of time, a significant body of popular, respected, often award-winning work, including his classics City and Way Station, and many shorter works, eight of which are contained in this collection.
Readers unfamiliar with Simak are in for a treat. More than half of the stories here were among the best stories of their respective years. "The Big Front Yard" (1958) won a Hugo. "A Death in the House" (1959) was selected by Judith Merril for Year's Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition. "Over the River and Through the Woods" (1965) made the cut for World's Best Science Fiction: 1966 edited by Donald Wollheim.
Contents:
A Death in the House
The Big Front Yard
Goodnight Mr. James
Dusty Zebra
Neighbor
Over the River & Through the Woods
Construction Shack
Grotto of the Dancing Deer
[He] wrote for so long and always so well that his excellence came to be taken for granted, as we take sunlight for granted until we go blind.
- Poul Anderson
I read Cliff's stories with particular attention, and I couldn't help but notice the simplicity and directness of the writing - the utter clarity of it. I made up my mind to imitate it, and I labored over the years to make my writing simpler, clearer, more uncluttered, to present my scenes on a bare stage. - Isaac Asimov
Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land.
- James Gunn
Good fantasy - and that includes science fiction - takes off from the known for its flights into the new. Cliff Simak was a master of the art. His known was the rural Midwest that he loved. His new could reach to the ends of space and time, but never beyond reality. Even his cosmic aliens always had half human dimensions that made them believable. I loved him, as so many did, for his unfailing warmth and a wit that was keen but never cruel. I heard from him often during the painful time after his wife's death. His own death touched me deeply, and I'm happy to see him remembered with this collection of his best-loved stories. - Jack Williamson
I always loved his stories, short or long. He made me love them -and the rural America of his childhood - as much as he did. - Lester del Rey
Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that a volume of the best stories of Clifford Simak (author of the classic City) would not have been published by Putnam or Del Rey, but today we have to be grateful to the one-man firm of Tachyon Publications for preserving Over the River and Through the Woods, which includes some of Simak's best stories, including two Hugo Award winners. After all, Simak is dead, which means his career is flatlined, even if Robert Heinlein said, "to read science fiction is to read Simak. The reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all."
Simak was a master of a special kind of nostalgic science fiction that reconciled the values of his youth (the rural Midwest of the 1920s) with the larger universe. Material that became ludicrous cliche in the hands of lesser writers - all those endless flying saucers landing in the hillbilly's back acre - was by Simak handled with elegance and dignity."A Death in the House" is typical: A farmer finds a dying alien. He does what he can, but that's very little. The farmer conceals the grave, wanting to give his "guest" that much dignity. But the alien is plantlike. It (or its young) sprouts out of the corpse. Human and alien struggle toward understanding. In "The Big Front Yard," a rural handyman finds his house transformed into a gateway to other worlds. The common people have the good sense; trouble starts when profiteers and the government get involved. The tone is light, friendly and clever.
This is not to suggest that Simak was a writer with no hard edges. "Good Night Mr. James" is a horror story, about a duplicate human being created to destroy a particularly nasty alien illegally smuggled to Earth. But the gentler mode was more typical, and he could also write humor. "Dusty Zebra" is a long technological joke, maybe a bit slight to be included when a 50-year career must be distilled into 218 pages. Simak's last story, the last in the book, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," is about an immortal caveman, quite different from de Camp's "Gnarly Man." He is the original artist who painted that cave art the scientists keep finding; after all this time, he just has to tell someone. The story won both the Hugo and the Nebula for 1980, because both readers and fellow professionals wanted to say "thank you."
- The Washington Post Book World
Clifford D. Simak is another classic SF writer who staked out a distinctive territory based on his rural midwestern roots - only a couple hundred miles north of Bradbury's - but he never strayed very far from a few classic SF themes which he treated with considerably more rigor than Bradbury, if sometimes with as much sentimentality. Simak's City is at least as important to the history of SF as Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles - some would say more so, given its more challenging conceptual framework - and his other short stories are among the most enduring in the genre, as Over the River & Through the Woods, a new limited edition from Tachyon Publications, attests.
Yet Simak, like Sturgeon, seems in danger of fading into the limbo of historical anthologies; while his work was once as widely available as that of any of the giants, today these stories seem almost like new discoveries - and are just as fresh. Part of the reason may be not that Simak's folksy language seems to belie the underlying sense of alienation and tragedy that characterizes much of his work; part may be due to the rediscovery of American regional idioms among younger SF writers from Terry Bisson to Nancy Kress . . .
'Over the River & Through the Woods' contains eight Simak stories from 1951 through 1980 - which means it includes none of the classic stories like "Desertion" or "Huddling Place", which later went to make up City, but does include his late Hugo and Nebula-winning masterpiece "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer" and the Hugo-winning "The Big Front Yard."
One of the first things that comes to mind when rereading the latter story after several years - it concerns a characteristically laconic farmer with a dog named Towser (the only name Simak seems to have permitted for dogs) who finds on his property a gateway to distant worlds - is that few contemporary writers would have let such a simple and elegant premise be confined to a novella. Simak's focus is on the unimpressed rustic whose very lack of response to the wonder at his doorstep intensifies our own.
When a rustic is impressed by an alien presence, such as in "A Death in the House," it is less likely to be from a sense of wonder than from a sense of companionship. Simak's roots may be firmly in SF, but he writes of alien encounters in a way Willa Cather might have written of them. Aliens are strange but unthreatening, and in some cases (as in "Neighbor") they can turn the entire neighborhood into a pastoral Shangri-la, isolated from the outside in a way that encapsulates what must be Simak's own drams of lost innocence.
But Simak could write about more than wonderful things happening to remote farmers. "Good Night, Mr. James" is a very early treatment (1951) of what we would today call a cloning story, done with the kind of cynical humor that is needed for what is essentially a double- and triple-cross tale. It reveals Simak's healthy streak of humor, as does "Dusty Zebra," in which trivial objects are zapped into another dimension in return for high-tech wonders.
"Construction Shack" ironically explores an almost Stapledonian notion of whole solar systems being engineered by ancient aliens (Pluto is the construction shack of the title), cast in terms of the matter-of-fact space jockeys so familiar from pulp SF. Simak may be at his best, however, when his theme is isolation and abandonment.
The title story concerns children from the future sent back to the refuge of the 1890s. The best tale in the collection and one of the high points of Simak's late career, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," concerns an anthropologist who comes to realize that his assistant seems to know far too much about certain ancient cave paintings, and may in fact have been their creator. Simak's evocation, in a few pages, of the sheer loneliness of immortality and the daunting perspectives of time involved, again could be a lesson to a generation of younger writers, and reminds us brilliantly of what Simak was capable of. - Locus Views: 1 116
"A superb mirror of a place, a time, and a group of people who capture our immediate interest and hold it tightly."
THE PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER
Young Reuven Malter is unsure of himself and his place in life. An unconventional scholar, he struggles for recognition from his teachers. With his old friend Danny Saunders--who himself had abandoned the legacy as the chosen heir to his father's rabbinical dynasty for the uncertain life of a healer--Reuvan battles to save a sensitive boy imprisoned by his genius and rage. Painfully, triumphantly, Reuven's understanding of himself, though the boy change, as he starts to aproach the peace he has long sought.... Views: 1 116
Red Schuhart is a stalker, one of those young rebels who are compelled, in spite of extreme danger, to venture illegally into the Zone to collect the mysterious artifacts that the alien visitors left scattered around. His life is dominated by the place and the thriving black market in the alien products. But when he and his friend Kirill go into the Zone together to pick up a “full empty,” something goes wrong. And the news he gets from his girlfriend upon his return makes it inevitable that he’ll keep going back to the Zone, again and again, until he finds the answer to all his problems. Views: 1 116
This now classic book revealed Flannery O'Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy. Stories include:
"A Good Man Is Hard to Find"
"The River"
"The Life You Save May Be Your Own"
"A Stroke of Good Fortune"
"A Temple of the Holy Ghost"
"The Artificial Nigger"
"A Circle in the Fire"
"A Late Encounter with the Enemy"
"Good Country People"
"The Displaced Person"
©1955 Flannery O'Connor; 1954, 1953, 1948 by Flannery O'Connor; renewed 1983, 1981 by Regina O'Connor; renewed 1976 by Mrs. Edward F. O'Connor; (P)2010 Blackstone Audio, Inc. Views: 1 115
Beginning with his debut masterpiece, The Naked and the Dead, Norman Mailer has repeatedly told the truth about war. Why Are We at War? returns Mailer to the gravity of the battlefield and the grand hubris of the politicians who send soldiers there to die. First published in the early days of the Iraq War, Why Are We at War? is an explosive argument about the American quest for empire that still carries weight today. Scrutinizing the Bush administration’s words and actions, Mailer unleashes his trademark moral rigor: “Because democracy is noble, it is always endangered. . . . To assume blithely that we can export democracy into any country we choose can serve paradoxically to encourage more fascism at home and abroad.”
Praise for Why Are We at War?
“We’re overloaded with information these days, some of it possibly true. Mailer offers a provocative—and persuasive—cultural and intellectual frame.”—Newsweek
“[Mailer] still has the stamina to churn out hard-hitting criticism.”—Los Angeles Times
*
“Penetrating . . . There’s plenty of irreverent wit and fresh thinking on display.”—San Francisco Chronicle
“Eloquent . . . thoughtful . . . Why Are We at War? *pulls no punches.”—Fort Worth Star-Telegram
*Praise for Norman Mailer
“[Norman Mailer] loomed over American letters longer and larger than any other writer of his generation.”—The New York Times
“A writer of the greatest and most reckless talent.”—The New Yorker
“Mailer is indispensable, an American treasure.”—The Washington Post
“A devastatingly alive and original creative mind.”—Life
“Mailer is fierce, courageous, and reckless and nearly everything he writes has sections of headlong brilliance.”—The New York Review of Books
“The largest mind and imagination [in modern] American literature . . . Unlike just about every American writer since Henry James, Mailer has managed to grow and become richer in wisdom with each new book.”—Chicago Tribune
“Mailer is a master of his craft. His language carries you through the story like a leaf on a stream.”—*The Cincinnati Post
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 1 115
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Terry Brooks's The Measure of the Magic.
The fate of a world rests on an unlikely hero. . . .
Tucked away in peaceful Shady Vale, the young half-elf Shea Ohmsford gives little thought to the outside world. Yet far to the north, the evil Warlock Lord has dispatched shadowy Skull Bearers, creatures twisted by dark sorcery, to hunt him down. At the same time, a black-cloaked giant of a man appears in Shady Vale. He claims to be the mysterious Druid known as Allanon, a wizardly wanderer of vast knowledge and power–and he has come to see Shea. For Shea, he says, is the last descendant of an ancient Elven king. Only he, in all the world, can wield the fabled Sword of Shannara. And only the Sword can stop the Warlock Lord from destroying all that lives.
The Sword lies far from Shady Vale, in the Druid castle of Paranor. And Paranor has fallen under the shadow of the Warlock Lord. Yet all is not lost. Shea will rise to the challenge. Together with Allanon and a handful of brave companions, he begins a desperate quest into the very heart of evil. . . .
Views: 1 115
Grandfather John Vogelin's land is his life -- a barren stretch of New Mexican wilderness, mercifully bypassed by civilization. Then the government moves in. And suddenly the elderly, mule-stubborn rancher is confronting the combined land-grabbing greed of the County Sheriff, the Department of the Interior, the Atomic Energy Commission and the U.S. Air Force. But a tough old man is like a mountain lion: if you back hom into a conner, he'll come out fighting. Views: 1 114
Ten stories of wonder and imagination by an author named Grand Master by the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America
In the collection’s title story, Frederick Gray is closing in on seventy and has outlived his usefulness as a professor of law. He has no family; his best friend, fellow faculty member Ben Lovell, has recently died. Before Gray moves into a retirement home, he takes a final canoe trip to a favorite fishing spot he and Lovell had visited many times, only to find that someone has built a house on the remote riverside. When an accident leaves Gray stranded and in pain, he returns to the shelter seeking aid and instead finds a new reason for living.
Nine additional tales showcase Clifford D. Simak’s talent for spinning stories that allow us to glimpse the possibilities of life beyond Earth as well as expand our wisdom of what it means to be human.
Each story includes an introduction by David W. Wixon, literary executor of the Clifford D. Simak estate and editor of this ebook. Views: 1 114
