A savagely lacerating satire, this is an example of the sort of literature of ideas sf was before commercial formulae & interminable series took over. A lot of today's readers won't get it & may be pissed off by its unresolved ending. But it's a very good story—though perhaps not quite as good as the socially conscious SF Brunner was producing during his peak a decade previous—& its unapologetic defiance of convention is a breath of fresh air when nearly everything today seems an attempt at a franchise & some authors are happier chugging out Star Wars novels for an easy paycheck than coming up with original sf.
Players at the Game of People is an attack on the leisure class, that fundamentally European institution of bygone days translated into a near-future milieu. Godwin Harpinshield is one of a select number who've entered into this quasi-Faustian arrangement with mysterious beings referred to as "owners." His every desire is catered to. He always gets the best table, the best women. He can travel across the globe & even, apparently, through time in the endless & yet increasingly futile pursuit of pleasure. He has only one obligation: he must recruit someone. This he does by rescuing a pathetic & naturally vulnerable young prostitute from her dead-end lifestyle while she still has a spark of hope & ambition. While it isn't altruistic, this act spells the beginning of the end. Unexpectedly, he meets the girl's mother, who's come looking for her. This encounter not only offers up a surprising personal revelation, it also prompts him to be bold about questioning the nature of the owners & what they're getting out of all this.
Brunner deliberately leaves several aspects of his story unexplained, not the least of which is who the owners are. While this won't make those folks happy who have to have boldface explanations for everything, the novel as it is wouldn't have worked as well without these elements of mystery. By leaving certain key questions up for speculation, he puts you squarely on the same playing field with Harpinshield. A book that could have been terribly obscure is made more accessible, not to mention suspenseful. The cynicism won't appeal to all. There are a few early scenes which come off as uncomfortably racist & sexist by today's standards. But readers who appreciate a dark, satirical edge to their fiction—stories that neither let you off the hook easily nor spell everything out—will find this bitterly ironic yet truthful tale a winner.--T. M. Wagner (edited) Views: 751
The Shadow of the Torturer is the first volume in the four-volume series, The Book of the New Sun. It is the tale of young Severian, an apprentice in the Guild of Torturers on the world called Urth, exiled for committing the ultimate sin of his profession -- showing mercy toward his victim -- and follows subsequent journey out of his home city of Nessus. Views: 745
When two male and two female supremely sensual, unspeakably cerebral humans find themselves under attack from aliens who want their awesome quantum breakthrough, they take to the skies -- and zoom into the cosmos on a rocket roller coaster ride of adventure and danger, ecstasy and peril.
From the Paperback edition. Views: 738
Reissued to follow the Syfy Channel film of Riverworld, this fourth book in the classic Riverworld series continues the adventures of Samuel Clemens and Sir Richard Francis Burton as they travel through Farmer's strange and wonderful Riverworld, a place where everyone who ever lived is simultaneously resurrected along a single river valley that stretches over an entire planet. Famous characters from history abound.
Now Burton and Clemens, who have traveled for more than thirty years on two great ships, are about to reach the end of the River. But there is a religion, The Church of the Second Chance, that has grown up along the River and its adherents, possibly inspired by aliens, are determined to destroy the riverboats. A coming battle may destroy Burton and Clemens, but even if they survive, how can they penetrate the alien tower of the Ethicals, who created this astonishing world? What can humans do against a race capable of creating a world and resurrecting the entire human race on it? Views: 731
The hero of this dazzling novel by American master E. L. Doctorow is Joe, a young man on the run in the depths of the Great Depression. A late-summer night finds him alone and shivering beside a railroad track in the Adirondack mountains when a private railcar passes. Brightly lit windows reveal well-dressed men at a table and, in another compartment, a beautiful girl holding up a white dress before her naked form. Joe will follow the track to the mysterious estate at Loon Lake, where he finds the girl along with a tycoon, an aviatrix, a drunken poet, and a covey of gangsters. Here Joe’s fate will play out in this powerful story of ambition, aggression, and identity. Loon Lake is another stunning achievement of this acclaimed author.
“Powerful . . . [a] complex and haunting meditation on modern American history.”
–The New York Times
“A genuine thriller . . . a marvelous exploration of the complexities and contradictions of the American dream . . . Not under any circumstances would we reveal the truly shattering climax.”
–The Dallas Morning News
“A dazzling performance . . . [Loon Lake] anatomizes America with insight, passion, and inventiveness.”
–The Washington Post Book World
“Hypnotic . . . tantalizes long after it has ended.”
–Time
“Compelling . . . brilliantly done.”
–St. Louis Post-Dispatch
“A masterpiece.”
–Chicago Sun-Times Views: 728
“A good, old-fashioned love story . . . Alice Hoffman’s writing at its precise and heartbreaking best.” —*The Washington Post*
Things have changed in Fisher’s Cove, the Long Island harbor town where Natalie spent her summers as a girl. The water used to be clean, and from her aunt Minnie’s boarding house you could see all the way to Connecticut even on hazy days. Twenty years ago, Minnie never had a problem finding lodgers—but now everyone wants to be in Montauk or the Hamptons.
The biggest change of all, though, is the nuclear power plant under construction on Angel Landing. Natalie’s boyfriend, Carter, is leading a protest against the plant, and despite the fact that he is more devoted to his environmental work than he is to her, she has followed him to Fisher’s Cove. During the days, she works as a therapist at a local counseling center; in the evenings, she ignores her aunt’s disapproval as she waits for Carter to call. But after an explosion lights up the night sky above Angel Landing, Natalie’s world is turned upside down. Into her office walks a man with an incredible confession to make, and the more she listens, the more Natalie begins to question the direction of her own life. The conclusions she draws—about passion, commitment, and what her heart truly wants—will lead her to a love she never imagined possible.
Told with grace, charm, and wit, Angel Landing is a captivating romance and one of Alice Hoffman’s most delightful novels. Views: 717
Fans young and old will laugh out loud at the irrepressible wit of peter Hatcher, the hilarious antics of mischievous Fudge, and the unbreakable confidence of know-it-all sheila tubman in Judy blume's five Fudge books. brand-new covers adorn these perennial favorites, and will entice a whole new generation of Fudge?and Judy blume?fans. Views: 717
Now in English for the first time, Romain Gary's final masterpiece begins with Ludo coming of age on a small farm in Normandy, under the care of his eccentric kite-making Uncle Ambrose. Ludo's life changes the day he meets Lila, a girl from the aristocratic Polish family that owns the estate next door. In a single glance, Ludo falls in love forever; Lila, on the other hand, disappears back into the woods. And so begins Ludo's adventure of longing, passion, and steadfast love for the elusive Lila, who begins to reciprocate his feelings just as Europe descends into World War II. After Germany invades Poland, Lila and her family go missing, and Ludo’s devotion to saving her from the Nazis becomes a journey to save his love, his loved ones, his country, and ultimately himself.
Filled with unforgettable characters who, as the war goes on, fling all they have into the fight to keep their hopes—and themselves—alive, The Kites is Romain Gary's poetic call for resistance in whatever form it takes. A war hero himself, Gary embraced and fought for humanity in all its nuanced complexities, in the belief that a hero might be anyone who has the courage to love and hope. Views: 713
The second novel in the Classic series "Canopus in Argos: Archives". A tale of love and the anicent battle between men and woman. Views: 698
This remarkable and symbolic novel centers on Wariinga's tragedy and uses it to tell a story of contemporary Kenya. Views: 690
Thomasina Thait had watched her well-born father gamble away their estate and drive her mother to an early grave. So Tommi was determined not to marry but to remain a governess. The Marquess of Thornhill was the gambler who had ruined her family, but she found it difficult to resist his brooding eyes, his handsome face…and his kiss. Regency Romance by Joan Vincent; originally published by Dell Candlelight Regency Special Views: 685
The Sweet-Shop Owner is set during a single June day in the life of an outwardly unremarkable man whose inner world proves to be exceptionally resonant. As he tends to his customers, Willy Chapman, the sweet-shop owner, confronts the specters of his beautiful and distant wife and his clever, angry daughter, the history through which he has passed, and the great, unrequited passion that has tormented him for forty years. Views: 677
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Collected together for the first time in hardcover, these eighteen classic stories from across John Updike’s career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity.
In 1956, Updike published a story, “Snowing in Greenwich Village,” about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding moments of intermittent happiness, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Seventeen Maples stories were collected in 1979 in a paperback edition titled Too Far to Go, prompted by a television adaptation. Now those stories appear in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, “Grandparenting,” which returns us to the Maples’s lives long after their wrenching divorce.
From the Hardcover edition. Views: 676
A wounded hero must confront his own worst enemy: himself
Mick "Brew" Axbrewder was once a great P.I. That was before he accidentally shot and killed a cop-worse, a cop who happened to be his own brother. Now he only works off and on, as muscle for his old partner, Ginny Fistoulari. It's a living. And it provides an occasional opportunity for him to dry out.
But their latest case demands more than muscle. Brew's dead brother's daughter has disap-peared. His brother's widow wants him and Ginny to investigate. And both of them seem to expect him to sober up. Because the darkness they're find-ing under the surface of Sunbelt city Puerto del Sol goes beyond one missing teenager.
Axbrewder will need all his talents to con-front that darkness. Most of all, he'll need to con-front his own worst enemy-himself.
More than two decades ago, bestselling author Stephen R. Donaldson published three novels about Mick Axbrewder and Ginny Fistoulari as paperback originals under the pseudonym Reed Stephens. More recently, under his own name, Donaldson published a new novel in the se-quence, The Man Who Fought Alone. Now, for Donaldson's millions of readers worldwide, the first of the original books, The Man Who Killed His Brother, appears under Donaldson's own name, in revised and expanded form. Views: 672
Revolution is simmering in the heat of the battered Central American town Port Tropique, where protagonist Franz Hall is an “intellectual Meursault in a paranoid Hemingway landscape, a self-conscious Conradian adventurer, a Lord Jim in the earliest stages of self-willed failure” (The New York Times). The ineffectual hero spends his days drinking and observing people in the zócalo and occasional nights involved in an ivory-smuggling operation threatened by impending government siege, yet always persistent are memories of Marie and what was lost. In this sinuous narrative of dislocation and remorse, Barry Gifford details Franz’s mundanity and the bizarre cast of characters swirling around him.The author of more than forty published works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry, which have been translated into more than twenty-five languages, Barry Gifford is an American writer in the European tradition, and one of the few contemporary American writers whose characters are familiar to audiences around the world.“Gifford uses the charged story of . . . an apprentice smuggler as an occasion for his own literary and cinematic smuggling—from Conrad, Hemingway, Camus, John Hawkes, Howard Hawks, Welles and Ozu, among others—and to discover a new literary form.”—The New York Times Book Review“A poet’s nuanced prose runs through Port Tropique . . . a spellbinding story.”—The Washington Post“A strange, disturbing . . . intriguing . . . impressionist painting of a book.”—San Francisco Chronicle Views: 665
