Gregory Benford expands Arthur C. Clarke's novella, Against the Fall of Night, into a novel-length adventure set billions of years in the future about human destiny among the stars. Views: 787
If you want an omnibus of short fiction by Arthur C. Clarke, a Science Fiction Writers of America Grand Master, then you want The Collected Stories of Arthur C. Clarke. If you're looking for a representative sample of Clarke's short stories, or for some examples of the creative and extrapolative abilities that established Clarke as one of science fiction's greatest and most important writers, then check out Tales from Planet Earth.
Tales from Planet Earth ranges widely across time, but the stories are centered on our home world. Many SF writers confine their visions of earth to its flatlands, but Clarke is three-dimensional; his stories "Hate," "The Deep Range," and "The Man Who Ploughed the Sea" plunge into the ocean, while "The Cruel Sky" ascends the Himalayas. Some stories, like "The Other Tiger" and "'If I Forget Thee, Oh Earth...'," end on chilling twists. "The Road to the Sea" spans centuries and millennia to explore how humanity's exodus to the stars may affect the world left behind. "Hate" considers how transcendence of the Earth's atmosphere may affect ancient enmities. "The Parasite" demonstrates a scary nastiness not usually associated with Clarke. "The Wall of Darkness" is set on an alternate-universe earth so different from ours, and "The Lion of Comarre" is set in a future so far away, that both stories feel like fantasy; but both are rigorously extrapolated from scientific theory. Two lighthearted entertainments, "The Next Tenants" and "The Man Who Ploughed the Sea," are from Tales of the White Hart. All of the stories in Tales from Planet Earth are recommended.
The iBooks 2001 Anniversary Edition of Tales from Planet Earth collects 14 SF stories first published between 1950 and 1987, including the satire "On Golden Seas," which has "never before [been] collected in any Clarke book." --Cynthia Ward Views: 784
Readers of M.M. Kaye's fiction will discover here the source of the characters, settings, and certain incidents of her novels. Most of all, they will bask in this warm account of a young woman's remarkable life--and the beginnings of a love affair with an India whose time has passed but which has not been forgotten. 24 pages of black-and-white photographs. Views: 783
From the author of the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles comes a huge, hypnotic novel of witchcraft and the occult through four centuries.
Demonstrating, once again, her gift for spellbinding storytelling and the creation of legend, Anne Rice makes real for us a great dynasty of witches--a family given to poetry and to incest, to murder and to philosophy; a family that, over the ages, is itself haunted by a powerful, dangerous, and seductive being.
On the veranda of a great New Orleans house, now faded, a mute and fragile woman sits rocking . . . and **The Witching Hour** begins.
It begins in our time with a rescue at sea. Rowan Mayfair, a beautiful woman, a brilliant practitioner of neurosurgery--aware that she has special powers but unaware that she comes from an ancient line of witches--finds the drowned body of a man off the coast of California and brings him to life. He is Michael Curry, who was born in New Orleans and orphaned in childhood by fire on Christmas Eve, who pulled himself up from poverty, and who now, in his brief interval of death, has acquired a sensory power that mystifies and frightens him.
As these two, fiercely drawn to each other, fall in love and--in passionate alliance--set out to solve the mystery of *her* past and *his* unwelcome gift, the novel moves backward and forward in time from today's New Orleans and San Francisco to long-ago Amsterdam and a château in the France of Louis XIV. An intricate tale of evil unfolds--an evil unleashed in seventeenth-century Scotland, where the first "witch," Suzanne of the Mayfair, conjures up the spirit she names Lasher . . . a creation that spells her own destruction and torments each of her descendants in turn.
From the coffee plantations of Port au Prince, where the great Mayfair fortune is made and the legacy of their dark power is almost destroyed, to Civil War New Orleans, as Julien--the clan's only male to be endowed with occult powers--provides for the dynasty its foothold in America, the dark, luminous story encompasses dramas of seduction and death, episodes of tenderness and healing. And always--through peril and escape, tension and release--there swirl around us the echoes of eternal war: innocence versus the corruption of the spirit, sanity against madness, life against death. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us, through circuitous, twilight paths, to the present and Rowan's increasingly inspired and risky moves in the merciless game that binds her to her heritage. And in New Orleans, on Christmas Eve, this strangest of family sagas is brought to its startling climax.
*From the Hardcover edition.* Views: 783
In the late 18th century, intent on avenging her family's death at the hands of a cult leader, Lady Leigh Strachan dresses as a boy and seeks out the reclusive S.T. Maitland, nobleman and highwayman, who was once known as the Prince of Midnight. Hiding in a crumbling castle in France, with a tame wolf as his pet, the hero is deaf in one ear, suffers from vertigo, and seems revoltingly sentimental to the stoic Leigh. But he joins her quest and together they begin to emerge from their individual suffering ... Views: 764
This “mesmerizing” novel about a crime at an elite music school “*calls to mind a David Lynch film” (TheNew York Times).
Shy piano teacher Maggie Blackburn has selflessly devoted her life and career to her students at the Forest Park Conservatory of Music in an affluent Connecticut suburb. Then a rape shakes the school’s refined grounds. The violated young student, Brendan Bauer, is a timid ex-seminarian. The perpetrator, Rolfe Christensen, is the newly appointed and celebrated composer-in-residence who has dazzled the faculty in ways Maggie could never have dreamed of. But when the conservatory’s conspiracy to conceal the crime results in Christensen’s murder, Bauer is suspected—and Maggie vows to find the real killer.
What Maggie soon discovers is that Christensen’s reputation—as genius, manipulator, and sexual predator—had preceded him, giving many people a reason to want him dead. But when the murder of another colleague casts additional doubt on Bauer’s innocence, Maggie’s labyrinthine hunt for a killer turns into more than an investigation. Now it’s a liberating obsession with secrets—hers included—as dark and twisted as the crimes themselves.
One of today’s most prolific and acclaimed literary talents, Joyce Carol Oates is a National Book Award winner, a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a #1 New York Times*–bestselling author. As Elmore Leonard said, with her psychological suspense novels written under the name Rosamond Smith, “[she] could become the world’s Number One mystery writer easily.”
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A woman returns from the dead with disastrous results for the family who loves her.... An old-fashioned barbershop is the site of a medieval ritual of bloody terror.... During a post-apocalyptic Christmas celebration, a messenger from the South brings tidings of great horror.... From a ghostly Civil War battlefield to a combat theme park in Vietnam, from the omnipotent brain of an autistic boy to a shocking story of psychic vampires, journey into a world of fear and mystery, a chilling twilight zone of the mind. Views: 761
The Man In Her Mirror...
He was a financial wizard, a driven rogue with a Midas touch, but Gideon Hughes had no interest in keeping the run-down Wonderland carnival he'd inherited-until an enchantress with spun-silver hair presented him with a puzzle he had just had to solve! Maggie Durant intrigued him, unnerved him--and made him yearn to storm the fortress of her mystery. But he found it almost impossible to conduct a courtship in the midst of clowns, gypsies, and magicians, even when the angelic siren who knew his secrets announced she was in love with him! Maggie hoped it was only chemistry between them, but the brave man who'd entered her sanctuary was destiny's knight. Gideon had always played by his rules, but in Maggie's world he had to feel his way. Would she show him the real woman who'd love him forever, instead of the shimmering reflection she made in his eyes? Views: 761
In the year 2139, fearless Tedra De Arr sets out to rescue her beleaguered planet Kystran from the savage rule of the evil Crad Ce Moerr. *
Experienced in combat but not in love, the beautiful, untouched Amazon flies with Martha, her wise-cracking, free-thinking computer, to a world where warriors reign supreme - and into the arms of the one man she can never hope to vanquish: the bronzed barbarian Challen Ly-San-Ter.
A magnificent creature of raw yet disciplined desires, the muscle-bound primitive succeeds where no puny Kystran male had before - igniting a raging fire within Tedra that must be extinguished before she can even think of saving her enslaved world... Views: 756
In these journals, the experiences of one of the most renowned twentieth-century American writers come to life with fascinating, wholly revealing detail.John Cheever's journals provide peerless insights into the creation of his novels and stories. But they are equally the record of a complex, often dark, always closely observed inner world. No American writer of comparable stature has left such an unreservedly revealing and moving account of himself: his family life, his literary life, and his emotional life. The final word from one of modern America's great writers, The Journals of John Cheever provides a powerful and beautiful capstone to a towering oeuvre.
From the Trade Paperback edition. Views: 755
Sometimes Carrie Blake feels she just can't stand life's problems or pain. At fifteen, she's had leukemia for three years, and although the disease is in remission, she's never sure when things might change. Her parents, whose bitter divoce has left Carrie feeling torn between them, don't seem to understand how much harder they make her daily life.
When Carrie meets Keith Gardner at a cancer support group, everything seems brighter. Keith and his loving supportive family are wonderful to Carrie. Then Keith's illness worsens and he knows he can no longer fight off dying. Armed with love of family and friends, Keith chooses to participate in a hospice program, which allows him to remain at home instead of in the hospital. Carrie feels helpless as she watches Keith slip away. Will Keith's courage help Carrie to face her own uncertain future?
From the Paperback edition. Views: 754
Here is the adventure of Eugene Debs Hartke. He's a Vietnam veteran, a jazz pianist, a college professor, and a prognosticator of the apocalypse (and other things Earth-shattering). But that's neither here no there. Because at Tarkington College—where he teaches—the excrement is about to hit the air-conditioning. And its all Eugene's fault. Views: 752
Nancy speaks at a career fair for river heights high where she meets her next client. Nancy Drew and investigative reporter Brenda Carlton compete to solve a case involving a string of local robberies, but Nancy must forget their rivalry when Brenda falls into a trap Nancy set for the thieves. Views: 740
Jessi can't believe it. Her dreaded Aunt Cecilia is moving in to take care of Jessi and her brother and sister. How humiliating--Jessi's going to have a baby-sitter!
Plus, Aunt Cecelia is a drill sergeant. She tells Jessi when to go to bed and how to wear her hair--and she even forbids Jessi to go to a Baby-sitters Club meeting.
Jessi knows she's old enough to take care of herself--but how can she tell Aunt Cecelia that? Views: 740
The Novel That Launched A Cult Phenomenon!This "entertaining blend of detective story and the supernatural" (Science Fiction Chronicle) was the book that started it all. Now, readers who are latecomers to The Vampire Files can discover the "very entertaining" (Mystery Scene) beginning of the compelling series -- in a beautiful new updated package! Views: 740
