Space 1999 - The Edge of the Infinite

The Gulag Archipelago is Solzhenitsyn's masterwork, a vast canvas of camps, prisons, transit centres and secret police, of informers and spies and interrogators and also of heroism, a Stalinist anti-world at the heart of the Soviet Union where the key to survival lay not in hope but in despair. The work is based on the testimony of some two hundred survivors, and on the recollection of Solzhenitsyn's own eleven years in labour camps and exile. It is both a thoroughly researched document and a feat of literary and imaginative power. This edition has been abridged into one volume at the author's wish and with his full co-operation.About the AuthorAleksander Solzhenitsyn was born in Kislovodsk, Russia, in 1918. He was brought up in Rostov, where he graduated in mathematics and physics in 1941. After distinguished service with the Red Army in the Second World War, he was imprisoned from 1945 to 1953 for making unfavourable remarks about Josef Stalin. He was rehabilitated in 1956, but in 1969 he was expelled from the Soviet Writers' Union for denouncing official censorship of his work. He was forcibly exiled from the Soviet Union in 1974 and deported to West Germany. Later he settled in America, but after Soviet officials finally dropped charges against him in 1991, he returned to his homeland in 1994. He has written many books, of which One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Cancer Ward and The Gulag Archipelago are his best known.

The classic evocation of Venice, acclaimed as one of the finest books ever written about the city. 'Entertaining, ironical, witty, high spirited and appreciative . . . Both melancholy and gay and worldly, I think of it now as among the best books on Venice; indeed as the best modern book about a city that I have ever read.' Geoffrey Grigson 'One of the most diverse and diverting books ever written about Venice . . . A taut and personal report, wholly absorbing, quickened by vivid prose and astringent humour.' Sunday Times 'For those of whom Venice is a memory, a treat in store, or even a dream, the broad canvas of this book covering a thousand years in the life of one of the most complex, original, and active communities the world has ever seen, is a work of lasting interest.' Guardian

The classic novel from "America's best crime novelist" (Time), with a new introduction by Dennis LehaneGeorge V. Higgins's seminal crime novel is a down-and-dirty tale of thieves, mobsters, and cops on the mean streets of Boston. When small-time gunrunner Eddie Coyle is convicted on a felony, he's looking at three years in the pen--that is, unless he sells out one of his big-fish clients to the DA. But which of the many hoods, gunmen, and executioners whom he calls his friends should he send up the river? Told almost entirely in crackling dialogue by a vivid cast of lowlifes and detectives, The Friends of Eddie Coyle is one of the greatest crime novels ever written.Amazon.com ReviewGeorge V. Higgins's first novel is like a blast of Atlantic air; the Boston prosecutor virtually reinvents the language of the crime novel with his unique ability to breathe life into the dialogue of the smalltime hoodlum and hustler. Trying to pull off one final score, career crook Eddie Coyle finds himself squeezed out of shape by the people above and below him. The explosive conclusion is inevitable yet fascinating. Review“Rings true as a police siren.”—*The Boston Globe*“The best crime novel ever written--makes The Maltese Falcon read like Nancy Drew.”—Elmore Leonard“Chilling . . . The most penetrating glimpse yet into what seems the real world of crime. . . . Positively reeking with authenticity.”—*The New York Times Book Review*“Truly a bravura performance. Higgins is a master of colorful street language heard around Boston. Throughout the novel, without quaintness or self-parody, he is able to sustain long arias of criminal shoptalk. . . . A sophisticated thriller.”—Time“First-rate, absolutely convincing, enormously readable.”—*The Christian Science Monitor*“Simultaneously a brilliant thriller and a cold and convincing business prospectus of felony--a profession that traps both sides, gunmen and policemen, into ceaseless compulsory degardations.”—The New Yorker“The most powerful and frightening crime novel that I have read this year. It will be remembered long after the year is over, as marking the debut of a fine original talent.”—Ross Macdonald“The first thing to know about George V. Higgins’ The Friends of Eddie Coyle is that it directly entered the crime-fiction canon upon its 1970 publication. The second thing to know is that it holds up as both a writer’s-writer thriller and as popular pulp, with Dennis Lehane introducing Picador’s new 40th-anniversary reissue of the novel by heralding it as ‘the game-changing crime novel of the last fifty years’—a moderate claim compared to that of Elmore Leonard, who hails it as the best crime novel period.” —Troy Patterson, SLATE“Weighed and calibrated like the barrel of a pistol. The fact that he's writing about crooks is crucial in some ways, incidental in others. The real subjects here are life's futility and its bleak humor... Elmore Leonard learned from this novel, likewise David Mamet and of course Quentin Tarantino, who saw the narrative virtue in marrying violence to comedies of manners.... Higgins took the tough-guy novel into areas of demented anthropology and re-created a genre.” —Richard Rayner, Los Angeles Times

Anonymous. "Brautigan, Richard." Kirkus Reviews 15 March 1976: 355.Brautigan-the-poet is at it again (The Pill versus The Springhill Mine Disaster, Rommel Drives On Deep into Egypt), and this fey little volume, with its modest startles, immortalized yawns, and affected yet likable artlessness, should reopen the languid debate over whether what he's writing is American haiku or surrealist Rod McKuen. Let's say a little of both. Brautigan has by now so thoroughly exercised what he calls the "invisible muscle" of daydream that he can conjure up his trademark lines ("a penny smooth as a star") and similes ("great huge snowflakes like millions/ of transparent washing machines") with a felicity bordering the facile. His inspiration is exceedingly short-winded, and the great majority of these poems are little more than five or six lines, sometimes less; many consist of one wee brainstorm image around which a minimum of grammatical trimming droops like whilted parsley. It's enough to aggravate any "serious" poet who struggles much harder for a far meagerer living; but for the reader Brautigan has his slight charm, his evocation of bemused mood, which occasionally shafts deeper. These poemlets range from simple, near-banal statement of familiar emotions ("For fear you will be alone/ you do so many things/ that aren't you at all") to a little gallery of disappointed and hopeful people; to the hot, empty landscapes and "gasoline ghosts" of highway America; to the all-embracing solipsism of small sensual contentments ("A beautiful girl is watching/ the bacon"); to such darker, more original dream-visions as "Toward the pleasures of reconstituted crow/ I collect darkness within myself like the shadow/ of a blind lighthouse."—. "Brautigan, Richard." The Booklist 15 May 1976: 1329.Typical Brautigan whimsy, whether insightful or seemingly meaningless, in short poems with appeal mainly for the writer's following.—. "Brautigan, Richard." Choice September 1976: 815.Not everyone likes or even manages to respect the poetry of Richard Brautigan; and even its fans must feel the urge to withdraw their acclaim from at least certain of his pieces, if only in self-defense. For Brautigan's work is nothing if not charming, and to admit to being in charm's thrall is hardly in keeping with the temper of the times. Brautigan does not care, even if one reader's excluded poems are precisely the favorites of another, for ease of operation is his keynote and his method too. "Finding is losing something else./ I think about, perhaps even mourn,/ what I lost to find this," he writes—a typical poem in its entirety. If that is a poem, what about "Impasse": "I talked a good hello/but she talked an even/ better good-bye"? Found on facing pages, these two pieces exemplify the arguable strengths and weaknesses of Brautigan's output: the tendency to flatten into prose so familiar one cannot stifle his "So what?", and the ripple in the affections achieved by just the same means. The best of his works are coy little presences that won't go away, cute poem-pooches, while the worst are harmless neighbors of the first. But Brautigan is all that survives of the generation of young writers to come along in the California of the 1960s, and his readership is large enough to make ordering his titles an automatic gesture by most librarians—especially, of course, those at universities.Bokinsky, Caroline J. "Richard Brautigan." Dictionary of Literary Biography. Vol. 5: American Poets Since World War II. Ed. Donald J. Greiner. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. 96-99.Brautigan's terse messages and witty similes are overshadowed by a blacker humor and a darker, more pensive mood. The poems are more personal; the reader even glimpses the poet in the process of writing. . . . A poet who once saw life in pleasant, whimsical analogies is now filled with foreboding and pessimism. His sensations are no longer so acute. . . . He concludes the volume with an existential pose [convincing himself that his actions have some value].Daum, Timothy. "Brautigan, Richard." Library Journal 101(15) 1 September 1976: 1780.Brautigan's poetic style, previously centered around eclectic insights into how everyday events are transformed into art, is here reduced to quick simulacra of bitter thoughts and cynical visions—his verse abounds with misplaced love, lonely nights, and jealous stabs at previous lovers. Commonplace images are mutated into uneasy jokes: "They said that/ my telephone/ would be fixed/ by 6./ They guaranteed/ it." Even the lighter poems, such as "Information" or "We meet, We try. Nothing happens, but." are deeply trained by Brautigan's ego, and a very few express and evoke the silent delight that has marked his recent novels. Desperation is a constant theme, as in "War Horse": "He has been made invisible/ by his own wounds./ I know how he feels." Where is the real Richard Brautigan: in his novels or his poems? Either way, his readers will ask for these poems, and few poetry colletions can afford to be without this work.

The Embezzler, first written in 1966, uses conflicting narrative voices and viewpoints to illuminate the fabled dimensions of American economic history as it was then understood. Inspired by the documented facts of the Wall Street fraud case that led the United States government to take control of the American stock market, Auchincloss then describes the case and its main players with credibility and skill, reinventing the facts of this historical event with skill. Given the financial crisis of 2008, and similar fraudulent schemes that have been exposed since, this is must reading.The Embezzler tells the life story of Guy Prime, who was born into wealth, enjoyed his youth, and eventually ended up in prison after he tried to secure loans against money he did not have and his embezzlements were revealed. Whatever the reasons for his gradual lapse into crime and his eventual disgrace, Guy Prime remains one of Louis Auchincloss's most engaging characters. Guy's gravest flaw appears not to be greed but rather a chronic tendency to misread human character. The story itself is told from three different viewpoints and narrators. Auchincloss's multi-narrator technique allows the reader to have a vivid sense of what transpired. This is classic Auchincloss, on a subject that illumines current events.About the AuthorLouis Auchincloss is an American novelist. He may well be the most prolific chronicler of the New York upper classes, a novelist of manners and morals in the tradition of Edith Wharton. Among his many works are Last of the Old Guard, The Headmaster’s Dilemma, and East Side Story. He is also the literary executor of the late Walter Lippmann.

A woman finds herself caught at the terrible intersection of love and businessAverill Blaine should have been married years ago, but Eden Shore stole her fiancé Noel's heart. Eden, a fashion model, needed only a few weeks with Noel before he broke his engagement and proposed to her instead, but she never went through with the marriage. Years later, Averill has found a new fiancé, and nothing—not Eden, not even murder—will get in her way.Eden goes to Averill's wedding in hopes of seducing Noel once more. As the two couples circle warily, death intrudes—in the shape of a suspicious airplane crash that kills Averill's uncle. He is an expert pilot, but no amount of skill can stop the flames that leap from his engine as he crests 15,000 feet. Still, Averill and Eden are determined to say "I do," no matter how many die on their way to the altar.

Introduces Mickey Spillane's greatest hero yet--Dogeron Kelly, a walking bomb of a man who explodes into block-busting action at the drop of a gun or a lift of a skirt as he goes after a multi-million-dollar mob with vengeance on his mind and burning hate in his heart. -introduces Mickey Spillane's greatest hero yet--Dogeron Kelly, a walking bomb of a man who explodes into block-busting action at the drop of a gun or a lift of a skirt as he goes after a multi-million-dollar mob with vengeance on his mind and burning hate in his heart.

Home, the spaceship's pilot, had been warned. "Don't forget the meteor swarm." And Home's directional calculations for the Vega Queen's course took that advice into account; the spaceship would go fifteen thousand miles out of its way to avoid those deadly celestial rocks.

"This is a personal matter. Someone killed my brother. I don't like that. If the police can't take care of it, then I'll bury my own dead."Nick English meant every word, but his efforts to find his brother's killer started a chain reaction of murder and violence that would nearly end his own life.Here is a story of organized blackmail punctuated by sudden and gruesome murder. Written with the punch and speed of a rivet gun, I'll Bury My Dead confirms James Hadley Chase's reputation as a leading writer of all-action, edge-of-your-seat thrillers that demand to be read in a single sitting.

Book DescriptionWhen Otis Chancy started out he had nothing. Then fate dealt him four of a kind - all bullets. The young drifter played his hand for keeps, taking his chances against crooked sheriffs, deadly gunmen, and renegade Indians. But the game was far from over.

Won Hugo Award for Best Novelette in 1959.