The recognition of failure and success is the theme of these eight short stories and the title novella from three-time National Book Award finalist Hortense CalisherExtreme Magic is Hortense Calisher's third collection of shorter works, after In the Absence of Angels (1951) and Tale for the Mirror (1962). Follow a drifting husband as he returns home and finds middle age in A Christmas Carillon. Listen with a daughter as she overhears a painful argument between her parents in The Gulf Between. Travel with a broken man as he heals after a tragic loss in Extreme Magic. Once again, Calisher captivates with her expressionistic prose and intricate characters.

This is one of Mr. Keeler's finest mystery novels, developing his 'Webwork plot' construction - an intricate edifice built up on one of the most startling and ingenious ideas in mystery literature.Through the diabolical scheme to separate a man from his inheritance, Mr. Keeler throws a fascinating sidelight upon a criminal use of modern psychology.Real—thrilling mystery—told by a master of mystery stories.

Arthur Fane arranges an unusual entertainment for his uncle, a long-term guest, and a few other witnesses — he hires Dr. Rich to hypnotise his wife Victoria. The guests, but not Victoria, have been shown that a gun in the room is actually harmless; everyone, including Victoria, is aware that a dagger provided is made of rubber. The hypnotised Victoria is invited to shoot her husband, and refuses; when told to stab him, though, she agrees. Unfortunately, someone has substituted a real dagger for the rubber one, even though everyone in the room agrees that it would have been impossible to make the substitution. Although Sir Henry Merrivale is busily engaged in dictating his scandalous and slanderous memoirs to a ghost writer, he takes a hand to solve the murder with his friend Chief Inspector Masters, and brings things to a head just as another death occurs.

First published in Astounding Science Fiction magazine in 1952.

David Nobbs classic is now available in ebook format. One wintry afternoon a lodger named Wilson arrives at 38, Trebisall Avenue, filled with hope. As he crosses the threshold of Mrs Pollard's house, with its "aura of impending stew" he becomes a new man. This is a tactic he has tried before, just as he has tried many jobs before, from cook to seismographer's assistant. But alas, each time he was sacked because it was not his vocation. And so he has moved on, from town to town, from landlady to landlady: from Mrs McManus of Barnstaple, to Mrs McManus of Newport (I.O.W). Now, under the motherly eye of Mrs Pollard, he attempts a number of new vocations including those of poet and postman. Strange things befall him in the process: he is even tried and convicted for scandalous offences of which he has no recollection. But his progress continues, out through the end of this book, in search of a panacea for all mankind.

Hercule Poirot is preparing for a voyage to South America. Looming in the doorway of his bedroom is an uninvited guest, coated from head to foot in dust and mud. The man’s gaunt face registers Poirot for a moment, and then he collapses. The stranger recovers long enough to identify Poirot by name and madly and repeatedly scribble the figure ‘4’ on a piece of paper. Poirot cancels his trip. An investigation is in order. Fortunately, Poirot has the faithful Captain Hastings at his side as he plunges into a conspiracy of international scope—one that would consolidate power in the deadly cabal known as ‘The Big Four.’

Book DescriptionImpressed by their tales of gunplay and thievery, young Shell Tucker had been eager to call them his friends. Then he saw the men in Bob Heseltine's gang from the other side, when they robbed his father of twenty thousand in hard-earned money. By the time Shell buried his pa, he knew what he had to do. Going after the gold, he rode to Colorado and a town called Los Angeles, California. But it wasn't until the outlaws shot him down and left him to die that Shell Tucker got mad enough to want to live--and wreak a kind of vengeance they'd never seen before.

Desert combat for von Dodenburg in The Sand Panthers. SS Wotan embarks on a daring and dangerous mission during the Battle for El Alamein.SS Wotan has been sent to join the Desert Rats, their apparent objective to wrest control of Alexandria away from the Allies. But Rommel doesn't want them! Instead, a thousand kilometres of desert lies before them, a blazing, barren, limitless hell. The only creatures an enemy lying in wait for them, silent and unseen.This is the final book in Leo Kessler's major World War 2 fiction series, The Dogs of War. It can also be enjoyed on its own as a one-off read. Leo Kessler is the pseudonym for the late writer Charles Whiting. Over three million of his books have been sold worldwide.

Tang carried the war to the enemy with unparalleled ferocity. This is her story as told by her skipper.From the Trade Paperback edition.

Alec’s world changes when he meets Abu the genie! Disasters were leading two-nil on Alec’s disaster-triumph scorecard when he slipped into the vacant factory lot, with Ginger Wallace hot on his heels, ready to destroy him. There was a catastrophe awaiting him at home too, and of course school was yet another disaster area. But his luck seemed to be changing when he discovered a sealed beer can that was obviously empty. Stranger still, when he held it up to his ear, he could hear a faint snoring…

One of the delights of Russian literature, a tour de force that has been compared to the best of Nabokov and Bulgakov, Yuri Olesha's novella Envy brings together cutting social satire, slapstick humor, and a wild visionary streak. Andrei is a model Soviet citizen, a swaggeringly self-satisfied mogul of the food industry who intends to revolutionize modern life with mass-produced sausage. Nikolai is a loser. Finding him drunk in the gutter, Andrei gives him a bed for the night and a job as a gofer. Nikolai takes what he can, but that doesn't mean he's grateful. Griping, sulking, grovelingly abject, he despises everything Andrei believes in, even if he envies him his every breath.Producer and sponger, insider and outcast, master and man fight back and forth in the pages of Olesha's anarchic comedy. It is a contest of wills in which nothing is sure except the incorrigible human heart.Marian Schwartz's new English translation of Envy brilliantly captures the energy of Olesha's masterpiece.ReviewOlesha wrote only one novel, Envy. The book was published in 1927, 10 years after the Bolshevik Revolution and a few years before the net of socialist realism fell on Russian writers....The narrative is driven by the narrator’s bitter, poetic commentary on the world. The characters represent, loosely, aspects of the new Soviet ethos. Vladimir Nabokov had a low opinion of almost everything produced in Russia after his departure, but he admired Olesha’s writing.— Columbus DispatchIn his best fiction, the short novel Envy, Olesha writes about the clash of two worlds, but with a wry, half-defeated yet touchingly affectionate irony that seems entirely his own.— Irving Howe, Harper’sOlesha’s stories are supreme and timeless cinema. To read his triumphant short novel Envy is to see it, to find the pages transformed into a screen on which to behold man’s heroic confrontation with the monsters of his own creation...Every page of Olesha demands to be read and seen again.— The New York TimesLanguage NotesText: English, Russian (translation)

Dulcie Royce inherited property from her father, whom she had believed died when she was a child. There was the manor house in the Cotswolds, with a scientific lab attached. But both Max Tyler and Dr. Ian Hamilton seemed to want her to sell up and return to her acting career. Something was dreadfully wrong at Malverton, and she was determined to find out what it was. Romantic Suspense/Gothic by Nancy Buckingham; originally published by Robert Hale