The Invisibility Affair

“It was a time of pause, a time between planting and harvest when the air was heavy, humming with its own slow warm music.” So begins an extraordinary fantasy of the rural Midwest by a recent winner of the John W. Campbell, Jr., Award for best young science fiction writer.One summer day in the 1920s, Haverstock’s Traveling Curiosus and Wondershow rides into a small Midwestern town. Haverstock’s show is a presentation of mysterious wonders: feats of magic, strange creatures, and frightening powers. Three teenage girls attend the opening performance that evening which, for each, promises love and threatens death. The three girls are drawn to the show and its performers—a lusty centaur, Angel the magical albino boy, the rowdy stage hands—but frightened by the enigmatic owner, Haverstock. The girls at first try to dismiss these marvels as trickery, but it becomes all too real, too vivid to be other than nightmare reality.Each feels the force of the show and its power to alter everyday lives: Francine is drawn embarrassingly to the centaur, Rose makes an assignation with one of the hands and gets in trouble, and Evelyn is fascinated by the pathetic, mysterious Angel, Boy Who Can Fly, and together they plan escape.No stranger or more disturbing vision of the dark side of carnival life has been handled with such grace or conviction since Bradbury's vintage period. With a poet's mastery of language Reamy brings his circus of characters to a startling, fantastic conclusion.

Mesklin is a vast, inhospitable, disc-shaped planet, so cold that its oceans are liquid methane and its snows are frozen ammonia. It is a world spinning dizzyingly, a world where gravity can be a crushing 700 times greater than Earth’s, a world too hostile for human explorers. But the planet holds secrets of inestimable value, and an unmanned probe that has crashed close to one of its poles must be recovered. Only the Mesklinites, the small creatures so bizarrely adapted to their harsh environment, can help. And so Barlennan, the resourceful and courageous captain of the Mesklinite ship Bree , sets out on an heroic and appalling journey into the terrible unknown. For him and his people, the prize to be gained is as great as that for mankind… Hal Clement’s Mission of Gravity is universally regarded as one of the most important and best loved novels in the genre. The remarkable and sympathetic depiction of an alien species and the plausible and scientifically based realization of the strange world they inhabit make it a major landmark in the history of hard SF.

A real estate salesman is making a fortune leasing houses to families — except the houses remain empty.

Peter Handke tells the story of a woman determined to break with her husband and her past and to form a new life for herself. Marianne, a mother and hausfrau in her thirtieth year, begins to examine her life keeping house in the suburbs of a large industrial city in West Germany. Excerpted from a description found at enotes.com

ReviewGothic sleazefest, menstrual fantasy, dime-store pulp fiction—an important early-century surrealist novel only now translated from its native Czech into English. -- New York PressProduct DescriptionWritten in 1935 at the height of Czech Surrealism, this parable of menstruation is a bizarre erotic fantasy of a young girl's maturation into womanhood. Drawing on de Sade's Justine, and Nosferatu and the language of pulp serials, this a lyrical, menacing dream of sexual awakening involves a vampire with a taste for chicken blood, changelings, lecherous priests, with an androgynous merging of brother and sister. An exploration of the grotesque, a meditation on youth and age, sexuality and death.

Challenging questions confort Nancy Drew when she attempts to solve the mystery of the strange tapping sounds in the house of a retired actress. Who is the tapper? How does he gain access to Miss Carter's house, despite securely locked doors and windows? Why do the tapping sounds come in Morse code? Is there a sinister motive behind the prowler's actions"?

Death Trap, one of many classic novels from crime writer John D. MacDonald, the beloved author of Cape Fear and the Travis McGee series, is now available as an eBook.As a teenage wild child, Jane Ann Paulson had earned her wicked reputation, but no one deserves the shocking death she receives. When the police find a suspect, everyone relaxes . . . everyone except for Hugh MacReedy. A construction engineer by trade, Hugh has no business investigating a murder. But he happens to owe a big debt to the innocent man they're sending to the electric chair. And so Hugh begins to look into Jane Ann's death, not knowing that her quiet little town is sitting on some ugly secrets, that he's about to blow the lid off each and every one of them, and that he's just put a very tempting target on his back. Features a new Introduction by Dean KoontzPraise for John D. MacDonald"The great entertainer of our age, and a mesmerizing storyteller." - Stephen King"My favorite novelist of all time." - Dean Koontz"To diggers a thousand years from now, the works of John D. MacDonald would be a treasure on the order of the tomb of Tutankhamen." - Kurt Vonnegut"A master storyteller, a masterful suspense writer . . . John D. MacDonald is a shining example for all of us in the field. Talk about thebest." - Mary Higgins Clark

Elizabeth Hunter, an ex-socialite in her eighties, has a mystical experience during a summer storm in Sydney which transforms all her relationships: her existence becomes charged with a meaning which communicates itself to those around her. From this simple scenario Patrick White unfurls a monumental exploration of the tides of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, impotence and and longing that fester within family relationships. In the Sydney suburb of Centennial Park, three nurses, a housekeeper and a solicitor attend to Elizabeth as her son and daughter convene at her deathbed. But, in death as in life, Elizabeth remains a destructive force on those who surround her. THE EYE OF THE STORM is a savage exploration of family relationships - and the sharp undercurrents of love and hate, comedy and tragedy, which define them.

The French writer Theophile Gautier (1811-1872) was a leading writer of the Romantic movement and forms a bridge between the supernatural fiction of Goethe and E.T.A. Hoffmann and the pivotal pulp magazine Weird Tales. Gautier was fascinated by antique times and classical cultures; strange and fantastic events; exotic and compelling horrors; and love that transcends class, time, and even death. As the lush, passionate stories and novellas in One of Cleopatra's Nights demonstrate, Gautier originated or crystallized two powerful archetypes that entertain and haunt us still--the romantic vampire and the femme fatale. His collection should be read by fans of fantasy, horror, historical, and Romantic fiction.The book (translated by the 19th-century fantasist Lafcadio Hearn) opens with "One of Cleopatra's Nights," in which a common hunter recklessly declares his love for the queen; instead of having him executed, she proposes to take him for her lover, if he will agree to one horrific condition. The second of the six tales is Gautier's most famous, "Clarimonde" (which also appears, in a different translation, in Italo Calvino's anthology of 19th-century fantasy classics, Fantastic Tales, under the title "The Beautiful Vampire"). If "Clarimonde" did not invent the romantic vampire, it established the formula, with its gorgeous, irresistible woman whose love will not surrender even to death, and who must imbibe her mortal lover's blood to remain at his side. In "Arria Marcella," a tourist's ardent fascination with a woman who perished in the eruption of Vesuvius brings the woman, and Pompeii, back to life--but not life as we know it. In the witty, slyly self-parodying story "The Mummy's Foot," a writer purchases the embalmed extremity to serve as a paperweight, only to find its original owner, a Pharaonic princess, has returned to reclaim her foot and lead him to the Egyptian afterlife. "Omphale" too is amusing and knowingly self-parodic, with its tale of a youthful French writer haunted by a legendary beauty of ancient Greece, or perhaps the late wife of a dead marquis. The collection concludes with the erotically charged novella "King Candaules," in which an ancient Greek ruler is unsatisfied with his beautiful wife's Oriental modesty, which allows only her husband to see her face; he arranges for one of his captains to see her naked, with ironic and tragic results. --Cynthia WardOne of Cleopatra's common people, a hunter, declares his love for Cleopatra and is in mortal danger from doing so. However, Cleopatra, instead of executing him, decides to take him as her lover under one condition....

Is anyone out there? Ann Burden is sixteen years old and completely alone. The world as she once knew it is gone, ravaged by a nuclear war that has taken everyone from her. For the past year, she has lived in a remote valley with no evidence of any other survivors. But the smoke from a distant campfire shatters Ann’s solitude. Someone else is still alive and making his way toward the valley. Who is this man? What does he want? Can he be trusted? Both excited and terrified, Ann soon realizes there may be worse things than being the last person on Earth.

Between the mountains and the sea, between the sea and Fairyland, lay the Free State of Dorimare and its picturesque capital, Lud-in-the-Mist. No Luddite ever had any truck with fairies or Fairyland. Bad business, those fairies. The people of Dorimare had run them out generations ago—and the Duke of Dorimare along with them.Until the spring of his fiftieth year Master Nathaniel Chanticleer, Mayor of Lud-in-the-Mist and High Seneschal of Dorimare, had lived a sleepy life with his only son, Ranulph. But as he grew, Ranulph was more and more fond of talking nonsense about golden cups, and snow-white ladies milking azure cows, and the sound of tinkling bridles at midnight. And when Ranulph was twelve, he got caught up with the fairies, and Nathaniel's life would never be the same.

Tarl Cabot must prove his final loyalty to the harsh and caste-bound planet known as Counter Earth. "Surrender Gor," reads a message sent from the Others, a mysterious people from the worlds of steel. Either the proud rulers of Gor must submit or be destroyed. Now Tarl is leaving the decadent city of Port Kar to wander in the wilds of Gor, taking up the sword to defend his rulers and enemies, the Priest-Kings, for he knows that the fate of his home planet, Earth, is inextricably tied to the fate of Gor. Rediscover this brilliantly imagined world where men are masters and women live to serve their every desire. Slave Girl of Gor is the 11th book in the Gorean Saga, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.