With this story, I’ve enter a future in which mankind has spread itself far out into the galaxy of which Earth’s sun — and Earth itself, of course — are such microscopically small bits of dust. In Anderson’s concept, most life forms encountered seem to be essentially humanoid. In this story, indeed, they are not only humanoid, but measurably “human” in their psychological reactions. If one wanted to draw some comparisons, one could, I suppose, compare Cundaloa in this tale with the islands of the Pacific, and Skontar with the Scandinavian countries. Sweden, for example, is Swedish through and through. Hawaii? Whatever Hawaii is, and it sounds wonderful for a vacation, it surely no longer belongs to the original Hawaiians… You will get the point of this analogy as you read on, of course. Poul Anderson

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Eighteen-year-old Stony De Coco has to make a choice: either join his father in the tightly knit world of New York's construction unions or take off and find his own path. But Stony’s family is not about to make that choice easy. As he tries to protect his little brother, Albert, from their dangerously unbalanced mother, and to postpone the difficult adult responsibilities that await him, he finds hope in a job working with children at a hospital--a job that promises not to make anyone happy but Stony.Richard Price's Bloodbrothers is a soulful and often profane story of working-class life in the Bronx, and one young man's bruising initiation into adulthood.

At the beginning of Peter Handke's novel, Gregor Keuschnig awakens from a nightmare in which he has committed murder, and announces, "From today on, I shall be leading a double life."  The duplicity, however, lies only in Keuschnig's mind; his everyday life as the press atache for the Austrian Embassy in Paris continues much as before: routine paperwork, walks in the city, futile intimacies with his family and his mistress.  But Keuschnig is oblivious to it all, merely simulating his previous identity while he searches for a higher significance, a mystical moment of true sensation which can free him from what the novel calls life's "dreadful normalcy."  Convinced that, if he fails, life's meaning will be revealed to him only when it is too late, he looks for portents everywhere.Keuschnig's search takes him through all of Paris.  At every step, his feelings are interwoven with acute observation of its streets, buildings, cafes, parks, sky.  It is an intimate and evocative journey, in a city that is at once supportive and familiar, strange and provocative.Language NotesText: English, German (translation)

A new paperback edition of the neo-noir novel book critics have called Willeford's best. Fast-talking, backstabbing, womanizing art critic Jacques Figueras will do anything — blackmail, burglary, fencing, assassination — to further his career. Crossing the art world with the underworld, Willeford expands his noir palette to include hues of sunny Florida and weird tints of Surrealism when Figueras takes a job for an art collector who doesn't care how his art is collected, even if it involves murder.

With her eye for the unending power plays between the genders, Fay Weldon chronicles two decades in the lives of three generations of women—and has a devilish good time doing it “Down among the women. What a place to be!” So begins Fay Weldon’s novel, opening onto 1950s London, where Wanda, a former radical who has left her husband, has raised her daughter Scarlet to be as tough and independent as she is. But twenty-year-old Scarlet has already had one abortion, and is about to become a single mother to the child she’ll call Byzantia. The novel also follows the lives of Scarlet’s friends: Sylvia, a born victim; respectable Jocelyn, hopelessly trapped in her dull, bourgeois existence; Audrey, who finally breaks out of her conventional life; and Helen, beautiful, vibrant, and doomed. Over the course of twenty years, they will discover it’s never too late to become the women they are meant to be.

Cocteau's novel Les Enfants Terribles, which was first published in 1929, holds an undisputed place among the classics of modern fiction.Written in a French style that long defied successful translation—Cocteau was always a poet no matter what we was writing—the book came into its own for English-language readers in 1955 when this translation was completed by Rosamund Lehmann. It is a masterpiece of the art of translation of which the Times Literary Supplement said: "It has the rare merit of reading as though it were an English original." Lehrmann was able to capture the essence of Cocteau's strange, necromantic imagination and to bring fully to life in English his story of a brother and sister, orphaned in adolescence, who build themselves a private world out of one shared room and their own unbridled fantasies. What started in games and laughter because for Paul and Elisabeth a drug too magical to resist. The crime which finally destroys them has the...

Contents:Patterns of ForceThe Gamesters of TriskelionAnd the Children Shall LeadThe Corbomite ManeuverShore Leave

Energy beings from outer space invaded Earth’s atmosphere making electricity and radio impossible. Is it humanity’s bane or blessing?

A Russian scientist defects, believing that in the West he will more easily realize his dream of contacting planets in outer space. But British Intelligence and the CIA have more worldly plans for him and move quickly, relentlessly, leaving behind a trail of blood which stretches from the Sahara desert to Manhattan, Paris, Dublin and halfway back across Africa.

The Drowner, 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.Lucille Hanson left her rich husband, a man who lived casually and loved carelessly. She found a new man, one who appeared to treat her right. Lucille was putting together the pieces of her life, determined not to make the old mistakes, the foolish ones that had almost wrecked her the first time around . . . until all of her hopes came to rest at the bottom of the lake where her body is found. It must have been an accident, most people say. It might have been suicide, others think. But among her mourners, just one person refuses to believe it was anything other than murder.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

Anna Seghers’s Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.Having escaped from a Nazi concentration camp in Germany in 1937, and later a camp in Rouen, the nameless twenty-seven-year-old German narrator of Seghers’s multilayered masterpiece ends up in the dusty seaport of Marseille. Along the way he is asked to deliver a letter to a man named Weidel in Paris and discovers Weidel has committed suicide, leaving behind a suitcase containing letters and the manuscript of a novel. As he makes his way to Marseille to find Weidel’s widow, the narrator assumes the identity of a refugee named Seidler, though the authorities think he is really Weidel. There in the giant waiting room of Marseille, the narrator converses with the refugees, listening to their stories over pizza and wine, while also gradually piecing together the story of Weidel, whose manuscript has shattered the narrator’s “deathly boredom,” bringing him to a deeper awareness of the transitory world the refugees inhabit as they wait and wait for that most precious of possessions: transit papers.