Popular books

Joshua Mohr

All This Life

<p>Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amidst the river of metal and glass a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the internet for all the world to experience. As the media swarms over the story, Jake will face the ramifications of his actions as he learns the perils of our modern disconnect between the real world and the world we create on line.</p><p>In land-locked Arizona, as the entire country learns of the event, Sara views Jake’s video just before witnessing a horrible event of her own: her boyfriend’s posting of their intimate sex tape. As word of the tape leaks out, making her an instant pariah, Sara needs to escape the small town’s persecution of her careless action. Along with Rodney, an old boyfriend injured long ago in a freak accident that destroyed his parents’ marriage, she must run faster than the internet trolls seeking to punish her for her indiscretions. Sara and Rodney will reunite with his estranged mother, Kat, now in danger from a new man in her life who may not be who he — or his online profiles — claim to be, a dangerous avatar in human form.</p><p>With a wide cast of characters and an exciting pace that mimics the speed of our modern, all-too-connected lives, All This Life examines the dangerous intersection of reality and the imaginary, where coding and technology seek to highlight and augment our already flawed human connections. Using his trademark talent for creating memorable characters, with a deep insight into language and how it can be twisted to alter reality, Joshua Mohr returns with his most contemporary and insightful novel yet.</p><

Joshua Mohr

Fight Song

<p>When his bicycle is intentionally run off the road by a neighbor's SUV, something snaps in Bob Coffen. Modern suburban life has been getting him down and this is the last straw. To avoid following in his own father’s missteps, Bob is suddenly desperate to reconnect with his wife and his distant, distracted children. And he's looking for any guidance he can get.</p><p>Bob Coffen soon learns that the wisest words come from the most unexpected places, from characters that are always more than what they appear to be: a magician/marriage counselor, a fast-food drive-thru attendant/phone-sex operator, and a janitor/guitarist of a French KISS cover band. Can these disparate voices inspire Bob to fight for his family? To fight for his place in the world?</p><p>A call-to-arms for those who have ever felt beaten down by life, is a quest for happiness in a world in which we are increasingly losing control. It is the exciting new novel by one of the most surprising and original writers of his generation.</p><

David Means

Assorted Fire Events: Stories

Upon its publication, won a Los Angeles Times Book Prize, was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award, and received tremendous critical praise. Ranging across America, taking in a breathtaking array of voices and experiences, this story collection now stands as one of the finest of our time.<

David Means

The Spot: Stories

<p>The Spot is an old blacksmith shed in which three men tweeze apart the intricacies of a botched bank robbery.</p><p>The Spot is a park on the Hudson River, where two lovers sense their affair is about to come to an end.</p><p>The Spot is at the bottom of Niagara Falls, where the body of a young girl floats as if caught in the currents of her own tragic story.</p><p>The Spot is in the ear of a Manhattan madman plagued by a noisy upstairs neighbor.</p><p>The Spot is a suburban hospital room in which a young father confronts his son's potentially devastating diagnosis.</p><p>The Spot is a dusty encampment in Nebraska where a gang of inept radicals plot a revolution.</p><p>The Spot draws thirteen new stories together into a masterful collection that shows David Means at his finest: at once comically detached and wrenchingly affecting, expansive and concise, wildly inventive and firmly rooted in tradition. Means's work has earned him comparisons to Flannery O'Connor (), Alice Munro, Bob Dylan, Jack Kerouac (), Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson (/NPR), Denis Johnson (), Poe, Chekhov, and Carver (), but the spot he has staked out in the American literary landscape is fully and originally his own.</p><

Richard Marsten

Vanishing Ladies

<p>A peaceful lake, a cabin in the country, and each other...</p><p>It looked as though it was going to be an idyllic holiday for Phil Colby and his fiancée Anne. But then Anne disappears from her motel room, and Phil finds a red-haired hooker in her place...</p><p>In a town where everyone from state trooper to the judge is on the take, Phil gets nowhere fast.</p><

Chelsea Martin

Even Though I Don't Miss You

Even Though I Don’t Miss You captures the essence of being part of a species that is prone to spending nights alone looking up photos of Heath Ledger’s daughter and contemplating making pasta. Its seemingly arbitrary obsession with human evolution and many allusions to self-contempt make this book not only timeless and deeply moving, but one of those rare books to which you will develop a sickening dependence.<

Chelsea Martin

Everything Was Fine Until Whatever

Anything is possible in Chelsea Martin's bizarre and endearingly honest collection of stories, lists, flash fictions, and revealing factoids. Everything Was Fine Until Whatever is a poker-faced and unpredictably comic tour de force. Festooned with artwork and hand-written notes, this is a grand debut by a magical new talent.<

Valerio Massimo Manfredi

Odysseus: The Return

Odysseus

Pete D Manison

No Blood on My Hands

“Just say no” isn’t always easy. Sometimes the hard part is figuring out what the question is…<

Benjamin Markovits

You Don't Have to Live Like This

<p>A frighteningly prescient novel of today’s America — one man’s story of a racially-charged real estate experiment in Detroit, Michigan.</p><p>“You get in the habit of living a certain kind of life, you keep going in a certain direction, but most of the pressure on you is just momentum. As soon as you stop the momentum goes away. It’s easier than people think to walk out on things, I mean things like cities, leases, relationships and jobs.” —From You Don’t Have to Live Like This</p><p>Greg Marnier, Marny to his friends, leaves a job he doesn’t much like and moves to Detroit, Michigan in 2009, where an old friend has a big idea about real estate and the revitalization of a once great American city. Once there, he gets involved in a fist-fight between two of his friends, a racially charged trial, an act of vigilante justice, a love affair with a local high school teacher, and a game of three-on-three basketball with the President — not to mention the money-soaked real estate project itself, cut out of 600 acres of emaciated Detroit. Marny’s billionaire buddy from Yale, Robert James, calls his project “the Groupon model for gentrification,” others call it “New Jamestown,” and Marny calls it home— until Robert James asks him to leave. This is the story of what went wrong.</p><p>You Don’t Have to Live Like This is the breakout novel from the “fabulously real” (Guardian) voice of the only American included in Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists. Using the framework of our present reality, Benjamin Markovits blurs the line between the fictional and the fact-based, and captures an invisible current threaded throughout American politics, economics, and society that is waiting to explode.</p><

Paul Metcalf

Genoa: A Telling of Wonders

<p>"[] invites us to pass our minds down a new but ancient track, to become, ourselves, both fact and fiction, and to discover something true about the geography of time." — William Gass, </p><p>" is a spectacular confrontation with Melville's work, the journals of Columbus and molecular biology — all folded into a hallucinatory narrative about two brothers and their different paths through the American century." — </p><p>"Much like his great-grandfather, Herman Melville, Paul Metcalf brings an extraordinary diversity of materials into the complex patterns of analogy and metaphor, to affect a common term altogether brilliant in its imagination." — Robert Creeley</p><p>"A unique work of historical and literary imagination, eloquent and powerful. I know of nothing like it." — Howard Zinn</p><p>First published in 1965, is Paul Metcalf's purging of the burden of his relationship to his great-grandfather Herman Melville. In his signature polyphonic style, a storm-tossed Indiana attic becomes the site of a reckoning with the life of Melville; with Columbus, and his myth; and between two brothers — one, an MD who refuses to practice; the other, an executed murderer. Genoa is a triumph, a novel without peer, that vibrates and sings a quintessentially American song.</p><

Katherine Maclean

Kiss Me

Do two improbables make a possible?<

Hector Malot

Sans famille

<p>Voici l'édifiante histoire de Rémi, enfant trouvé, recueilli par la brave mère Barberin, puis acheté par le signor Vitalis, ancien chanteur qui possède une troupe d'animaux savants. Rémi part avec eux, apprend le métier. Un jour, après bien des vicissitudes inhérentes à la condition de pauvres saltimbanques ambulants, Vitalis meurt de froid dans les carrières de Gentilly. Rémi se trouve alors d'autres maîtres : un jardinier, avec une fille muette, Lise. Mais ces temps heureux ne durent guère...</p><p>Nous ne vous dévoilerons pas toutes les aventures que va connaître Rémi, dont la légitime obsession est de retrouver ses parents. Comme vous pouvez vous en douter, il y parviendra. Un grand classique de la littérature pour la jeunesse, que nous vous recommandons, et que vous pouvez lire à tout âge.</p><

Paul Mcauley

Something Coming Through

<p>One of our finest SF writers moves closer to home. London is devastated. New worlds are being explored. And the aliens have arrived…</p><p>The aliens are here. And they want to help. The extraordinary new project from one of the country's most acclaimed and consistently brilliantly SF novelists of the last 30 years.</p><p>The Jackaroo have given humanity 15 worlds and the means to reach them. They're a chance to start over, but they're also littered with ruins and artifacts left by the Jackaroo's previous clients.</p><p>Miracles that could reverse the damage caused by war, climate change, and rising sea levels. Nightmares that could for ever alter humanity — or even destroy it.</p><p>Chloe Millar works in London, mapping changes caused by imported scraps of alien technology. When she stumbles across a pair of orphaned kids possessed by an ancient ghost, she must decide whether to help them or to hand them over to the authorities. Authorities who believe that their visions point towards a new kind of danger.</p><p>And on one of the Jackaroo's gift-worlds, the murder of a man who has just arrived from Earth leads policeman Vic Gayle to a war between rival gangs over possession of a remote excavation site.</p><p>Something is coming through. Something linked to the visions of Chloe's orphans, and Vic Gayle's murder investigation. Something that will challenge the limits of the Jackaroo's benevolence…</p><

Leonard Michaels

Sylvia

<p>First acclaimed as a story-length memoir, then expanded into a novel, draws us into the lives of a young couple whose struggle to survive Manhattan in the early 1960s involves them in sexual fantasias, paranoia, drugs, and the extreme intimacy of self-destructive violence.</p><p>Reproducing a time and place with extraordinary clarity, Leonard Michaels explores with self-wounding honesty the excruciating particulars of a youthful marriage headed for disaster.</p><

Leonard Michaels

The Collected Stories

<p>Leonard Michaels was a master of the short story. His collections are among the most admired, influential, and exciting of the last half century. brings them back into print, from the astonishing debut (1969) to the uncollected last stories, unavailable since they appeared in , and .</p><p>At every stage in his career, Michaels produced taut, spare tales of sex, love, and other adult intimacies: gossip, argument, friendship, guilt, rage. A fearless writer-"destructive, joyful, brilliant, purely creative," in the words of John Hawkes-Michaels probed his characters' motivations with brutal humor and startling frankness; his ear for the vernacular puts him in the company of Philip Roth, Grace Paley, and Bernard Malamud. Remarkable for its compression and cadences, his prose is nothing short of addictive.</p><

Leonard Michaels

The Men's Club

Seven men, friends and strangers, gather in a house in Berkeley. They intend to start a men's club, the purpose of which isn't immediately clear to any of them; but very quickly they discover a powerful and passionate desire to talk. First published in 1981, is a scathing, pitying, absurdly dark and funny novel about manhood in the age of therapy. "The climax is fitting, horrific, and wonderfully droll" ().<

Peter Markus

Bob, or Man on Boat

<p>“Markus has a remarkable ability to strip life down to its basics, to the point where the metaphors we manufacture as the looking-glass for our existence end up standing in for existence itself. Fish, mud, night and river come to stand in place of family connections as fathers and sons, by giving themselves to fishing give themselves over to a lone search and to loss.”—Brian Evenson, author of </p><

Peter Markus

We Make Mud

Peter Markus makes myth out of mud, a river, fish. By parceling his obsessions so obsessively, he creates a never-before-seen form of mud, a new species of fish, a river that flows backwards to its source: all of this rendered in a language that is uniquely and privately his own.<

Will Mcdermott

The Moons of Mirrodin

Mirrodin Cycle

Paul J Mcauley

Residuals

<p>Two British writers add their own bizarre spin to a familiar American tale. Veteran author Paul J. McAuley’s most recent story for us, “Second Skin,” was published in our April 1997 issue. Kim Newman, who is making his first appearance j in our pages, is the author of a large number of fiction and nonfiction books, short stories, and articles.</p><p>Some of his most recent and best known works are (Carroll & Graf/Avon, 1995), Anno (Carroll & Graf/Avon, 1992), and with Stephen Jones, (Carroll & Graf, 1992).</p><p>Mr. Newman and Mr. McAuley are also the co-editors of (Gollancz, 1992), an anthology of stories about popular music/culture.</p><

Atwood Margaret

The Heart Goes Last

Living in their car, surviving on tips, Charmaine and Stan are in a desperate state. So, when they see an advertisement for Consilience, a ‘social experiment’ offering stable jobs and a home of their own, they sign up immediately. All they have to do in return for suburban paradise is give up their freedom every second month – swapping their home for a prison cell. At first, all is well. But then, unknown to each other, Stan and Charmaine develop passionate obsessions with their ‘Alternates,’ the couple that occupy their house when they are in prison. Soon the pressures of conformity, mistrust, guilt and sexual desire begin to take over.<

Magnus Mills

A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In

Far away, in the ancient empire of Greater Fallowfields, things are falling apart. The imperial orchestra is presided over by a conductor who has never played a note, the clocks are changed constantly to ensure that the sun always sets at five o' clock, and the Astronomer Royal is only able to use the observatory telescope when he can find a sixpence to put in its slot. But while the kingdom drifts, awaiting the return of the young emperor, who has gone abroad and communicates only by penny post, a sinister and unfamiliar enemy is getting closer and closer…A Cruel Bird Came to the Nest and Looked In is Magnus Mills's most ambitious work to date. A surreal portrait of a world that, although strange and distant, contains rather too many similarities to our own for the alien not to become brilliantly familiar and disturbingly close to home. It is comic writing at its best — and it is Magnus Mills's most ambitious, enjoyable and rewarding novel to date.<

Magnus Mills

All Quiet on the Orient Express

As the wet Lakeland fells grow misty and the holiday season draws to a close; as the tourists trickle away from the campsite, along with the sunshine, and the hot water, and the last of the good beer — a man accidentally spills a tin of green paint, and thereby condemns himself to death.<

Magnus Mills

Explorers of the New Century

Set at the dawn of the great age of exploration, the era of Shackleton and Perry and Scott, the book presents the adventures of two intrepid teams, both vying to reach the AFP, or Agreed Furthest Point-a worthy, even ennobling cause. The competition is friendly but conditions are extreme. To get through the arid, lifeless landscape, both teams must learn to make sacrifices, sacrifices that will change just about everything.<

Magnus Mills

Screwtop Thompson

All of Magnus Mills' darkly comic and hugely entertaining stories are here collected in one book for the first time.<

Magnus Mills

Three to See the King

Living in a tin shack, on a great plain, with only the wind for company; what could be better? But with Mary Petrie rapidly turning your house into a home, and the charismatic Michael Hawkins enticing your neighbours away, suddenly there are choices to be made. Should you stay? Or join the exodus?<

Ian R Macleod

The Golden Keeper

Ian MacLeod’s novel, is just out from Harcourt Brace, and his short story collection, , will be out soon from Arkham House. In a departure in style and setting from his previous tales, Mr. MacLeod takes us to an eerie time and place for a terrifying glimpse of… .<

Christopher Moore

Secondhand Souls

Grim Reaper

<p>In San Francisco, the souls of the dead are mysteriously disappearing — and you know that can't be good — in New York Times bestselling author Christopher Moore's delightfully funny sequel to A Dirty Job.</p><p>Something really strange is happening in the City by the Bay. People are dying, but their souls are not being collected. Someone — or something — is stealing them and no one knows where they are going, or why, but it has something to do with that big orange bridge. Death Merchant Charlie Asher is just as flummoxed as everyone else. He's trapped in the body of a fourteen-inch-tall "meat" waiting for his Buddhist nun girlfriend, Audrey, to find him a suitable new body to play host.</p><p>To get to the bottom of this abomination, a motley crew of heroes will band together: the seven-foot-tall death merchant Minty Fresh; retired policeman turned bookseller Alphonse Rivera; the Emperor of San Francisco and his dogs, Bummer and Lazarus; and Lily, the former Goth girl. Now if only they can get little Sophie to stop babbling about the coming battle for the very soul of humankind…</p><

Ottessa Moshfegh

Eileen

<p>A lonely young woman working in a boys’ prison outside Boston in the early 60s is pulled into a very strange crime, in a mordant, harrowing story of obsession and suspense, by one of the brightest new voices in fiction.</p><p>The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings.</p><p>Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature.</p><

Andreï Makine

Brief Loves That Live Forever

In Soviet Russia the desire for freedom is also a desire for the freedom to love. Lovers live as outlaws, traitors to the collective spirit, and love is more intense when it feels like an act of resistance. Now entering middle age, an orphan recalls the fleeting moments that have never left him — a scorching day in a blossoming orchard with a woman who loves another; a furtive, desperate affair in a Black Sea resort; the bunch of snowdrops a crippled childhood friend gave him to give to his lover.<

Liv Morris

Shiver : 13 Sexy Tales of Humor and Horror

Anthology

The sassy ladies of sexy Romantic Comedy serve up some spooky and spicy Halloween fun.<

Sarah J Maas

Queen of Shadows

Throne of Glass

Jonathan Maberry

SNAFU: An Anthology of Military Horror

<p>An anthology of military horror</p><p>When the going gets tough, the tough fight to the death in SNAFU.</p><p>(SNAFU — military slang for ‘Situation Normal — All F*cked Up)</p><p>FIGHT OR DIE!</p><p>Some contributors:</p><p>— James A Moore (A Jonathan Crowley novella)</p><p>— Greig Beck (A new novella)</p><p>— Weston Ochse (A new novella by the author of Seal Team 666)</p><p>— Jonathan Maberry (A Joe Ledger novella)</p><p>Along with eleven emerging and established writers.</p><

Ken Mcclure

The Secret

Steven Dunbar

Steven Dunbar gets the news that an old friend, Dr Simone Ricard of Medicins Sans Frontieres, has died in an accident while attending a scientific meeting in Prague. She and her team have been working to eradicate polio in the border region between Pakistan and Afghanistan and have discovered a possible reason for their failure to do so — fake teams put in by the CIA. She has gone to Prague to publicise this but the meeting organisers won’t let her speak — they already know the reason and have accepted the CIA apology. They think it will only make matters worse if wider publicity is sought.<

José Manuel-Prieto

Rex

<p>The new novel from internationally acclaimed author José Manuel Prieto, Rex is a sophisticated literary game rife with allusions to Proust and Borges, set in a world of wealthy Russian expats and mafiosos who have settled in western Europe.</p><p>J. is a young Cuban man who, thanks to his knowledge of Russian and Spanish, has become the tutor of the young son of a wealthy Russian couple living in Marbella, in the part of southern Spain that the Russian mafia has turned into its winter quarters. As he stays with the family, J. becomes the personal secretary of the boy’s father, Vasily, an ex-scientist that J. suspects is on the run from gangsters. Vasily’s wife, Nelly, a seductive woman always draped in mind-boggling quantities of precious stones, believes the only way to evade the gangsters is an extravagant plan linking Vasily to the throne of the czars. As J. attempts to give Vasily’s son a general grade-school education by exclusively reading him Proust, the paranoid world of Vasily’s household comes ever closer to its unmasking.</p><

John Mcgahern

The Collected Stories

These 34 funny, tragic, bracing, and acerbic stories represent the complete short fiction of one of Ireland's finest living writers. On struggling farms, in Dublin's rain-drenched streets, or in parched exile in Franco's Spain, McGahern's characters wage a confused but touching war against the facts of life.<

John Mcgahern

The Barracks

Elizabeth Reegan, after years of freedom — and loneliness, marries into the enclosed Irish village of her upbringing. Moving between tragedy and savage comedy, desperation and joy, this was John McGahern's first novel.<

Saadat Hasan Manto

Bombay Stories

<p>A collection of classic, yet shockingly contemporary, short stories set in the vibrant world of mid-century Bombay, from one of India’s greatest writers.</p><p>Arriving in 1930s Bombay, Saadat Hasan Manto discovered a city like no other. A metropolis for all, and an exhilarating hub of license and liberty, bursting with both creative energy and helpless despondency. A journalist, screenwriter, and editor, Manto is best known as a master of the short story, and Bombay was his lifelong muse. Vividly bringing to life the city’s seedy underbelly — the prostitutes, pimps, and gangsters that filled its streets — as well as the aspiring writers and actors who arrived looking for fame, here are all of Manto’s Bombay-based stories, together in English for the very first time. By turns humorous and fantastical, Manto’s tales are the provocative and unflinching lives of those forgotten by humanity.</p><

Saadat Manto

Manto: Selected Stories

The gentle dhobi who transforms into a killer, a prostitute who is more child than woman, the cocky, young coachman who falls in love at first sight, a father convinced that his son will die before his first birthday. Saadat Hasan Manto's stories are vivid, dangerous and troubling and they slice into the everyday world to reveal its sombre, dark heart. These stories were written from the mid 30s on, many under the shadow of Partition. No Indian writer since has quite managed to capture the underbelly of Indian life with as much sympathy and colour. In a new translation that for the first time captures the richness of Manto's prose and its combination of high emotion and taut narrative, this is a classic collection from the master of the Indian short story.<

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