Disclaimer

Fredric Brown (1906-1972) is perhaps best remembered for his use of humor and his mastery of the "short-short" form (these days called flash fiction) — stories of one to three pages, often with ingenious plotting devices and surprise endings. (He also wrote excellent short stories and novels.) This volume contains 27 of his stories, including the classics "The Waveries," "Honeymoon in Hell," "Cartoonist," and many more!<

The sharpest, most stylized, and ambitious anthology of Native American literature ever published. Readers enter into a welter of troubled history throughout the Americans where the heritage of violence meets the ferocity of intent.<

A shocking scientific discovery.

A conspiracy of staggering brilliance.

A thriller unlike any you've ever read…

When a NASA satellite discovers an astonishingly rare object buried deep in the Arctic ice, the floundering space agency proclaims a much-needed victory—a victory with profound implications for NASA policy and the impending presidential election. To verify the authenticity of the find, the White House calls upon the skills of intelligence analyst Rachel Sexton. Accompanied by a team of experts, including the charismatic scholar Michael Tolland, Rachel travels to the Arctic and uncovers the unthinkable: evidence of scientific trickery—a bold deception that threatens to plunge the world into controversy. But before she can warn the President, Rachel and Michael are ambushed by a deadly team of assassins. Fleeing for their lives across a desolate and lethal landscape, their only hope for survival is to discover who is behind this masterful plot. The truth, they will learn, is the most shocking deception of all.

RESPLENDENT is a collection of stories that encompasses mankind's epic fight for survival against the Xeelee, a narrative of how man will change and evolve over our epic journey out into the universe. These tales will encompass the rise of sub-molecular empires in the first nanoseconds after the Big Bang to mankind's final transformation. Full of cutting-edge science, descriptions of time and space on a mind-boggling scale and memorable, all-too-human characters. It is both the capstone to one of the most significant series in the history of SF and a remarkable achievement in its own right. This is a mature and uniquely talented writer at the height of his powers.<

It’s hard enough to keep track of one reality. With than one…<

A misfit man finds a misfit dog. Ray, aged fifty-seven, ‘too old for starting over, too young for giving up’, and One Eye, a vicious little bugger, smaller than expected, a good ratter. Both are accustomed to being alone, unloved, outcast — but they quickly find in each other a strange companionship of sorts. As spring turns to summer, their relationship grows and intensifies, until a savage act forces them to abandon the precarious life they’d established, and take to the road.

"Mexico's greatest woman writer." — Roberto Bolaño

"A luminous writer. . Boullosa is a masterful spinner of the fantastic" —

An imaginative writer in the tradition of Juan Rulfo, Jorge Luis Borges, and Cesar Aira, Carmen Boullosa shows herself to be at the height of her powers with her latest novel. Loosely based on the little-known 1859 Mexican invasion of the United States, is a richly imagined evocation of the volatile Tex-Mex borderland. Boullosa views border history through distinctly Mexican eyes, and her sympathetic portrayal of each of her wildly diverse characters — Mexican ranchers and Texas Rangers, Comanches and cowboys, German socialists and runaway slaves, Southern belles and dancehall girls — makes her storytelling tremendously powerful and absorbing.

Shedding important historical light on current battles over the Mexican — American frontier while telling a gripping story with Boullosa's singular prose and formal innovation, marks the welcome return of a major writer who has previously captivated American audiences and is poised to do so again.

Are you this didn’t almost happen?<

There are standard protocols for job-hunting, but things don’t always work that way…<

Desperate times call for…<

Return to the eon-spanning and universe-crossing conflict between humanity and the unknowable alien Xeelee in this selection of uncollected and unpublished stories, newly edited and placed in chronological reading order.

From tales charting the earliest days of man's adventure to the stars to stories of Old Earth, four billion years in the future, the range and startling imagination of Baxter is always on display. As humanity rises and falls, ebbs and flows, one thing is always needed – the ability to endure.

Contains eleven short stories and novellas.

In Paula Bomer's bold, unapologetic debut novel, a pregnant mother and wife abandons her family in search of an identity that is hers alone after she finds herself unexpectedly pregnant for the third time. She does everything a pregnant mother shouldn't do — engaging in casual sex, drinking beer, and smoking weed — as she attempts to reclaim her sidelined career as an artist. A lacerating response to the culture of mommy blogs, helicopter parents, and "parental correctness" as well as an unflinching look at the choices women face when trying to balance art and family.<

“Ben Jelloun is arguably Morocco’s greatest living author, whose impressive body of work combines intellect and imagination in magical fusion.” —The Guardian

In The Happy Marriage, the internationally acclaimed Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun tells the story of one couple — first from the husband’s point of view, then from the wife’s — just as legal reforms are about to change women’s rights forever.

The husband, a painter in Casablanca, has been paralyzed by a stroke at the very height of his career and becomes convinced that his marriage is the sole reason for his decline.

Walled up within his illness and desperate to break free of a deeply destructive relationship, he finds escape in writing a secret book about his hellish marriage. When his wife finds it, she responds point by point with her own version of the facts, offering her own striking and incisive reinterpretation of their story.

Who is right and who is wrong? A thorny issue in a society where marriage remains a sacrosanct institution, but where there’s also a growing awareness of women’s rights. And in their absorbing struggle, both sides of this modern marriage find out they may not be so enlightened after all.

On August 19, 1991, eight high-ranking Soviet officials took over the government of the USSR and proclaimed themselves its new rulers. Less than seventy-two hours later, their coup had collapsed, but it would change the course of history in a way that no one—certainly not the plotters themselves—could have foreseen.

The editor of this volume, who witnessed these momentous events, have assembled firsthand accounts of the attempted coup. They include testimonies from “junta” members and military officers, resistance leaders and ordinary citizens, Muscovites and residents of other locales, Russian and foreign journalists, foreign visitors and returning émigrés, as well as Mikhail Gorbachev and Boris Yeltsin. Key documents and photographs complement the individual accounts.

The provocative introduction to the volume places the August events in the larger context—from the early days of perestroika and glasnost to the second confrontation at the White House, in October 1993.

This exquisitely imagined novel opens as the great astronomer and composer William Herschel rescues his sister Caroline from a life of drudgery in Germany and brings her to England and a world of music-making and stargazing. Lina, as Caroline is known, serves as William’s assistant and the captain of his exhilaratingly busy household. William is generous, wise, and charismatic, an obsessive genius whom Lina adores and serves with the fervency of a beloved wife. When William suddenly announces that he will be married, Lina watches as her world collapses.

With her characteristically elegant prose, Brown creates from history a compelling story of familial collaboration and conflict, the sublime beauty of astronomy, and the small but essential place we have within a vast and astonishing cosmos. Through Lina’s trials and successes, we witness the dawning of an early feminist consciousness, of a woman struggling to find her own place among the stars.

T.C. Boyle's riotous first novel now in a new edition for its 25th anniversary. Twenty five years ago, T.C. Boyle published his first novel, Water Music, a funny, bawdy, extremely entertaining novel of imaginative and stylistic fancy that announced to the world Boyle's tremendous gifts as a storyteller. Set in the late eighteenth century, Water Music follows the wild adventures of Ned Rise, thief and whoremaster, and Mungo Park, a Scottish explorer, through London's seamy gutters and Scotland's scenic highlands to their grand meeting in the heart of darkest Africa. There they join forces and wend their hilarious way to the source of the Niger. "Ribald, hilarious, exotic, engrossing flight of the literary imagination." — Los Angeles Times "Water Music does for fiction what Raiders of the Lost Ark did for film. . Boyle is an adept plotter, a crazed humorist, and a fierce describer. "-The Boston Globe "High comic fiction. . Boyle is a writer of considerable talent. He pulls off his most implausible inventions with wit, a perfect sense of timing, and his considerable linguistic gifts." — The Washington Post<

With this haunting first volume of his trilogy, John Berger begins his chronicle of the eclipse of peasant cultures in the twentieth century. Set in a small village in the French Alps, relates the stories of skeptical, hard-working men and fiercely independent women; of calves born and pigs slaughtered; of summer haymaking and long dark winters f rest; of a message of forgiveness from a dead father to his prodigal son; and of the marvelous Lucie Cabrol, exiled to a hut high in the mountains, but an inexorable part of the lives of men who have known her. Above all, this masterpiece of sensuous description and profound moral resonance is an act of reckoning that conveys the precise wealth and weight of a world we are losing.<