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Evil has crept into Molena Point, California, on stealthy cat feet. A rash of brazen burglaries, from antique jewelry to vintage cars, coincides with the unwelcome appearance of yellow-eyed Azrael, feline nemesis of crime-solving cats Joe Grey and Dulcie. But what follows soon after really has Joe's fur standing on edge. A young, healthy waiter drops dead at a reception for local artist Charlie Harper. And when the trail of big-time thefts leads up to San Francisco, the dark beast Azrael is on the scene. Does he have contact as well with a stalker and a handsome philanderer? If Joe and Dulcie don't get to the bottom of these misdeeds soon, they and all their human friends will have ample reasons to be afraid… to be very afraid.<

"It's me, your cat. I had to split. I witnessed a crime and someone is following me. Trust me. When I get this sorted out, I'll be home. I am still your cat, and I guess I miss you…" Joe Grey jumped down to the floor without hanging up the phone. He was trapped in an unfolding nightmare. First he found he could understand human speech (who would have guessed they had so little to say?). Then he found he could talk (useful for scaring dogs) and even read. He got worried when he found himself feeling human emotions like guilt and sympathy. He even caught himself planning his day! All that, Joe Grey could have handled. If only he hadn't found himself in the alley behind Jolly's Deli the night Beckwhite was murdered…<

When a high-speed chase goes terribly wrong, Santa Fe police officer Dan Page watches in horror as a car and gas tanker explode into flames. Torn with guilt that he may be responsible, Page returns home to discover that his wife, Tori, has disappeared.

Frantic, Page follows her trail to Rostov, a remote town in Texas famous for a massive astronomical observatory, a long-abandoned military base, and unexplained nighttime phenomena that drew onlookers from every corner of the globe. Many of these gawkers – Tori among them – are compelled to visit this tiny community to witness the mysterious Rostov Lights.

Without warning, a gunman begins firing on the lights, screaming 'Go back to hell where you came from,' the turns his rifle on the bystanders. A bloodbath ensues, and events quickly spiral out of control, setting the stage for even greater violence and death.

Page must solve the mystery of the Rostov Lights to save his wife. In the process, he learns that the decaying military base may not be abandoned at all, and that the government may have known about the lights for decades. Could these phenomena be more dangerous than anyone could have possibly imagined?

Beware of the cat striking back…

On a lovely moonlit night, Joe Grey is minding his own business, carrying a gift of mice to a litter of kittens, when he stumbles upon a murder scene. Behind an empty house lies a swimming pool, its bottom covered with mud. There is also blood, the smell of human death, and drag marks. But there is no victim. Without a body, it's a crime that will be hard to prove.

With stubborn feline curiosity, Joe Grey sets out to investigate. As he, Dulcie, and Kit follow the killer's trail among four houses whose owners are on vacation, they discover that more murder has been planned for the small, close-knit neighborhood. They uncover evidence of conflict among the residents and multiple signs of breaking-and-entering, although nothing valuable seems to be missing.

With the help of two local ferals, the cats find the victim's hidden grave and learn of the violence that is yet to come. As they set out to alert the law, they discover the perfect way to thwart the killer – through that person's unnatural but powerful fear of cats.

Thus unfolds the next installment in Shirley Rousseau Murphy's beguiling series about the gray tomcat P.I., his feline friends, and human companions, as, skirting danger, they unravel events shaped by human frailty and by the darkest feline imaginings from the killer's past.

Following in the tradition of Clive Cussler and Matthew Reilly, Andy McDermott takes us a roller-coaster ride in search of the legendary Atlantis. Archaeologist Nina Wilde believes she has found the location of the lost city of Atlantis and now she wants the opportunity to prove her theory. Someone else though wants her dead! With the help of ex-SAS bodyguard Eddie Chase and beautiful heiress Kari Frost, Nina faces a breakneck race against time around the world, pursued at every step by agents of the mysterious – and murderous – Brotherhood of Selasphoros. From the jungles of Brazil to the mountains of Tibet, from the streets of Manhattan to the depths of the Atlantic Ocean, the hunt for Atlantis leads to a secret hidden for 11,000 years – which in the wrong hands could destroy civilization as we know it…<

Joe Grey never regretted the mysterious accident that gave him the ability to talk and undersand human speech. Especially now that he had company – for it had happened to his "girlfriend" Dulcie, too.

The problem was, Dulcie wasn't only listening to humans. She was believing them! She was convinced that the man in jail for killing a famous artist and burning her studio was innocent. And, leave it to Dulcie, she was determined to find the evidence that would convict the real murderer.

Even if she had to get Joe Grey killed doing it!

The cats who saved Christmas…

The charming seaside village of Molena Point, California, leads one to expect a quiet traditional Christmas surrounded by family and friends-but not this holiday season. Instead of singing carols and climbing into Christmas trees, Joe Grey, feline P.I., is faced with his most difficult case yet-and that's saying a lot for a wily tomcat who for years has been solving crimes the police can't even crack.

At midnight in the deserted gardens of the shopping plaza, a stranger lies dead beneath the village Christmas tree; the only witness to the shooting is a little child. But when the police arrive, summoned by an anonymous phone call of feline origin, both the body and the child have disappeared. As police scramble for leads, the grey tomcat, his tabby lady, and their tortoiseshell pal, Kit, launch their own unique investigation.

Together Joe Grey, Dulcie, and Kit face their most heartbreaking case yet as they care for the child who may be the killer's next target. Trying to sort out perplexing clues amidst the happiness of the season, they shadow a cast of colorful characters. But neither the police nor their unknown feline assistants are aware that they might have stumbled over the murderer and never known it, until an electrifying final scene when the killer's identity is revealed.

For years Shirley Rousseau Murphy has written tales that have delighted readers and critics alike. With her lyrical prose and fast-paced plotting, Murphy has created another delightfully absorbing trip to a magical place populated by unforgettable characters whom readers have come to think of as friends.

When celebrated novelist Elliot Traynor and his wife arrive in Molena Point, strange events begin to occur, and feline sleuth Joe Grey and his cat companion Dulcie must delve into their latest mystery and soon find themselves tracking a killer.<

Ingram Sandy had been lured to the Greek island of Thera by a father she had never known, an archaeologist scorned for his obsession with Atlantis. Now, as the island's slumbering volcano came back to life, a terrifying power drew Sandy deep into the fathomless waters of her heritage, destiny and doom.<

Love – and murder – is in the air…

It took Joe Grey's human, Clyde, nearly forever to pop the question to Ryan Flannery, and what more romantic time to tie the knot than on Valentine's Day? But dark secrets from the past, uncovered by Joe and his feline pals, threaten to ruin the happy union.

First, a body discovered many miles away reopens a ten-year-old cold case involving a man who disappeared days before his own wedding. The jilted bride is back in town and eager to find the truth… or to hide evidence of her own wrongdoing. Trouble is, she's soon involved with Ryan's father, who is house-sitting and preparing meals for Joe Grey while Clyde and Ryan are on their honeymoon.

Then another body is found closer to home on the grounds of a ruined estate, deserted save for a band of unusual feral cats. Around the wrist of the corpse is a bracelet bearing the image of a rearing cat, and the cats discover a rare literary volume hidden nearby that divulges their own secret: their special ability to speak.

But as the police investigate the two murders, located more than five hundred miles apart, only Joe Grey suspects that the crimes are related. It takes a chase from which the tomcat wonders if he'll emerge alive for anyone to hone in on the connection between the murders. Finally, feline perception and cop sense combine to bring a killer to justice in this delightful new tale involving Shirley Rousseau Murphy's three amazing cats.

Steve Martin's first foray into fiction is as assured as it is surprising. Set in Los Angeles, its fascination with the surreal body fascism of the upper classes feels like the comedian's familiar territory, but the shopgirl of the book's title may surprise his fans. Mirabelle works in the glove department of Neiman's, "selling things that nobody buys any more." Spending her days waiting for customers to appear, Mirabelle "looks like a puppy standing on its hind legs, and the two brown dots of her eyes, set in the china plate of her face, make her seem very cute and noticeable." Lonely and vulnerable, she passes her evenings taking prescription drugs and drawing "dead things," while pursuing an on-off relationship with the hopeless Jeremy, who possesses "a slouch so extreme that he appears to have left his skeleton at home." Then Mr. Ray Porter steps into Mirabelle's life. He is much older, rich, successful, divorced, and selfish, desiring her "without obligation." Complicating the picture is Mirabelle's voracious rival, her fellow Neiman's employee Lisa, who uses sex "for attracting and discarding men."

The mutual incomprehension, psychological damage, and sheer vacuity practiced by all four of Martin's characters sees Shopgirl veer rather uncomfortably between a comedy of manners and a much darker work. There are some startling passages of description and interior monologue, but the characters are often rather hazy types. Martin tries too hard in his attempt to write a psychologically intense novel about West Coast anomie, but Shopgirl is still an enjoyable, if rather light, read.

A double murder leaves feline sleuth Joe Gray hopping mad as Max Harper, Molena Point's dedicated chief of police, stands framed for murder, and Joe and his sidekick Dulcie are the only creatures who can save him. Reprint.<

On a chilly October night, five people gather in a run-down motel on the Jersey shore and begin preparations to break into an abandoned hotel nearby. Built during the glory days of Asbury Park by a reclusive millionaire, the magnificent structure, which foreshadowed the beauties of Art Deco architecture, is now a decrepit, boarded up edifice marked for demolition.

The five are "creepers", the slang term for urban explorers – city archaeologists of sorts who go into abandoned buildings to uncover their secrets. And, on this evening they are joined by a reporter who wants to profile them – anonymously, as this is highly illegal activity – for a New York Times piece.

Balenger, the sandy-haired, broad-shouldered reporter with a decided air of mystery about him, isn't looking for just a story, however. And, soon after the group sets forth into the rat-infested tunnel leading to the building, it is clear that he will get even more than he bargained for. Danger, terror and death are awaiting the creepers in a place ravaged by time and redolent of evil.

Multiple-award-winning author Shirley Rousseau Murphy once again brings us Joe Grey and Dulcie, the most cunning set of feline sleuths ever to stick their paws into crime solving.

Always a loner, Charlie Getz never expected to fall in love with anyone, let alone the chief of police of Molena Point, California. So her wedding on a perfect, sunny day is all the more joyous – especially when two of the honored guests are four-footed pals, feline detectives Joe Grey and Dulcie.

However, two unexpected visitors – a young boy and an old man hidden in the shadows – are preparing to bomb the soon-to-be-filledlied church. The lone witness, a small tattercoat kit crouched beneath the oak branches, warns Joe's owner, Clyde; then, with claws and teeth, she stops the two would-be murderers. But the shock of the near disaster that might have killed half the village is only the beginning. The next morning Charlie's good friend, building contractor Ryan Flannery, awakens to find her estranged, philandering husband dead in her garage… and her own gun is missing.

With suspicion falling squarely on Ryan's shoulders, Joe Grey, Dulcie, and Kit use their skills of break-and-enter to prove her innocence. But a stranger's sinister push into her life is as unexpected as the arrival, on the morning of the murder, of a handsome purebred hunting dog, a homeless stray who seems determined to move in with Ryan.

Whatever hateful force has descended on the small seaside village, the three cats are soon paw-deep in a tangle of jealousy, greed, and carefully planned retribution. So they work the case as only cats can, passing information anonymously to the cops, making a heroic feline effort to nail the killer and catch the wedding bomber, and hoping to see the silver hunting dog settled safely into his new home.

"Lecteur, je suis moi-même la matière de mon livre": c'est ce surprenant aveu de subjectivité qui ouvre l'un des textes les plus modernes de la littérature française, quoique l'un des plus anciens. À la mort de son ami La Boétie, Montaigne décide en effet de prendre la plume pour perpétuer leurs discussions si fécondes. Sur ce mode autobiographique, tous les sujets seront abordés, de l'amitié à l'éducation, de la philosophie à la lecture, de la religion à la mort des hommes. En s'observant lui-même, Montaigne fait ainsi le tour de l'homme, proposant une réflexion essentielle sur sa place dans le monde et sur le champ d'action de la pensée humaine.

Au siècle de Rabelais, des poètes de la Pléiade et de l'humanisme européen, l'oeuvre de Montaigne reste une météorite inclassable, entre écriture personnelle et monument philosophique. Oeuvre d'un homme engagé dans son temps, les Essais allaient fonder toute une tradition d'écriture à la française, de Pascal à Malraux, de Rousseau à Camus.

La nouvelle qui donne son titre au recueil, est une des plus connues de Maupassant. Le château d'Uville est occupé par cinq officiers prussiens. Parmi eux, «un tout petit blondin fier et brutal», surnommé Mademoiselle Fifi à cause de son allure féminine. Le saccage du luxueux château ne parvenant pas à tromper l'ennui, on décide d'organiser une petite fête avec des dames de Rouen. Elles arrivent, ces cinq «filles à plaisir», dont Rachel, «une brune toute jeune, à l'œil noir comme une tache d'encre». Elle échoit en partage à Mademoiselle Fifi, qui la brutalise, «saisi d'une férocité rageuse, travaillé par son besoin de ravage». Au moment des toasts, les Allemands insultent les Français vaincus, et surtout les Françaises, qu'ils déclarent toutes leur propriété. Rachel se révolte alors…<

"DAZZLING… MAGICAL… AN EXTRAORDINARY WORK!" -New York Times

"BRILLIANT… RESONATES FROM PAST TO PRESENT." – San Francisco Chronicle

"A MAGNIFICENT HEROINE… A GLORIOUS BOOK!" – Baltimore Sun

"BEAUTIFULLY WRITTEN… POWERFUL…

TONI MORRISON HAS BECOME ONE OF AMERICA 'S FINEST NOVELISTS." -Cleveland Plain Dealer

"THERE IS SOMETHING GREAT IN BELOVED: A PLAY OF HUMAN VOICES, CONSCIOUSLY EXALTED, PERVERSELY STRESSED, YET HOLDING TRUE. IT GETS YOU." – The New Yorker

"A STUNNING BOOK… A LASTING ACHIEVEMENT!" -Christian Science Monitor

"Magical… rich, provocative, extremely satisfying!" – Milwaukee Journal

"Superb… a profound and shattering story that carries the weight of history… exquisitely told." -Cosmopolitan

"Compelling… Morrison shakes that brilliant kaleidoscope of hers again, and the story of pain, endurance, poetry, and power she is born to tell comes out right." -Village Voice

"In her most probing novel, Toni Morrison has demonstrated once again the stunning powers that place her in the first ranks of our living novelists." – St. Louis Post-Dispatch

"Shattering emotional power and impact!" -New York Daily News

"A book worth many rereadings." – Glamour

"Astonishing… a triumph!"-New Woman

"A work of genuine force… beautifully written." -Washington Post

"Written with a force rarely seen in contemporary fiction… One feels deep admiration." -USA Today

"Toni Morrison is not just an important contemporary novelist but a major figure of our national literature."-New York Review of Books

"Heart-wrenching… mesmerizing!" – Atlanta Journal-Constitution

"Powerful is too tame a word to describe Toni Morrison's searing new novel." -Library Journal

"Shatteringly eloquent."-Booklist

"A rich, mythical novel… a triumph!"- St. Petersburg Times

"Powerful… voluptuous!" – New York Magazine

Originally published in 1970, The Bluest Eye is Toni Morrison's first novel. In an afterword written more than two decades later, the author expressed her dissatisfaction with the book's language and structure: "It required a sophistication unavailable to me." Perhaps we can chalk up this verdict to modesty, or to the Nobel laureate's impossibly high standards of quality control. In any case, her debut is nothing if not sophisticated, in terms of both narrative ingenuity and rhetorical sweep. It also shows the young author drawing a bead on the subjects that would dominate much of her career: racial hatred, historical memory, and the dazzling or degrading power of language itself.

Set in Lorain, Ohio, in 1941, The Bluest Eye is something of an ensemble piece. The point of view is passed like a baton from one character to the next, with Morrison's own voice functioning as a kind of gold standard throughout. The focus, though, is on an 11-year-old black girl named Pecola Breedlove, whose entire family has been given a cosmetic cross to bear:

You looked at them and wondered why they were so ugly; you looked closely and could not find the source. Then you realized that it came from conviction, their conviction. It was as though some mysterious all-knowing master had given each one a cloak of ugliness to wear, and they had each accepted it without question… And they took the ugliness in their hands, threw it as a mantle over them, and went about the world with it.

There are far uglier things in the world than, well, ugliness, and poor Pecola is subjected to most of them. She's spat upon, ridiculed, and ultimately raped and impregnated by her own father. No wonder she yearns to be the very opposite of what she is-yearns, in other words, to be a white child, possessed of the blondest hair and the bluest eye.

This vein of self-hatred is exactly what keeps Morrison's novel from devolving into a cut-and-dried scenario of victimization. She may in fact pin too much of the blame on the beauty myth: "Along with the idea of romantic love, she was introduced to another-physical beauty. Probably the most destructive ideas in the history of human thought. Both originated in envy, thrived in insecurity, and ended in disillusion." Yet the destructive power of these ideas is essentially colorblind, which gives The Bluest Eye the sort of universal reach that Morrison's imitators can only dream of. And that, combined with the novel's modulated pathos and musical, fine-grained language, makes for not merely a sophisticated debut but a permanent one. -James Marcus

Tango to dramat o współczesnym społeczeństwie, w którym panuje konformizm, anarchia, brak postaw. Farsową sytuację kompletnego pomieszania i rozprzężenia opanowuje i wykorzystuje władza, czyli silny i brutalny cham.

Tango to już klasyka, najbardziej znany i najważniejszy utwór Sławomira Mrożka o społecznych zagrożeniach.