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Stefan Rudnicki

Stefan Rudnicki

  • “My words itch at your ears till you understand them.”
    —“Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman 

    There is a reason the words of Walt Whitman have persisted in American literature, in literature at large, for so long. He was not simply a man of his time, not just a writer for the moment. Whitman was a man of the people and a writer of the soul—the souls of humankind, and the soul of America.

    Miracles and Vistas: A Walt Whitman Compendium spans the breadth of Whitman’s literary and lyrical work, from his lectures and essays to his prose and to both his short- and long-form poetry. The Compendium begins with Whitman’s political works, several of which have direct relevance on the state of America and the world today. After these pieces comes a selection of his humorous, touching, and unusual fiction and short poetry. Then the whole compilation culminates in his unparalleled and all-encompassing “Song of Myself.”

    Compiled by Stefan Rudnicki with Alison Belle Bews, this original collection from Skyboat Media showcases the “multitudes” contained in Whitman’s writing.

    Full Contents:

    1. Introduction by Stefan Rudnicki

    2. “Whoever You Are Holding Me Now in Hand”

    3. “Origins of Attempted Secession”

    4. “Abraham Lincoln”

    5. “Some War Memoranda”

    6. “Last of the War Cases”

    7. “O Captain! My Captain!”

    8. “Death of Abraham Lincoln Lecture”

    9. “President Lincoln’s Funeral Hymn”

    10. “Democratic Vistas”

    11. “Miracles”

    12. “The Love of the Four Students”

    13. “Revenge and Requital”

    14. “The Dark Side”

    15. “Death in the School-Room”

    16. “A Noiseless Patient Spider”

    17. “Some Fact-Romances”

    18. “Song of Myself”

  • An orphaned giant named Berg is in search of just one person he can call friend.

    When he was very young, Berg’s mother hid him in a cave and led an angry mob of villagers away, sacrificing her own life to protect her son. In all the years since, Berg has lived alone, the only reminders of his family are his mother’s satchel and his recurring dreams of a white bear who shares a magical sand from a fallen star. When the white bear touches Berg with the star-blue sand, he feels safe and happy in his dreams. Sometimes, when he feels lonely, he will risk entering a village to trade a smooth river rock or a feather for food. He’s really searching for kindness, companionship, and, maybe one day, someone who will want to get to know him and be his friend. But with every attempt he makes, people only see his massive size and cruelly chase him away, thinking he is Ünhold—a giant and a monster. Whoever this Ünhold is, Berg also fears him and hopes they never meet.

    In his travels, Berg comes upon a new town, a city made of iron where blacksmiths construct all kinds of ironworks from gates to sculptures to chains and weapons. Berg meets a little girl, Anya, who doesn’t run and scream in fear like everyone else does. To his amazement and delight, Anya knows about the dream-sand and says she wants to be his friend.

    The mayor convinces the villagers of the benefit of having a giant around who can protect their city from the dangers he says Ünhold has in store for them. Anya has learned about the dream-sand from secretly watching Ünhold use it to trade for food and trinkets, and she suspects the mayor is planning something different than what he says. Fearing the city isn’t safe for Berg, she warns her giant friend to flee. When a secret plot is revealed to capture Berg, the young giant has to figure out where he can place his trust.

  • From the New York Times bestselling author of Enders Game comes a brand-new series following a teen who wakes up on an abandoned Earth to discover that he’s a clone!

    Laz is a side-stepper: a teen with the incredible power to jump his consciousness to alternate versions of himself in parallel worlds. All his life, there was no mistake that a little side-stepping couldn’t fix.

    Until Laz wakes up one day in a cloning facility on a seemingly abandoned Earth.

    Laz finds himself surrounded by hundreds of other clones, all dead, and quickly realizes that he too must be a clone of his original self. Laz has no idea what happened to the world he remembers as vibrant and bustling only yesterday, and he struggles to survive in the barren wasteland he’s now trapped in. But the question that haunts him isn’t why was he created, but instead, who woke him up … and why?

    There’s only a single bright spot in Laz’s new life: one other clone appears to still be alive, although she remains asleep. Deep down, Laz believes that this girl holds the key to the mysteries plaguing him, but if he wakes her up, she’ll be trapped in this hellscape with him.

    This is one problem that Laz can’t just side-step his way out of.

  • New York Times bestselling author

    Hugo and Nebula Award–winning author

    When Ryan’s crush, Bizzy Horvat, moves into the other half of his family’s duplex, he is swept up into a world of micropotents and micropowers. It becomes Ryan’s job to protect Bizzy from people who want to kill her.

    Ryan wakes up to find his contractor dad building walls to turn their big old house into a duplex. The family that moves into the other side includes Bizzy Horvat, the pretty girl he has a crush on at school. Bizzy claims her mother is a witch with the power to curse people with clumsiness or, in Bizzy’s case, astonishing beauty.

    When a bee gets caught in Bizzy’s hair, Ryan acts so quickly and radically to save her from getting stung that he attracts the attention of a group of micropotents—people with micropowers. He soon realizes that Bizzy and her mother also have such powers. It becomes Ryan’s job, with the help of the other micropotents, to protect the Horvats from a group of witch hunters from their native country, who are determined to kill Bizzy, her mother, and all the other “witches”—micropotents—who have gathered to protect them.

  • Sam, the P.V.O Kid! is a fun book that was created by Lifestyle Not A Trend LLC to teach children discipline; how to count, manage, and save money; and how to start a business.

  • It is time to start colonizing the solar system. Ex-astronaut, current space advisor, and all-out troubleshooter for the President, Jake Ross, is determined to make it happen.

    And what better way than to return to America’s glory by returning to the moon and setting up a permanent moon-base which can then serve as the launching pad for Mars and beyond.

    But as usual, political intrigue and conflicting priorities are threatening the whole program. Add to that a President who is about to die, a strong contingent in the legislative body which thinks that money spent on a moon-base is money wasted, and the general apathy of the public, and you have an almost impossible task.

    Even NASA, natural enthusiasts of a project like this, are dragging their feet because they have lost control of the top-spot in the project.

    But none of those opposing forces have contended with the resolve and the skill of Jake Ross. He will create the base on the moon. He will send humans out to many worlds.

  • Marie Brennan returns to the Onyx Court, a fairy city hidden below Queen Victoria’s London. Now the Onyx Court faces its greatest challenge.

    Seven years ago, Eliza’s childhood sweetheart vanished from the streets of Whitechapel. No one believed her when she told them that he was stolen away by the faeries.

    But she hasn’t given up the search. It will lead her across London and into the hidden palace that gives refuge to faeries in the mortal world. That refuge is now crumbling, broken by the iron of the underground railway, and the resulting chaos spills over to the streets above.

    Three centuries of the Onyx Court are about to come to an end. Without the palace’s protection, the fae have little choice but to flee. Those who stay have one goal: to find safety in a city that does not welcome them. But what price will the mortals of London pay for that safety?

  • The year is 1666. The King and Parliament vie for power, fighting one another with politics and armies alike. Below, the faerie court has enemies of its own. The old ways are breaking down, and no one knows what will rise in their place.

    But now, a greater threat has come, one that could destroy everything. In the house of a sleeping baker, a spark leaps free of the oven—and ignites a blaze that will burn London to the ground. While the humans struggle to halt the conflagration that is devouring the city street by street, the fae pit themselves against a less tangible foe: the spirit of the fire itself, powerful enough to annihilate everything in its path.

    Mortal and fae will have to lay aside the differences that divide them and fight together for the survival of London itself.

  • The Royal Society of London plays home to the greatest minds of England. It has revolutionized philosophy and scientific knowledge. Its fellows map out the laws of the natural world, disproving ancient superstition and ushering in an age of enlightenment.

    To the fae of the Onyx Court, living in a secret city below London, these scientific developments are less than welcome. Magic is losing its place in the world-and science threatens to expose the court to hostile eyes.

    In 1666, a Great Fire burned four-fifths of London to the ground. The calamity was caused by a great Dragon—an elemental beast of flame. Incapable of destroying something so powerful, the fae of London banished it to a comet moments before the comet’s light disappeared from the sky. Now the calculations of Sir Edmond Halley have predicted its return in 1759.

    So begins their race against time. Soon the Dragon’s gaze will fall upon London and it will return to the city it ravaged once before. The fae will have to answer the question that defeated them a century before: How can they kill a being more powerful than all their magic combined? It will take both magic and science to save London-but reconciling the two carries its own danger …

  • Hero–or Nazi?

    Silvia Foti was raised on reverent stories about her hero grandfather, a martyr for Lithuanian independence and an unblemished patriot. Jonas Noreika, remembered as “General Storm,” had resisted his country’s German and Soviet occupiers in World War II, surviving two years in a Nazi concentration camp only to be executed in 1947 by the KGB. His granddaughter, growing up in Chicago, was treated like royalty in her tightly knit Lithuanian community.

    But in 2000, when Silvia traveled to Lithuania for a ceremony honoring her grandfather, she heard a very different story—a “rumor” that her grandfather had been a “Jew-killer.”

    The Nazi’s Granddaughter is Silvia’s account of her wrenching twenty-year quest for the truth, from a beautiful house confiscated from its Jewish owners, to familial confessions and the Holocaust tour guide who believed that her grandfather had murdered members of his family.

    A heartbreaking and dramatic story based on exhaustive documentary research and soul-baring interviews, The Nazi’s Granddaughter is an unforgettable journey into World War II history, intensely personal but filled with universal lessons about courage, faith, memory, and justice.

  • ABOVE

    The year is 1590. The City of London flourishes, the most brilliant jewel in the crown of Elizabeth I, Gloriana, the Virgin Queen.

    BELOW

    The Onyx Court is London’s faerie shadow. Ruled by Invidiana, its heartless queen, it reflects and distorts the glory of the mortal court.

    BETWEEN

    Years ago, Elizabeth forged a pact with her faerie counterpart to secure both of their thrones. Now that alliance is in danger. Michael Deven, a rising star in Elizabeth’s court, seeks the “hidden player” who has influenced mortal politics for so long. Lady Lune, a faerie out of favor, must infiltrate the mortal world to protect her vicious queen. Together this pair will uncover the secret of Invidiana’s power—a secret that has the potential to shatter both realms.

  • Two novellas set in Aliette de Bodard’s award-winning, critically acclaimed Xuya universe, a timeline where Asia became dominant, and where the space age has Confucian galactic empires of Vietnamese and Chinese inspiration

    The Citadel of Weeping Pearls

    The Citadel of Weeping Pearls was a great wonder; a perfect meld between cutting-edge technology and esoteric sciences—its inhabitants capable of teleporting themselves anywhere, its weapons small and undetectable and deadly. Thirty years ago, threatened by an invading fleet from the Dai Viet Empire, the Citadel disappeared and was never seen again. But now the empire itself is under siege, on the verge of a war against an enemy that turns their own mindships against them; and the Empress, who once gave the order to raze the Citadel, is in desperate need of its weapons.

    Meanwhile, on a small isolated space station, an engineer obsessed with the past works on a machine that will send her thirty years back, to the height of the Citadel’s power. But the Citadel’s disappearance still extends chains of grief and regret all the way into the fraught atmosphere of the Imperial Court; and this casual summoning of the past might have world-shattering consequences.

    The Tea Master and the Detective

    Welcome to the Scattered Pearls Belt, a collection of ring habitats and orbitals ruled by exiled human scholars and powerful families, and held together by living mindships who carry people and freight between the stars. In this fluid society, human and mindship avatars mingle in corridors and in function rooms, and physical and virtual realities overlap, the appearance of environments easily modified and adapted to interlocutors or current mood.

    A transport ship discharged from military service after a traumatic injury, The Shadow’s Child now ekes out a precarious living as a brewer of mind-altering drugs for the comfort of space-travellers. Meanwhile, abrasive and eccentric scholar Long Chau wants to find a corpse for a scientific study. When Long Chau walks into her office, The Shadow’s Child expects an unpleasant but easy assignment. When the corpse turns out to have been murdered, Long Chau feels compelled to investigate, dragging The Shadow’s Child with her.

    As they dig deep into the victim’s past, The Shadow’s Child realises that the investigation points to Long Chau’s own murky past—and, ultimately, to the dark and unbearable void that lies between the stars.

  • “Literary ancestor to Miss Marple, Lisbeth Salander, and Nancy Drew.”—The Guardian (London)

    First published in 1864, decades before there were official female detectives or female police officers in Britain, The Female Detective features the original lady detective: the determined and resourceful Miss Gladden, known as “G.” She examines crime scenes incognito, tracks down killers, and solves mysteries employing all manner of skill, subterfuge, and charm to achieve her ends while attempting to conceal her own identity from others.

    Miss Gladden’s deductive methods and energetic approach anticipate those of Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, and she can be seen as beginning a powerful tradition of female detectives in these seven short stories. The Female Detective is sure to enchant a new generation of crime fiction fans.

  • At a funeral of an old friend, Matt Helm takes a trip down memory lane and sparks a romance that he thought was safely locked in the past. But with old feelings resurfacing, other things Helm thought were buried are coming back to haunt him—a small-time hood in Mexico, a dirty drug deal, and a string of women that lead him into dangerous territory.

  • Here is a thrilling, uplifting story of true-life heroism unequaled since the publication of Anne Frank’s diary—a story that the young must hear and their elders must remember. Take Alicia’s hand—and follow.

    Her name is Alicia. She was thirteen when she began saving the lives of people she did not know—while fleeing the Nazis through war-ravaged Poland.

    Her family cruelly wrenched from her, Alicia rescued other Jews from the Gestapo, led them to safe hideouts, and lent them her courage and hope. Even the sight of her mother’s brutal murder could not quash this remarkable child’s faith in human goodness—or her determination to prevail against overwhelming odds.

    After the war, Alicia continued to risk her life, leading Polish Jews on an underground route to freedom in Palestine. She swore on her brother’s grave that if she survived, she would speak for her silenced family. This book is the eloquent fulfillment of that oath.

  • The latest entry in Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger’s popular Sherlock Holmes-inspired mystery series

    Sherlock Holmes has not only captivated readers for more than a century and a quarter, he has fascinated writers as well. It is little wonder, then, that when the renowned Sherlockians Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger invited their writer-friends and colleagues to be inspired by the Holmes canon, a cornucopia of stories sprang forth, with more than sixty of the greatest modern writers participating in four acclaimed anthologies.

    Now, King and Klinger have invited another fifteen masters to become In League with Sherlock Holmes. The contributors to this volume include award-winning authors of horror, thrillers, mysteries, westerns, and science-fiction, all bound together in admiration and affection for the original stories. The resulting stories are funny, haunting, thrilling, and surprising. All are unforgettable.

  • From the master of the Western comes a novel full of romance and adventure.

    Adam Laret—big, young, and headstrong—ran from Ehrenberg to the banks of the Rio Colorado. He was blindly fleeing his scheming, gambling brother and the woman Guerd stole from him. But Adam’s escape wasn’t complete until Guerd, in the company of a sheriff, hunted him down. Then Adam committed the ultimate crime. With the mark of Cain upon him—he traveled into the desert to atone for his sins.

    In a vast, harsh world of heat and beauty, of stealthy creatures and gnawing starvation, Adam faced death and madmen, Indians and strangers who lived where life was impossible. But nothing he did—no act of courage, righteousness, or violence—washed Adam clean. Until he met a woman and made a choice: to fight his way back to civilization, the most dangerous place of all.

  • Based on historic events, and frighteningly relevant to today’s headlines—a taut thriller about one American diplomat’s year of living dangerously in Tehran in the days leading up to the Iranian Revolution …

    In the style of Alan Furst, this suspenseful thriller—based on real events—places an idealistic American diplomat in a turbulent, US-hating Tehran in the days leading up to the Iranian Revolution. Backed by the CIA, and trailed by a beautiful and engaging French journalist he suspects is a spy, David Weiseman’s mission is to ease the Shah of Iran out of power and find the best alternative between the military, religious extremists, and the political ruling class—many of whom are simultaneously trying to kill him.

  • In this new collection, Ben Bova has compiled fourteen of his favorite short stories. Each story includes an all-new introduction with compelling insight into the narrative.

    Exploring the boundaries of the genre, Bova not only writes of spaceships, aliens, and time travel in most of his titles, but also speculates on the beginnings of science fiction in “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” as well as the morality of man in “The Angel’s Gift.” Stories such as “The Café Coup” and “We’ll Always Have Paris” dip into speculative historical fiction, asking questions about what would happen if someone could change history for the better. This expansive collection is a key addition for Bova fans and sci-fi lovers alike!

    Stories included in this collection: “Monster Slayer,” “Muzhestvo,” “We’ll Always Have Paris,” “The Great Moon Hoax, or A Princess of Mars,” “Inspiration,” “Scheherazade and the Storytellers,” “The Supersonic Zeppelin,” “Mars Farts,” “The Man Who Hated Gravity,” “Sepulcher,” “The Café Coup,” “The Angel’s Gift,” “Waterbot,” and “Sam and the Flying Dutchman.”

  • “I am a sick man … I am a spiteful man,” a nameless voice cries out. And so, from underground, emerge the passionate confessions of a suffering man; the painful self-examination of a tormented soul; the bristling scorn of a lonely individual who has become one of the greatest antiheroes in all literature.

    In 1864, just prior to the years in which he wrote his greatest novels—Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, The Possessed, and The Brothers Karamazov—Fyodor Dostoevsky penned the darkly fascinating Notes from Underground. Its nameless hero is a profoundly alienated individual in whose brooding self-analysis there is a search for the true and the good in a world of relative values and few absolutes. Moreover, the novel introduces themes—moral, religious, political, and social—that dominated Dostoevsky’s later works.

    Those who are familiar with his works will immediately recognize the novel’s richly complex philosophical, political, and psychological themes; those who are not will find the best introduction to Dostoevsky’s grander masterpieces.

  • From two acclaimed experts in the genre, a brand-new volume of supernatural stories showcasing the forgotten female horror writers from 1852–1923

    While the nineteen-year-old Mary Shelley may be hailed as the first modern writer of horror, the success of her immortal Frankenstein undoubtedly inspired dozens of female authors who wrote their own evocative, chilling tales.

    Weird Women, edited by award-winning anthologists Lisa Morton and Leslie S. Klinger, collects some of the finest tales of terror by authors as legendary as Louisa May Alcott, Frances Hodgson Burnett, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, alongside works of writers who were the bestsellers and critical favorites of their time—Marie Corelli, Ellen Glasgow, Charlotte Riddell—and lesser known authors who are deserving of contemporary recognition.

    As railroads, industry, cities, and technology flourished in the mid-nineteenth century, so did stories exploring the horrors they unleashed. This anthology includes ghost stories and tales of haunted houses, as well as mad scientists, werewolves, ancient curses, mummies, psychological terrors, demonic dimensions, and even weird westerns.

    Curated by Klinger and Morton with an aim to present work that has languished in the shadows, all of these exceptional supernatural stories are sure to surprise, delight, and frighten today’s readers.

  • We burn them to ashes and then burn the ashes.

    In Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, that’s the motto of the Firemen who hunted down and burned books wherever they found them. Bradbury warned of a world where our literary history is taken from us. In Burn the Ashes, some of the best science fiction authors working today continue to explore the dystopic worlds they introduced in Ignorance Is Strength.

    Edited by John Joseph Adams, Hugh Howey, and Christie Yant, the Dystopia Triptych is a series of three anthologies of dystopian fiction. Ignorance Is Strength—before the dystopia—focuses on society during its descent into absurdity and madness. Burn the Ashes—during the dystopia—turns its attention to life during the strangest, most dire times. Or Else the Light—after the dystopia—concludes the saga with each author sharing their own vision of how we as a society might crawl back from the precipice of despair.

    Burn the Ashes features all-new, never-before-published works by the following authors, in order of appearance: Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Hugh Howey, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, Dominica Phetteplace, Alex Irvine, Tobias S. Buckell, Scott Sigler, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

  • Into the darkness within; or else the light …

    When Margaret Atwood wrote these words, she left open the possibility that even our darkest tales may harbor a glimmer of hope. In Or Else the Light, the third and final entry in the Dystopia Triptych, over a dozen of the best minds in science fiction conclude their stories with a descent into darkness, or perhaps a ray of light.

    Edited by John Joseph Adams, Hugh Howey, and Christie Yant, the Dystopia Triptych is a series of three anthologies of dystopian fiction. Ignorance Is Strength—before the dystopia—focuses on society during its descent into absurdity and madness. Burn the Ashes—during the dystopia—turns its attention to life during the strangest, most dire times. Or Else the Light—after the dystopia—concludes the saga with each author sharing their own vision of how we as a society might crawl back from the precipice of despair.

    Or Else the Light features all-new, never-before-published works by the following authors, in order of appearance: Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Hugh Howey, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, Dominica Phetteplace, Alex Irvine, Tobias S. Buckell, Scott Sigler, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

  • War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.

    George Orwell once wrote of a world where abuse of power begins with an abuse of language and a bastardization of truth. Some of today’s most exciting voices in speculative fiction explore the ramifications of those ideas in Ignorance Is Strength.

    The Dystopia Triptych is a series of three anthologies of dystopian fiction. Ignorance Is Strength—before the dystopia—focuses on society during its descent into absurdity and madness. Burn the Ashes—during the dystopia—turns its attention to life during the strangest, most dire times. Or Else the Light—after the dystopia—concludes the saga with each author sharing their own vision of how we as a society might crawl back from the precipice of despair.

    Ignorance Is Strength features all-new, never-before-published works by the following authors, in order of appearance: Carrie Vaughn, Tim Pratt, Rich Larson, Cadwell Turnbull, Karin Lowachee, Adam-Troy Castro, Caroline M. Yoachim, Hugh Howey, An Owomoyela, Seanan McGuire, Dominica Phetteplace, Alex Irvine, Tobias S. Buckell, Scott Sigler, Darcie Little Badger, Violet Allen, and Merc Fenn Wolfmoor.

  • “Right out of the gate, the entire game was designed to empty the pockets of those rich, celeb-loving LA suckers.”—Houston Curtis

    Leonardo DiCaprio. Alex Rodriguez. Tobey Maguire. Affleck. Damon. Cassavetes.

    What do these people have in common? Not just fame and fortune; all these men are also alumni of the ultra-exclusive, high-stakes poker ring that inspired Aaron Sorkin’s Oscar-nominated film, Molly’s Game.

    But Houston Curtis, the card shark who cofounded the game with Tobey Maguire, knows that Sorkin’s is the whitewashed version. In Billion Dollar Hollywood Heist, Curtis goes all-in, revealing the true story behind the game. From its origins with Maguire to staking DiCaprio’s first game, installing Molly Bloom, avoiding the hookers and blow down the hall, and weathering the FBI investigation that left Curtis with a lien on his house—this is the no-holds-barred account of the world’s most exclusive Texas hold ’em game from the man who started it—with all the names and salacious details that Molly’s Game left out.

    With the insider appeal of Rounders, more A-listers than Ocean’s 11, and the excitement of The Sting, Billion Dollar Hollywood Heist is the untold, insider’s story that makes Molly’s Game look tame.

  • Born in New York City’s black ghetto Harlem at the start of World War II, Samuel R. Delany married white poet Marilyn Hacker right out of high school. The interracial couple moved into the city’s new bohemian quarter, the Lower East Side, in summer 1961.

    Through the decade’s opening years, new art, new sexual practices, new music, and new political awareness burgeoned among the crowded streets and cheap railroad apartments. Beautifully, vividly, insightfully, Delany calls up this era of exploration and adventure as he details his development as a black gay writer in an open marriage, with tertiary walk-ons by Bob Dylan, Stokely Carmichael, W. H. Auden, and James Baldwin, and a panoply of brilliantly drawn secondary characters.

  • Discover the many faces of Arsène Lupin as you’ve never seen them before in this original compilation from Skyboat Media and Blackstone Publishing.

    Arsène Lupin boldly makes a name for himself in “Madame Imbert’s Safe” as he attempts to steal from a couple who may be hiding more than just money, and flaunts his keen eye as he traces a cold case in “The Queen’s Necklace.” In “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin,” passengers onboard a transatlantic steamer fear for their valuables when the captain announces that Arsène Lupin has snuck onto the ship … and he could be disguised as anyone. In “Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late,” Lupin goes head-to-head with Holmes, but someone from Lupin’s past may get in the way.

    Just when it seems like Lupin is in a criminal league all his own, Herlock Sholmes appears. Similar to the famous English detective (but, owing to the complaints of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, possessing an entirely different name), Sholmes travels to Paris to solve the case of the stolen blue diamond. Monsieur Lupin must employ all his ingenuity to avoid arrest and protect his reputation as the greatest thief the world has ever known. With daring escapes and intricate heists, this compilation showcases Lupin at his most cunning—and his most outrageous

    Full contents: Introduction by Alison Belle Bews • “The Arrest of Arsène Lupin” • “The Escape of Arsène Lupin” • “Madame Imbert’s Safe” • “The Black Pearl” • “Sherlock Holmes Arrives Too Late” • “The Queen’s Necklace” • “Lottery Ticket No. 514” • “The Blue Diamond” • “Herlock Sholmes Opens Hostilities” • “Light in the Darkness” • “An Abduction” • “The Second Arrest of Arsène Lupin”

  • He was the most dangerous fugitive, but didn’t exist!

    Nickie Haflinger had lived several lifetimes…but technically never existed. He was originally a fugitive from Tarnover, the incredibly powerful government think tank that educated him. First he had broken his identity code—then he made his escape. 

    Now he needed to find a way to restore sanity and freedom to the computerized masses and save a world nearing the brink of disaster. He didn’t care how he accomplished this—but the government did. That’s when his Tarnover teachers took him back into their labs, where Nickie Haflinger was set up to receive a whole new education.

  • Imagine a spell that can age you a lifetime in heartbeats, turn loved ones into enemies, and set demons upon your soul … and imagine having to use it to save the kingdom.

    Battle-tested Augum, Bridget, and Leera prepare for a final confrontation with the increasingly vicious Lord of the Legion. To face him, they must master a hopelessly complex spell they can only learn from their legendary mentor, Anna Atticus Stone.

    But with a kingdom hurtling toward annihilation, Anna Stone’s health failing, and relationships crumbling under the stress, the trio face the most painful decisions of their lives. For the slim chance of victory, they’ll risk everything on a daring plan—one that, whether it triumphs or fails, will exact a terrible price.

  • The outrageous tales of the gentleman thief Arsène Lupin

    In “Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!,” it has been a fortnight since the baroness Repstein disappeared from Paris, taking with her a fortune in jewels stolen from her husband. French detectives have chased her all over Europe, following the trail of gemstones like so many precious breadcrumbs, but she has eluded their efforts. When Arsène Lupin finds her, she will not escape so easily. Meanwhile in “The Wedding-Ring,” a wife desperately tries to outwit a husband set on divorce and willing to use their son as a pawn. A greedy stepfather, a strange car accident, a false wedding announcement, and more are woven through the rest of these thrilling tales, in which the cunning gentleman thief outwits both policemen and criminals time and time again, always making sure to pocket something for himself.

    Full contents: “Two Hundred Thousand Francs Reward!” • “The Wedding-Ring” • “The Sign of the Shadow” • “The Infernal Trap” • “The Red Silk Scarf” • “Shadowed by Death” • “A Tragedy in the Forest of Morgues” • “Lupin’s Marriage” • “The Invisible Prisoner” • “Edith Swan-Neck”

  • A historical sci-fi tale of the Land of the Blue Mountains 

    Best known for his masterpiece of horror, Dracula, Bram Stoker wrote a number of other novels and many short stories, all with supernatural themes or filled with a physical terror reminiscent of Poe. First published in 1909, The Lady of the Shroud is an engrossing concoction of an epic steampunk adventure, military tale, and science fiction romance. 

    Old Roger Melton has died, leaving behind one of the greatest fortunes in Europe. His arrogant relative Ernest Melton expects to be the heir, but, much to the family’s surprise, Roger leaves his vast estate to his obscure young nephew, Rupert Sent Leger. But Rupert’s newfound wealth comes with strange conditions attached, one of which is that he must inhabit the old castle of Vissarion in the remote Balkan nation known as the Land of the Blue Mountains. 

    Rupert, an intrepid adventurer, agrees and travels to Vissarion with his Aunt Janet, who possesses the occult power of Second Sight. But all is not as it seems at Vissarion. Rupert finds himself visited by a ghostly woman clothed in a burial shroud who sleeps in a tomb. Haunted by her strange beauty, he declares his love and they wed in an Orthodox ceremony conducted by candlelight. As a newly married couple, their trials and adventures continue. From sea battles with mechanical crabs and flying machines to insidious court plotters and spies, the newlyweds battle all manner of foe in their quest to free their country and become the ruling Voivodes of Vissarion, the Land of the Blue Mountains. 

  • In this original collection from Skyboat Media and Blackstone Publishing, Elizabeth Gaskell showcases the height of gothic fiction’s ability to delight in the otherworldly and to dig deep into what truly haunts us.

    Set against the backdrop of the Salem witch trials, “Lois the Witch” reveals much about the complicity of mankind. Recently orphaned, Lois is forced to leave the English parsonage that had been her home and sail to America. Though she is a God-fearing and honest girl, it seems her identity as the strange, new, English girl is all anyone can see and she becomes a target for the superstitious townsfolk. In “The Grey Woman” we follow a young woman who learns the true nature of her new husband and is forced to flee their isolated home. In “Curious, If True” we are given a peek into a party attended by some very familiar fairy-tale figures. And finally, in “The Doom of the Griffiths” we must wait and see if the prophecy of an old family curse will be fulfilled.

    A collaborator and friend of Charles Dickens and Wilkie Collins, Elizabeth Gaskell is a leading figure in Victorian literature.

    Full contents:

    “Lois the Witch” – read by Gabrielle de Cuir
    “The Half-Brothers” – read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “The Old Nurse’s Story” – read by Justine Eyre
    “The Grey Woman” – read by Juliet Mills
    “Curious, If True” – read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “Disappearances” – read by Juliet Mills
    “The Doom of the Griffiths” – read by Justine Eyre

  • The most spine-tingling suspense stories from the colonial era—including Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, and H. P. Lovecraft, and many more

    This stunning anthology of classic colonial suspense fiction plunges deep into the native soil from which American horror literature first sprang. While European writers of the Gothic and bizarre evoked ruined castles and crumbling abbeys, their American counterparts looked back to the colonial era’s stifling religion, and its dark and threatening woods.

    Today the best-known tale of colonial horror is Washington Irving’s The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, although Irving’s story is probably best known today from various movie versions it has inspired. Colonial horror tales of other prominent American authors—Nathaniel Hawthorne and James Fenimore Cooper among them—are overshadowed by their bestsellers, and are difficult to find in modern libraries. Many other pioneers of American horror fiction are presented afresh in this breathtaking volume for today’s public readers.

    Some will have heard the names of Increase and Cotton Mather in association with the Salem witch trials, but will not have sought out their contemporary accounts of what were viewed as supernatural events. By bringing these writers to the attention of the contemporary readers, this collection will help bring their names—and their work—back from the dead.

  • Two tales from the golden age of supernatural fiction

    The Haunted House at Latchford by Mrs. J. H. Riddell

    Mrs. J. H. Riddell excelled at blending the realistic and supernatural elements in her stories. In Essex she found the right dreary setting for The Haunted House at Latchford, “where beyond the fated house and ruined garden lay the belt of pine trees and the lake of the dismal swamp, which had furnished Crow Hall with no less than two tragedies.”

    The Haunted Hotel by Wilkie Collins

    Like Edgar Allan Poe before him and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle after, Wilkie Collins shifted easily from rational domains to the “superrational.” The Haunted Hotel exhibits the same relentless pace and narrative power, the same attention to plot and backdrop detail that distinguish The Moonstone and The Woman in White, along with the obsession with destiny and the willful struggle against it. Collins’s much-loved Venice provides the scenery and fatal beauty, the grim waterways and palaces the author will haunt with mysterious women, grotesques, and bloody conspiracies.

  • This masterful collection of seventeen classic mystery stories, dating from 1837 to 1914, traces the earliest history of popular detective fiction.

    Today, the figure of Sherlock Holmes towers over detective fiction like a colossus―but it was not always so. Edgar Allan Poe’s French detective Dupin, the hero of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” preceded Holmes’s deductive reasoning by more than forty years with his “tales of ratiocination.” In A Study in Scarlet, the first of Holmes’ adventures, Doyle acknowledged his debt to Poe―and to Émile Gaboriau, whose thief-turned-detective Monsieur Lecoq debuted in France twenty years earlier.

    If “Rue Morgue” was the first true detective story in English, the title of the first full-length detective novel is more hotly contested. Two books by Wilkie Collins―The Woman in White (1859) and The Moonstone (1868)―are often given that honor, with the latter showing many of the features that came to identify the genre: a locked-room murder in an English country house; bungling local detectives outmatched by a brilliant amateur detective; a large cast of suspects and a plethora of red herrings; and a final twist before the truth is revealed. Others point to Mary Elizabeth Braddon’s The Trail of the Serpent (1861) or Aurora Floyd (1862), and others still to The Notting Hill Mystery (1862–3) by the pseudonymous “Charles Felix.”

    As the early years of detective fiction gave way to two separate golden ages―of hard-boiled tales in America and intricately-plotted, so-called “cozy” murders in Britain―the legacy of Sherlock Holmes, with his fierce devotion to science and logic, gave way to street smarts on the one hand and social insight on the other―but even though these new sub-genres went their own ways, their detectives still required the intelligence and clear-sightedness that characterized the earliest works of detective fiction: the trademarks of Sherlock Holmes, and of all the detectives featured here.

  • Warlocks Augum, Bridget, and Leera are finally able to relax after a grueling ordeal in Bahbell. But their fugitive mentor, the legendary Anna Atticus Stone, tasks them with a dangerous new quest—sneak into an ancient library and research an artifact that could devastate the Legion, and turn the tide in the war.

    Their substitute mentor Leopold Harvus, however, is an obsessive and petty man with a distaste for anything untoward, particularly Augum and Leera’s affections for each other. As their studies suffer from his meddling, Harvus finally pushes Augum too far—leading to a brazen act of rebellion that plunges the trio and their quest into mortal peril, for Harvus quickly proves he is not a man to be trifled with.

  • Algernon Blackwood, a journalist and broadcast narrator, was one of the most prolific writers of ghost stories in the history of the genre. Included here are thirteen of his stories.

    The title story, “The Touch of Pan,” explores the lingering presence of myth in everyday life. In “The Glamour of the Snow,” Blackwood winds a tale about a man’s infatuation with a supernatural winter beauty. In “The Attic,” the ghost of an usurer haunts the old Chateaux and, on the anniversary of a young boy’s death, the boy’s cat brings the family together.

    “The Willows” follows two campers who are on a canoe trip down the Danube, with the sense of a looming threat following them. When darkness falls, they pick the wrong place to sleep for the night—a place where another dimension impinges on our own. American horror author H. P. Lovecraft considered “The Willows” to be the finest supernatural tale in English literature.

    Full contents:

    “The Touch of Pan,” read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “The Transfer,” read by Justine Eyre
    “The Occupant of the Room,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “The Valley of the Beasts,” read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “The Glamour of the Snow,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “The Pikestaff Case,” read by Kate Orsini
    “The Tryst,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “Wayfarers,” read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “The House of the Past,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “Initiation,” read by Stefan Rudnicki
    “The Wings of Horus,” read by Gabrielle de Cuir
    “The Attic,” read by Paul Boehmer
    “The Willows,” read by Stefan Rudnicki

  • The survivor of a plane crash wakes up in a hospital in Canada, his memory a blank. Then in walks Kitty, a gorgeous woman, who tells him that he is Paul Madden, a photographer and her fiancé. Not bad. Except that a man on the phone keeps calling him Matt Helm.

    Things don’t add up. This can only mean trouble …

  • From the internationally bestselling author of The Last Kabbalist of Lisbon comes a dazzling new work of historical fiction, retelling the story of the Passion from the point of view of Lazarus.

    According to the New Testament, Jesus resurrected his friend, but the Gospel of John omits details of how he achieved this miracle and whether he had any special purpose in doing so. The acclaimed novelist Richard Zimler takes up the tale and recreates the story of the Passion from Lazarus’s point of view.

    Restored to physical health, he has difficulty picking up his former existence; his experience of death has left him fragile and disoriented, and he has sensed nothing of an afterlife. Meanwhile he has become something of a local celebrity, even though he and Jesus are increasingly reviled by the Temple’s high priests. As he turns more and more to Jesus for guidance, while observing his friend’s growing mystical powers and influence through his spiritual activities, he finds their lives becoming dangerously entwined, which tests to the limit their friendship and affection.

    In this compelling work of fiction, the author places Jesus in the historical context of ancient Jewish practice and tradition; he is at once a charismatic rabbi and a political activist who uses his awareness of a transcendent reality—culminating in the Kingdom of Heaven—to try to bring justice to his people and a broader compassion for humankind.

    With The Gospel According to Lazarus, Richard Zimler brings the familiar story vividly to life and finds fresh meaning in the Passion and Crucifixion.

  • Earth is the latest science fiction novel from multiple Hugo Award winner Ben Bova, author of Apes and Angels and Survival

    A wave of lethal gamma radiation is expanding from the core of the Milky Way galaxy at the speed of light, killing everything in its path. The countdown to when the death wave will reach Earth and the rest of the solar system is at two thousand years.

    Humans were helped by the Predecessors, who provided shielding generators that can protect the solar system. In return, the Predecessors asked humankind’s help to save other intelligent species that are in danger of being annihilated.

    But what of Earth? With the Death Wave no longer a threat to humanity, humans have spread out and colonized all the worlds of the solar system. The technology of the Predecessors has made Earth a paradise, at least on the surface. But a policy of exiling discontented young people to the outer planets and asteroid mines has led to a deep divide between the new worlds and the homeworld, and those tensions are about to explode into open war.

  • Meticulously formatted, this is a highly readable edition of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s investigation of Central Intelligence Agency interrogation and detention programs launched in the wake of the 9/11 attacks.

    Based on over six million internal CIA documents, the report details secret prisons—like the one in Thailand run by Gina Haspel—prisoner deaths, interrogation practices, and cooperation with other foreign and domestic agencies. It also examines charges that the CIA deceived elected officials and governmental overseers about the extent and legality of its operations.

    Over five years in the making, and withheld from public view since its declassification in April, 2014, this is the full summary report as finally released by the United States government on December 9, 2014.

  • Matt Helm is unexpectedly rich, and he doesn’t like it. Twenty thousand mysterious dollars appear in his bank account, but this is no time for celebration. Another secret agent with an unexplained surplus is murdered, and Helm figures he better work out who his “benefactor” is before he becomes the next target.

  • “Are you really a thief?”

    That’s the question that has haunted fourteen-year-old Ezekiel Blast all his life. But he’s not a thief, he just has a talent for finding things. Not a superpower—a micropower. Because what good is finding lost bicycles and hair scrunchies, especially when you return them to their owners and everyone thinks you must have stolen them in the first place? If only there were some way to use Ezekiel’s micropower for good, to turn a curse into a blessing. His friend Beth thinks there must be, and so does a police detective investigating the disappearance of a little girl. When tragedy strikes, it’s up to Ezekiel to use his talent to find what matters most.

    Master storyteller Orson Scott Card delivers a touching and funny, compelling and smart novel about growing up, harnessing your potential, and finding your place in the world, no matter how old you are.

  • It is almost impossible to envision what childhood would be like without the enchanting world of fairyland. Three-headed trolls, horses that carry their masters up mountains of glass, giants and dwarfs, monsters and magicians, fairies and ogres—these are the companions who will thrill young boys and girls of all lands and all times, as Andrew Lang’s phenomenally successful collections of stories have proved. From the day that they were first printed, the Lang fairy-tale books of many colors have entertained thousands of boys and girls, as they have also brought pleasure to the many parents who have read these unforgettable classics to their children.

    In addition to such familiar favorites as “Jack and the Beanstalk,” “Rapunzel,” “The Ratcatcher” (“The Pied Piper”), and “Snowdrop” (“Snow White”), The Red Fairy Book contains a wonderful collection of lesser-known tales from French, German, Danish, Russian, and Romanian sources. A tale from Norse mythology recounts the old story of Sigurd and Brynhild; tales by the great Madame d’Aulnoy include “Graciosa and Percinet” and “Princess Rosette”; lesser-known tales from Grimm’s collection include “The Three Dwarfs,” “Mother Holle,” and “The Golden Goose.”

    All in all, this collection contains thirty-seven stories, all narrated in the clear, lively prose for which Lang was famous. Not only are Lang’s generally conceded to be the best English versions of standard stories, his collections are the richest and widest in range. His position as one of England’s foremost folklorists as well as his first-rate literary abilities makes his collections unmatchable in the English language.

  • Mikhail Sholokhov’s groundbreaking epic novel gives a sweeping depiction of Russian life and culture in the early twentieth century. In the same vein as War and Peace, by Leo Tolstoy, And Quiet Flows the Don gives listeners a glimpse into many aspects of Russian culture, and the choices a country makes when faced with war and destruction.

  • “I can’t kill you. If I do, Mac will send out the executioners, the termination squads …”

    When the big man in Washington assigned Matt Helm to ride shotgun on a top-secret mission in Norway, Helm wanted to know why. But this was a need-to-know deal, at least until his partner—a woman posing as his mistress—was killed. Now Helm is mad—mad enough to blow the operation sky high.

  • Artificial intelligence/robotics: Have we opened a Pandora’s Box?

    As AI and robotics eliminate jobs across the spectrum, governmental revenues will plummet while the debt increases dramatically. This crisis of limited resources on all levels—underfunded or nonexistent pensions, health problems, lack of savings, and job destruction without comparable job creation—will drive many into homelessness and produce a dramatic rise in violence as we fight over shrinking resources.

  • Johnny Lundgren, a.k.a. Warlock, is an unemployed foundation executive who, after surviving a midlife crisis, finally decides to get a job. Warlock soon gets hired by a crazy but genius doctor as a trouble-shooter, where he’s tasked with everything from battling poachers in the haunted wilderness of northern Michigan to investigating his employer’s wife and son in the seamy underside of Key West. A comedy with one foot in the abyss, Warlock is what the New York Times called “farcical, reflective, luscious, gritty” entertainment from one of this country’s most beloved authors.

  • John Knox, the Thundering Scott, lives a life of adventure and danger in turbulent, corrupt sixteenth-century Scotland. Finding himself a wanted man, Knox is besieged in a castle by French soldiers, seized, and made a galley slave. Yet he is unflinching in his stand for the gospel, even in the face of assassins and death, and even when his fiery preaching makes him an enemy of Mary, Queen of Scots.

    Told from the perspective of a young student resolved to protect Knox no matter the cost, Douglas Bond’s thrilling biographical novel provides a look at the harrowing life story of a giant of the faith. Discover the fascinating story of a timid man transformed by the grace and power of the gospel into one of the most influential figures in Scottish history.

  • This novel centers on the figure of Ilya Ilyich Oblomov, a member of the dying class of the landed gentry, who spends most of his time lying in bed gazing at life in an apathetic daze, encouraged by his equally lazy servant Zakhar and routinely swindled by his acquaintances. But this torpid existence comes to an end when, spurred on by his crumbling finances, the love of a woman, and the reproaches of his friend, the hardworking Schtoltz, Oblomov finds that he must engage with the real world and face up to his commitments.

  • Moses is renowned as a great lawgiver, prophet, friend of God, and deliverer of his people. The events of his life, spanning four books of the Bible, resound throughout Scripture. In this epic undertaking, James M. Boice delves into the narrative to uncover its rich meaning and gospel application to our lives today.

    We can learn a lot from Moses about faithfulness, prayerfulness, meekness, and good leadership—we can even learn from his sins and failure! But Boice shows how we can also look beyond Moses and the Israelites to the awesome power of God and the promise of a much needed, much greater Deliverer.

  • H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos is a primary influence of countless iconic authors, and even now, nearly a century after its publication, its themes of cosmic horror and madness remain at the forefront of supernatural literature, as well as being highly influential in the mediums of music, film, and video games. But Lovecraft’s expansive imagination didn’t stop there. This five-story volume contains some fascinating rarities outside the Cthulhu Mythos.

    The Lurking Fear includes examples of Lovecraft’s earliest weird fiction including “Hypnos,” “What the Moon Brings,” “Imprisoned with the Pharaohs,” and “Memory,” (inspiration for the 2014 film of the same name) as well as the title story, “The Lurking Fear,” a traditional horror study commissioned by George Julian Houtain to be run as a serial in Home Brew magazine in 1923 that has served as the source material for multiple films and been adapted into a comic book.

    Only H. P. Lovecraft could conceive the delicious and spine-tingling horrors you will find within the pages of this unique five-story collection.

  • The first in a five-volume set of essential reading that examines the causes of the Great War

    This, the first in Sir Winston Churchill’s five-volume history examining the events and context leading up to the outbreak of World War I from a true insider’s point of view, is unsurpassed as both a historical and personal account of the earth-shaking events leading up to the Great War.

    Churchill’s epic series begins in 1911, when Churchill was First Lord of the Admiralty, and opens with a chilling description of the Agadir Crisis, and an in-depth account of naval clashes in the Dardanelles—one of Churchill’s major military failures. It takes readers from the fierce bloodshed of the Gallipoli campaign to the tragic sinking of the Lusitania and the tide-turning battles of Jutland and Verdun—as well as the USA’s entry into the combat theater.

    Written in powerful prose by a great leader who would also go on to receive a Nobel Prize in Literature, and based on thousands of his own personal letters and memos, The World Crisis provides a perspective you won’t find anywhere else: a dynamic insider’s account of events that would shape the outcome of modern history.

  • Their plans were conceived in a drunken excitement and resulted in more horror than any of them could have imagined. There was the poet able to retreat into beatific reveries of superb fishing in cold, fast streams; the Vietnam vet consumed by uppers, downers, and violence; and the girl who loved only one of them—at first.

    With their ideals ostensibly in order, they set out from Florida to save the Grand Canyon from a dam they believed was being built. Along with the tape deck for the car, the liquor, and the drugs, there was also a case of dynamite.

  • From a #1 New York Times bestselling author comes the story of Judas Iscariot—and the stunning betrayal that changed the course of history.

    One of the great dramas of the biblical era is brought to thrilling new life in this epic novel told from the unique perspective of Judas Iscariot himself. This is the story of Judas the myth, condemned by Dante to the most terrifying circle of Hell; Judas the man, the son of wealth and power who fought to suppress the lusts of the flesh and the sin of pride to become one of the twelve original disciples of Jesus Christ; and Judas the apostle, victim of a diabolical lie, history’s arch traitor, who sold his Lord for thirty pieces of silver, and sealed his fate with a kiss.

    From Judas’s years as the young rebel of an affluent family undone by his own idealism to his victimization by Pontius Pilate to the crucifixion and Christ’s resurrection, I, Judas is one of the most powerful and revelatory works of religious fiction ever published.

  • A masterful and definitive biography of one of the most misunderstood and controversial writers in Russian literature

    Mikhail Sholokhov is arguably one of the most contentious recipients of the Nobel Prize in Literature. As a young man, Sholokhov’s epic novel, Quiet Don, became an unprecedented overnight success.

    Stalin’s Scribe is the first biography of a man who was once one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent political figures. Thanks to the opening of Russia’s archives, Brian Boeck discovers that Sholokhov’s official Soviet biography is actually a tangled web of legends, half-truths, and contradictions. Boeck examines the complex connection between an author and a dictator, revealing how a Stalinist courtier became an ideological acrobat and consummate politician in order to stay in favor and remain relevant after the dictator’s death.

    Stalin’s Scribe is remarkable biography that both reinforces and clashes with our understanding of the Soviet system. It reveals a Sholokhov who is bold, uncompromising, and sympathetic―and reconciles him with the vindictive and mean-spirited man described in so many accounts of late Soviet history.

    Shockingly, at the height of the terror, which claimed over a million lives, Sholokhov became a member of the most minuscule subset of the Soviet Union’s population―the handful of individuals whom Stalin personally intervened to save.

  • Originally published in 1923, Ernest Hemingway’s Three Stories and Ten Poems feature some of the expatriate’s lesser known, but still wonderful, works.

    The stories and poems include:

    • “Up in Michigan”
    • “Out of Season”
    • “My Old Man”
    • “Chapter Heading”
    • “Montparnasse”
    • “Roosevelt”
    • And more!

    Originally privately published in Paris, Three Stories and Ten Poems holds an interesting history. The three stories “Up in Michigan,” “Out of Season,” and “My Old Man” were first seen in this collection, but “Up in Michigan” was banned and not considered publishable in America until 1938 because of its blatant sexuality. In addition, this original publication of the three stories is all that remains of Hemingway’s early works after his suitcase containing the originals was stolen.

  • Larionov. A general of the Imperial Russian Army who mysteriously avoided execution by the Bolsheviks when they swept to power and went on to live a long life in Yalta, leaving behind a vast heritage of memoirs.

    Solovyov. The young history student who travels to Crimea, determined to find out how Larionov evaded capture after the 1917 revolution.

    With wry humor, Eugene Vodolazkin, one of Russia’s foremost contemporary writers, takes listeners on a fascinating journey through a momentous period of Russian history, interweaving the intriguing story of two men from very different backgrounds that ultimately asks whether we can really understand the present without first understanding the past.

  • On June 6, 1944, Werner T. Angress parachuted down from a C-47 into German-occupied France with the 82nd Airborne Division. Nine days later, he was captured behind enemy lines and, concealing his identity as a German-born Jew, became a prisoner of war. Eventually, he was freed by US forces, rejoined the fight, and participated in the liberation of a concentration camp.

    Although he was an American soldier, less than ten years before he had been an enthusiastically patriotic German-Jewish boy. Rejected and threatened by the Nazi regime, the Angress family fled to Amsterdam to escape persecution and death, and young Angress then found his way to the United States.

    In Witness to the Storm, Angress weaves the spellbinding story of his life, including his escape from Germany, his new life in the United States, and his experiences in World War II. A testament to the power of perseverance and forgiveness, Witness to the Storm is the powerful tale of one man’s struggle to fight for and rescue the country that had betrayed him.

  • A reappraisal of the giant massacres perpetrated by the Ottoman Empire and then the Turkish Republic against their Christian minorities from 1894 to 1924

    Between 1894 and 1924, three waves of violence swept across Anatolia, targeting the region’s Christian minorities, who had previously accounted for 20 percent of the population. By 1924 the Armenians, Assyrians, and Greeks had been reduced to 2 percent. Most historians have treated these waves as distinct, isolated events, and successive Turkish governments presented them as an unfortunate sequence of accidents. The Thirty-Year Genocide is the first account to show that the three were actually part of a single, continuing, and intentional effort to wipe out Anatolia’s Christian population.

    The years in question, the most violent in the recent history of the region, began during the reign of the Ottoman sultan Abdulhamid II, continued under the Young Turks, and ended during the first years of the Turkish Republic founded by Ataturk. Yet despite the dramatic swing from the Islamizing autocracy of the sultan to the secularizing republicanism of the post–World War I period, the nation’s annihilationist policies were remarkably constant, with continual recourse to premeditated mass killing, homicidal deportation, forced conversion, mass rape, and brutal abduction. And one thing more was a constant: the rallying cry of jihad. While not justified under the teachings of Islam, the killing of two million Christians was effected through the calculated exhortation of the Turks to create a pure Muslim nation.

    Revelatory and impeccably researched, Benny Morris and Dror Ze’evi’s account is certain to transform how we see one of modern history’s most horrific events.

  • The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds.

    Stars in My Pocket like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel’s central issues—technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism—have only become more pressing with the passage of time.

    The novel’s topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other’s perfect erotic object out to “point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more?” What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by “cultural fugue,” and the other is—you!

  • Apprentice warlocks Augum, Bridget, and Leera have reunited with their legendary mentor, Anna Atticus Stone. But her epic battle with the diabolical Lord of the Legion has taken a toll, and now she suffers from a deadly arcane fever. To revive her, Augum will have to earn the respect of a warrior people … by facing his childhood tormentors.

    Meanwhile, Augum and Leera’s feelings for each other are complicated by the upcoming Star Feast, a magical midnight dance to mark Endyear. Their revelry will have to be short-lived, however, for a perilous quest beckons—the trio must infiltrate an ancient castle that will pit them against enemies old and new, while testing every ounce of their skill and courage.

  • Time after time the American military has failed to match lofty declarations about its superiority, producing instead a mediocre record of military accomplishments. Starting from the Korean War the United States hasn’t won a single war against a technologically inferior, but mentally tough enemy. The technological dimension of American “strategy” has completely overshadowed any concern with the social, cultural, operational, and even tactical requirements of military (and political) conflict. With a new cold war with Russia emerging, the United States enters a new period of geopolitical turbulence completely unprepared in any meaningful way—intellectually, economically, militarily, or culturally—to face a reality which was hidden for the last seventy-plus years behind the curtain of never-ending Chalabi moments and a strategic delusion concerning Russia, whose history the US viewed through a Solzhenitsified caricature kept alive by a powerful neocon lobby, which even today dominates US policy makers’ minds.

    This book

    • explores the dramatic difference between the Russian and US approach to warfare, which manifests itself across the whole spectrum of activities from art and the economy, to the respective national cultures;
    • illustrates the fact that Russian economic, military, and cultural realities and power are no longer what American “elites” think they are by addressing Russia’s new and elevated capacities in the areas of traditional warfare as well as cyberwarfare and space; and
    • studies in depth several ways in which the US can simply stumble into conflict with Russia and what must be done to avoid it.

    Martyanov’s former Soviet military background enables deep insight into the fundamental issues of warfare and military power as a function of national power—assessed correctly, not through the lens of Wall Street “economic” indices and a FIRE economy, but through the numbers of enclosed technological cycles and culture, much of which has been shaped in Russia by continental warfare and which is practically absent in the US.

  • Born and brought up on a space ship that is slowly deteriorating, Linc discovers its secrets and the way to get the remaining occupants to their ultimate destination.

  • It was a double mission this time: First, to terminate a top-notch enemy agent. Second, to locate the missing fiancée of a Texas oil millionaire, lost in the Bermuda Triangle. Somehow these two cases were connected, but it wasn’t clear how until more high-profile types disappeared. They weren’t dead, just part of a deadly little game …

  • A group of scientists and other space travelers face life-or-death decisions after their spacecraft is damaged by fire.

  • Augum, Bridget, and Leera want only to study new spells and make their legendary mentor proud. But when she unexpectedly departs on a crucial quest, they run afoul of a devious old witch and are forced to make a hasty getaway—straight into the hands of a notorious maniac known as the Blade of Sorrows.

    Prisoners of the Blade and his sadistic apprentice, the trio must face their greatest challenge yet: escape using nothing but an ancient spell with some nasty side effects. But more than their lives are at stake, for an entire kingdom’s hopes rest with their mentor—and she’s heading for a deadly trap.

  • Award-winning writer Ben Bova returns with another tense political thriller starring Jake Ross, science advisor to Senator Frank Tomlinson, as they continue their complex power maneuvers they began in Power Play and Power Surge.

    Dr. Jake Ross came to Washington to try to make a difference, but he’s learned the only way to get something done in Washington, assuming your ideals survive the corrosive atmosphere, is to gather power. Ross has gathered a great deal, riding in the wake of Frank Tomlinson. But now Tomlinson has decided to shoot for the moon. If they win, they get it all. If they lose, the game is over for Jake Ross.

    The Power trilogy combines the political thriller with nuts-and-bolts near future science fiction. Bova’s vision of a future powered by solar satellite transmission is tantalizingly within reach.

  • A powerful world government has scientists transported from an overpopulated earth to a satellite on the eve of their discovery of a method to modify the human embryo.

  • Matt Helm is on vacation in Mexico with nothing on his mind except fishing, when some joker tries to shoot him in the back. Naturally, it was no accident—when secret agents get shot at, it never is. So Helm has to go back to work. At least there’s a bonus in the form of his boss’ beautiful daughter, a playmate in peril.

  • One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen’s most defiant and uninhibited work.

    As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell, two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy—and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for three hundred years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors.

    By turns vulgar, rhapsodic, and viciously witty, Beautiful Losers explores each character’s attainment of a state of self-abandonment, in which the sensualist cannot be distinguished from the saint.

  • When Matt Helm is dispatched to Los Angeles to investigate the shooting of an agent, it wasn’t just an assignment—it was personal. To get the answers he wants means run-ins with two-bit hoods, a trio of beautiful women, a bunch of drug traffickers, and his old friend Mr. Soo, whose government has ideas about polluting America to death.

  • From award-winning author Eugene Vodolazkin comes this poignant story of memory, love, and loss spanning twentieth-century Russia.

    A man wakes up in a hospital bed, with no idea who he is or how he came to be there. The only information the doctor shares with his patient is his name: Innokenty Petrovich Platonov. As memories slowly resurface, Innokenty begins to build a vivid picture of his former life as a young man in Russia in the early twentieth century, living through the turbulence of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath. But soon, only one question remains: how can he remember the start of the twentieth century, when the pills by his bedside were made in 1999? Reminiscent of the great works of twentieth-century Russian literature, with nods to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and Bulgakov’s The White Guard, The Aviator cements Vodolazkin’s position as the rising star of Russia’s literary scene.

  • Czechoslovakia, 1939. Snow is falling over the city when the Nazis invade. Before the ice on the roads has a chance to melt, everything has changed for the country—and for Viktor Trn.

    It isn’t obvious at first. The day-to-day realities of occupation take time to sink in. After losing his job as a history professor, Trn remains optimistic, preserving what little he can of his family’s dwindling freedom. In his family’s small apartment, the radio brings worsening news as Europe surrenders to Germany. Friends are arrested, men are hanged in the local school. Trn must protect his young son, but he understands leaving their homeland could prove too dangerous.

    In the spirit of Kristin Hannah’s The Nightingale and Anthony Doerr’s All the Light We Cannot See, The Wooden King explores denial, desire, and family drama against the lyrically rendered backdrop of World War II, deftly navigating “the simple difference between what we do and what we ought to do” in the face of rising totalitarianism.

  • The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of Earth, where his kind have settled among the leftover artifacts of humanity. The deeper tale concerns, however, the way those who are “different” must deal with the dominant cultural ideology. The tale follows Lobey’s mythic quest for his lost love, Friza. In luminous and hallucinated language, it explores what new myths might emerge from the detritus of the human world as those who are “different” try to seize history and the day.

  • Buddha and Einstein Walk into a Bar explores the revolutionary idea that sensing how long we can live is a latent capacity in us, currently unknown—just like the introduction of fire, the invention of flying, and the discovery of radio waves were before we “discovered” them. Understand how the knowledge of transcendence, consciousness, and self-healing are integral to your well-being.

    You could drive a car without a fuel gauge, but knowing how much gas you have clearly gives you more control of your vehicle. Using the latest breakthroughs in cosmology, neuroplasticity, superstring theory, and epigenetics, Buddha and Einstein Walk into a Bar helps you to master your entire system of mind, body, and energy and provides practical tools to help you live your longest and healthiest life.

    In this book, you will learn

    • exercises—align the different systems of the body;
    • mindfulness and meditation—relieve daily stress;
    • good nutrition―simple rules sustainable for a lifetime;
    • proper rest―for mental and physical peak performance; and
    • active lifestyle―stay vibrant through your entire life.

  • Charming and lyrical, The Fairies of Sadieville concludes Alex Bledsoe’s widely-praised contemporary fantasy series about the fairy descendants of Appalachia.

    “This is real.” Three small words on a film canister found by graduate students Justin and Veronica, who discover a long-lost silent movie from more than a century ago. The startlingly realistic footage shows a young girl transforming into a winged being. Looking for proof behind this claim, they travel to the rural foothills of Tennessee to find Sadieville, where it had been filmed.

    Soon, their journey takes them to Needsville, whose residents are hesitant about their investigation, but Justin and Veronica are helped by Tucker Carding, who seems to have his own ulterior motives. When the two students unearth a secret long hidden, everyone in the Tufa community must answer the most important question of their entire lives―what would they be willing to sacrifice in order to return to their fabled homeland of Tír na nÓg?

  • The first tremors of the earth were felt at 7:22 EST. time. Every single person felt the rumbling and experienced the tremors that would forever alter the course of history. Most did not survive. These are the accounts of some of those who did.

    Following three sets of people, The Upheaval is filled with heartbreak and hope. The day starts out like any other but soon goes to calamity. From earthquake to fire to tsunami, they must face disaster from every angle—the world they once knew has shattered in a just a few hours.

  • Portland has a witch problem.

    Claire expects Christmas vacation to deliver an earned respite from thinking, doing, and obeying. She gets to sleep in and play with dragons. Right? Of course not. Ghosts don’t care about vacation.

    Drew wishes magic could finish high school for him. Who cares about calculus or dangling participles when he can crush mutant bugs with his mind? It can’t do much more, though, until he gets off his butt and learns how to use it properly.

    In this fifth and final installment of the Spirit Knights series, Claire and Drew find out what happens when they spend three weeks ignoring the obligations of the power at their command and live a normal life.

    Spoiler alert: nothing good.

  • “Ride, You Tonto Raiders”

    Matt Sabre is a young and experienced gunfighter—but not a trouble seeker. But when Billy Curtin calls him a liar and goes for his gun, Matt has no choice but to draw and fire. To his surprise, the dying man gives him $5,000 and begs him to take the money to his wife, who is alone in defending the family ranch in the Mogollons. A combination of guilt, regret, and wanting to do the right thing leads Sabre to make that ride.

    “Riders of the Dawn”

    A young gunslinger is changed for the better by meeting a beautiful woman. A classic range-war Western, this novel features that powerful, romantic, strangely compelling vision of the American West for which L’Amour’s fiction is known. In the author’s words, “It was a land where nothing was small, nothing was simple. Everything, the lives of men and the stories they told, ran to extremes.”

    This story is one of Louis L’Amour’s early creations that have long been a source of speculation and curiosity among his fans. Early in his career, L’Amour wrote a number of novel-length stories for the pulps. Long after they were out of print, the characters of these early stories still haunted him. It was by revising and expanding these stories that L’Amour would create his first novels.

  • When a human team is sent to scout a few hundred light-years in front of the death wave, it encounters a civilization far in advance of our own, a civilization of machine intelligences.

    These sentient, intelligent machines have existed for eons and have survived earlier “death waves,” gamma-ray bursts from the core of the galaxy. They are totally self-sufficient, completely certain that the death wave cannot harm them, and utterly uninterested in helping to save other civilizations, whether organic or machine.

    But now that the humans have discovered them, they refuse to allow them to leave their planet, reasoning that other humans will inevitably follow if they learn of their existence.

  • This time Mac has gone too far. For Helm to impersonate a Communist courier to whom he bears no resemblance is suicide—and that isn’t all. Someone wants to get the layout of the Alaskan Northwest Coastal Defense System, but they aren’t the goodies or the baddies. So who the hell are they? And who is the mysterious Holz that Helm is meant to kill?

  • In a near future, the air pollution is so bad that everyone wears gas masks. The infant mortality rate is soaring and birth defects, new diseases, and physical ailments of all kinds abound. The water is undrinkable—unless you’re poor and have no choice. Large corporations fighting over profits from gas masks, drinking water, and clean food tower over an ineffectual, corrupt government.

    Environmentalist Austin Train is on the run. The “trainites,” a group of violent environmental activists, want him to lead their movement; the government wants him dead; and the media demands amusement. But Train just wants to survive.

    More than a novel of science fiction, The Sheep Look Up is a skillful and frightening political and social commentary that takes its place next to other remarkable works of dystopian literature, such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451, and George Orwell’s 1984.

  • The best-known prose work by the winner of the 1980 Nobel Prize for Literature examines the moral and intellectual conflicts faced by men and women living under totalitarianism of the left or right.

    Written in the early 1950s, when Eastern Europe was in the grip of Stalinism and many Western intellectuals placed their hopes in the new order of the East, this classic work reveals in fascinating detail the often beguiling allure of totalitarian rule to people of all political beliefs and its frightening effects on the minds of those who embrace it.

  • Etchison’s fiction is justly famous for its creepy ambience, and explores the terrain mapped out by Philip K. Dick, Thomas Harris, and any number of black and white horror movies. This is his legendary first collection, carefully corrected by the author for this new edition. The title story won both the World Fantasy Award and the British Fantasy Award in 1982, the first time a single work received both major awards. Contents include sixteen groundbreaking stories and an introduction by Ramsey Campbell.

    • “It Only Comes Out at Night”
    • “Sitting in the Corner, Whimpering Quietly”
    • “The Walking Man”
    • “We Have All Been Here Before”
    • “Daughter of the Golden West”
    • “The Pitch”
    • “You Can Go Now”
    • “Today’s Special”
    • “The Machine Demands a Sacrifice”
    • “Calling All Monsters”
    • “The Dead Line”
    • “The Late Shift”
    • “The Nighthawk”
    • “It Will Be Here Soon”
    • “Deathtracks”
    • “The Dark Country”

  • Available for the first time in English, here is an unforgettable novel about the desolation of Hitler’s postwar Germany.

    The war is over, yet Dr. Doll, a loner and “moderate pessimist,” lives in constant fear. By night, he is still haunted by nightmarish images of the bombsite in which he is trapped—he, and the rest of Germany. More than anything, he wishes to vanquish the demon of collective guilt, but he is unable to right any wrongs, especially in his position as mayor of a small town in northeast Germany that has been occupied by the Red Army.

    Dr. Doll flees this place for Berlin, where he finds escape in a morphine addiction: each dose is a “small death.” He tries to make his way in the chaos of a city torn apart by war, accompanied by his young wife, who shares his addiction. Fighting to save two lives, he tentatively begins to believe in a better future.

    Nightmare in Berlin captures the demoralized and desperate atmosphere of postwar Germany in a way that has never been matched or surpassed.

  • Raynham Place has been home to a number of mysterious occurrences. From its start as a battlefield through its time as a tuberculosis hospital and even in its current incarnation as an apartment complex, the grounds here have been awash in blood and instability.

    When two friends decide to move in to Raynham together, a wound that they share opens wide and threatens their sanity. But they’re not alone. Something is off here at Raynham, something that goes beyond the local legends of ghosts and serial killers and Black Hounds, something that gets inside of everyone who ever lives here.

    When a sacrifice is made, the first freely given in ages, the truth behind Raynham’s legends finally surfaces and the building fills to bursting with all the dreams of Hell.

  • On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, the epic story of an enormous apartment building where Communist true believers lived before their destruction

    The House of Government is unlike any other book about the Russian Revolution and the Soviet experiment. Written in the tradition of Tolstoy’s War and Peace, Grossman’s Life and Fate, and Solzhenitsyn’s The Gulag Archipelago, Yuri Slezkine’s gripping narrative tells the true story of the residents of an enormous Moscow apartment building where top Communist officials and their families lived before they were destroyed in Stalin’s purges. A vivid account of the personal and public lives of Bolshevik true believers, the book begins with their conversion to Communism and ends with their children’s loss of faith and the fall of the Soviet Union.

    Completed in 1931, the House of Government, later known as the House on the Embankment, was located across the Moscow River from the Kremlin. The largest residential building in Europe, it combined 505 furnished apartments with public spaces that included everything from a movie theater and a library to a tennis court and a shooting range. Slezkine tells the chilling story of how the building’s residents lived in their apartments and ruled the Soviet state until some eight hundred of them were evicted from the House and led, one by one, to prison or their deaths.

    Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, The House of Government weaves together biography, literary criticism, architectural history, and fascinating new theories of revolutions, millennial prophecies, and reigns of terror. The result is an unforgettable human saga of a building that, like the Soviet Union itself, became a haunted house, forever disturbed by the ghosts of the disappeared.

  • The third and final volume of the very best of Ben Bova, creator of the New York Times bestselling Grand Tour science fiction series, six-time Hugo award winner, and past president of the National Space Society—a grand master of science fiction storytelling. These stories span the five decades of Bova’s incandescent career.

    Here are tales of star-faring adventure, peril, and drama. Here are journeys into the mind-bending landscapes of virtual worlds and alternate realities. Here you’ll also find stories of humanity’s astounding future on Earth, on Mars, and in the Solar System beyond—stories that always get the science right. And Bova’s gathering of deeply realized, totally human characters are the heroic, brave, tricky, sometimes dastardly engineers, astronauts, corporate magnates, politicians, and scientists who will make these futures possible—and those who often find that the problems of tomorrow are always linked to human values, and human failings, that are as timeless as the stars.

  • In 1968, the world experienced a brand-new kind of terror with the debut of George A. Romero’s landmark movie Night of the Living Dead. The newly dead rose to attack the living. Not as vampires or werewolves. This was something new—and terrifying. Since then, zombies have invaded every aspect of popular culture.

    But it all started on that dreadful night in a remote farmhouse. Nights of the Living Dead returns to that night, to the outbreak, to where it all began. New York Times bestselling author Jonathan Maberry teams with the godfather of the living dead himself, George A. Romero, to present a collection of all-new tales set during the forty-eight hours of that legendary outbreak.

    Nights of the Living Dead includes stories by some of today’s most important writers: Brian Keene, Carrie Ryan, Chuck Wendig, Craig E. Engler, David J. Schow, David Wellington, Isaac Marion, Jay Bonansinga, Joe R. Lansdale, John A. Russo, John Skipp, Keith R. A. DeCandido, Max Brallier, Mike Carey, Mira Grant, Neal and Brendan Shusterman, and Ryan Brown. Plus original stories by Romero and Maberry!

    For anyone who loves scary stories, take a bite out of this!

  • Quickly becoming a cornerstone of Holocaust historiography, this is a devastatingly stark memoir from one of the lone survivors of Treblinka.

    Why do some live while so many others perish? Tiny children, old men, beautiful girls—in the gas chambers of Treblinka, all are equal. The Nazis kept the fires of Treblinka burning night and day, a central cog in the wheel of the Final Solution.

    In the tradition of Elie Wiesel’s Night and Primo Levi’s Survival in Auschwitz and The Drowned and the Saved, Rajchman provides the only survivors’ record of Treblinka. Originally written in Yiddish in 1945 without hope or agenda other than to bear witness, Rajchman’s account shows that sometimes the bravest and most painful act of all is to remember.

  • The author of three books on CIA operations, Douglas Valentine began his research into the agency’s activities when CIA director William Colby gave him free access to interview agency officials who had been involved in various aspects of the Phoenix program in South Vietnam. It was a permission Colby was to regret. The CIA would eventually rescind it and made every effort to impede publication of The Phoenix Program, which documented an elaborate system of population surveillance, control, entrapment, imprisonment, torture, and assassination in Vietnam.

    While researching Phoenix, Valentine learned that the CIA allowed opium and heroin to flow from its secret bases in Laos to generals and politicians on its payroll in South Vietnam. His investigations into this illegal activity focused on the CIA’s relationship with the federal agencies mandated by Congress to stop illegal drugs from entering the United States. Based on interviews with senior officials, Valentine wrote two subsequent books, The Strength of the Wolf and The Strength of the Pack, showing how the CIA infiltrated federal drug enforcement agencies and commandeered their executive management, intelligence, and foreign operations staffs in order to ensure the unimpeded flow of drugs to traffickers and foreign officials in its employ.

    Ultimately, portions of his research materials were archived at the National Security Archive, Texas Tech University’s Vietnam Center, and the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.

    This book includes excerpts from the aforementioned titles, along with subsequent articles and transcripts of interviews on a range of current topics, with a view to shedding light on the systemic dimensions of the CIA’s ongoing illegal and extralegal activities. These articles and interviews illustrate how the agency’s activities impact social and political movements abroad and at home.

    A common theme is the CIA’s ability to deceive and propagandize the American public through its impenetrable, government-sanctioned shield of official secrecy and plausible deniability.

    Though investigated by the Church Committee in 1975, CIA praxis then continues to inform CIA praxis today. Valentine tracks the agency’s steady expansion into practices targeting the last population to be subjected to the exigencies of the American empire: the American people themselves.

  • Portland has a mutant cockroach problem.

    Death didn’t solve anything for Claire. Now condemned to an eternity of roaming the Earth as a sixteen-year-old, she has to figure out this whole ghost thing from the other side. Lesson one: memories are power. Lesson two: this sucks.

    Drew has no idea how to deal with the loss of his best—and only—friend. With the questionable guidance and help of the ghost possessing him, he’s trying. He’s really trying.

    In this fourth installment of the Spirit Knights series, old friends and new threats force both to confront their pasts. While the Knight’s away, though, the bugs will play. Claire and Drew must each find the strength to conquer their fears or Portland won’t survive the giant cockroach apocalypse.

  • The Nazi regime preached an ideology of physical, mental, and moral purity. But as Norman Ohler reveals in this gripping new history, the Third Reich was saturated with drugs.

    On the eve of World War II, Germany was a pharmaceutical powerhouse, and companies such as Merck and Bayer cooked up cocaine, opiates, and, most of all, methamphetamines, to be consumed by everyone from factory workers to housewives to millions of German soldiers. In fact, troops regularly took rations of a form of crystal meth—the elevated energy and feelings of invincibility associated with the high even help to explain certain German military victories.

    Drugs seeped all the way up to the Nazi high command and, especially, to Hitler himself. Over the course of the war, Hitler became increasingly dependent on injections of a cocktail of drugs—including a form of heroin—administered by his personal doctor, Dr. Morell.

    While drugs alone cannot explain the Nazis’ toxic racial theories or the events of World War II, Ohler’s investigation makes an overwhelming case that, if drugs are not taken into account, our understanding of the Third Reich is fundamentally incomplete. Carefully researched and rivetingly readable, Blitzed throws surprising light on a history that, until now, has remained in the shadows.

  • Matt Helm is puzzled. He’s been sent to Mexico to investigate the sighting of a flying saucer, but Helm doesn’t believe in little green men. Then his Russian opposite number is shot in her hotel, but who did it? And why are the Mexican cops acting so tough? Time to track down the redhead who called in the sighting and get to the bottom of the case.

  • The second volume of the best stories from legendary hard science fiction writer Ben Bova, the creator of the New York Times bestselling Grand Tour science fiction series, a six-time Hugo award winner, and past president of the National Space Society.

    The stories included in this volume span the five decades of Bova’s incandescent career at the center of science fiction and space advocacy.

    Here are tales of star-faring adventure, peril, and drama. Here are journeys into the mind-bending landscapes of virtual worlds and alternate realities. Here you’ll also find stories of humanity’s astounding future on Earth, on Mars, and in the Solar System beyond—stories that always get the science right. And Bova’s gathering of deeply realized, totally human characters are the heroic, brave, tricky, sometimes dastardly engineers, astronauts, corporate magnates, politicians, and scientists who will make these futures possible—and those who often find that the problems of tomorrow are always linked to human values, and human failings, that are as timeless as the stars.

  • Once a hero, now a pariah, Richard Muller is humanity’s last hope.

    Richard Muller was an honorable diplomat who braved unimaginable dangers to make contact with the first-known race of intelligent aliens. But those aliens left a mark on him: a psychic wound that emanates a telepathic miasma that his fellow humans can neither cure nor endure.

    Muller is exiled to the remote planet of Lemnos, where he is left, deeply embittered, at the heart of a deadly maze—until a new alien race appears, seemingly intent on exterminating humanity. Only Muller can communicate with them, due to the very condition that has made him an outcast. But will Muller stick his neck out for the people who so callously rejected him?

  • Portland has a Knight problem

    Now that the Spirit Knights have accepted sixteen-year-old Claire into their order, she just has to convince all its Knights she belongs. Forced into a test to prove her worth, she discovers more than anyone wants her to.

    Meanwhile, Justin runs around playing janitor. He’s made some big messes, but cleaning them up puts him on a new path, one he never imagined his future could hold. All on Thanksgiving.

    In this third installment of the Spirit Knights series, Claire thinks she knows what must be done to save herself and the world from the plague of ghosts the Spirit Knights have left behind.

    If she’s wrong, there may be nothing left to save.

  • Strange things are happening in Tel Ilan, a century-old pioneer village. A disgruntled retired politician complains to his daughter that he hears the sound of digging at night. Could it be their tenant, that young Arab? But then the young Arab hears the digging sounds too. Where has the mayor’s wife gone, vanished without a trace, her note saying “Don’t worry about me”?

    Around the village, the veneer of new wealth—gourmet restaurants, art galleries, a winery—barely conceals the scars of war and of past generations: disused air raid shelters, rusting farm tools, and trucks left wherever they stopped.

    Scenes from Village Life is a memorable novel-in-stories by the inimitable Amos Oz: a brilliant, unsettling glimpse of what goes on beneath the surface of everyday life.

  • Portland has a dragon problem.

    Now genuinely a Spirit Knight, sixteen-year-old Claire wants to know everything about the job. Fate dumps a dragon on her and she only has more questions. She knows how much she needs training and wishes she could snap her fingers to learn everything at once.

    Justin can answer Claire’s questions, but between his demanding young daughters, his sarcastic horse, and the recent loss of his own mentor, he’d rather just be a Knight. No one told him adopting an apprentice would devour all his free time and dredge up the past.

    In this sequel to Girls Can’t Be Knights, Claire and Justin face dragons, ghosts, witches, echoes, and memories. Their survival and the fate of Portland may depend on Justin’s intellect. They’re doomed.

  • Six-time Hugo Award winner Ben Bova chronicles the saga of humankind’s expansion beyond the solar system in Apes and Angels, the last installment in the Star Quest Trilogy.

    Humankind headed out to the stars not for conquest, nor exploration, nor even for curiosity. Humans went to the stars in a desperate crusade to save intelligent life wherever they found it.

    A wave of death is spreading through the Milky Way galaxy, an expanding sphere of lethal gamma radiation that erupted from the galaxy’s core twenty-eight thousand years ago and now is approaching Earth’s vicinity at the speed of light. Every world it touched was wiped clean of all life. But it’s possible to protect a planet from gamma radiation. Earth is safe.

    Now, guided by the ancient intelligent machines called the Predecessors, men and women from Earth seek out those precious, rare worlds that harbor intelligent species, determined to save them from the doom that is hurtling toward them.

    The crew of the Odysseus has arrived at Mithra Gamma, the third planet of the star Mithra, to protect the stone-age inhabitants from the Death Wave. But they’ll also have to protect themselves.

  • An ongoing, episodic “prose comic” from which the pictures are summoned by the magic of words, Goon Squad is set in an alternate version of modern-day Manchester. Its biggest divergence from the real city is that it—along with most other large urban centers—has a team of superheroes to protect it against unusual threats with which the conventional forces of law and order would have problems.

    Goon Squad: Year One features three action-packed volumes in a single collection: Goon Squad: Special Talents, Goon Squad: Without Sin, and Goon Squad: Old Enemies.

  • Even the Spirit Knights could not see this coming …

    Sixteen-year-old Claire wants her father back. His death left her only memories and an empty locket. After six difficult years in foster care, her vocabulary no longer includes “hope” and “trust.” But everything changes dramatically when she encounters Justin, a Spirit Knight restlessly hunting dangerous ghosts that devour the living, who rides into her path on his magical horse and takes her under his wing. When an evil spirit threatens Claire’s life, she’ll need Justin’s help to survive.

    A fun and absorbing adventure tale full of humor and magic!

    No one, including Claire, believes she can be a Spirit Knight, even when all signs show she is ready to become one. This is because the Spirit Knights have been a boys’ club for over a thousand years. Worse yet, Claire will have to dive into the hair-raising ghost-hunting job before she gets full access to the Knights’ order. Fortunately for her, she has Justin as her private tutor. With the help of his sarcastic horse and saintly wife, he’ll teach her the finer points of the job. Add in a little luck, and they both might survive long enough for her to learn it all.

    Girls Can’t Be Knights is a magical and unique adventure story that will touch your soul and raise your spirits.

  • Tragic, comic, and utterly honest, this extraordinary memoir is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history.

    It is the story of a boy growing up in the war-torn Jerusalem of the forties and fifties in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. His mother and father, both wonderful people, were ill-suited to each other. When Oz was twelve and a half years old, his mother committed suicide—a tragedy that was to change his life. He leaves the constraints of the family and the community of dreamers, scholars, and failed businessmen to join a kibbutz, changes his name, marries, has children, and finally becomes a writer as well as an active participant in the political life of Israel.

    A story of clashing cultures and lives, of suffering and perseverance, of love and darkness.

  • Lev Davidovich Trotsky burst onto the world stage in November 1917 as coleader of a Marxist Revolution seizing power in Russia. It made him one of the most recognized personalities of the twentieth century, a global icon of radical change.

    Yet just months earlier, this same Lev Trotsky was a nobody, a refugee expelled from Europe, writing obscure pamphlets and speeches, barely noticed outside a small circle of fellow travelers. Where had he come from to topple Russia and change the world? Where else? New York City.

    Between January and March 1917, Trotsky found refuge in the United States. America had kept itself out of the European Great War, leaving New York the freest city on earth. During his time there—just over ten weeks—Trotsky immersed himself in the local scene. He settled his family in the Bronx, edited a radical left wing tabloid in Greenwich Village, sampled the lifestyle, and plunged headlong into local politics. His clashes with leading New York socialists over the question of US entry into World War I would reshape the American left for the next fifty years.

  • The first installment in the thrilling, action-packed Chaos Chronicles

    When John Bandicut sets out across the surface of Triton, he’s hardly ready for the storm of chaos that’s about to blow through his life. The alien Quarx that soon inhabits his mind is humanity’s first contact with an alien life. The Quarx, part of an ancient galactic civilization that manipulates chaos theory to predict catastrophic events, seeks to prevent a cometary collision that could destroy the Earth. But it must have help. If Bandicut chooses to trust the Quarx, he must break all the rules—indeed, sacrifice his life as he knows it—to prevent humanity’s greatest cataclysm.

    Leaving friends and lover behind, hurtling across the solar system in a stolen spaceship, Bandicut can only pray that his actions will save the Earth—even if he doesn’t live to see it again.

  • Imagine if Rapunzel’s parents were Edwardian preppers.

    Hazel’s parents saw the 1912 sinking of the Titanic as a portent of doom and locked their daughter away. Isolated and alone, each birthday she wishes to be free, whatever the risk. If only her childhood friend Henry would return and breach the high walls.

    On the front lines of the Great War, Henry kept a token of happier times—a worn photograph of a young girl with long blonde plaits. He returns from war damaged and vowing to do one brave thing to make up for his cowardice: release Hazel from her prison. But could Henry keep her safe in a world ravaged by the pandemic?

    How can Henry reconcile protecting Hazel with setting her free? Or perhaps the sheltered young woman will teach the soldier a lesson about life, liberating him from a tower of his own construction.

  • In his ninth and final novel, cultural observer, novelist, and poet Herman Melville gives us a picture of everything wrong with America in the decade preceding the Civil War.

    Evoking Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, this is a story of interlocking tales from a group of steamboat passengers traveling down the Mississippi toward New Orleans. Aboard the Fidèle can be found all manner of con man, from those selling stock in failing companies and herbal cure-all “medicines” to those who are raising money for a supposed charitable organization and those who simply ask for money outright. One man sneaks aboard ship to test the so-called confidence of the passengers, and everyone is forced to confront that in which he places his trust before journey’s end.

    Mixing his trademark satirical style with allegory and metaphysical treatise, Melville’s The Confidence-Man is a precursor to the twentieth-century literary preoccupations with nihilism, existentialism, and absurdism.

  • Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor driving the thirty-second century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lorq von Ray is plenty willing to fly through the core of a recently imploded sun in order to obtain seven tons of it. The potential for profit is so great that Lorq has little difficulty cobbling together an alluring crew, including a gypsy musician and a moon-obsessed scholar interested in the ancient art of writing a novel. What the crew doesn’t know is that Lorq’s quest is actually fueled by a private revenge so consuming that he’ll stop at nothing to achieve it.

    In the grandest manner of speculative fiction, Nova is a wise and witty classic that casts a fascinating new light on some of humanity’s oldest truths and enduring myths.

  • The first volume in a sterling collection of stories from legendary hard science fiction master Ben Bova

    These are selected stories from Bova’s amazing career at the center of science fiction and space advocacy. He is the creator of the New York Times bestselling Grand Tour series, a six-time Hugo Award winner, and past president of the National Space Society. The very best of Ben Bova, these stories span the five decades of Bova’s incandescent career.

    Here are tales of star-faring adventure, peril, and drama. Here are journeys into the mind-bending landscapes of virtual worlds and alternate realities. Here you’ll also find stories of humanity’s astounding future on Earth, on Mars, and in the solar system beyond—stories that always get the science right. And Bova’s gathering of deeply realized, totally human characters are the heroic, brave, tricky, sometimes dastardly engineers, astronauts, corporate magnates, politicians, and scientists who will make these futures possible—and those who often find that the problems of tomorrow are always linked to human values and human failings which are as timeless as the stars.

  • In Dhalgren, perhaps one of the most profound and bestselling science fiction novels of all time, Samuel R. Delany has produced a novel that rivals the best American fiction of the 1970s.

    Bellona is a city at the dead center of the United States. Something has happened there … the population has fled. Madmen and criminals wander the streets. Strange portents appear in the cloud-covered sky. And into this disaster zone comes a young man—a poet, lover, and adventurer—known only as the Kid.

    Tackling questions of race, gender, and sexuality, Dhalgren is a literary marvel and a groundbreaking work of American magical realism.