Grover Gardner

A lively and evidence-based argument that a whole food diet is essential for good mental health

Food has power to nourish your mind, supporting emotional wellness through both nutrients and pleasure. In this groundbreaking book, journalist Mary Beth Albright draws on cutting-edge research to explain the food-mood connection.

She redefines “emotional eating” based on the science, revealing how eating triggers biological responses that affect humans’ emotional states both immediately and long-term.

Albright’s accessible narrative and ability to interpret complex studies from the new field of nutritional psychology, combined with straightforward suggestions for what to eat and how to eat it, make this an indispensable guide.

Listeners will come away knowing how certain foods help reduce the inflammation that can harm mental health, the critical relationship between the microbiome and the brain, which vitamins help restore the body during intensely emotional times, and how to develop a healthful eating pattern for life―with thirty-day kickoff plan included.

Eat & Flourish is the entertaining, inspiring book for today’s world.

An unholy attack upon his brother-in-law General Arisaydia pitches sorcerer Learned Penric and his Temple demon Desdemona headlong into the snake pit of Cedonian imperial politics. But they will not travel alone. The mission from his god brings Penric some of his strangest new allies yet, and the return of some of his most valued old ones.

This novel-length story takes place two years after the events of The Physicians of Vilnoc.

A prismatic look at the meeting of Marie Curie and Albert Einstein and the impact these two pillars of science had on the world of physics, which was in turmoil.

In 1911, some of the greatest minds in science convened at the First Solvay Conference in Physics, a meeting like no other. Almost half of the attendees had won or would go on to win the Nobel Prize. Over the course of those few days, these minds began to realize that classical physics was about to give way to quantum theory, a seismic shift in our history and how we understand not just our world, but the universe.

At the center of this meeting were Marie Curie and a young Albert Einstein. In the years preceding, Curie had faced the death of her husband and soul mate, Pierre. She was on the cusp of being awarded her second Nobel Prize, but scandal erupted all around her when the French press revealed that she was having an affair with a fellow scientist, Paul Langevin.

The subject of vicious misogynist and xenophobic attacks in the French press, Curie found herself in a storm that threatened her scientific legacy.

Albert Einstein proved a supporter in her travails. They had an instant connection at Solvay. He was young and already showing flourishes of his enormous genius. Curie had been responsible for one of the greatest discoveries in modern science—radioactivity—but still faced resistance and scorn. Einstein recognized this grave injustice, and their mutual admiration and respect, borne out of this, their first meeting, would go on to serve them in their paths forward to making history.

Curie and Einstein come alive as the complex people they were in the pages of The Soul of Genius. Utilizing never before seen correspondence and notes, Jeffrey Orens reveals the human side of these brilliant scientists, one who pushed boundaries and demanded equality in a man’s world, no matter the cost, and the other, who was destined to become synonymous with genius.

All the Cowboys Ain’t Gone is the rollicking adventure story of Lincoln Smith, a young Texan living at the beginning of the twentieth century, who thinks of himself as the last true cowboy. He longs for the days of the Old West, when men like his father, a famous Texas Ranger, lived by the chivalric code. Lincoln finds himself hopelessly out of time and place in the fast-changing United States of the new century. When he gets his heart broken by a sweetheart who doesn’t appreciate his anachronistic tendencies, he does what any sensible young romantic would do: he joins the French Foreign Legion.

On his way to an ancient and exotic country at the edge of the Sahara, Lincoln encounters a number of curious characters and strange adventures, from a desert hermit who can slow up time to a battle with a crocodile cult that worships the god of death. He meets them all with his own charming brand of courage and resourcefulness.

Bastard’s Eve is a night of celebration for most residents in the canal city of Lodi—but not for sorcerer Learned Penric and his Temple demon Desdemona, who find themselves caught up in the affairs of a shiplost madman, a dangerous ascendant demon, and a very unexpected saint of the fifth god.

This novella falls between “Penric’s Fox” and “Penric’s Mission” in the internal chronology of the Penric & Desdemona tales.

The endgame for Hitler’s Reich

Hitler’s army had dared all to win all on the Western Front with its surprise winter campaign in the Ardennes, the “Battle of the Bulge.” But when American and Allied forces recovered from their initial shock, the German Army, the Wehrmacht, was left fighting for its very survival—especially on the Eastern Front, where the Soviet Army was intent on matching, or even surpassing, Nazi atrocities.

At the mercy of the Fuhrer—who refused to acknowledge reality and insisted on forbidding German retreats—the Wehrmacht was slowly annihilated in horrific battles that have rarely been adequately covered in histories of the Second World War, perhaps most especially the brutal Soviet siege of Budapest, which became known as “the Stalingrad of the Waffen-SS.”

Now, at last, veteran military historian Dr. Samuel Mitcham, in the capstone of a career covering of more than forty books—most of them on the German Armed Forces in World War II—tells the extraordinary tale of how Hitler’s once-feared war machine came to a cataclysmic end, from the Battle of the Bulge in December 1944 to the German surrender in May 1945.

Making use of German wartime papers and memoirs—some rarely seen in English-language sources—Mitcham’s sweeping narrative makes The Death of Hitler’s War Machine: The Final Destruction of the Wehrmacht a book that needs to be on the shelf of every student of World War II history.

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.”

When a mysterious plague breaks out in the army fort guarding Vilnoc, the port capital of the duchy of Orbas, Temple sorcerer Penric and his demon Desdemona are called upon by General Arisaydia to resurrect Penric’s medical skills and solve its lethal riddle. In the grueling days that follow, Pen will find that even his magic is not enough to meet the challenges without help from dedicated new colleagues—and the god of mischance.

When the ship in which they are traveling is captured by Carpagamon island raiders, Temple sorcerer Penric and his resident demon Desdemona find their life complicated by two young orphans, Lencia and Seuka Corva, far from home and searching for their missing father. Pen and Des will need all their combined talents of mind and magic to unravel the mysteries of the sisters and escape from the pirate stronghold.

Edward O. Wilson—winner of two Pulitzer prizes, champion of biodiversity, and Faculty Emeritus at Harvard University—is arguably one of the most important thinkers of the twentieth century. Yet his celebrated career began not with an elite education but from an insatiable curiosity about the natural world and drive to explore its mysteries. Called “one of the finest scientific memoirs ever written” by the Los Angeles Times, Naturalist is a wise and personal account of Wilson’s growth as a scientist and the evolution of the fields he helped define.

At once practical and lyric, Naturalist provides fascinating insights into the making of a scientist, and a valuable look at some of the most thought-provoking ideas of our time. As relevant today as when it was first published twenty-five years ago, Naturalist is a poignant reminder of the human side of science and an inspiring call to celebrate the little things of the world.

“Is Paris burning?” is the question Hitler asked over and over as the French Second and American Fourth Divisions battered their way into the city.

Few moments in history are as stirring as the Allied liberation of Paris, yet few people are aware of how narrowly—and how miraculously—the city escaped Hitler’s secret plan to reduce it to ashes. Is Paris Burning? reconstructs, in meticulous and riveting detail, the network of fateful events—day by day, moment by moment—that saved the City of Light.

Bestselling authors and renowned journalists Larry Collins and Dominique Lapierre spent three years researching this book, drawing on French Resistance radio messages, German military records, countless interviews, and secret correspondence between de Gaulle, Churchill, Roosevelt, and Eisenhower. Here they recreate the drama, the fervor, and the triumph that heralded one of the most dramatic events of our time.

A century of the industrial age saw unprecedented leaps in technology and engineering, from the first flight of an airplane to the first flight of humans to the moon. But alongside these awe-inspiring achievements were horrible disasters caused by faulty engineering or careless judgment. Catastrophes and Heroes explores eight such disasters and recognizes the unheralded heroes who stepped up to save others in times of great danger.

Included in this collection are the stories of female phone operators who, despite being in the path of destruction after the Los Angeles St. Francis Dam collapsed in 1928, stayed on the job to warn others to evacuate; Ernest Hemingway, who assisted survivors in his own boat after a hurricane destroyed the Florida East Coast Railway in 1935; and Ernest Betts who, though knowing little first aid, saved thirty people after the streamliner train the City of San Francisco crashed in the Nevada mountains in 1939.

Filled with little-known stories and historical insights, this book explores the rich history of the marvels of engineering and technological advances in the span of a century and reveals how the perils, though disastrous, gave rise to heroism and compassion at a time when machines were supposed to do it all.

Olawale Wombo and a small contingent of Omnians are sent to assist Earth to uplift its technological prowess. With the aid of the incomparable SADEs, advanced tech is transferred to the Sol Enclave, the system’s governing body.

After Sol’s construction of Tridents—Omnian-designed warships—Earthers possess the ability to transit quickly among the stars. The desire to know what happened to Earth’s colony ship, the Honora Belle, sent to the stars a millennium ago is resurrected. An Omnian Trident and the vessel Rêveur accompany three Sol Enclave Tridents in search of the Belle’s colonists.

Swiftly, the Omnians and the Earthers become enmeshed in a centuries-old conflict enveloping a vast area of space inhabited by alliance races. The enemy is the Colony: a giant insectoid species that has arrivied in force to overtake an alliance home world.

Olawale Wombo must decide whether to abide by the expedition’s original purpose or help the embattled alliance races. He asks himself one question: What would Omnian leader Alex Racine do? He knows the answer to that question. Every Omnian knows the answer.

Based on a true story and told with the pacing, humor, and thrills of a Mediterranean mystery, Andrea Camilleri’s novel tells of a turn-of-the-century Sicilian scandal that revealed a tendency that is with us still: the refusal to accept the truth.

The lawyer and journalist Matteo Teresi discovers the existence of a secret sect whose members include priests, politicians, and regional VIPs. During the early morning hours, when the town’s churches are closed, the “Sect of the Angels” meets in the sacristy to carry out their holy office: initiating devout virgins into the rites of married life. Preying on their victims’ naivete, the hooded “elect” commit ignominious acts while promising the young women divine grace.

In 1901, at a time of immense changes in Sicilian society, the scandal breaks nationwide. But far from being hailed as a hero, Teresi is accused of disrupting the status quo and irrationally blamed for an outbreak of disease and a series of calamities.

From the salons, churches, and social clubs of Sicily to the country’s highest courts, Camilleri’s novel is a fast-paced, at times funny, passionately rendered portrait of the machinations of power and the difficult destiny of a local hero.

In this brilliant narrative of America’s first limited war, John Toland shows yet again why, for over two decades, he has been one of this country’s most respected and popular military historians. Toland lets both the events and the participants speak for themselves, employing scrupulous archival research and interviews as the bases for the drama and accuracy of his writing. In Mortal Combat reveals Mao’s prediction of the date and place of MacArthur’s Inchon landing, Russia’s indifference to the war, Mao’s secret leadership of the North Korean military, and the true nature of both sides’ treatment and repatriation of POWs.

In addition to being the first Westerner to gain access to Chinese records and combatants, Toland interviewed numerous North and South Korean veterans and over two hundred members of the American military, many of whom had never been approached before. The result is a signal work of compelling readability and lasting importance.

A collection of treasured stories by the unchallenged master of American fiction

Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow has deservedly been celebrated as one of America’s greatest writers. For more than sixty years he stretched our minds, our imaginations, and our hearts with his exhilarating perceptions of life. Here, collected in one volume and chosen by the author himself, are favorites such as “What Kind of Day Did You Have?” “Leaving the Yellow House,” and a previously uncollected piece, “By the St. Lawrence.” With his larger-than-life characters, irony, wisdom, and unique humor, Bellow presents a sharp, rich, and funny world that is infinitely surprising. With a preface by Janice Bellow and an introduction by James Wood, this is a collection to treasure for longtime Saul Bellow fans and an excellent introduction for new readers.

In an alternate Renaissance Italy where the church regulates magic and licenses magicians, fiery Fiametta Beneforte wants to be more than her goldsmith-mage father’s unpaid apprentice. But when the Duchy of Montefoglia is laid under military and magical siege, she unexpectedly must join with Thur Ochs, a young Swiss miner and foundryman, to tap their skills in both metalwork and necromancy to rescue her father’s soul and combat an evil sorcerer.

A vibrant history of the renowned and often controversial Iowa Writers’ Workshop and its celebrated alumni and faculty

As the world’s preeminent creative writing program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has produced an astonishing number of distinguished writers and poets since its establishment in 1936. Its alumni and faculty include twenty-eight Pulitzer Prize winners, six US poet laureates, and numerous National Book Award winners. This volume follows the program from its rise to prominence in the early 1940s under director Paul Engle, who promoted the “workshop” method of classroom peer criticism.

Meant to simulate the rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny in the publishing industry, this educational style created an environment of both competition and community, cooperation and rivalry. Focusing on some of the exceptional authors who have participated in the program—such as Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Smiley, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, and Marilynne Robinson—David Dowling examines how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has shaped professional authorship, publishing industries, and the course of American literature.

Artifice, the great enemy, has been defeated. The sister SADEs, Omnian sentient digital entities, are free from their boxes. Most humans are unaware that the sisters have duplicated themselves many more times than suspected. They now constitute a sizable, powerful group, calling themselves the Sisterhood.

The elimination of Artifice’s rule should be a time of relief and recovery for Alex Racine’s Omnian fleet and for the Toralians, whose home world was Artifice’s lair. Instead, it’s a chaotic period.

Visitors appear, sailing the distinct, black-hulled Toralian battleships. Five colonial governors wish to witness the recovery of the ancient home world. President Sargut welcomes them, but Alex is suspicious about the governors’ motives. In a face-to-face meeting, it becomes clear that the governors have a dark, ulterior purpose.

With the release of the federacy from Artifice’s reign, word reaches the Omnians that races are embracing their newfound freedom. Some enjoy peace, some desire expansion, and some yearn for revenge.

The races’ latter choices mean danger for the Toralians and Alex’s fleet. Powerful battleship fleets are either sailing for the Toralian home world to exact reprisals, or they’re seeking new territory. Every encounter presents a challenge for the Omnian fleet.

Some fleets have crossed the federacy’s boundary and are headed toward humankind’s worlds. Alex and the Omnians face a difficult choice. They must choose whether to defend the Toralian home world, which is forming a nascent society, or chase the fleets that are headed toward their planets.

Invisible Heroes of World War II documents ten fascinating true stories of a diverse group of soldiers and noncombatants from all over the world, including African Americans, women, and Native Americans, who fought with the Allies during World War II. These heroes made significant contributions in the war effort, and sometimes gave their lives for freedom and liberty, often without much recognition or fanfare. Some were frontline soldiers who were captured by the enemy and endured horrific conditions as POWs, others were ordinary citizens who fought in the French Resistance and provided vital operations to undermine Nazi occupation, while others were engineers, workers in industry, or war correspondents and photographers. All served with valor and distinction as part of the massive Allied forces who fought to free the world from tyranny and oppression.

As an international war correspondent and radio commentator, William L. Shirer didn’t just research the fall of France. He was there. In just six weeks, he watched the Third Reich topple one of the world’s oldest military powers—and institute a rule of terror and paranoia.

Based on in-­person conversation with the leaders, diplomats, generals, and ordinary citizens who both shaped the events of this time and lived through them on a daily basis, Shirer shapes a compelling account of historical events—without losing sight of the personal experience.

From the heroic efforts of the Freedom Fighters to the tactical military misjudgments that caused the fall and the daily realities of life for French citizens under Nazi rule, this fascinating and exhaustively documented account from one of the twentieth century’s most important historians makes the events of the fall accessible to a younger audience in vivid and memorable style.

The great spheres and probes of Artifice, humankind’s enemy, haunt every inhabited world near and far. The Omnians’ long and arduous search for Artifice has ended. They’ve located Artifice’s lair in the Talus system.

The sentient digital entity rules a vast swath of worlds, known as the federacy, through ruthless intimidation. Its insidious programs are embedded in every races’ digital systems—warships, shuttles, stations, domes, comm platforms, and power plants. One misstep by a race could see its citizens exterminated in vast numbers. The survivors, if there were any, would be thrown back to the days before spaceflight.

Artifice has had millennia to secure its base. Powerful battleship fleets guard the system’s periphery and the approaches above and below the entity’s planet, Toral. Probes surround the system and warn of unauthorized encroachment, and Artifice has control of the planet’s army of bots.

The Omnian expeditionary fleet, led by Alex Racine, desperately needs allies in order to defeat or circumvent Artifice’s defensive measures. The Omnians are curious about the fleet of black-hulled battleships, which bear a resemblance to Artifice’s probes and guard the Talus system. The SADEs, the Omnians’ digital friends, believe that the sentients aboard the black fleet and Artifice share a common history.

Whether or not the Omnians can gather allies, they don’t intend to abandon their goal and return to Omnia. They mean to capture or destroy the entity, Artifice, or die trying.

Admired by F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, and Dashiell Hammett, and hailed as one of the best one hundred English-language novels by Time magazine, The Day of the Locust continues to influence American writers, artists, and culture. Bob Dylan wrote the classic song “Day of the Locusts” in homage, and Matt Groening’s Homer Simpson is named after one of its characters. No novel more perfectly captures the nuttier side of Hollywood. Here the lens is turned on its fringes—actors out of work, film extras with big dreams, and parents lining their children up for small roles. But it’s the bit actress Faye Greener who steals the spotlight with her wildly convoluted dreams of stardom: “I’m going to be a star some day—if I’m not I’ll commit suicide.”

Set against a backdrop of Cold War paranoia, this futuristic novel about identity and technology is “one of the unrecognized classics of SF” (Locus).

East and West have fused into separate superstates known as the Allied National Government (ANG) and the Soviet International Bloc (SIB). As the Cold War rages, brilliant scientist Lucas Martino works on a top-secret project known only as K-Eighty-eight that could alter the balance of world power. The project goes horribly awry at an Allied research facility near the Soviet border, and Martino is abducted.

After several months of tense negotiations, he returns severely injured from the lab explosion, and under pressure from America, undergoes extensive reconstructive surgery. He has a mechanical arm. His polished metal skull—a kind of craniofacial prosthesis—contains few discernible features. Several of his internal organs are artificial. While his fingerprints are identified as belonging to Lucas Martino, they could be the result of transplant. Is he the real Martino? Or a technologically altered impostor sent by America’s enemies for the purpose of spying and infiltration? Tasked with uncovering the truth, ANG Security Chief Shawn Rogers makes some shocking discoveries.

Narrated in chapters alternating between Rogers and Martino, Who? poses existential questions about the human condition.

In a sensational follow-up to Echoes of Sherlock Holmes and In the Company of Sherlock Holmes, a brand-new anthology of stories inspired by the Arthur Conan Doyle canon

For the Sake of the Game is the latest volume in the award-winning series from New York Times bestselling editors Laurie R. King and Leslie S. Klinger, with stories of Sherlock Holmes, Dr. Watson, and friends in a variety of eras and forms. King and Klinger have a simple formula: ask some of the world’s greatest writers―regardless of genre―to be inspired by the stories of Arthur Conan Doyle.

The results are surprising and joyous. Some tales are pastiches, featuring the recognizable figures of Holmes and Watson; others step away in time or place to describe characters and stories influenced by the Holmes world. Some of the authors spin whimsical tales of fancy; others tell hardcore thrillers or puzzling mysteries. One beloved author writes a song; two others craft a melancholy tale of insectoid analysis.

This is not a volume for listeners who crave a steady diet of stories about Holmes and Watson on Baker Street. Rather, it is for the generations of people who were themselves inspired by the classic tales, and who are prepared to let their imaginations roam freely.

Features stories by Peter S. Beagle, Rhys Bowen, Reed Farrel Coleman, Jamie Freveletti, Alan Gordon, Gregg Hurwitz, Toni L. P. Kelner, William Kotzwinkle and Joe Servello, Harley Jane Kozak, D. P. Lyle, Weston Ochse, Zoe Sharp, Duane Swierczynski, and F. Paul Wilson

This exhilarating Cold War narrative takes listeners from top-secret Cabinet Room meetings to exclusive social clubs, and into the pages of a powerful man’s intimate diary. Ike’s Mystery Man brings a new dimension to our understanding of the inner-workings of the Eisenhower White House. It also shines a bright light on the indispensable contributions and sacrifices made by patriotic gay Americans in an era when Executive Order 10450 banned anyone suspected of “sexual perversion,” i.e. homosexuality, from any government job, and gays in the government were persecuted by the likes of Joseph McCarthy and Roy Cohn in the Senate, and J. Edgar Hoover and Clyde Tolson at the FBI.

Ike’s Mystery Man shows that Eisenhower’s National Security Advisor Robert “Bobby” Cutler—working alongside Ike and also the Dulles brothers at the CIA and State Department—shaped US Cold War strategy in far more consequential ways than has been previously understood. Bobby also left behind a six-volume diary which reveals that he was in love with a man half his age, NSC staffer Skip Koons. Their friend Steve Benedict, who also is gay, became Ike’s White House Security Officer. In addition to Bobby’s diary, Ike’s Mystery Man relies on thousands of personal letters, interviews, and previously classified archives to tell a gripping story that has never before been told.

Still new to her duties as Lady Vorkosigan, Ekaterin is working together with expatriate scientist Enrique Borgos on a radical scheme to recover the lands of the Vashnoi exclusion zone, lingering radioactive legacy of the Cetagandan invasion of the planet Barrayar. When Enrique’s experimental bioengineered creatures go missing, the pair discover that the zone still conceals deadly old secrets.

The Omnian expeditionary fleet sails for the faraway place they call “the wall.” The worlds of humankind have consolidated their resources to create a powerful armada to confront the alien federation.

During the Omnians’ previous encounter with an alien fleet at the wall, the Nua’ll comm sphere spoke to them in multiple languages. When the messages were deciphered by SADEs, the humans’ digital friends, the Omnians realized two things. One, they would face a vast empire composed of hundreds of races, and, two, the Nua’ll were not the leaders of the federacy. They had spoken of masters.

Multiple challenges faced Alex Racine, the Omnian leader, to cobble together the fleet he required. The Confederation, which was composed of many colonies, could produce ships, but most of its people lacked the will to fight. Haraken and New Terra were worlds with limited material production capability. But they produced individuals who were anxious to deliver a blow against the federation.

A debate raged over whether humans should flee, wait, or fight the onslaught of giant spheres, which ravaged humankind’s worlds, and the probes that spied on them. It was Alex Racine’s choice to confront the alien race. Anything less was only delaying the inevitable.

The Omnians knew nothing about what they would find beyond the wall, where the federation’s enormous empire lay. Alex knew he couldn’t defeat the federacy in a long series of protracted engagements. His plan was to attempt to conquer and divide. He just needed to find the right sentient race for his idea to work.

Based on a true story, a “wild west” tale of two brothers who battle both the state and a Mafia empire in 1920s Italy.

Raffadali, province of Agrigento, 1920s. The Sacco brothers are free men with strong ideas about socialism and the state. Their lives change radically one morning when their father, Luigi Sacco, receives an anonymous letter from the local Mafia demanding protection money and is the victim of a robbery attempt. Luigi tells the police of the extortion letters he received, but the police don’t know what to do: no one in the village has ever dared denounce the Mafia before. From that moment on, the Sacco brothers must defend themselves—from the Mafia and the forces of order, from their collaborators, traitors, and from the village’s leaders—as they are assailed by murder attempts, false accusations, and false testimony.

Through the tale of the Sacco brothers and what happens to the town of Raffadali, The Sacco Gang makes clear that not only does the Mafia kill people but it can also condition and irreparably devastate people’s lives.

A New York Times bestselling historian sheds new light on Sherman’s epic “March to the Sea,” especially the soldiers, doctors, nurses, and civilians who would change the nation for the better.

America in the antebellum years was a deeply troubled country, divided by partisan gridlock and ideological warfare, angry voices in the streets and the statehouses, furious clashes over race and immigration, and a growing chasm between immense wealth and desperate poverty.

The Civil War that followed brought America to the brink of self-destruction. But it also created a new country from the ruins of the old one―bolder and stronger than ever. No event in the war was more destructive, or more important, than William Sherman’s legendary march through Georgia―crippling the heart of the South’s economy, freeing thousands of slaves, and marking the beginning of a new era.

This invasion not only quelled the Confederate forces, but transformed America, forcing it to reckon with a century of injustice. Dickey reveals the story of women actively involved in the military campaign and later, in civilian networks. African Americans took active roles as soldiers, builders, and activists. Rich with despair and hope, brutality and compassion, Rising in Flames tells the dramatic story of the Union’s invasion of the Confederacy, and how this colossal struggle helped create a new nation from the embers of the Old South.

How a fraying social fabric is fueling the outrage of rural Americans

What is fueling rural America’s outrage toward the federal government? Why did rural Americans vote overwhelmingly for Donald Trump? And, beyond economic and demographic decline, is there a more nuanced explanation for the growing rural-urban divide? Drawing on more than a decade of research and hundreds of interviews, Robert Wuthnow brings us into America’s small towns, farms, and rural communities to paint a rich portrait of the moral order—the interactions, loyalties, obligations, and identities―underpinning this critical segment of the nation. Wuthnow demonstrates that to truly understand rural Americans’ anger, their culture must be explored more fully.

We hear from farmers who want government out of their business, factory workers who believe in working hard to support their families, town managers who find the federal government unresponsive to their communities’ needs, and clergy who say the moral climate is being undermined. Wuthnow argues that rural America’s fury stems less from specific economic concerns than from the perception that Washington is distant from and yet threatening to the social fabric of small towns. Rural dwellers are especially troubled by Washington’s seeming lack of empathy for such small-town norms as personal responsibility, frugality, cooperation, and common sense. Wuthnow also shows that while these communities may not be as discriminatory as critics claim, racism and misogyny remain embedded in rural patterns of life.

Moving beyond simplistic depictions of the residents of America’s heartland, The Left Behind offers a clearer picture of how this important population will influence the nation’s political future.

Not all the folks who roamed the Old West were cowhands, rustlers, or cardsharps. And they certainly weren’t all heroes.

Give-a-Damn Jones, a free-spirited itinerant typographer, hates his nickname almost as much as the rumors spread about him. He’s a kind soul who keeps finding himself in the wrong place at the wrong time.

That’s what happened in Box Elder, a small Montana town. Tensions are running high, and anything—or anyone—could be the fuse to ignite them: a recently released convict trying to prove his innocence, a prominent cattleman who craves respect at any cost, a wily traveling dentist at odds with a violent local blacksmith, or a firebrand of an editor who is determined to unlock the town’s secrets.

Jones walks into the middle of it all, and this time, he may be the hero that this town needs.

A thrilling art-heist escapade that evokes a world of European high culture and luxury, while plumbing the vicissitudes of less exalted human foibles and obsessions

Johann Friedrich von Allmen, a bon vivant of dandified refinement, has exhausted his family fortune. Forced to downscale, Allmen inhabits the garden house of his former Zurich estate, attended by his Guatemalan butler, Carlos. When not reading novels by Balzac and Somerset Maugham, he plays jazz on a Bechstein baby grand.

Allmen’s fortunes take a sharp turn when he meets Jojo, a stunning blonde whose lakeside villa contains five art nouveau bowls created by renowned French artist Émile Gallé and decorated with a dragonfly motif. Allmen, seeking to pay off mounting debts, absconds with the priceless bowls and embarks on a high-risk, potentially violent bid to cash them in.

This is the first book in a series of humorous, fast-paced detective novels devoted to Allmen—a memorable gentleman-thief who, with his trusted sidekick Carlos, creates an investigative firm to recover missing precious objects.

The mining certificates granting ownership of the Christabel mine that Edward Dugan inherited from his father had a face value of $250,000, but the mine itself had been declared worthless. Still, Henry Christian, the man that had sold them to Dugan’s father, said he’d buy them back for $1,500.

Penniless, Dugan decided to walk the three thousand miles from his home in Boston to the mine in the Southwest to check out the offer.

But along the way he meets a travel companion named Red. Red knows Christian by reputation, and by another name: Bonanza Chris. He knows the only reason Bonanza Chris would buy the mine back is if he had discovered it was far from worthless.

He decides not to abandon Dugan to negotiate with Bonanza Chris on his own, but not even Red can imagine how far Bonanza Chris will go to restake his claim on the mine.

Five days ago, the blowing up of the express office safe in Burnt Timbers, Montana, had gone off without a hitch for the four members of the Buck Streeter gang, netting them $28,000. Since then they have taken refuge in an abandoned shack on a plateau above the town of Brigham in northern Wyoming. With its bank and express office across the street from each other and lacking any telegraph for communication, Brigham seems like the perfect place to stage their next robbery before laying low for a while.

Streeter is worried about their newest but oldest gang member, Frank Reno, who suffers from consumption and whose coughing throughout the night makes sleep difficult for them all; they need their rest in this tough, cold high country. Still, the gang is confident, and they take their time visiting and studying the lay of the land in Brigham. What they haven’t taken into consideration is the snowstorm heading into northern Wyoming and, even more significantly, the determination of US Marshal John Galloway.

Although eighteen years as a lawman has worn down the aging Galloway, he has no fear of death, and he is committed to stopping the gang’s spree of robbing and terrorizing small towns across the West, which has taken him from Texas to the Pacific Northwest to Montana. With orders coming from the Denver office, Galloway, who has learned everything he can about the four, has followed his instincts from Burnt Timbers to northern Wyoming. Galloway is convinced that Brigham will be the gang’s next target, but as the icy storm sets in, the question becomes when they will strike.

A departure from London’s normal tales of the frozen North, all of these tales take place in the islands of Hawaii. The tales deal with racial issues, family relationships, leprosy quarantines, missionaries, and the diverse people who make their homes on the beautiful Hawaiian islands.

London traveled to Hawaii in the late 1800s and early 1900s, including an eight-month stay shortly before he died in 1916. He had a fondness for the islands that is apparent in the rich descriptions in these tales.

Short stories in this collection:

• “The House of Pride”
• “Koolau the Leper”
• “Goodbye, Jack”
• “Aloha Oe”
• “Chun Ah Chun”
• “The Sheriff of Kona”

In this sequel novella to Mira’s Last Dance, Temple sorcerer Penric and the widow Nikys have finally reached safety in the duchy of Orbas when a secret letter from a friend brings frightening news: Nikys’ mother has been taken hostage by her brother’s enemies at the Cedonian imperial court, and confined in a precarious island sanctuary.

Their own romance still unresolved, Nikys, Penric, and of course Desdemona must infiltrate the hostile country once more, finding along the way that family relationships can be as unexpectedly challenging as any rescue scheme.

The year is 2085, and humanity has spread throughout the solar system, a stable lunar colony is agitating for independence, and lunar tourism is on the rise…

Against this background, professional “Close Protection” specialist Scotty Griffin, fresh off a disastrous assignment, is offered the opportunity of a lifetime: to shepherd the teenaged heir to the Republic of Kikaya on a fabulous vacation. Ali Kikaya will participate in the first live action role-playing game conducted on the Moon itself. Having left Luna—and a treasured marriage—years ago due to a near-tragic accident, Scotty leaps at the opportunity.

Live action role-playing attracts a very special sort of individual: brilliant, unpredictable, resourceful, and addicted to problem solving. By kidnapping a dozen gamers in the middle of the ultimate game, watched by more people than any other sporting event in history, they have thrown down an irresistible gauntlet: to “win” the first game that ever became “real.” Pursued by armed and murderous terrorists, forced to solve gaming puzzles to stay a jump ahead, forced to juggle multiple psychological realities as they do … this is the game for which they’ve prepared their entire lives, and they are going to play it for all it’s worth.

After the passage of two decades, the Omnians discovered a second, critical clue about the Nua’ll, humankind’s enemy, while investigating Celus-4, the home world of the intelligent, canine-like aliens, the Dischnya.

This striking discovery, combined with the final broadcast of the Nua’ll sphere at Libre, prior to its detonation, gave Alex Racine and company the means to narrow the search for the Nua’ll home world.

Alex has a consuming desire to locate the point of origin of the Nua’ll before another gigantic sphere arrives to destroy more colonies. The first sphere’s incursion into the Confederation burned billions of humans to ash.

Six scout ships are constructed by the Omnians and crewed by SADEs, self-aware digital entities, to search the stars along a narrow path defined by the two clues.

During its search, a scout ship, the Vivian, is captured by an alien warship in a faraway system, the SADEs dub Vinium. The two ships, locked tightly together in a form of electronic warfare, achieve an impasse.

The scout ship calls for help, and Alex Racine receives the strange message. According to the SADEs, the aliens aboard the warship appear to be plant people.

Rescuing the scout ship presents Alex and his companions the opportunity to meet the plant people, the Vinians, on their home world. It leads the Omnians to one more incredible discovery about the Nua’ll, which, unfortunately, proves Alex’s worst fears.

Some eight months after the events of Penric and the Shaman, Learned Penric, sorcerer and scholar, travels to Easthome, the capital of the Weald. There he again meets his friends Shaman Inglis and Locator Oswyl. When the body of a sorceress is found in the woods, Oswyl draws him into another investigation, and they must all work together to uncover a mystery mixing magic, murder, and the strange realities of Temple demons.

Dream Park, the ultimate in amusement parks, was about to embark on the greatest game ever: the California Voodoo Game. Across the world bets were being placed; fortunes and reputations hung in the balance. Gaming careers would be made—or destroyed. And the most advanced software package ever invented was going to be tested.

But one of the players was a murderer—and worse. Only Alex Griffin, head of Dream Park Security, and Game Master Tony McWhirter guessed the extent of the treachery tainting the Game. Somehow, they had to catch the killer—but above all, the Game must go on …

A visionary science fiction classic from Larry Niven and Steven Barnes

The Barsoom Project is the direct sequel to 1981’s Dream Park. Eviane’s first visit to the state-of-art amusement arena Dream Park ended in disaster: the special effects had seemed more real than life … until the holograms she was shooting with live ammunition turned out to be solid flesh and blood … and very, very dead.

Haunted by the past, rebounding from a lengthy spell in a mental hospital, she has returned to Dream Park to exorcise a nightmare that has become reality. But in Dream Park, nothing is what it seems. The Inuit mythology controlling the images is part of a “Fat Ripper Special” designed to implant new behavioral memes. The players are struggling against the game master, one another, and their own demons. And there is a killer who wants to ensure Eviane never regains her memory … no matter what it costs.

Blending together hard science fiction with virtual reality and RPG-like fantasy games, The Barsoom Project is science fiction at the cutting edge and a classic creation from two of the genre’s most beloved writers.

From the author of the Inspector Montalbano series comes the remarkable account of an exceptional woman who rises to power in seventeenth-century Sicily and brings about sweeping changes that threaten the iron-fisted patriarchy, before being cast out in a coup after only twenty-seven days.

Sicily, April 16, 1677. From his deathbed, Charles III’s viceroy, don Angel de Guzmàn, marquis of Castel de Roderigo, names his wife, donna Eleonora, as his successor. Eleonora di Mora is a highly intelligent and capable woman who immediately applies her political acumen to heal the scarred soul of Palermo, a city afflicted by poverty, misery, and the frequent uprisings they entail.

The marquise implements measures that include lowering the price of bread, reducing taxes for large families, reopening women’s care facilities, and establishing stipends for young couples wishing to marry—all measures that were considered seditious by the conservative city fathers and by the Church. The machinations of powerful men soon result as donna Eleonora, whom the Church sees as a dangerous revolutionary, is recalled to Spain. Her rule lasted twenty-seven days—one cycle of the moon.

Based on a true story, Camilleri’s gripping and richly imagined novel tells the story of a woman whose courage and political vision is tested at every step by misogyny and reactionary conservatism.

For thirteen violent months in the 1930s, John Dillinger and his gang swept through the Midwest. The criminals of the Depression robbed almost at will, as the Indiana State Police had only forty-one members, including clerks and typists. Dillinger’s daring escapes at Crown Point jail or through the withering machine gun fire of FBI agents at Little Bohemia Lodge, along with his countless bank robberies, excited the imagination of a despondent country. He eluded the lawmen of a half-dozen states and the growing power of the FBI, earning him the dubious honor of Public Enemy Number One and captivating Americans to the present day.

His brief but significant career is vividly chronicled here in extraordinary detail, as is the entire outlaw era of Baby Face Nelson, Bonnie and Clyde, Ma Barker, and Machine Gun Kelly. John Toland conducted hundreds of interviews; his research took him through thirty-four states, into the cells where Dillinger was confined, and into every bank he robbed.

The Dillinger Days is the inside account of a desperate and determined war between the law and the lawless, a struggle that did not end until a unique set of circumstances led to Dillinger’s bloody death outside a Chicago movie house.

A group of pretend adventurers suit up for a campaign called “the South Seas Treasure Game.” As in the early role-playing games, there are dungeon masters, warriors, magicians, and thieves. The difference? At Dream Park, a futuristic fantasy theme park full of holographic attractions and the latest in VR technology, they play in an artificial enclosure that has been enhanced with special effects, holograms, actors, and a clever story line. The players get as close as possible to truly living their adventure.

All’s fun and games until a park security guard is murdered, a valuable research property is stolen, and all evidence points to someone inside the game. The park’s head of security, Alex Griffin, joins the game to find the killer, but finds new meaning in the games he helps keep alive.

From freezing infantrymen huddled in bloodied trenches on the front lines to intricate political maneuvering and tense strategy sessions in European capitals, noted historian John Toland tells of the unforgettable final year of the First World War. As 1918 opened, the Allies and Central Powers remained locked in a desperate, bloody stalemate, despite the deaths of millions of soldiers over the previous three and a half years. The arrival of the Americans “over there” by the middle of the year turned the tide of war, resulting in an Allied victory in November.

In these pages participants on both sides, from enlisted men to generals and prime ministers to monarchs, vividly recount the battles, sensational events, and behind-the-scenes strategies that shaped the climactic, terrifying year. It’s all here—the horrific futility of going over the top into a hail of bullets in no man’s land; the enigmatic death of the legendary German ace, the Red Baron; Operation Michael, a punishing German attack in the spring; the Americans’ long-awaited arrival in June; the murder of Russian Czar Nicholas II and his family, the growing fear of a communist menace in the east; and the armistice on November 11. The different points of view of Germans, Americans, British, French, and Russians add depth, complexity, and understanding to the tragedies and triumphs of the War to End All Wars.

“Our apologies, good friends, for the fracture of good order, the burning of paper instead of children, the angering of the orderlies in the front parlor of the charnel house. We could not, so help us God, do otherwise.”

Daniel Berrigan was a Jesuit priest, poet, and peacemaker whose words and actions over fifty years have offered a powerful witness to the God of Life. Father Berrigan, along with his brother Philip, was one of the Catonsville Nine, arrested and imprisoned in 1968 for destroying draft files in a protest against the Vietnam War. But this was only one step along a journey of faith.

Through these selections from his many books, journals, poems, and homilies, a chronicle of Berrigan’s life and work unfolds, from the early steps in his vocation to his decision to cross the line and go to prison, his ongoing witness for peace, and his extraordinary commentaries on scripture and the life of radical discipleship.

Alex Racine, who led an elite group of humans and SADEs (self-ware digital entities), left the newly discovered planet of Celus-5 under difficult circumstances. Few of the Harakens with Alex thought there was little he could do to bring peace to the embroiled planet. From their viewpoint, the demands of the Celus-5 Swei Swee, the six-legged aliens of the ocean, and the Dischnya, the warring, dog-like, intelligent creatures, who inhabited the dry plains, were too convoluted to solve.

Except Alex doesn’t see fulfilling the desires of the two sentient species, identifying the third species hiding in the green, and gaining permission for humans and SADEs to settle the planet as challenges. To Alex, these are merely stepping-stones to what he seeks.

Two centuries ago, Swei Swee escaped from their masters, the Nua’ll, and landed their dark travelers on the shoreline of Celus-5. This was the first clue the Harakens had received in twenty years as to the direction the enormous and deadly alien sphere of the Nua’ll originated before it attacked the first Confederation colony.

Alex was intent on solving the thorny issues of Celus-5, so he could garner the Dischnya’s support to help him solve the burning questions: When and from which direction did the Nua’ll sphere enter the Celus system? To do this, and prevent potential future attacks on human worlds, Alex realizes he must shed the responsibilities of the past years and return to the foundations on which he built Haraken, which were city-ships, Independents, and SADEs.

“The conscious and intelligent manipulation of the organized habits and opinions of the masses is an important element in democratic society. Those who manipulate this unseen mechanism of society constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”—Edward Bernays

A seminal and controversial figure in the history of political thought and public relations, Edward Bernays pioneered the scientific technique of shaping and manipulating public opinion, which he famously dubbed the “engineering of consent.” During World War I, he was an integral part of the US Committee on Public Information, or CPI, a powerful propaganda apparatus that was mobilized to package, advertise, and sell the war to the American people as one that would “Make the World Safe for Democracy.” The CPI became the blueprint for the marketing strategies of future wars.

Bernays applied the techniques he had learned in the CPI and, incorporating some of the ideas of Walter Lipmann, became an outspoken proponent of propaganda as a tool for democratic and corporate manipulation of the population. His 1928 bombshell, Propaganda, lays out his eerily prescient vision for using propaganda to regiment the collective mind in a variety of areas, including government, politics, art, science, and education. To read this book today is to frightfully comprehend what our contemporary institutions of government and business have become in regard to the organized manipulation of the masses.

The Nazi fascination with the occult is legendary, yet today it is often dismissed as Himmler’s personal obsession or wildly overstated for its novelty. Preposterous though it was, however, supernatural thinking was inextricable from the Nazi project. The regime enlisted astrology and the paranormal, paganism, Indo-Aryan mythology, witchcraft, miracle weapons, and the lost kingdom of Atlantis in reimagining German politics and society and recasting German science and religion. In this eye-opening history, Eric Kurlander reveals how the Third Reich’s relationship to the supernatural was far from straightforward. Even as popular occultism and superstition were intermittently rooted out, suppressed, and outlawed, the Nazis drew upon a wide variety of occult practices and esoteric sciences to gain power, shape propaganda and policy, and pursue their dreams of racial utopia and empire.

In 1948, most white people in the North had no idea how unjust and unequal daily life was for the ten million African Americans living in the South. But that suddenly changed after Ray Sprigle, a famous white journalist from Pittsburgh, went undercover and lived as a black man in the Jim Crow South.

Escorted through the South’s parallel black society by John Wesley Dobbs, a historic black civil-rights pioneer from Atlanta, Sprigle met with sharecroppers, local black leaders, and families of lynching victims. He visited ramshackle black schools and slept at the homes of prosperous black farmers and doctors. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reporter’s series was syndicated coast to coast in white newspapers and carried into the South only by the Pittsburgh Courier, the country’s leading black paper. His vivid descriptions and undisguised outrage at “the iniquitous Jim Crow system” shocked the North, enraged the South, and ignited the first national debate in the media about ending America’s system of apartheid.

Six years before Brown v. Board of Education, seven before the murder of Emmett Till, and thirteen before John Howard Griffin’s similar experiment became the bestseller Black Like Me, Sprigle’s intrepid journalism blasted into the American consciousness the grim reality of black lives in the South.

Over the years, rancher Luke Lilavelt built his Window Sash brand from a podunk operation into a full-fledged cattle empire. But he didn’t do it through hard work. He added to his holdings through bloody methods only marginally within the law.

And most of those methods were carried out by Dave Wall, Lilavelt’s troubleshooter.

The work hurt Wall’s reputation considerably. But Wall knew it wouldn’t hurt as much as Lilavelt revealing the secrets he’s holding about his brother-in-law’s checkered past. So Wall keeps doing the miserly coward’s dirty work.

But when he’s finally had enough and refuses to be Lilavelt’s strongarm any longer, Lilavelt makes good on his threat to reveal the secrets, forcing Wall to find a way to stop Lilavelt’s plans, or see his brother-in-law end up in prison—or worse.

In this sequel to the novella Penric’s Mission, the injured Penric, a Temple sorcerer and learned divine, tries to guide the betrayed General Arisaydia and his widowed sister Nikys across the last hundred miles of hostile Cedonia to safety in the Duchy of Orbas.

In the town of Sosie, the fugitive party encounters unexpected delays, and even more unexpected opportunities and hazards, as the courtesan Mira of Adria, one of the ten dead women whose imprints make up the personality of the chaos demon Desdemona, comes to the fore with her own special expertise.

For its initial mission, Haraken’s explorer ship, the Sojourn, undertook the investigation of Celus-5, a world identified by Willem, a SADE (self-aware digital entity), and his team of scientists, as the best candidate for a new colony.

What should have been a routine survey mission became a disaster. To the Harakens’ surprise, they discovered not one, but two alien species, which were constantly engaged in conflict. One species, the Dischnya, hid their nests underground, and each nest owed its allegiance to a queen. On the grassy plains, where the Dischnya lived, the resources were scarce, and the warriors competed fiercely.

Unfortunately, the Harakens’ landing party was late in discovering the Dischnya’s hideouts, and a shuttle and crew, including Teague, Alex Racine’s son, were captured by the dog-like warriors of the Tawas Soma nest. Soon the mission was mired in a standoff, and Captain Asu Azasdau fired off a comm to Haraken, pleading for a rescue, from Tomas Monti, the Haraken president, and Alex Racine.

The survey group might have been forgiven for their hasty landing. They were focused on investigating the three objects buried in the sands along the continent’s shoreline. Smooth, dark, and silver, they were the ships belonging to the nemesis of every human—the Nua’ll.

The dark travelers presented another clue as to the direction of the Nua’ll home world, but it also invoked the question: Where were the Swei Swee, the six-legged, whistling aliens, who once were aboard the ships?

Until the Confederation created Allora, it had produced SADEs (self-aware digital entities) for hundreds of years with enormous consistency and harnessed their capabilities to power the society. But this particular young SADE was disturbed by her confinement. Trapped in metal-alloy housing on the bridge of a luxury passenger liner, Allora sought to possess the same freedom enjoyed by humans, who came and went from her starship with abandon.

Allora’s hope for emancipation rested on Alex Racine, the Haraken president who had freed his SADEs, and she yearned to walk the worlds a free entity, as they did. Racine had pleaded for years with the Council of Leaders to give the Confederation SADEs equal status as citizens, and it was Allora’s thought to have him intercede on her behalf and bargain for her transfer to a mobile avatar so that she might live among the Harakens.

But Allora’s plans were thrown into disarray when she learned that Racine would soon end his presidency. Desperate, Allora, known to her fellow SADEs as the wild child, concocts a plan to kidnap the Council Leader and his associates. She intends to hold them hostage until they acquiesce to her demands.

Little does Allora know that her actions will set the Confederation and the Harakens on a collision course. Quietly waiting and watching the drama unfold are tens of thousands of SADEs, who control Confederation starships, stations, and Houses and have a vested interest in the outcome.

Trouble infiltrated the Harakens’ capital city of Espero, in the form of New Terra criminal gangs who grew wealthy and powerful on the moons of Ganymede, hiding behind the cover of an ill-conceived mining charter. The gangs brought stims and addictive hallucinogenic drugs to Espero, distributing them to the young on the planet.

Christie Racine and her friends visited a hidden club rumored to be a source of the dangerous drugs and have run afoul of the criminals running the illegal establishment. Kidnapped and transported out of Hellébore’s system aboard a freighter, the girls become desperate to free themselves.

Alex Racine, Christie’s brother and president of the Harakens, races to discover where the girls were taken. The trail leads Alex from Espero to the pleasure domes of Jolares, a moon orbiting a gas giant in Oistos, the New Terrans’ home system. Alex’s search is complicated by the discovery of not one, but three sets of pleasure domes, each on its own moon and run by its own criminal mastermind.

It becomes a dangerous game of hide-and-seek, as the Harakens attempt to recover their girls and locate the biochemist who created the dangerous hallucinogen, without panicking the kidnappers. The Harakens’ efforts are complicated by the duplicitous scheme of “Mr. Blue” and “Sniffer,” two gang leaders, who seek to steal the domes of “Craze,” the third gang leader, in a dangerous double-cross.

Alex and his people thought things couldn’t get any more complicated until they discover the gangs have gone to war with deadly stunners and plasma rifles in a fight for possession of the Haraken girls, who are caught between the rivals.

In his thirtieth year, Penric fell in love with light …

Learned Penric, a sorcerer and divine of the Bastard’s Order, travels across the sea to sunlit Cedonia on his first covert diplomatic mission, to attempt to secure the services of a disaffected Cedonian general for the Duke of Adria. However, nothing is as it seems: Penric is betrayed and thrown into a dungeon, and worse follows for the general and his kin.

Penric’s narrow escapes and adventures—including his interest in a young widow—are told with Bujold’s remarkable energy, wit, and humor. Once again, Bujold has created unforgettable characters and a wondrous, often dangerous world of intrigue and sorcery.

Gothic master Edgar Allan Poe’s complete works are collected in this multivolume set by Blackstone Audio. Here are his short stories, detective fiction, and poems in all their mysterious and macabre glory. Also included are Poe’s literary reviews and editorial musings, comprising an often caustic analysis of the poetry, drama, and fiction of the period.

This collection includes Poe’s famous stories “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s poetry features prominently in this collection, with well-known classics such as “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “Lenore” presented alongside lesser-known works like “Eulalie” and “The Conqueror Worm.” Poe fans will be treated to his fearless and acerbic analysis of then-modern works, a practice earning him the reputation as a “tomahawk man” in artistic circles.

In this novella set in the World of the Five Gods and four years after the events in Penric’s Demon, Penric is a divine of the Bastard’s Order as well as a sorcerer and scholar, living in the palace where the Princess-Archdivine holds court. His scholarly work is interrupted when the Archdivine agrees to send Penric, in his role as sorcerer, to accompany a “Locator” of the Father’s Order, assigned to capture Inglis, a runaway shaman charged with the murder of his best friend. However, the situation they discover in the mountains is far more complex than expected. Penric’s roles as sorcerer, strategist, and counselor are all called upon before the end.

Bujold delivers an astonishing tale that is not soon forgotten.

For centuries we’ve believed that work was where you learned discipline, initiative, honesty, self-reliance—in a word, character. A job was also, and not incidentally, the source of your income: if you didn’t work, you didn’t eat, or else you were stealing from someone. If only you worked hard, you could earn your way and maybe even make something of yourself.

In recent decades, through everyday experience, these beliefs have proven spectacularly false. In this book, James Livingston explains how and why Americans still cling to work as a solution rather than a problem—why it is that both liberals and conservatives announce that “full employment” is their goal when job creation is no longer a feasible solution for any problem, moral or economic. The result is a witty, stirring denunciation of the ways we think about why we labor, exhorting us to imagine a new way of finding meaning, character, and sustenance beyond our workaday world—and showing us that we can afford to leave that world behind.

Sol’s warships paid the ultimate price for threatening the Haraken and New Terran worlds. Now, Haraken President Alex Racine and his Méridien partner, Renée de Guirnon, are engaged in a desperate gamble to stop a war between their worlds and United Earth’s (UE) massive forces before it starts.

What’s Alex’s grand plan? He hasn’t a clue, but his people believe in him and hope he will find a way to protect them. Alex does have powerful assets: the Haraken space fleet; the genius SADEs, mobile Haraken digital intelligences; and the defected UE scientists, who are providing a wealth of intelligence about their home world.

Arriving at Sol, Alex discovers the perfect opportunity to make his statement to the UE Supreme Tribunal in the form of the aging Idona Station, which has fallen into disrepair as UE militia and rebels battle for control. Alex explains his unorthodox plan when he says, “The UE tribunes will succumb when we overpower them with prosperity.”

The Harakens work to meld Idona’s militia, stationers, and rebels into the Haraken’s view of the world, one based on peace, purpose, and equality. The Tribunal is at odds over the Harakens’ interference in their system, forcing the rifts in the UE’s political structure to widen into chasms.

In the exciting conclusion to Haraken, the series’ previous book, Sol is the story of a clash of cultures and ideals as Earthers struggle to find a way toward a successful new future.

Nine years of tranquility came to an abrupt end when a Méridien starship entered the Hellébore system, sounding a dire warning for Alex Racine, the Haraken president. Unwanted visitors had arrived again. But this time, they’re not alien; they’re human. Claiming to have followed the course of a colony ship launched a millennium ago when Earth wrestled with resource wars and climate change, the mission commander, Antonio García, requests a meeting with the planet’s leaders. The Earthers profess a kinship with all humans, and their great desire is to have Méridien join their United Earth (UE). Alex Racine journeys to Méridien to investigate and uncover the Earthers’ intentions. In the Haraken world, SADEs (self-aware digital entities) have been freed from their boxes aboard the Méridien-built starships. The mobile SADEs are powerful players in Alex’s strategies, inventing ingenious methods to investigate the Earthers and their ship. Complicating matters, the Méridien leadership is in turmoil. The Council Leader insists her people ignore the Earthers, but this path has costs. As tensions escalate, García sends a request for support to his superiors back on Earth, lest his discovery of the rich, Méridien worlds, boasting unbelievable advanced technology, slip through his grasp. A UE battleshiop heeds the call, escalating the pressure for action. Join the journey as the Harakens and Méridiens work together to protect their planets and their way of life from the newest invaders.

This election year, celebrate the Republican Party by drinking like a Republican! Organized by president, this fun audiobook is full of cocktail recipes, bar tips, and hysterical drinking anecdotes from all Republican White House administrations. Which president liked to mix whiskey, vodka, and orange juice? Who had a trick for hiding the labels of cheap wine? Drinking with the Republicans is the bar guide with a twist that all political buffs will enjoy!

First published in 1935, when Americans were still largely oblivious to the rise of Hitler in Europe, this prescient novel tells a cautionary tale about the fragility of democracy and offers an alarming, eerily timeless look at how fascism could take hold in America.

Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, is dismayed to find that many of the people he knows support presidential candidate Berzelius Windrip. The suspiciously fascist Windrip is offering to save the nation from sex, crime, welfare cheats, and a liberal press. But after Windrip wins the election, dissent soon becomes dangerous for Jessup. Windrip forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States into a totalitarian state.

The Méridiens are fleeing to their far colonies—and they have reason to run. Over the course of decades, they have lost hundreds of ships, billions of people, and seven Confederation colonies to an alien enemy: an advancing swarm of silver ships transported in the bowels of a gigantic, spherical vessel.

Alex Racine, who once enjoyed the solitary life of an explorer-tug captain, is now an admiral and responsible for the lives of a quarter million Librans. Further complicating his life, Alex’s Librans have made it clear they don’t want to settle on his home world. They want a new home, and he must secure them one.

The silver ships await Alex’s makeshift flotilla at Libre, the last colony they consumed. Thus far, Alex’s people have succeeded in skirmishes against the enemy’s fighters. Now, though, they’re preparing to attack the entire alien fleet and halt the devastation of the colonies.

To the surprise and chagrin of his officers and crew alike, Alex concocts a new plan, for he believes humanity faces not one but two alien species, and one may be enslaved to the other. If so, Alex believes slaves should be liberated, not obliterated.

To test Alex’s theory, his people must capture a wholly intact silver ship—a feat never before accomplished. The crew remains doubtful, but their admiral is determined to communicate with the aliens before he’s forced to destroy them, and his wish is their command.

The saga of the Rêveur continues in this second novel in the Silver Ships series.

The surviving Méridiens have returned to Confederation space, aided by their recently discovered cousins, the New Terrans. They expect a celebration after their seventy-one-year absence. Instead, they’re shocked to find the silver ships have destroyed half the Confederation.

The Méridiens are fleeing in advance of the horde of alien ships. But Alex Racine and his crew didn’t come this far to run away from humanity’s enemy. They intend to hunt the silver ships. But, to succeed, they need help.

Renée de Guirnon, the leader of the Rêveur’s Méridiens, reveals a sordid secret of Méridien society: citizens who defy their House, for any reason, are stripped of their rights, declared “Independents,” and imprisoned on the planet Libre.

But the Independents aren’t everyone’s pariahs, especially if you’re Alex Racine and you’re looking for allies against the silver ships. An entire colony of independent, free-thinking radicals offers just the sort of people Alex wants on his side, so an alliance is struck.

Soon the enemy ships will swarm off the planet Bellamonde, and the race begins for Alex and the Librans. The planet must be evacuated and the military force readied before the silver ships attack. Alex knows a battle is coming, but will they have enough time to prepare?

Cordelia Naismith Vorkosigan returns to the planet that changed her destiny in a new novel by multiple New York Times bestselling author Lois McMaster Bujold.

Future imperfect

Three years after her famous husband’s death, Cordelia Vorkosigan, widowed Vicereine of Sergyar, stands ready to spin her life in a new direction. Oliver Jole, admiral, Sergyar Fleet, finds himself caught up in her web of plans in ways he’d never imagined, bringing him to an unexpected crossroads in his life.

Meanwhile, Miles Vorkosigan, one of Emperor Gregor’s key investigators, this time dispatches himself on a mission of inquiry, into a mystery he never anticipated—his own mother.

Plans, wills, and expectations collide in this sparkling science fiction social comedy, as the impact of galactic technology on the range of the possible changes all the old rules, and Miles learns that not only is the future not what he expects, neither is the past.

A delightful collection of Lois McMaster Bujold’s early stories and a comprehensive introduction by this New York Times bestselling author

“Protozoa” is a word from biology via the Greek meaning “first animals.” These short stories were indeed among the first life spontaneously generated in Lois McMaster Bujold’s nascent writing career. Along with an introduction by the author, this collection features the short stories “Barter,” “Garage Sale,” “The Hole Truth,” “Dreamweaver’s Dilemma,” and “Aftermaths.”

Maurizio de Giovanni presents By My Hand, the fifth book in the critically acclaimed Commissario Ricciardi series.

As Naples prepares for its holiday celebrations, behind the facade of order and happiness imposed by the fascist regime lurks terrible poverty and blinding desperation. In a luxurious apartment on the Mergellina beach, the bodies of a fascist militia officer and his wife have been found. The woman’s throat has been cut, while the man has been stabbed over sixty times. Seemingly, the hands of two separate killers have been at work. A statuette of St. Joseph, patron saint of workers, lies in pieces on the floor. At the scene of the crime, Ricciardi, who has the dubious gift of being able to see and hear the last seconds in the lives of those who have suffered a violent death, listens to the enigmatic last words of the couple. Accompanied by his faithful partner Brigadier Raffaele Maione—and once more troubled by two women who compete for his attentions—the commissario will have to trace a wide and frenetic arc through the streets of Naples in order to uncover the truth.

On his way to his betrothal, young Lord Penric comes upon a riding accident with an elderly lady on the ground, her maidservant and guardsmen distraught. As he approaches to help, he discovers that the lady is a Temple divine, servant to the five gods of this world. Her avowed god is the Bastard, “master of all disasters out of season,” and with her dying breath she bequeaths her mysterious powers to Penric. From that moment on, Penric’s life is irreversibly changed, and his life is in danger from those who envy or fear him.

Set in the fantasy world of the author’s acclaimed novels The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls, and The Hallowed Hunt, this novella has the depth of characterization and emotional complexity that distinguishes Bujold’s work.

In this fourth installment of the internationally successful Commissario Ricciardi series, the commissario investigates the death of Matteo, one of the many street urchins who live hand-to-mouth in the dark alleys of 1930s Naples. While at first the death seems provoked by natural causes, there's more to the tragedy than meets the eye.

Commissario Ricciardi is the undisputed wizard of Neapolitan crime scenes. He solves every crime with an uncanny swiftness that leaves his colleagues dumbfounded. Indeed, there are those who think his abilities are the work of the devil, an unnatural and ungodly gift to be exorcised. And maybe they're right. Ricciardi sees the dead; he sees and hears the final moments in the lives of those who have suffered violent deaths. It may be a talent, or it may be a curse, but it is nonetheless a kind of black magic. Sometimes, however, even black magic isn't enough. It's a rainy autumn in Naples and the fog lays thick over the city as its inhabitants celebrate the week of the dead. Ricciardi's instincts tell him that the dead boy is the victim of a murder, but investigating the homicide is not going to be easy. The authorities want to avoid any trouble, any sign that things are not as they ought to be in Naples, for they are preparing for the state visit of Benito Mussolini. Ricciardi will have to conduct his investigation hidden from the eyes of his superiors. What's worse, his sixth sense is no help to him this time: the scene of the crime is silent, still, not a word or a sign, or even a scream from the dead. Has his unwelcome gift finally faded? Or is something more sinister at work?

Guest-edited by longtime Lightspeed assistant editor Christie Yant, Women Destroy Science Fiction! contains eleven original science fiction short stories, four short-story reprints, a novella reprint, and for the first time ever, an array of flash fiction stories.

This special issue includes

• Original science fiction by Seanan McGuire, N. K. Jemisin, Charlie Jane Anders, Maria Dahvana Headley, Amal El-Mohtar, Kris Millering, Heather Clitheroe, Rhonda Eikamp, Gabriella Stalker, Elizabeth Porter Birdsall, and K. C. Norton;
• Reprints by Alice Sheldon (a.k.a. James Tiptree Jr.), Eleanor Arnason, Maria Romasco Moore, Tananarive Due, and Maureen F. McHugh; and
• Original flash fiction by Carrie Vaughn, Ellen Denham, Samantha Murray, Holly Schofield, Cathy Humble, Emily Fox, Tina Connolly, Effie Seiberg, Marina J. Lostetter, Rhiannon Rasmussen, Sarah Pinsker, Kim Winternheimer, Anaid Perez, Katherine Crighton, and Vanessa Torline.

In the middle of a summer heat wave, as Naples prepares for one of its most important holy days, a renowned surgeon falls to his death from the window of his office. For Commissario Ricciardi and Brigadier Maione, it is the beginning of an investigation that will bring them into contact with the most torrid, conflicting, and enduring of human passions. In the world Ricciardi and Maione are about to enter, infidelity appears inextricable from the most joyful expressions of love, and this interdependence sows doubt and uncertainty in both men, compromising their own attempts at love.

Ricciardi is one of the most intriguing and unique figures to appear in crime fiction in recent years. He possesses the dubious gift of being able to see and hear the last seconds in the lives of those who have suffered a violent death. This ability makes him an unusually effective investigator but plagues him and renders human relationships almost impossible. He is a classic noir hero and the cursed son of a city that, for all its Mediterranean splendor, is a perfect noir city.

In this new installment in the Commissario Ricciardi series, Maurizio de Giovanni creates a large cast of unforgettable characters and a compelling, suspenseful plot that demonstrates once more why he is considered one of the best crime writers working today.

Naples, 1931. Together with his indefatigable partner Brigadier Maione, Commissario Ricciardi, a man driven into solitude by his paranormal “gift” of seeing the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths—a talent that also makes him a highly effective investigator—is conducting an investigation into the death of the beautiful and mysterious Duchess of Camparino. The duchess’ connections to Neapolitan privileged social circles and the local Fascist elite make the case a powder keg waiting to blow.

Ricciardi has visions. He sees and hears the final seconds in the lives of victims of violent deaths. It is both a gift and a curse. It has helped him become one of the most acute and successful homicide detectives in the Naples police force. But all that horror and suffering has hollowed him out emotionally: He drinks and doesn't sleep. Other than his loyal partner Brigadier Maione he has no friends.

Naples, 1931. In a working-class apartment in the Sanita neighborhood, an elderly woman by the name of Carmela Calise has been beaten to death. When Ricciardi and Maione arrive at the scene they start asking the neighbors questions. No one wants to talk, but slowly a few interesting facts slip out. Carmela Calise was moonlighting as a fortune-teller and moneylender. In her decrepit apartment, she would receive clients—among them some of the city's rich and powerful—predicting their futures in such a way as to manipulate and deceive. If economic ruin lurked in their futures, Calise was happy to help—for a price, of course. She had many enemies: those indebted to her, manipulated by her lies, disappointed by her prophesies, or destroyed by her machinations. Murder suspects in this atmospheric thriller abound, and Commissario Ricciardi, one of the most original and intriguing investigators in contemporary crime fiction, will have his work cut out for him.

In poetic vignettes, Einstein’s Dreams explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.

A modern classic, Einstein’s Dreams is a fictional collage of stories dreamed by Albert Einstein in 1905, when he worked in a patent office in Switzerland. As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, and people are fated to repeat their triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.

Translated into thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.

Naples, 1931. A bitter wind stalks the city streets, and murder lies at its chilled heart. When Maestro Vezzi, one of the world’s greatest tenors, is found brutally murdered in his dressing room at Naples’ famous San Carlo theater, the enigmatic and aloof Commissario Ricciardi is called to investigate. Arrogant and bad-tempered, Vezzi was hated by many. But with the livelihoods of the opera at stake, who would have committed such a callous act? Ricciardi and his loyal colleague Maione are determined to discover the truth, but Ricciardi carries a secret of his own. Will it help him solve this murder?

Naples, 1932. A week before Easter, springtime offers fragrant temptations to the men and women of Naples—but evil also lurks in the sweet-smelling spring air. At the high-class brothel in the center of town known as Paradiso, Viper, the most famous prostitute of all, is found dead after being suffocated with a pillow. Her last client swears that he left her alive and well. But when her next client arrived, he found her dead. Who killed her and why? Ricciardi must untangle a complex knot of greed, frustration, jealousy, and rancor in order to solve the riddle of Viper’s death. As he does, he will discover an endless trail of conflicting emotions just beneath the surface of a city that lives on passion.

De Giovanni’s mysteries unfold with such sinuous ease that they seem to write themselves. They enchant, surprise, and keep readers enthralled. Commissario Ricciardi, with the dubious gift of being able to see and hear the last seconds in the lives of those who have suffered a violent death, is one of the most fascinating investigators to make his appearance in the world of international crime fiction. In Viper, the lustful and boisterous city of Naples has never been more seductive.

Well known for The Jungle, his scathing expos├® of the Chicago meatpacking industry at the turn of the twentieth century, Upton Sinclair here takes on yet another massive industry: coal mining.

Based on the 1914 and 1915 Colorado coal strikes, King Coal describes the abhorrent conditions faced by workers in the western United States' coal mining industry during the 1910s. The story follows Hal Warner, a rich man looking to get a better view of the lives of commoners. It is a tale of struggle, threats, and violence, of hardened men and the advocacy for workers' rights. In this business, the road to unionization is a rocky one.

In a distant galaxy of colonized planets, the atrocity of slavery is alive and well. Young Thorby was just another bedraggled orphan boy sold at auction, but his new owner, Baslim, is not the disabled beggar he appears to be. Adopting Thorby as his son, Baslim fights relentlessly as an abolitionist spy. When the authorities close in on Baslim, Thorby must find his own way in a hostile galaxy. Joining with the Free Traders, a league of merchant princes, Thorby must find the courage to live by his wits and fight his way up from society’s lowest rung. But Thorby’s destiny will be forever changed when he discovers the truth about his own identity.

Citizen of the Galaxy is a suspenseful tale of adventure, coming of age, and interstellar conflict by science fiction’s Grand Master.

John D. Rockefeller, Sr., history’s first billionaire and the patriarch of America’s most famous dynasty, is an icon whose true nature has eluded three generations of historians. Now Ron Chernow, a National Book Award–winning biographer, gives us a detailed and insightful history of the mogul. Titan is the first full-length biography based on unrestricted access to Rockefeller’s exceptionally rich trove of papers. A landmark publication full of startling revelations, the book indelibly alters our image of this most enigmatic capitalist.

Born the son of a flamboyant, bigamous snake-oil salesman and a pious, straitlaced mother, Rockefeller rose from rustic origins to become the world’s richest man by creating America’s most powerful and feared monopoly, Standard Oil. Branded “the Octopus” by legions of muckrakers, the trust refined and marketed nearly 90 percent of the oil produced in America.

Rockefeller was likely the most controversial businessman in our nation’s history. Critics charged that his empire was built on unscrupulous tactics: grand-scale collusion with the railroads, predatory pricing, industrial espionage, and wholesale bribery of political officials. The titan spent more than thirty years dodging investigations until Teddy Roosevelt and his trustbusters embarked on a marathon crusade to bring Standard Oil to bay.

While providing abundant evidence of Rockefeller’s misdeeds, Chernow discards the stereotype of the cold-blooded monster to sketch an unforgettably human portrait of a quirky, eccentric original. A devout Baptist and temperance advocate, Rockefeller gave money more generously than anyone before him—his chosen philanthropies included the Rockefeller Foundation, the University of Chicago, and what is today Rockefeller University. Titan presents a finely nuanced portrait of a fascinating, complex man, synthesizing his public and private lives and disclosing numerous family scandals, tragedies, and misfortunes that have never before come to light.

John D. Rockefeller’s story captures a pivotal moment in American history, documenting the dramatic post–Civil War shift from small business to the rise of giant corporations that irrevocably transformed the nation. With cameos by Joseph Pulitzer, William Randolph Hearst, Jay Gould, William Vanderbilt, Ida Tarbell, Andrew Carnegie, Carl Jung, J. P. Morgan, William James, Henry Clay Frick, Mark Twain, and Will Rogers, Titan turns Rockefeller’s life into a vivid tapestry of American society in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. It is Ron Chernow’s signal triumph that he writes this monumental saga with all the sweep, drama, and insight that this giant subject deserves.

No one expected the oil to last forever. How right they were.

A geopolitical miscalculation tainted the world’s major oil fields with radioactivity and plunged the Middle East into chaos. Any oil that remains usable is more prized than ever. No one can build solar farms, wind farms, and electric cars quickly enough to cope. The few countries still able to export petroleum and natural gas—Russia chief among them—have a stranglehold on the world economy.

Then, from the darkness of space, came Phoebe. Rather than deflect the onrushing asteroid, America coaxed it into Earth’s orbit. Solar power satellites—cheaply mass-produced in orbit with resources mined from the new moon to beam vast amounts of power to the ground—offer America its last, best hope of avoiding servitude and economic ruin.

As though building miles-wide structures in space isn’t challenging enough, special interests, from technophobes to eco-extremists to radio astronomers, want to stop the project. And the remaining petro powers will do anything to protect their newfound dominance of world affairs.

NASA engineer Marcus Judson is determined to make the powersat demonstration project a success. And he will—even though nothing in his job description mentions combating an international cabal or going into space to do it.

Howells’ best-known work and a subtle classic of its time, The Rise of Silas Lapham is an elegant tale of Boston society and manners.

After garnering a fortune in the paint business, Silas Lapham moves his family from their Vermont farm to the city of Boston in order to improve his social position. The consequences of this endeavor are both humorous and tragic as the greedy Silas brings his company to the brink of bankruptcy.

The novel focuses on important themes in the American literary tradition—the efficacy of self-help and determination, the ambiguous benefits of social and economic progress, and the continual contradiction between urban and pastoral values—and provides a paradigm of American culture in the Gilded Age.

Mark Twain is a master of adventure, mystery, and wit. This collection, containing three tales of mystery, offers a healthy dose of each—and more! In Tom Sawyer, Detective, a sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer Abroad, take a ride down the Mississippi to Uncle Silas’ farm. Mark Twain’s satirical take on the immensely popular detective novels of the time provides enough twists and turns to satisfy any avid mystery fan. In “The Stolen White Elephant,” Mark Twain is a character in his own story! Listeners will delight in this tale of an Indian elephant getting lost in New Jersey—and the hunt that ensues. Finally, in “A Double-Barreled Detective Story,” Sherlock Holmes comes to America! When the legendary detective finds himself in the American West, his extraordinary skills and scientific methods are called upon once more.

Twain’s biting satire, cunning wit, and provocative mysteries will entertain listeners of all ages.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “A legal thriller that’s comparable to classics such as Scott Turow’s Presumed Innocent . . . tragic and shocking.”—Associated Press

NOW AN EMMY-NOMINATED ORIGINAL STREAMING SERIES • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Entertainment Weekly • Boston Globe • Kansas City Star

Andy Barber has been an assistant district attorney in his suburban Massachusetts county for more than twenty years. He is respected in his community, tenacious in the courtroom, and happy at home with his wife, Laurie, and son, Jacob. But when a shocking crime shatters their New England town, Andy is blindsided by what happens next: his fourteen-year-old son is charged with the murder of a fellow student.

Every parental instinct Andy has rallies to protect his boy. Jacob insists that he is innocent, and Andy believes him. Andy must. He’s his father. But as damning facts and shocking revelations surface, as a marriage threatens to crumble and the trial intensifies, and as the crisis reveals how little a father knows about his son, Andy will face a trial of his own—between loyalty and justice, between truth and allegation, between a past he’s tried to bury and a future he cannot conceive.

Award-winning author William Landay has written the consummate novel of an embattled family in crisis—a suspenseful, character-driven mystery that is also a spellbinding tale of guilt, betrayal, and the terrifying speed at which our lives can spin out of control. 

In 1861, young Mark Twain found himself adrift as a tenderfoot in the Wild West. Roughing It is a hilarious record of his travels over a six-year period that comes to life with his inimitable mixture of reporting, social satire, and rollicking tall tales. Twain reflects on his scuffling years mining silver in Nevada, working at a Virginia City newspaper, being down-and-out in San Francisco, reporting for a newspaper from Hawaii, and more.

This humorous account is a patchwork of personal anecdotes and tall tales, many of them told in the “vigorous new vernacular” of the West.

Selling seventy-five thousand copies within a year of its publication in 1872, Roughing It was greeted as a work of “wild, preposterous invention and sublime exaggeration” whose satiric humor made “pretension and false dignity ridiculous.” Meticulously restored from a variety of original sources, this text adheres to the author’s wishes in thousands of details of wording, spelling, and punctuation.

Once an Eagle is the story of one special man, a soldier named Sam Damon, and his adversary over a lifetime, fellow officer Courtney Massengale. Damon is a professional who puts duty, honor, and the men he commands above self-interest. Massengale, however, brilliantly advances his career by making the right connections behind the lines and in Washington’s corridors of power.

Beginning in the French countryside during the Great War, the conflict between these adversaries solidifies in the isolated garrison life marking peacetime, intensifies in the deadly Pacific jungles of World War II, and reaches its treacherous conclusion in the last major battleground of the Cold War—Vietnam.

A study in character and values, courage, nobility, honesty, and selflessness, here is an unforgettable story about a man who embodies the best in our nation—and in us all. 

In June 1867, Mark Twain set out for Europe and the Holy Land on the paddle steamer Quaker City. His enduring, no-nonsense guide for the first-time traveler also served as an antidote to the insufferably romantic travel books of the period.

“Who could read the programme for the excursion without longing to make one of the party?”

So Mark Twain acclaims his voyage from New York City to Europe and the Holy Land. His adventures produced The Innocents Abroad, a book so funny and provocative it made him an international star for the rest of his life. He was making his first responses to the Old World—to Paris, Milan, Florence, Venice, Pompeii, Constantinople, Sebastopol, Balaklava, Damascus, Jerusalem, Nazareth, and Bethlehem. For the first time he was seeing the great paintings and sculptures of the Old Masters. He responded with wonder and amazement but also with exasperation, irritation, and disbelief. Above all he displayed the great energy of his humor, more explosive for us now than for his beguiled contemporaries.

Here is the dramatic expos├® of the Chicago meatpacking industry at the turn of the century that prompted the investigation by Theodore Roosevelt which culminated in the pure-food legislation of 1906.

The Jungle is the story of Jurgis Rudkus, a Slavic immigrant who marries frail Ona Lukoszaite and seeks security and happiness as a workman in the Chicago stockyards. Once there, he is abused by foremen; his meager savings are filched by real estate sharks; and at every turn he is plagued by the misfortunes arising from poverty, poor working conditions, and disease. Finally, in accordance with Sinclair’s own creed, Rudkus turns to socialism as a way out.

In this sardonic portrait of the up-and-coming middle class during the prosperous 1920s, On the surface, everything is all right with Babbitt’s world of the solid, successful businessman. But in reality, George F. Babbitt is a lonely, middle-aged man. He doesn’t understand his family, has an unsuccessful attempt at an affair, and is almost financially ruined when he dares to voice sympathy for some striking workers. Babbitt finds that his only safety lies deep in the fold of those who play it safe. He is a man who has added a new word to our language: a “Babbitt,” meaning someone who conforms unthinkingly, a sheep.

In April 1878, Mark Twain and his family traveled to Europe. Overloaded with creative ideas, Twain had hoped that the sojourn would spark his creativity enough to bring at least one of the books in his head to fruition. Instead, he wrote of his walking tour of Europe, describing his impressions of the Black Forest, the Matterhorn, and other attractions. Neglected for years, A Tramp Abroad sparkles with Twain’s shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture and showcases his unparalleled ability to integrate humorous sketches, autobiographical tidbits, and historical anecdotes in a consistently entertaining narrative. Cast in the form of a walking tour through Germany, Switzerland, France, Italy, and England, A Tramp Abroad includes among its adventures a voyage by raft down the Neckar and an ascent of Mont Blanc by telescope, as well as the author’s attempts to study art—a wholly imagined activity Twain “authenticated” with his own wonderfully primitive pictures. This book reveals Mark Twain as a mature writer and is filled with brilliant prose, insightful wit, and Twain’s unerring instinct for the truth.

“I’ve struck it!” Mark Twain wrote in a 1904 letter to a friend. “And I will give it away—to you. You will never know how much enjoyment you have lost until you get to dictating your autobiography.”

Thus, after dozens of false starts and hundreds of pages, Twain embarked on his “Final (and Right) Plan” for telling the story of his life. His innovative notion—to “talk only about the thing which interests you for the moment”—meant that his thoughts could range freely. The strict instruction that many of these texts remain unpublished for one hundred years meant that when they came out, he would be “dead, and unaware, and indifferent,” and that he was therefore free to speak his “whole frank mind.”

The year 2010 marked the one hundredth anniversary of Twain’s death. In celebration of this important milestone, here, for the first time, is Mark Twain’s uncensored autobiography, in its entirety, exactly as he left it. This major literary event offers the first of three volumes and presents Mark Twain’s authentic and unsuppressed voice, brimming with humor, ideas, and opinions, and speaking clearly from the grave, as he intended.

Fading charmer Tommy Wilhelm has reached his day of reckoning and is scared. In his forties, he still retains a boyish impetuousness that has brought him to the brink of chaos: he is separated from his wife and children; at odds with his vain, successful father; failed in his acting career (a Hollywood agent once placed him as "the type that loses the girl"); and in a financial mess. In the course of one climactic day he reviews his past mistakes and spiritual malaise, until a mysterious, philosophizing con man grants him a glorious, illuminating moment of truth and understanding and offers him one last hope.

The inspiration for the gripping docuseries Hitler and the Nazis, now streaming on Netflix

Since its publication in 1960, William L. Shirer’s monumental study of Hitler’s German empire has been widely acclaimed as the definitive record of the twentieth century’s blackest hours.

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich offers an unparalleled and thrillingly told examination of how Adolf Hitler nearly succeeded in conquering the world. With millions of copies in print around the globe, it has attained the status of a vital and enduring classic.

Now, long after the end of World War II, it may seem incredible that our most valued institutions and way of life were threatened by the menace that Hitler and the Third Reich represented. Shirer’s description of events and the cast of characters who played such pivotal roles in defining the course Europe was to take is unforgettable.

Shirer benefitted from his many years as a reporter, thus a personal observer of the rise of Nazi Germany, and by availing himself of some of the 485 tons of documents from the German Foreign Office, as well as countless other diaries, phone transcriptions, and other written records meticulously kept at every level by the Germans. With these, he has put together a brutally objective account of how Hitler wrested political control of Germany and planned and executed his six-year quest to dominate the world, only to see Germany go down in flames. 

The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich is a vast, richly rewarding experience for anyone who wants to come to grips with the mysterious question of how this menace to civilization ever came into being, much less was sustained for as long as it was. The answer, unfortunately, is that most of Germany, for a whole host of reasons, embraced Nazism and the fanaticism that Hitler engendered. 

The popular adventures of Miles Vorkosigan, a clever and outlandish science fiction hero for the modern era, continue in these three tales. In “The Mountains of Mourning,” Miles is dispatched to a backcountry region of Barrayar, where he must act as detective, judge, and executioner in a controversial murder case.

In “Labyrinth,” Miles adopts his alternate persona as Dendarii Mercenary Admiral Naismith for an undercover mission to rescue an important research geneticist from Jackson’s Whole.

And in the title story, Miles infiltrates an escape-proof Cetagandan POW camp and plays hero to the most deeply distressed damsel of his colorful career.

This fourth volume in Orson Scott Card's five-book anthology of short stories features tales with religious themes, exploring the mysteries of ritual, sacrifice, faith, and death.

Mortal Gods
In our mortality lies our greatness.

Saving Grace
A story of TV faith healers and those who follow them.

Eye for Eye
An abused child has the gift of creating illness and death in those he is angry with. Winner of the Hugo Award for Best Novella in 1988.

St. Amy's Tale
A family destroys all technology.

Kingsmeat
When flesh-eating aliens take over a human colony world, one human forestalls total doom by feeding them non-essential bits of his fellow colonists.

Holy
A seemingly pointless mission to bring an offering to another culture's shrine takes on unexpected meaning.

"I believe that speculative fiction—science fiction in particular—is the last American refuge of religious literature. Real religious literature, I think, explores the nature of the universe and discovers the purpose behind it."—Orson Scott Card, from his introduction

This final collection in Orson Scott Card's five-volume anthology of short works features the "hidden stories", including his first published piece, some tales about Mormon family life and other stylistic departures, and several stories that were later developed into acclaimed novels such asEnder's Game,Songmaster,Invasive Procedures, and the Tales of Alvin Maker series. Listen as Card crafts a paranoid thriller, a spoof of "serious" contemporary literature, an epic narrative poem, and much more. Card includes background commentaries for each story in his afterwords. Stories include:Ender's Game;Mikal's Songbird;Prentice Alvin and the No-Good Plow;Malpractice;Follower;Hitching;Damn Fine Novel;Billy's Box;The Best Family Home Evening Ever;Bicicleta;I Think Mom and Dad Are Going Crazy, Jerry; andGert Fram.

The irrepressible Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn, always looking for trouble, find it again in Tom Sawyer Abroad, Twain’s once-celebrated but now little-known sequel to his classics The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.

Tom and Huck have both ranged the length of the Mississippi, but, as Huck declares, “Do you reckon Tom Sawyer was satisfied after all them adventures?…No, he wasn’t. It only just pisoned him for more.” So the two boys head off to see the unveiling of a futuristic airship—only to be kidnapped by its mad inventor! But when the inventor goes overboard in a storm, it’s up to Tom and Huck to take control of the airship as it heads out over the seething ocean toward the unknown. Yonder they will encounter robbers, lions, Bedouins, and the perils of the Sahara in their very own Arabian adventure.

A return trip down the Mississippi River to Uncle Silas’ farm is just the beginning of a yarn that includes Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn, a diamond heist, a confidence man, twins, a murder, and enough twists and turns to satisfy an avid mystery fan. A sequel to The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Tom Sawyer Abroad, this is Mark Twain’s satirical take on the immensely popular detective novels of the time. As Tom attempts to solve a mysterious murder, Mark Twain examines the social customs, legal system, and family expectations of the time as only he could. Once a staple of juvenile fiction, then banned as politically incorrect, Twain’s forgotten classic brings to life its time and place.

The earthy and urbane Sicilian detective Inspector Montalbano casts his spell on more and more fans with each new mystery from Andrea Camilleri.

While swimming along the Sicilian shore, Inspector Montalbano discovers a corpse. His pursuit of the cause of death intersects with the inquiry into a hit-and-run accident that claimed the life of a young boy who may have been victimized by human traffickers. The buying and selling of immigrant children, for slave labor, sex, and as a source of illegal organ transplants, is part of the evil underside of the opening of Europe's borders. That, combined with frustration with his department's repressive handling of security for the G8 summit in Genoa and the corruption among his superiors and the politicians behind them, makes setting anything right seem like an exercise in futility. Montalbano alternates between despair and steely resolve, and when he realizes that he may have inadvertently aided the boy's victimizers, his internal turmoil intensifies.

Immediately recognized as a revelatory and enormously controversial book since its first publication in 1971, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is universally recognized as one of those rare books that forever changes the way its subject is perceived.

Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee is Dee Brown’s classic, eloquent, meticulously documented account of the systematic destruction of the American Indian during the second half of the nineteenth century. Using council records, autobiographies, and firsthand descriptions, Brown allows great chiefs and warriors of the Dakota, Ute, Sioux, Cheyenne, and other tribes to tell us in their own words of the series of battles, massacres, and broken treaties that finally left them and their people demoralized and decimated.

A unique and disturbing narrative told with force and clarity, Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee changed forever our vision of how the West was won—and lost. It tells a story that should not be forgotten and so must be retold from time to time.

Leo Graf was just your average highly efficient engineer: mind your own business, fix what’s wrong, and move on to the next job. Everything neat and according to spec, just the way he liked it. Safety Regs weren’t just the rule book he swore by; he’d helped write them. But all that changed on his assignment to the Cay Habitat. Leo was to teach welding to a secretly produced batch of humanoid workers genetically engineered with two additional arms instead of legs to be ideally suited to working in free fall. Could he just stand there and allow the exploitation of hundreds of helpless children merely to enhance the bottom line of a heartless mega-corporation? Leo hadn’t anticipated a situation where the right thing to do was neither safe nor in the rules.

Leo adopted a thousand quaddies. Now all he had to do was teach them to be free.

Composed in the last years of Roberto Bolaño’s life, 2666 was greeted across Europe and Latin America as his most brilliant achievement, surpassing even his previous work in its strange beauty, daring experimentation, and epic scope. The book’s subject matter ranges from the heady heights of literature and love to the gritty realism of violence and death as it explores how humans make sense of senseless events. Its throng of unforgettable characters includes academics and convicts, writers and cops, pursuing their own separate yet interrelated quests for meaning: an enigmatic Prussian novelist who disappears from the public eye after the death of his lover; a group of literary critics who bond through their shared love of the novelist’s works; an African American journalist sent to Mexico on a sports beat in the wake of his mother’s death; and a Spanish professor and widowed father whose mind is beginning to lose its grip on reality. Their lives intersect in the urban sprawl of Santa Teresa, a fictional Juárez on the US-Mexico border, where the serial killings of hundreds of young working class women remain unsolved.

Captain Cordelia Naismith of the Betan Expeditionary Force was on a routine mission to study the life forms on an uninhabited, neutral planet. Little did she know that the enemy Barrayarans had chosen this place as their secret base for an as-yet undeclared war. Separated from her team, Cordelia is captured by Lord Aral Vorkosigan, the leader in charge of the Barrayaran mission. Aral himself is caught in a web of political intrigue that has led to a recent attempt on his life. As the two strangers struggle together across the unfriendly terrain of the foreign planet toward Aral’s ship, they discover that their greatest danger may be the romance inconveniently developing between them, on the brink of a war that will divide their peoples more strongly than ever.

Recognized as the current exemplar of character-based science fiction, Bujold debuts her beloved Vorkosigan saga with this tale about the future parents of Miles Vorkosigan.

Set in Bujold’s Vorkosigan universe, this independent novel follows a doctor as he braces himself for his first encounter with that most alien of aliens—a female of his own species.

Dr. Ethan Urquhart is chief of biology at a District Reproduction Center. He delivers babies from uterine replicators. You see, on Athos there are no women. In fact, the planet is forbidden to them. Isolated from the galactic community by distance and a lack of exploitable resources, the Athosians have peacefully lived their peculiar social experiment for two hundred years. But now, the ovarian cultures dating back to the original settlement of the planet are giving out. With the future of Athos at stake, Ethan is chosen on behalf of his cloistered fellows for a unique mission: to brave the wider universe in quest of new ovarian tissue cultures to replenish Athos’ dwindling stocks. Along the way, he must tangle with covert operatives, killers, telepathy, interplanetary politics, and—perhaps most disturbingly—an indomitable female mercenary named Elli Quinn. 

Having brought to life eccentric cereal king John Harvey Kellogg in The Road to Wellville and sex researcher Alfred Kinsey in The Inner Circle, T. C. Boyle now turns his fictional sights on an even more colorful and outlandish character: Frank Lloyd Wright.

Boyle’s account of Wright’s life, as told through the experiences of the four women who loved him, blazes with his trademark wit and invention. Wright’s life was one long howling struggle against the bonds of convention, whether aesthetic, social, moral, or romantic. He never did what was expected and despite the overblown scandals surrounding his amours and very public divorces and the financial disarray that dogged him throughout his career, he never let anything get in the way of his larger-than-life appetites and visions. Wright’s triumphs and defeats were always tied to the women he loved: the Montenegrin beauty Olgivanna Milanoff; the passionate Southern belle Maud Miriam Noel; the spirited Mamah Cheney, tragically killed; and his young first wife, Kitty Tobin. In The Women, T. C. Boyle’s protean voice captures these very different women and, in doing so, creates a masterful ode to the creative life in all its complexity and grandeur.

This Hugo-nominated novella adds a delightful extra chapter to Bujold’s Vorkosigan series, describing the wedding of Miles and Ekaterin and events leading up to it.

In the festive season of Winterfair on the planet Barrayar, Lord Miles Vorkosigan is making elaborate preparations for his wedding. The long-awaited event stirs up romance and intrigue among his eccentric family and friends, particularly for bioengineered space mercenary Sergeant Taura and shy, diffident Armsman Roic. But Miles also has an enemy who is plotting to turn the romantic ceremony into a festival of death.

Winterfair Gifts offers another of Bujold’s witty, character-centered science fiction plots with a twist of romance.

Meet Sam Dodsworth, an amiable fifty-year-old millionaire and "American Captain of Industry, believing in the Republican Party, high tariffs and, so long as they did not annoy him personally, in Prohibition and the Episcopal Church." Dodsworth runs an auto manufacturing firm, but his beautiful wife, Fran, obsessed with the notion that she is growing old, persuades him to sell his interest in the company and take her to Europe. He agrees for the sake of their marriage, but before long, the pretensions of the cosmopolitan scene prove more enticing to Fran than her husband.

Both a devastating, surprisingly contemporary portrait of a marriage falling apart and a grand tour of the Europe of a bygone era,Dodsworth is stamped with Sinclair Lewis' signature satire, wickedly observant of America's foibles, and great fun.

Who could forget the pranks, the adventures, the sheer fun of Tom Sawyer? From Tom’s sly trickery with the whitewashed fence to his and Becky Thatcher’s calamities in Bat Cave, the enjoyment never ends.

Just what did boys do in a small town during the mid-1800s, a time when there were no televisions, no arcades, and no videos? They whitewashed fences, floated down rivers, traded marbles, formed secret societies, smoked pipes, and, on occasion, managed to attend their own funerals. Yes, they may have been a bit mischievous, but as Aunt Polly said of Tom when she believed him to be dead, “He was the best-hearted boy that ever was.” Aunt Polly’s sentiments reveal one of Mark Twain’s cardinal philosophies: In this deceitful and infirm world, innocence can be found only in the heart of a boy.

The Adventures of Tom Sawyer is a humorous and nostalgic book depicting the carefree days of boyhood in a small Midwestern town. The characters are based on Twain’s schoolmates and the town, Hannibal, Missouri, is where Twain grew up.

The dwarfish, fetally damaged yet brilliant Miles Vorkosigan has more than his share of troubles. Having recently escaped an assassination plot whose tool was a brainwashed clone of himself, Miles has set the clone, Mark, free for a new chance at life. But when he decides to let his clone brother assume his secret identity and lead the Dendarii Free Mercenary on an unauthorized mission to liberate other clones from the outlaw planet of Jackson’s Whole, things start to get really messy. The mission goes awry, Miles’ rescue attempt goes even more wrong, and Miles ends up killed and placed in cryogenic suspension for future resuscitation. Then, as if that weren’t bad enough, the cryo-container is lost! Now it is up to the confused, disturbed Mark to either take Miles’ place as heir of the Vorkosigan line or redeem himself by finding and saving Miles.

A Son of the Middle Border is an epic story of the quest for new frontiers during the last half of the nineteenth century, and of the gradual, heartbreaking failure of America’s pioneer ideal.

Drawing on the history of his own family, Pulitzer Prize winner Hamlin Garland chronicles the experiences of a generation. A Son of the Middle Border, Garland’s bittersweet narrative of growing up on Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota farms, captures in vivid, moving detail the stories of the thousands of courageous and optimistic Americans who sought new and prosperous lives on the midwestern frontier and discovered not only the grandeur of the plains but also the immense toll nature demands from those who try to tame the land.

Political intrigue, culture clash and romance make a stirring mix in this award-winning follow-up novel to the acclaimed Shards of Honor.

In the wake of interplanetary war, former commander Cordelia Naismith has deserted her own planet to marry the leader of the defeated enemy, Aral Vorkosigan. On his home planet of Barrayar, two rival factions are eyeing the recently vacated throne, and Aral, recently appointed regent of Barrayar by the emperor on his deathbed, must stand between them. As Lord and Lady Vorkosigan, Aral and Cordelia struggle to establish stability in a fragile government thrown into confusion by the transition of power and the threat of civil war. When a palace coup endangers the government, their lives, and her unborn son, Cordelia takes action to secure the safety of her new family and new home.

They are twelve men who shouldn’t be alive. They have survived the sudden blinding sandstorm that crippled their air freighter; survived a desperate crash landing in the Sahara of Central Libya; survived to face the slow, dry, agonizing death of the desert, for no rescue plans will seek their unscheduled flight.

Twelve men with one hope: to build a new plane from the wreckage of their Skytruck and make a flight out of hell, two hundred miles to the nearest oasis.

Only one man could build such a plane: Stringer, the brilliant and obsessed engineer. Only one man could fly it: Towns, the arrogant and tormented pilot. Both had been aboard the Skytruck, but both are mortal enemies whose consuming hatred for each other is a danger greater than the desert itself.

This tale is so riveting it has inspired two major motion pictures—the unforgettable 1965 film starring Jimmy Stewart and the 2004 film starring Dennis Quaid.

In 1870, ten-year-old Adolph Korn was kidnapped by Indians. He thrived in the Comanches’ rough, nomadic existence, quickly becoming one of the tribe’s fiercest warriors. Forcibly returned to his parents after three years, Korn never adjusted to life in white society. He spent his last years living in a cave, all but forgotten by his family.

Then Scott Zesch stumbled upon his great-great-great-uncle’s grave. Determined to understand how such a “good boy” could have become Indianized so completely, Zesch traveled across the West, digging through archives, speaking with Comanche elders, and tracking eight other child captives from the region with hauntingly similar experiences.

With a historian’s rigor and a novelist’s eye, Zesch paints a vivid portrait of life on the Texas frontier and offers one of the few nonfiction accounts of captivity.