"HYSTERICAL!" --The Philadelphia Inquirer The unhappy inhabitants of planet Krikkit are sick of looking atthe night sky above their heads--so they plan to destroy it. Theuniverse, that is. Now only five individuals stand between thewhite killer robots of Krikkit and their goal of totalannihilation. They are Arthur Dent, a mild-mannered space and time traveler, whotries to learn how to fly by throwing himself at the ground andmissing; Ford Prefect, his best friend, who decides to go insane tosee if he likes it; Slartibartfast, the indomitable vicepresidentof the Campaign for Real Time, who travels in a ship powered byirrational behavior; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the two-headed, three-armedex-head honcho of the Universe; and Trillian, the sexy space cadetwho is torn between a persistent Thunder God and a very depressedBeeblebrox. How will it all end? Will it end? Only this stalwart crew knows asthey try to avert "universal" Armageddon and save life as we knowit--and don't know it! "ADAMS IS ONE OF THOSE RARE TREASUR
Full grown with a long, smoke-coloured beard, requiring the services of a cane and fonder of cigars than warm milk, Benjamin Button is a very curious baby indeed. And, as Benjamin becomes increasingly youthful with the passing years, his family wonders why he persists in the embarrassing folly of living in reverse. In this imaginative fable of ageing and the other stories collected here - including "The Cut-Glass Bowl" in which an ill-meant gift haunts a family's misfortunes, "The Four Fists" where a man's life shaped by a series of punches to his face, and the revelry, mobs and anguish of "May Day" - F. Scott Fitzgerald displays his unmatched gift as a writer of short stories.
The suicide of an elderly German Jew explodes into revelationafter revelation: of a Mafia-like organization called "Odessa"...of a real-life fugitive known as the "Butcher of Riga.."of ayoung German journalist tumed obsessed avenger.......and,ultimately, of brilliant, ruthless plot to reestablish theworldwide power of SS mass murderers and to carry out Hitler'schilling "Final Solution."
"DOUGLAS ADAMS IS A TERRIFIC SATIRIST." - -The Washington Post Book World Facing annihilation at the hands of the warlike Vogons is acurious time to have a craving for tea. It could only happen to thecosmically displaced Arthur Dent and his curious comrades in armsas they hurtle across space powered by pure improbability--anddesperately in search of a place to eat. Among Arthur's motley shipmates are Ford Prefect, a longtimefriend and expert contributor to the Hitchhiker's Guide to theGalaxy; Zaphod Beeblebrox, the three-armed, two-headed ex-presidentof the galaxy; Tricia McMillan, a fellow Earth refugee who's gonenative (her name is Trillian now); and Marvin, the moody androidwho suffers nothing and no one very gladly. Their destination? Theultimate hot spot for an evening of apocalyptic entertainment andfine dining, where the food (literally) speaks for itself. Will they make it? The answer: hard to say. But bear in mind thatthe Hitchhiker's Guide deleted the term "Future Perfe
Many people among them Henry James) have considered Balzac tobe the greatest of all novelists. Eugenie Grandet, his spare,classical story of a girl whose life is blighted by her father'shysterical greed, goes a long way to justifying that opinion. Oneof the most magnificent of his tales of early nineteenth-centuryFrench provincial life, this novel is the work of a writer on whomnothing was lost, and who represents most fully the ability of thehuman animal to understand and illuminate its own condition. Translated By Ellen Marriage With An Introduction By Fredric R.Jameson Fredric R. Jameson is William A. Lane, Jr. Professor ofComparative Literature at Duke University in North Carolina. Hispublications include Sartre: The Origins of a Style, Signatures ofthe Visible, and Post-modernism, or, The Cultural Logic of LateCapitalism, with Aesthetics of the Geopolitical forthcoming. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.
"Whether Alice Munro's The Beggar Maid is a collection of stories or a new kind of novel I'm not quite sure, but whatever it is, it's wonderful. The psychological precision...is a delight, and the startling twists -- the unexpected leaps in time, the transformation of familiar characters -- they make the book what books ought to be, a little wild, a little mysterious." -- John Gardner In this exhilarating series of interweaving stories, Alice Munro re-creates the evolving bond -- one that is both constricting and empowering -- between two women in the coupe of almost forty years. One is Flo, practical, suspicious of other people's airs, at times dismayingly vulgar. The other is Rose, Flo's stepdaughter, a clumsy, shy girl who somehow-in spite of Flo's ridicule and ghastly warnings -- leaves the small town she grew up in to achieve her own equivocal success in the larger world. "The stories are absolutely wonderful-every word she writes is interesting." -- Alice Adams "The best stories of the year." -- The
This stunning and steamy debut chronicles the adventures ofNan King, a small town girl at the turn of the century whose lifetakes a wild turn of its own when she follows a local music hallstar to London...
Hired by a Massachusetts grand dame to prove the innocence of her grandson, who has been implicated in a school shooting during which seven people were killed, Spenser wonders why the boy seems unconcerned about his possible wrongful imprisonment and faces difficult obstacles in the wake of unhelpful school officials and a blackmail conspiracy.
Let's Call It "The Turn of the Phillips-Head Screw" I was happily working on a novel titled What the Night Knows, thepremise of which was already described on various web-sitepostings, when an idea for a ghost story slammed into me with asmuch force as an exuberant 60-pound golden retriever playingbowl-dad-off-his-feet. When I picked myself up from my officefloor, I didn't need a sticky roller to remove the dog hair from myclothes, but the story I had been working on was entirely Swifferedout of my head to make room for the ghost story. After alerting myeditor and my publisher of my intentions, I put aside What theNight Knows and set to work enthusiastically on the new idea. Over the next few months, as the manu* pages piled up, Ioccasionally sent lists of possible titles to my editor and mypublisher, and they sent lists of titles to me. None of us likedthe same title. We didn't argue. We just quietly declined to beenthusiastic about one another's suggestions. We are a genteelbunch. The only one of us to wa
Once upon a time people described Ray Bradbury as aparticularly gifted writer of science fiction. Today he seems morelike a magical realist, a small-town American cousin to Borges andGarcia Marquez. A writer whose vision of the world is so intensethat the objects in it sometimes levitate or glow with otherworldlyauras. Who but Bradbury could imagine the playroom in whichchildren's fantasies become real enough to kill? The beautifulwhite suit that turns six down-and-out Chicanos into their idealselves? Only Bradbury could make us identify with a man who livesin terror of his own skeleton. And if a generic science fictionwriter might describe a spaceship landing on Mars, only Bradburycan tell us how the Martians see it-and the and dreamlike visitorsfrom Planet Earth.
From the celebrated imagination of Dean Koontz comes a powerfulreworking of one of the classic stories of all time. If you thinkyou know the legend, you know only half the truth. Now themesmerizing saga concludes. . . . As a devastating hurricaneapproaches, as the benighted creations of Victor Helios begin tospin out of control, as New Orleans descends into chaos and thefuture of humanity hangs in the balance, the only hope rests withVictor’s first, failed attempt to build the perfect human.Deucalion’s centuries-old history began as the originalmanifestation of a soulless vision–and it is fated to end in theultimate confrontation between a damned creature and his madcreator. But first they must face a monstrosity not even Victor’smalignant mind could have conceived–an indestructible entity thatsteps out of humankind’s collective nightmare with powers, and apurpose, beyond imagining.
Set in the years leading up to and culminating in Napoleon's disastrous Russian invasion, this novel focuses upon an entire society torn by conflict and change. Here is humanity in all its innocence and corruption, its wisdom and folly.
In Blindness, a city is overcome by an epidemic ofblindness that spares only one woman. She becomes a guide for agroup of seven strangers and serves as the eyes and ears for thereader in this profound parable of loss and disorientation. Wereturn to the city years later in Saramago’s Seeing, asatirical commentary on government in general and democracy inparticular. Together here for the first time, this beautifuledition will be a welcome addition to the library of any Saramagofan.
Introduction and Notes by David Blair. University of Kent at Canterbury It is 1757. Across north-eastern America the armies of Britain and France struggle for ascendancy. Their conflict, however, overlays older struggles between nations of native Americans for possession of the same lands and between the native peoples and white colonisers. Through these layers of conflict Cooper threads a thrilling narrative, in which Cora and Alice Munro, daughters of a British commander on the front line of the colonial war, attempt to join their father. Thwarted by Magua, the sinister 'Indian runner', they find help in the person of Hawk-eye, the white woodsman, and his companions, the Mohican Chingachgook and Uncas, his son, the last of his tribe. Cooper’s novel is full of vivid incident- pursuits through wild terrain, skirmishes, treachery and brutality- but reflects also on the interaction between the colonists and the native peoples. Through the character of Hawkeye, Cooper raises lasting questions about the
The acclaimed author of A Good Day to Die and Warlock haswritten a screenplay to be directed by Edward Zwick, starringAnthony Hopkins, Brad Pitt, and Aidan Quinn, and scheduled forrelease October 7th from Tristar pictures.
'Ah, the taste and feel of blood when all passion and greed is sharpened in that one desire!' Lestat: a vampire - but very much not the conventional undead, for Lestat is the truly alive. Lestat is vivid, ecstatic, stagestruck, and in his extravagant story he plunges from the lasciviousness of eighteenth-century Paris to the demonic Egypt of prehistory; from fin-de-siecle New Orleans to the frenetic twentieth-century world of rock superstardom - as, pursued by the living and the dead, he searches across time for the secret of his own dark immortality.
Contains The Taming of the Shrew, A Midsummer Night's Dream, The Merchant of Venice and Twelfth Night.
