He was one of the best Marine snipers in Vietnam. Today, twenty years later, the disgruntled hero of an unheroic war, all Bob Lee Swagger wants is to be left alone and to leave the killing behind.

But with consummate psychological skill, a shadowy military organization seduces Bob into leaving his beloved Arkansas hills for one last mission for his country, unaware until too late that the game is rigged.

The assassination plot is executed to perfection—until Bob Lee Swagger, alleged lone gunman, comes out of the operation alive, the target of a nationwide manhunt, his only allies a woman he just met and a discredited FBI agent.

Now Bob Lee Swagger is on the run, using his lethal skills once more—but this time to track down the men who set him up and to break a dark conspiracy aimed at the very heart of America.

Martin Vail, the brilliant "bad-boy" lawyer every prosecutor and politician love to hate, is defending Aaron Stampler, a man found holding a bloody butcher's knife near a murdered archbishop. Vail is certain to lose, but Vail uses his unorthodox ways to good advantage when choosing his legal team—a tight group of men and women who must uncover the extraordinary truth behind the archbishop's slaughter. They do, in a heart-stopping climax unparalleled for the surprise it springs on the reader...

In the middle of the twenty-first century, life as we know it has changed for all time. Shira Shipman's marriage has broken up, and her young son has been taken from her by the corporation that runs her zone, so she has returned to Tikva, the Jewish free town where she grew up.

There, she is welcomed by Malkah, the brilliant grandmother who raised her, and meets an extraordinary man who is not a man at all, but a unique cyborg implanted with intelligence, emotions—and the ability to kill.

From the imagination of Marge Piercy comes yet another stunning novel of morality and courage, a bold adventure of women, men, and the world of tomorrow.

Vikram Seth's novel is, at its core, a love story: Lata and her mother, Mrs. Rupa Mehra, are both trying to find—through love or through exacting maternal appraisal—a suitable boy for Lata to marry. Set in the early 1950s, in an India newly independent and struggling through a time of crisis, A Suitable Boy takes us into the richly imagined world of four large extended families and spins a compulsively readable tale of their lives and loves. A sweeping panoramic portrait of a complex, multiethnic society in flux, A Suitable Boy remains the story of ordinary people caught up in a web of love and ambition, humor and sadness, prejudice and reconciliation, the most delicate social etiquette and the most appalling violence.

In me are the memories of a boy's life, spent in that realm of enchantments. These are the things I want to tell you.... Robert McCammon delivers a tour de force of storytelling in his award-winning masterpiece, a novel of Southern boyhood, growing up in the 1960s, that reaches far beyond that evocative landscape to touch readers universally. Boy's Life is a richly imagined, spellbinding portrait of the magical worldview of the young -- and of innocence lost.

Zephyr, Alabama, is an idyllic hometown for eleven-year-old Cory Mackenson -- a place where monsters swim the river deep and friends are forever. Then, one cold spring morning, Cory and his father witness a car plunge into a lake -- and a desperate rescue attempt brings his father face-to-face with a terrible, haunting vision of death. As Cory struggles to understand his father's pain, his eyes are slowly opened to the forces of good and evil that surround him. From an ancient mystic who can hear the dead and bewitch the living, to a violent clan of moonshiners, Cory must confront the secrets that hide in the shadows of his hometown -- for his father's sanity and his own life hang in the balance....

In Red Mars, award-winning author Kim Stanley Robinson presents the first installment of his acclaimed Mars Trilogy. The novel chronicles the ambitious endeavor of terraforming Mars, beginning in 2026 with the arrival of a group of 100 colonists. Among them are leaders such as John Boone, Maya Toitavna, Frank Chalmers, and Arkady Bogdanov, who carry the burden of their mission's success and the dreams of humanity.

The colonists embark on a monumental task to transform the barren, hostile climate of the red planet into a habitable environment. Their plans include orbiting giant satellite mirrors to reflect sunlight, sprinkling black dust on the polar caps to capture warmth, and drilling massive tunnels into the mantle to release hot gases.

Set against a backdrop of massive planetary changes, the narrative delves into the personal lives of the colonists, exploring their rivalries, loves, and friendships. As some become consumed by their passion for Mars, others see the planet as a chance for profit or a laboratory for genetic breakthroughs. However, not everyone is in favor of altering Mars, leading to conflicts that could jeopardize the entire mission.

Red Mars is a brilliant and imaginative epic that combines cutting-edge science with human drama, exploring the complexities of colonization and the ethical dilemmas of altering an entire world.

The Elephant Vanishes is a collection that showcases the imaginative genius of Haruki Murakami, an international literary icon. These stories blend the mundane with the extraordinary, creating a world where the surreal becomes the new normal.

A man witnesses the inexplicable disappearance of his favorite elephant, newlyweds find themselves driven by insatiable hunger to rob a McDonald's, and a young woman becomes the object of affection for a peculiar green monster. Each story takes the reader on a journey across the boundaries of reality, returning with remarkable treasures.

By turns haunting and hilarious, this collection includes the story Barn Burning, which inspired the major motion picture Burning.

Dora and Nora Chance are a famous song-and-dance team of the British music halls. Billed as The Lucky Chances, the sisters are the illegitimate and unacknowledged daughters of Sir Melchior Hazard, the greatest Shakespearean actor of his day.

At once ribald and sentimental, glittery and tender, this rambunctious family saga is Angela Carter at her bewitching best. Wise Children celebrates the lore and magic of show business while exploring the connections between parent and child, the transitory and the immortal, authenticity and falsehood.

Expect showgirls and Shakespeare, music, mischief, and mistaken identity – all wrapped in a big, bawdy tangle of theatrical joy and heartbreak.

In this best-selling new book, his first in seventeen years, Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, takes us on a poignant and passionate journey as mysterious and compelling as his first life-changing work. Instead of a motorcycle, a sailboat carries his philosopher-narrator Phaedrus down the Hudson River as winter closes in. Along the way he picks up a most unlikely traveling companion: a woman named Lila who in her desperate sexuality, hostility, and oncoming madness threatens to disrupt his life.

In Lila Robert M. Pirsig has crafted a unique work of adventure and ideas that examines the essential issues of the nineties as his previous classic did the seventies.

Deep in the African rain forest, near the legendary ruins of the Lost City of Zinj, an expedition of eight American geologists is mysteriously and brutally killed in a matter of minutes. Ten thousand miles away, Karen Ross, the Congo Project Supervisor, watches a gruesome video transmission of the aftermath: a camp destroyed, tents crushed and torn, equipment scattered in the mud alongside dead bodies — all motionless except for one moving image — a grainy, dark, man-shaped blur.

In San Francisco, primatologist Peter Elliot works with Amy, a gorilla with an extraordinary vocabulary of 620 “signs,” the most ever learned by a primate, and she likes to fingerpaint. But recently, her behavior has been erratic and her drawings match, with stunning accuracy, the brittle pages of a Portuguese print dating back to 1642 . . . a drawing of an ancient lost city. A new expedition — along with Amy — is sent into the Congo where they enter a secret world, and the only way out may be through a horrifying death.

Jesus' Son, the first collection of stories by Denis Johnson, presents a unique, hallucinatory vision of contemporary American life unmatched in power and immediacy and marks a new level of achievement for this acclaimed writer. In their intensity of perception, their neon-lit evocation of a strange world brought uncomfortably close to our own, the stories in Jesus' Son offer a disturbing yet eerily beautiful portrayal of American loneliness and hope.

Contains:

• Car Crash While Hitchhiking
• Two Men
• Out on Bail
• Dundun
• Work
• Emergency
• Dirty Wedding
• The Other Man
• Happy Hour
• Steady Hands at Seattle General
• Beverly Home

This now classic book revealed Flannery O'Connor as one of the most original and provocative writers to emerge from the South. Her apocalyptic vision of life is expressed through grotesque, often comic situations in which the principal character faces a problem of salvation: the grandmother, in the title story, confronting the murderous Misfit; a neglected four-year-old boy looking for the Kingdom of Christ in the fast-flowing waters of the river; General Sash, about to meet the final enemy.

Stories include:
A Good Man Is Hard to Find
The River
The Life You Save May Be Your Own
A Stroke of Good Fortune
A Temple of the Holy Ghost
The Artificial Nigger
A Circle in the Fire
A Late Encounter with the Enemy
Good Country People
The Displaced Person

Join New York Times bestselling author Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine as they take off around the world in search of exotic, endangered creatures. Encounter the animal kingdom in its stunning beauty, astonishing variety, and imminent peril: from the giant Komodo dragon of Indonesia, the helpless but loveable Kakapo of New Zealand, to the blind river dolphins of China, and the white rhinos of Zaire. Hilarious and poignant—as only Douglas Adams can be—Last Chance to See is an entertaining and arresting odyssey through the Earth’s magnificent wildlife galaxy.

It’s easy to get disheartened when your planet has been blown up, the woman you love has vanished due to a misunderstanding about space/time, the spaceship you are on crashes on a remote and Bob-fearing planet, and all you have to fall back on are a few simple sandwich-making skills. However, instead of being disheartened, Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life a bit–and immediately all hell breaks loose.Hell takes a number of forms: there’s the standard Ford Prefect version, in the shape of an all-new edition of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and a totally unexpected manifestation in the form of a teenage girl who startles Arthur Dent by being his daughter when he didn’t even know he had one.Can Arthur save the Earth from total multidimensional obliteration? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save his daughter, Random, from herself? Of course not. He never works out exactly what is going on. Will you?

The fables of Aesop have become one of the most enduring traditions of European culture, ever since they were first written down nearly two millennia ago. Aesop was reputedly a tongue-tied slave who miraculously received the power of speech; from his legendary storytelling came the collections of prose and verse fables scattered throughout Greek and Roman literature.

First published in English by Caxton in 1484, the fables and their morals continue to charm modern readers: who does not know the story of the tortoise and the hare, or the boy who cried wolf?

The Love Affair between Scarlett and Rhett comes to a startling culmination.

Come back to Tara...to Scarlett and Rhett...and to the greatest love story in all fiction. This is the book whose initial publication was an instant sensation: selling out immediately, setting new records, and enthralling readers all over the world. This is the book everyone wants to read, savor, and enjoy.

Scarlett is a 1991 novel by Alexandra Ripley, written as a sequel to Margaret Mitchell's 1936 novel, Gone with the Wind. The book debuted on The New York Times bestsellers list, but both critics and fans of the original novel found Ripley's version to be inconsistent with the literary quality of Gone with the Wind.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning epic of the Great Depression, The Grapes of Wrath chronicles the Dust Bowl migration of the 1930s and tells the story of one Oklahoma farm family, the Joads—driven from their homestead and forced to travel west to the promised land of California. Out of their trials and their repeated collisions against the hard realities of an America divided into Haves and Have-Nots evolves a drama that is intensely human yet majestic in its scale and moral vision, elemental yet plainspoken, tragic but ultimately stirring in its human dignity.

A portrait of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless, of one man’s fierce reaction to injustice, and of one woman’s stoical strength, the novel captures the horrors of the Great Depression and probes into the very nature of equality and justice in America. At once a naturalistic epic, captivity narrative, road novel, and transcendental gospel, Steinbeck’s powerful landmark novel is perhaps the most American of American Classics.

The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales is a unique collection that takes a playful jab at the traditional fairy tale format. With its unconventional page arrangement and eclectic, frenetic mix of text and pictures, the book is a spoof on the art of book design as well as the art of the fairy tale itself.

The individual tales, such as The Really Ugly Duckling and Little Red Running Shorts, offer a fresh and humorous take on the classic stories we all know and love. Extracted for telling aloud, these tales promise great success and laughter. This masterpiece comes from the team that brought you The True Story of the Three Little Pigs.

A Fire Upon the Deep is the big, breakout book that fulfills the promise of Vinge's career to date: a gripping tale of galactic war told on a cosmic scale. Thousands of years hence, many races inhabit a universe where a mind's potential is determined by its location in space, from superintelligent entities in the Transcend, to the limited minds of the Unthinking Depths, where only simple creatures and technology can function. Nobody knows what strange force partitioned space into these "regions of thought," but when the warring Straumli realm use an ancient Transcendent artifact as a weapon, they unwittingly unleash an awesome power that destroys thousands of worlds and enslaves all natural and artificial intelligence.

Fleeing the threat, a family of scientists, including two children, are taken captive by the Tines, an alien race with a harsh medieval culture, and used as pawns in a ruthless power struggle. A rescue mission, not entirely composed of humans, must rescue the children-and a secret that may save the rest of interstellar civilization.

In Naked Lunch, William S. Burroughs revealed his genius. In The Soft Machine he begins an adventure that will take us even further into the dark recesses of his imagination, a region where nothing is sacred, nothing taboo. Continuing his ferocious verbal assault on hatred, hype, poverty, war, bureaucracy, and addiction in all its forms, Burroughs gives us a surreal space odyssey through the wounded galaxies in a book only he could create.

The Wheel of Time turns and Ages come and go, leaving memories that become legend. Legend fades to myth, and even myth is long forgotten when the Age that gave it birth returns again.

In the Third Age, an Age of Prophecy, the World and Time themselves hang in the balance. What was, what will be, and what is, may yet fall under the Shadow. The seals of Shayol Ghul are weak now, and the Dark One reaches out. The Shadow is rising to cover humankind. In Tar Valon, Min sees portents of hideous doom. Will the White Tower itself be broken?

In the Two Rivers, the Whitecloaks ride in pursuit of a man with golden eyes, and in pursuit of the Dragon Reborn. In Cantorin, among the Sea Folk, High Lady Suroth plans the return of the Seanchan armies to the mainland. In the Stone of Tear, the Lord Dragon considers his next move. It will be something no one expects, not the Black Ajah, not Tairen nobles, not Aes Sedai, not Egwene or Elayne or Nynaeve. Against the Shadow rising stands the Dragon Reborn...

Under the influence of their charismatic classics professor, a group of clever, eccentric misfits at an elite New England college discover a way of thinking and living that is a world away from the humdrum existence of their contemporaries. But when they go beyond the boundaries of normal morality, they slip gradually from obsession to corruption and betrayal, and at last—inexorably—into evil.

Over and again, the aged seeress Tamis scried all the possible tomorrows. In every one, dark forces threatened Greece; terrible evil was poised to reenter the world. The future held only one hope: a half-caste Spartan boy, Parmenion. So Tamis made it her mission to see that Parmenion would become the deadliest warrior in the world — no matter what the cost.

Raised to manhood in Sparta, bullied and forced to fight for his life every day, Parmenion had no notion of the unseen dimensions of magic and mystery that shaped his fate. He grew in strength and cunning. His military genius earned him the title Strategos in Sparta. His triumphs for the city of Thebes made him a hero. And finally, his fate led him to the service of Philip of Macedon.

As Tamis had foreseen, Parmenion's destiny was tied to the Dark God, to Philip, and to the yet-unborn Alexander. All too soon, the future was upon them. Parmenion stood poised to defeat evil — or to open the gate for the Dark God to reenter the world.

Stephen King cranks up the suspense in a different kind of bedtime story. A game of seduction between a husband and wife goes horribly awry when the husband dies. But the nightmare has just begun...

Gerald and Jessie Burlingame have gone to their summer home on a warm weekday in October for a romantic interlude. After being handcuffed to her bedposts, Jessie tires of her husband's games, but when Gerald refuses to stop, she lashes out at him with deadly consequences. Still handcuffed, she is trapped and alone. Painful memories from her childhood bedevil her. Her only company is a hungry stray dog and the sundry voices that populate her mind.

As night comes, she is unsure whether it is her imagination or if she has another companion: someone watching her from the corner of her dark bedroom.

The first lesson Lister learned about space travel was you should never try it. But Lister didn't have a choice. All he remembered was going on a birthday celebration pub crawl through London. When he came to his senses again, with nothing in his pockets but a passport in the name of Emily Berkenstein.

So he did the only thing he could. Amazed to discover they would actually hire him, he joined the space corps—and found himself aboard Red Dwarf, a spaceship as big as a small city that, six or seven years from now, would get him back to Earth.

What Lister couldn't foresee was that he'd inadvertently signed up for a one-way jaunt three million years into the future—a future which would see him the last living member of the human race, with only a hologram crew mate and a highly evolved cat for company. Of course, that was before the ship broke the light barrier and things began to get really weird...

Acclaimed as a quiet triumph and a brutally moving work of art, Maus II: A Survivor's Tale: And Here My Troubles Began introduces readers to Vladek Spiegleman, a Jewish survivor of Hitler's Europe, and his son, a cartoonist trying to come to terms with his father, his father's terrifying story, and History itself. Its form, the cartoon (the Nazis are cats, the Jews mice), succeeds perfectly in shocking us out of any lingering sense of familiarity with the events described, approaching, as it does, the unspeakable through the diminutive.

This second volume, subtitled And Here My Troubles Began, moves us from the barracks of Auschwitz to the bungalows of the Catskills. Genuinely tragic and comic by turns, it attains a complexity of theme and a precision of thought new to comics and rare in any medium. Maus ties together two powerful stories: Vladek's harrowing tale of survival against all odds, delineating the paradox of daily life in the death camps, and the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. At every level, this is the ultimate survivor's tale - and that too of the children who somehow survive even the survivors.

One, No One and One Hundred Thousand is a thought-provoking novel by Luigi Pirandello. The story follows the protagonist, Vitangelo Moscarda, who undergoes a profound identity crisis after a casual remark from his wife. She informs him that his nose tilts to the right, leading Moscarda to a startling realization: "For others, I was not what till now, privately, I had imagined myself to be."

This revelation sets Moscarda on a journey of self-discovery, where he questions the nature of reality, identity, and the multifaceted perceptions others have of him. Through a series of philosophical musings and encounters with various characters, he grapples with the fragmented nature of the self and the illusions that shape our understanding of the world.

In this novel, Pirandello masterfully explores the fundamental human inability to communicate, our essential solitariness, and the inescapable restriction of our free will, all while evoking thoroughly sustained and earthy laughter.

This book is a remarkable synthesis of themes and personalities, illuminating such dramas as Six Characters in Search of an Author, and invites readers to ponder the essence of identity and the freedom found in embracing one's own madness.

In a world of extraordinary imagination, a final battle is waged against a power of unimaginable proportions.

Five men and women from our world face a battle with an evil beyond imagining in the deeply moving conclusion to Guy Gavriel Kay’s acclaimed Fionavar Tapestry. As the Unraveller’s armies assemble, those resisting him must call upon the most ancient of powers, knowing that if this realm of gods and magic is conquered by evil, the ripples of destruction will be felt across all worlds.

But despite the sacrifices made and courage shown, all may be undone because of one child’s choice. For that one has been born of both Darkness and Light, and he alone must walk the darkest road as the fate of worlds hangs in the balance...

One of Faulkner's comic masterpieces, The Reivers is a picaresque that tells of three unlikely car thieves from rural Mississippi.

Eleven-year-old Lucius Priest is persuaded by Boon Hogganbeck, one of his family's retainers, to steal his grandfather's car and make a trip to Memphis. The Priests' black coachman, Ned McCaslin, stows away, and the three of them are off on a heroic odyssey, for which they are all ill-equipped, that ends at Miss Reba's bordello in Memphis.

From there, a series of wild misadventures ensues—involving horse smuggling, trainmen, sheriffs' deputies, and jail.

Lara Cameron is a famous, powerful, and wealthy New York building developer. She struggled from brutal poverty in Glace Bay, where a banker took her body as part of her first deal, to Chicago, where she took banker Keller's love lightly for granted. As her skyscrapers and boutique hotels tower on earth, she is at the top of a male-dominated field.

She lies and cheats to close a deal, making cruel enemies. At forty, she is beautiful, glamorous, insecure, ruthless, vulnerable, secretly generous, and rich—and still wants more. She marries an international concert pianist, the Lochinvar of her childhood dreams, but someone puts him in the hospital and threatens to take down her empire.

In a dazzling global setting from London to New York, Reno to Rome, Lara will find everything she has won—her fortune, her fame, and the man she loves—shockingly endangered by a secret with the devastating power to destroy her.

This powerful twentieth-century reimagining of Shakespeare’s King Lear centers on a wealthy Iowa farmer who decides to divide his farm between his three daughters. When the youngest objects, she is cut out of his will. This sets off a chain of events that brings dark truths to light and explodes long-suppressed emotions. Ambitiously conceived and stunningly written, A Thousand Acres takes on themes of truth, justice, love, and pride—and reveals the beautiful yet treacherous topography of humanity.

In Richmond, Virginia, young lovers are dying. So far, four couples in the area have disappeared, only to be found months later as mutilated corpses. When the daughter of the president's newest drug czar vanishes along with her boyfriend, Dr. Kay Scarpetta knows time is short.

Following a macabre trail of evidence that ties the present homicides to a grisly crime in the past, Kay must draw upon her own personal resources to track down a murderer who is as skilled at eliminating clues as Kay is at finding them...

Philip Marlowe's about to give up on a completely routine case when he finds himself in the wrong place at the right time to get caught up in a murder that leads to a ring of jewel thieves, another murder, a fortune-teller, a couple more murders, and more corruption than your average graveyard.

Sam Spade is hired by the fragrant Miss Wonderley to track down her sister, who has eloped with a louse called Floyd Thursby. But Miss Wonderley is in fact the beautiful and treacherous Brigid O'Shaughnessy, and when Spade's partner Miles Archer is shot while on Thursby's trail, Spade finds himself both hunter and hunted: can he track down the jewel-encrusted bird, a treasure worth killing for, before the Fat Man finds him?

In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in love. It is not simply that their families disapprove; the Montagues and the Capulets are engaged in a blood feud. In this death-filled setting, the movement from love at first sight to the lovers' final union in death seems almost inevitable.

And yet, this play set in an extraordinary world has become the quintessential story of young love. In part because of its exquisite language, it is easy to respond as if it were about all young lovers.

Zoe is wary when, in the dead of night, the beautiful yet frightening Simon comes to her house. Simon seems to understand the pain of loneliness and death and Zoe's brooding thoughts of her dying mother.

Simon is one of the undead, a vampire, seeking revenge for the gruesome death of his mother three hundred years before. Does Simon dare ask Zoe to help free him from this lifeless chase and its insufferable loneliness?

The Grass Crown is an epic tale of ambition, power, and betrayal set in the heart of ancient Rome. This gripping drama follows the life of Marius, the legendary general who saved Rome from barbarian invasion and achieved the unprecedented feat of becoming consul six times. However, as his influence wanes, a deadly enmity brews between him and his former ally, Sulla, who is now plotting his own rise to power.

Amidst this personal conflict, Rome faces existential threats both from within and from neighboring Italian states, as well as from the ferocious Asian conqueror. Births, deaths, prophecies, and rivalries intertwine to create a whirlwind of drama, offering readers a remarkable insight into the passion and torment of one of history’s greatest civilizations.

Regarded by many as the finest, and funniest, comic novel of the twentieth century, Lucky Jim remains as trenchant, withering, and eloquently misanthropic as when it first scandalized readers in 1954. This is the story of Jim Dixon, a hapless lecturer in medieval history at a provincial university who knows better than most that “there was no end to the ways in which nice things are nicer than nasty ones.” Kingsley Amis’s scabrous debut leads the reader through a gallery of emphatically English bores, cranks, frauds, and neurotics with whom Dixon must contend in one way or another in order to hold on to his cushy academic perch and win the girl of his fancy.

More than just a merciless satire of cloistered college life and stuffy postwar manners, Lucky Jim is an attack on the forces of boredom, whatever form they may take, and a work of art that at once distills and extends an entire tradition of English comic writing, from Fielding and Dickens through Wodehouse and Waugh. As Christopher Hitchens has written, “If you can picture Bertie or Jeeves being capable of actual malice, and simultaneously imagine Evelyn Waugh forgetting about original sin, you have the combination of innocence and experience that makes this short romp so imperishable.”

Thomas Mann's last great novel, first published in 1947 and now rendered into English by acclaimed translator John E. Woods, is a modern reworking of the Faust legend, in which Germany sells its soul to the Devil. Mann's protagonist, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, is the flower of German culture, a brilliant, isolated, overreaching figure, his radical new music a breakneck game played by art at the very edge of impossibility. In return for twenty-four years of unparalleled musical accomplishment, he bargains away his soul—and the ability to love his fellow man.

Leverkühn's life story is a brilliant allegory of the rise of the Third Reich, of Germany's renunciation of its own humanity and its embrace of ambition and nihilism. It is also Mann's most profound meditation on the German genius—both national and individual—and the terrible responsibilities of the truly great artist.

Big Sur is a poignant masterpiece of wrenching personal expression from the author of On the Road and The Dharma Bums. In this 1962 novel, Kerouac's alter ego Jack Duluoz, overwhelmed by success and excess, gravitates back and forth between wild binges in San Francisco and an isolated cabin on the California coast where he attempts to renew his spirit and clear his head of madness and alcohol. Only nature seems to restore him to a sense of balance.

In the words of Allen Ginsberg, Big Sur "reveals consciousness in all its syntactic elaboration, detailing the luminous emptiness of his own paranoiac confusion."

In the 1960s, political tension forces the García family away from Santo Domingo and towards the Bronx. The sisters all hit their strides in America, adapting and thriving despite cultural differences, language barriers, and prejudice.

But Mami and Papi are more traditional, and they have far more difficulty adjusting to their new country. Making matters worse, the girls—frequently embarrassed by their parents—find ways to rebel against them.

The García sisters—Carla, Sandra, Yolanda, and Sofía—tell their stories about being at home—and not at home—in America. Uprooted from their family home in the Dominican Republic, they arrive in New York City in 1960 to find a life far different from the genteel existence of maids, manicures, and extended family they left behind.

What they have lost—and what they find—is revealed in the fifteen interconnected stories that make up this exquisite novel from one of the premier novelists of our time.

They're back: Calvin, the six-year-old dirty tricksmeister and master of indignation and his warm, cuddly philosopher sidekick, Hobbes. A tiger whose idea of adventure is to lie on his back by the fire and have his stomach rubbed. In six short years, this unlikely duo has captured the hearts, the minds, and, most of all, the funny bones of America.

This treasury collection contains a never-before-published full-color section, as well as the cartoons appearing in The Revenge of the Baby-Sat and Scientific Progress Goes "Boink." All Sunday cartoons are presented full-page and full-color.

Miecz przeznaczenia is a collection of short stories that serves as a continuation of the adventures of Geralt from Ostatnie życzenie (The Last Wish), and at the same time precedes the story described in Saga o wiedźminie (The Witcher Saga). Generally, the stories included in this collection are no different from those written earlier. Geralt, with his strength, courage, and intelligence, fights monsters or in other ways tries to help people. The world in which the action takes place is depicted in a highly vivid manner, allowing readers to easily imagine it. The book is imbued with emotions, dreams, and values. On the pages of the stories, we see love, sacrifice, honor, determination driven by the intention to help a loved one, and attachment to one's own land.

Fatherland is set in a universe where Nazi Germany won World War II. In this alternate history, the story's lead protagonist, an SS officer, embarks on an investigation into the murder of a Nazi government official who was one of the participants at the Wannsee Conference. Through his investigation, he uncovers a plot to eliminate all attendees of the conference in order to help Germany gain better political accommodations with the United States.

Young Lerris is dissatisfied with his life and trade, and yearns to find a place in the world better suited to his skills and temperament. But in Recluce, a change in circumstances means taking one of two options: permanent exile from Recluce or the dangergeld, a complex, rule-laden wanderjahr in the lands beyond Recluce, with the aim of learning how the world works and what his place in it might be. Many do not survive.

Lerris chooses dangergeld. When Lerris is sent into intensive training for his quest, it soon becomes clear that he has a natural talent for magic. And he will need magic in the lands beyond, where the power of the Chaos Wizards reigns unchecked. Though it goes against all of his instincts, Lerris must learn to use his powers in an orderly way before his wanderjahr, or fall prey to Chaos.

The Yearling, by Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, is an American classic—and Pulitzer Prize–winning story that epitomizes the love between a child and a pet. Young Jody adopts an orphaned fawn he calls Flag and makes it a part of his family and his best friend. But life in the Florida backwoods is harsh, and so, as his family fights off wolves, bears, and even alligators, and faces failure in their tenuous subsistence farming, Jody must finally part with his dear animal friend.

This compelling novel has as its protagonist Cornelius Suttree, living alone and in exile in a disintegrating houseboat on the wrong side of the Tennessee River close by Knoxville. He stays at the edge of an outcast community inhabited by eccentrics, criminals, and the poverty-stricken. Rising above the physical and human squalor around him, his detachment and wry humor enable him to survive dereliction and destitution with dignity.

A rousing call to arms whose influence is still felt today Originally published on the eve of the 1848 European revolutions, The Communist Manifesto is a condensed and incisive account of the worldview Marx and Engels developed during their hectic intellectual and political collaboration. Formulating the principles of dialectical materialism, they believed that labor creates wealth, hence capitalism is exploitive and antithetical to freedom.

This new edition includes an extensive introduction by Gareth Stedman Jones, Britain's leading expert on Marx and Marxism, providing a complete course for students of The Communist Manifesto, and demonstrating not only the historical importance of the text, but also its place in the world today.