With ravishing beauty and unsettling intelligence, Michael Ondaatje's Booker Prize-winning novel traces the intersection of four damaged lives in an Italian villa at the end of World War II. Hana, the exhausted nurse; the maimed thief, Caravaggio; the wary sapper, Kip: each is haunted by the riddle of the English patient, the nameless, burned man who lies in an upstairs room and whose memories of passion, betrayal, and rescue illuminate this book like flashes of heat lightning.

Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their precise, respectful observation, their graveyard humor, and their offhand perfection of style.

These masterpieces (along with several previously uncollected stories) are available in one volume, which presents an indelible collective portrait of an unsuspected New York and its odder citizens—as depicted by one of the great writers of this or any other time.

Thirteenth-century Wales is a divided country, ever at the mercy of England's ruthless, power-hungry King John. Then Llewelyn, Prince of North Wales, secures an uneasy truce with England by marrying the English king's beloved, illegitimate daughter, Joanna. Reluctant to wed her father's bitter enemy, Joanna slowly grows to love her charismatic and courageous husband who dreams of uniting Wales. But as John's attentions turn again and again to subduing Wales--and Llewelyn--Joanna must decide to which of these powerful men she owes her loyalty and love.

A sweeping novel of power and passion, loyalty and lives, this is the book that began the trilogy that includes FALLS THE SHADOW and THE RECKONING.

This book contains the complete Andersen's fairy tales and stories in audiobook and hardcopy format. Hans Christian Andersen was a Danish author and poet. Although a prolific writer of plays, travelogues, novels, and poems, Andersen is best remembered for his fairy tales, a literary genre he so mastered that he himself has become as mythical as the tales he wrote. Andersen's popularity is not limited to children; his stories - called eventyrs, or "fantastic tales" - express themes that transcend age and nationality.

During his lifetime he was acclaimed for having delighted children worldwide and was feted by royalty. Andersen's fairy tales, which have been translated into more than 125 languages, have become culturally embedded in the West's collective consciousness, readily accessible to children, but presenting lessons of virtue and resilience in the face of adversity for mature listeners/readers as well. They have inspired motion pictures, plays, ballets, and animated films.

Angels in America is a powerful narrative told through two full-length plays: Millennium Approaches and Perestroika. In this poignant story, Tony Kushner explores the lives of a handful of people trying to make sense of the world amidst the AIDS crisis.

The central character, Prior, is a man living with AIDS. His lover, Louis, has left him and becomes involved with Joe, an ex-Mormon and political conservative. Joe's wife, Harper, is slowly having a nervous breakdown.

These personal stories are woven together with that of Roy Cohn, a fictional re-creation of the infamous American conservative ideologue. Cohn is depicted as struggling to remain in the closet while seeking personal salvation through his beliefs.

Set against the backdrop of America in the mid-1980s, the play addresses themes of life and death, love and sex, heaven and hell, offering a bold and emotional exploration of human experiences.

J R is the long-awaited novel from William Gaddis, author of The Recognitions, that tremendous book which, in the twenty years since its publication, has come to be acknowledged as an American masterpiece. And J R is a book of comparable magnitude, substance, and humor—a rushing, raucous look at money and its influence, at love and its absence, at success and its failures, in the magnificently orchestrated circus of all its larger- and smaller-than-life characters; a frantic, forlorn comedy about who uses—and misuses—whom.

At the center: J R, ambitious sixth-grader in torn sneakers, bred on the challenge of "free enterprise" and fired by heady mail-order promises of "success." His teachers would rather be elsewhere, his principal doubles as a bank president, his Long Island classroom mirrors the world he sees around him—a world of public relations and private betrayals where everything (and everyone) wears a price tag, a world of "deals" where honesty is no substitute for experience, and the letter of the law flouts its spirit at every turn.

Operating from the remote anonymity of phone booths and the local post office, with beachheads in a seedy New York cafeteria and a catastrophic, carton-crammed tenement on East 96th Street, J R parlays a deal for thousands of surplus Navy picnic forks through penny stock flyers and a distant textile-mill bankruptcy into a nationwide, hydra-headed "family of companies."

The J R Corp and its Boss engulf brokers, lawyers, Congressmen, disaffected school teachers and disenfranchised Indians, drunks, divorcées, second-hand generals, and a fledgling composer hopelessly entangled in a nightmare marriage of business and the arts. Their bullish ventures—shaky mineral claims and gas leases, cost-plus defense contracts, a string of nursing homes cum funeral parlors, a formula for frozen music—burgeon into a paper empire ranging from timber to textiles, from matchbooks to (legalized) marijuana, from prostheses to publishing, inadvertently crushing hopes, careers, an entire town, on a collision course with the bigger world... the pragmatic Real World where the business of America is business, where the stock market exists as a convenience, and the tax laws make some people more equal than others... the world that makes the rules because it plays to win, and plays for keeps.

Absurdly logical, mercilessly real, gathering its own tumultuous momentum for the ultimate brush with commodity trading when the drop in pork belly futures masks the crumbling of our own, J R captures the reader in the cacophony of voices that revolves around this young captive of his own myths—voices that dominate the book, talking to each other, at each other, into phones, on intercoms, from TV screens and radios—a vast mosaic of sound that sweeps the reader into the relentless "real time" of spoken words in a way unprecedented in modern fiction.

The disturbing clarity with which this finished writer captures the ways in which we deal, dissemble, stumble through our words—through our lives—while the real plans are being made elsewhere makes J R the extraordinary novel that it is.

King Lear by William Shakespeare is a profound theatrical exploration of familial conflict, honor, and madness. With its compelling narrative, the play delves into the heart of a kingdom divided by the whims of a flawed monarch and the machinations of his ambitious offspring.

The tragedy unfolds as Lear, the aging king, decides to divide his realm amongst his three daughters, leading to a treacherous power struggle that strips him of his authority and sanity. Through the tribulations of Lear and his court, Shakespeare examines themes of loyalty, betrayal, and the harsh consequences of vanity and pride.

At its core, King Lear is a poignant commentary on the human condition, the fragility of power, and the complex bonds that tie families together, often tightly interwoven with suffering and loss. It is a story that resonates as much today as it did when it was first performed, with timeless insights into the depths of human nature and the inevitable flow of fate.

Angels in America is a play in two parts by American playwright Tony Kushner. The play is a complex, often metaphorical, and at times symbolic examination of AIDS and homosexuality in America in the 1980s. Certain major and minor characters are supernatural beings (angels) or deceased persons (ghosts). The play contains multiple roles for several of the actors. Initially and primarily focusing on a gay couple in Manhattan, the play also has several other storylines, some of which occasionally intersect.

The Famished Road is a modern classic that reveals the tension between the land of the living, with its violence and political struggles, and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits. In the decade since it won the Booker Prize, Ben Okri's Famished Road has become a classic. Like Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children or Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, it combines brilliant narrative technique with a fresh vision to create an essential work of world literature.

The narrator, Azaro, is an abiku, a spirit child, who in the Yoruba tradition of Nigeria exists between life and death. The life he foresees for himself and the tale he tells is full of sadness and tragedy, but inexplicably he is born with a smile on his face. Nearly called back to the land of the dead, he is resurrected. But in their efforts to save their child, Azaro's loving parents are made destitute.

The tension between the land of the living and the temptations of the carefree kingdom of the spirits propels this latter-day Lazarus's story.

An epic tale of freedom and slavery, love and war, and the potential futures of humankind. It tells of a twenty-first century California clan caught between two clashing worlds, one based on tolerance, the other on repression.

The earth is a living, conscious being. In company with cultures of many different times and places, we name these things as sacred: air, fire, water, and earth. Whether we see them as the breath, energy, blood, and body of the Mother, or as the blessed gifts of a Creator, or as symbols of the interconnected systems that sustain life, we know that nothing can live without them.

To call these things sacred is to say that they have a value beyond their usefulness for human ends, that they themselves become the standards by which our acts, our economics, our laws, and our purposes must be judged. No one has the right to appropriate them or profit from them at the expense of others. Any government that fails to protect them forfeits its legitimacy.

All people, all living things, are part of the earth life, and so are sacred. No one of us stands higher or lower than any other. Only justice can assure balance: only ecological balance can sustain freedom. Only in freedom can that fifth sacred thing we call spirit flourish in its full diversity.

To honor the sacred is to create conditions in which nourishment, sustenance, habitat, knowledge, freedom, and beauty can thrive. To honor the sacred is to make love possible.

The Recognitions is a masterwork about art and forgery, exploring the increasingly thin line between the counterfeit and the fake. Gaddis anticipates by almost half a century the crisis of reality that we currently face, where the real and the virtual are combining in alarming ways, and the sources of legitimacy and power are often obscure to us.

The book delves into the obsession with seventeenth-century Flemish masterpieces, through the character Wyatt Gwyon, who forges original artwork that is amazingly faithful to the spirit and techniques of the time. This profound narrative is a bold critique of cultural and artistic authenticity.

Postcards is the mesmerizing tale of Loyal Blood, a man who spends a lifetime running from a terrible crime that forever incapacitates him from forming intimate connections. Blood's journey begins in 1944, taking him from his hardscrabble Vermont hill farm across the vast landscapes of America.

From New York to California, passing through Ohio, Minnesota, Montana, British Columbia, North Dakota, Wyoming, and New Mexico, Loyal must live a hundred lives to survive. He delves into mining gold, growing beans, hunting fossils, prospecting for uranium, and ranching. Meanwhile, his family suffers great losses, particularly the hard-won values of endurance and pride, legacies of generations rooted in intimacy with the land.

Postcards chronicles the lives of the rural and the dispossessed, mapping their world with the historical accuracy and narrative skill reminiscent of Cather, Dreiser, and Faulkner. It stands as a new American classic.

In reality, Hiro Protagonist delivers pizza for Uncle Enzo's CosoNostra Pizza Inc., but in the Metaverse he's a warrior prince. Plunging headlong into the enigma of a new computer virus that's striking down hackers everywhere, he races along the neon-lit streets on a search-and-destroy mission for the shadowy virtual villain threatening to bring about infocalypse.

Snow Crash is a mind-altering romp through a future America so bizarre, so outrageous… you'll recognize it immediately.

In a gripping feat of storytelling, Anne Rice continues the extraordinary Vampire Chronicles that began with the now-classic Interview with the Vampire. For centuries, Lestat—vampire-hero, enchanter, seducer of mortals—has been a courted prince in the dark and flourishing universe of the living dead. Now he is alone. And in his overwhelming need to destroy his doubts and his loneliness, Lestat embarks on the most dangerous enterprise he has undertaken in all the years of his haunted existence.

Returning to Lestat as the main character, the fourth in the Vampire Chronicles series finds Lestat impulsive and careless in the pursuit of what he wants: a serial killer in Southern Florida. Lestat is surrounded by mortals in this tale, and a new worthy counterpoint character to Lestat is introduced, Raglan James. James is a vampire hunter, and a formidable adversary for Lestat. James offers Lestat the opportunity to switch bodies temporarily with a young mortal. Against Louis' advice, Lestat accepts and discovers he hates everything about being human. He also finds that James has disappeared with Lestat's powerful vampire body. Louis refuses to help Lestat become a vampire again, and he turns to another mortal to help him trick James into switching souls, and giving up Lestat's body.

Centering on the themes of body and soul and soul migration, The Tale of the Body Thief is a novel of action.

In a weedy lot on the outskirts of Memphis, two boys watch a shiny Lincoln pull up to the curb. Eleven-year-old Mark Sway and his younger brother were sharing a forbidden cigarette when a chance encounter with a suicidal lawyer left Mark knowing a bloody and explosive secret: the whereabouts of the most sought-after dead body in America. Now Mark is caught between a legal system gone mad and a mob killer desperate to cover up his crime. And his only ally is a woman named Reggie Love, who has been a lawyer for all of four years. Prosecutors are willing to break all the rules to make Mark talk. The mob will stop at nothing to keep him quiet. And Reggie will do anything to protect her client—even take a last, desperate gamble that could win Mark his freedom... or cost them both their lives.

Gore Vidal's Narratives of Empire series spans the history of the United States from the Revolution to the post-World War II years. With their broad canvas and large cast of fictional and historical characters, the novels in this series present a panorama of the American political and imperial experience as interpreted by one of its most worldly, knowing, and ironic observers.

To most Americans, Abraham Lincoln is a monolithic figure, the Great Emancipator and Savior of the Union, beloved by all. In Gore Vidal's Lincoln we meet Lincoln the man and Lincoln the political animal, the president who entered a besieged capital where most of the population supported the South and where even those favoring the Union had serious doubts that the man from Illinois could save it. Far from steadfast in his abhorrence of slavery, Lincoln agonizes over the best course of action and comes to his great decision only when all else seems to fail. As the Civil War ravages his nation, Lincoln must face deep personal turmoil, the loss of his dearest son, and the harangues of a wife seen as a traitor for her Southern connections.

Brilliantly conceived, masterfully executed, Gore Vidal's Lincoln allows the man to breathe again.

The war for survival of the planet Lusitania will be fought in the heart of a child named Gloriously Bright. On Lusitania, Ender found a world where humans and pequininos and the Hive Queen could all live together; where three very different intelligent species could find common ground at last. Or so he thought.

Lusitania also harbors the descolada, a virus that kills all humans it infects, but which the pequininos require in order to become adults. The Starways Congress so fears the effects of the descolada, should it escape from Lusitania, that they have ordered the destruction of the entire planet, and all who live there. The Fleet is on its way, and a second xenocide seems inevitable.

When Laurie Kenyon, a twenty-one-year-old student, is accused of murdering her English professor, she has no memory of the crime. Her fingerprints, however, are everywhere.

Laurie reaches out to her sister, attorney Sarah, to mount her defense. Sarah, in turn, brings in psychiatrist Justin Donnelly to help unravel the mystery.

Kidnapped at the age of four and victimized for two years, Laurie has developed astounding coping skills. Only when the unbearable memories of those lost years are released can the truth of the crime come out—and only then can the final sadistic plan of her abductor, whose obsession is stronger than ever, be revealed.

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.

High above the planet Harmony, the Oversoul watches. Its task, programmed so many millennia ago, is to guard the human settlement on this planet—to protect this fragile remnant of Earth from all threats. To protect them, most of all, from themselves. The Oversoul has done its job well. There is no war on Harmony. There are no weapons of mass destruction. There is no technology that could lead to weapons of war.

By control of the data banks, and subtle interference in the very thoughts of the people, the artificial intelligence has fulfilled its mission. But now there is a problem. In orbit, the Oversoul realizes that it has lost access to some of its memory banks, and some of its power systems are failing. And on the planet, men are beginning to think about power, wealth, and conquest.

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....

Food of the Gods is an exploration of humans' symbiotic relationships with plants and chemicals. It presents information on prehistoric partnership societies and the roles of spices and spirits in the rise of dominator societies. The book delves into the politics of tobacco, tea, coffee, opium, and alcohol.

Why, as a species, are humans so fascinated by altered states of consciousness? Can altered states reveal something to us about our origins and our place in nature? In Food of the Gods, ethnobotanist Terence McKenna’s research on man’s ancient relationship with chemicals opens a doorway to the divine, and perhaps a solution for saving our troubled world.

McKenna provides a revisionist look at the historical role of drugs in the East and the West, from ancient spice, sugar, and rum trades to marijuana, cocaine, synthetics, and even television—illustrating the human desire for the “food of the gods” and the powerful potential to replace abuse of illegal drugs with a shamanic understanding, insistence on community, reverence for nature, and increased self-awareness.

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.

Ecce Homo is an extraordinary autobiography penned by the renowned philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche in late 1888, just weeks before his final descent into madness. This remarkable work stands as one of the most intriguing and bizarre examples of the genre ever written.

In this compelling narrative, Nietzsche provides a profound exploration of his life, philosophical journey, and intellectual development. He examines the heroes he has identified with, struggled against, and ultimately overcome, including Schopenhauer, Wagner, Socrates, and Christ. Through this examination, Nietzsche predicts the cataclysmic impact of his forthcoming revelation of all values.

Both self-celebrating and self-mocking, penetrating and strange, Ecce Homo offers the final, definitive expression of Nietzsche's main beliefs and serves as his last testament.

This essential reading challenges traditional morality, encourages the establishment of autonomy, and promotes a commitment to creativity.

What if everything in the world were a misunderstanding, what if laughter were really tears?

Either/Or is the earliest of the major works of Søren Kierkegaard, one of the most startlingly original thinkers and writers of the nineteenth century, and the first which he wrote under a pseudonym, as he would for his greatest philosophical writings.

Adopting the viewpoints of two distinct figures with radically different beliefs—the aesthetic young man of Part One, called simply 'A', and the ethical Judge Vilhelm of the second section—Kierkegaard reflects upon the search for a meaningful existence. He contemplates subjects as diverse as Mozart, drama, boredom, and, in the famous Seducer's Diary, the cynical seduction and ultimate rejection of a young, beautiful woman.

A masterpiece of duality, Either/Or is an exploration of the conflict between the aesthetic and the ethical—both meditating ironically and seductively upon Epicurean pleasures, and eloquently expounding the noble virtues of a morally upstanding life.

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.

The Death and Life of Great American Cities is a direct and fundamentally optimistic indictment of the short-sightedness and intellectual arrogance that has characterized much of urban planning in this century. Since its first publication in 1961, it has become the standard against which all endeavors in that field are measured.

In prose of outstanding immediacy, Jane Jacobs writes about what makes streets safe or unsafe; about what constitutes a neighborhood, and what function it serves within the larger organism of the city; about why some neighborhoods remain impoverished while others regenerate themselves. She writes about the salutary role of funeral parlors and tenement windows, the dangers of too much development money and too little diversity.

Compassionate, bracingly indignant, and always keenly detailed, Jane Jacobs's monumental work provides an essential framework for assessing the vitality of all cities.

Operation Doomsday is now active. Commander Robert Bellamy of US Naval Intelligence is dispatched on a top secret mission. A weather balloon carrying sensitive military information has crashed in Switzerland. Bellamy must locate the ten witnesses to the incident so that they can be sworn to secrecy.

But as he conducts his search, Bellamy begins to suspect that he, too, is being hunted by an unknown and lethal force. What he was told about the balloon was only one part of an almost unbelievable happening...

From Washington to Zurich, Rome, and Paris, the story unfolds to reveal Bellamy's past: why the woman he loves the most cannot return his love, why his friends become his deadly enemies, and why the world must never learn the incredible secret hidden on the Swiss Alps.

The Fire Next Time is a powerful and provocative document that galvanized the nation and gave passionate voice to the emerging civil rights movement when it first appeared in 1963. Written by James Baldwin, this national bestseller provides a searing examination of racial injustice and its consequences.

The book consists of two "letters" written on the occasion of the centennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. In these letters, Baldwin exhorts Americans, both black and white, to confront and attack the terrible legacy of racism. The work is at once a personal reflection on Baldwin's early life in Harlem and a broader commentary on the state of race relations in America.

Described by the The New York Times Book Review as "sermon, ultimatum, confession, deposition, testament, and chronicle… all presented in searing, brilliant prose," The Fire Next Time stands as a classic of American literature, urging us to confront the oppressive institutions of race, religion, and nationhood itself, while insisting on shared resilience and love as a way forward.

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.

Wake up and take control of your life! From the bestselling author of Inner Strength, Unlimited Power, and MONEY Master the Game, Anthony Robbins, the nation's leader in the science of peak performance, shows you his most effective strategies and techniques for mastering your emotions, your body, your relationships, your finances, and your life.

The acknowledged expert in the psychology of change, Anthony Robbins provides a step-by-step program teaching the fundamental lessons of self-mastery that will enable you to discover your true purpose, take control of your life, and harness the forces that shape your destiny.

Here it is — the first new Catechism of the Catholic Church in more than 400 years, a complete summary of what Catholics throughout the world believe in common. This book is the catechism (the word means instruction) that will serve as the standard for all future catechisms.

The Catechism draws on the Bible, the Mass, the Sacraments, Church tradition and teaching, and the lives of saints. It comes with a complete index, footnotes, and cross-references for a fuller understanding of every subject.

Using the tradition of explaining what the Church believes (the Creed), what she celebrates (the Sacraments), what she lives (the Commandments), and what she prays (the Lord's Prayer), the Catechism of the Catholic Church offers challenges for believers and answers for all those interested in learning about the mystery of the Catholic faith.

Here is a positive, coherent, and contemporary map for our spiritual journey toward transformation.

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

"Find the Elves and return them to the world of Men!" the shade of the Druid Allanon had ordered Wren. It was clearly an impossible task. The Elves had been gone from the Westland for more than a hundred years. There was not even a trace of their former city of Arborlon left to mark their passing. No one in the Esterland knew of them — except, finally, the Addershag.

The blind old woman had given instructions to find a place on the coast of the Blue Divide, build a fire, and keep it burning for three days. "One will come for you." Tiger Ty, the Wing Rider, had come on his giant Roc to carry Wren and her friend Garth to the only clear landing site on the island of Morrowindl, where, he said, the Elves might still exist, somewhere in the demon-haunted jungle.

Now she stood within that jungle, remembering the warning of the Addershag: "Beward, Elf-girl. I see danger ahead for you... and evil beyond imagining." It had proved all too true. Wren stood with her single weapon of magic, listening as demons evil beyond all imagining gathered for attack. How long could she resist?

And if, by some miracle, she reached the Elves and could convince them to return, how could they possibly retrace her perilous path to reach the one safe place on the coast?

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

Can The Secret Circle Survive...

Lured into the most popular in-crowd imaginable, Cassie is intoxicated by her newfound strength, a power as addictive as it is perilous. Caught between two members' consuming desires to use the coven's mysterious force, Cassie turns to one of their boyfriends, Adam—and falls captive to her own dangerous love.

Bewitched by the promise of love through magic, Cassie captures Adam's heart and upsets the delicate balance of power, unleashing a storm of fury no one anticipates...

Or Will The Dark Struggle Of Good, Evil, And Tormented Love Consume Them All?

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?

In Rain of Gold, Victor Villaseñor weaves the parallel stories of two families and two countries, bringing us the timeless romance between the volatile bootlegger who would become his father and the beautiful Lupe, his mother. These are men and women in whose lives the real and the fantastical exist side by side, and in whose hearts the spirit to survive is fueled by a family’s unconditional love.

This non-fiction saga is an all-American story of poverty, immigration, struggle, and success. It focuses on three generations of the Villaseñor family, their spiritual and cultural roots back in Mexico, their immigration to California, and their overcoming of poverty, prejudice, and economic exploitation.

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.