PrintcrimeWhen Sysadmins Ruled the Earth (audiobook)Anda's GameI, RobotI, Row-BoatAfter the SiegeDescription Notice: This Book is published by Historical Books Limited (www.publicdomain.org.uk) as a Public Domain Book, if you have any inquiries, requests or need any help you can just send an email to [email protected] book is found as a public domain and free book based on various online catalogs, if you think there are any problems regard copyright issues please contact us immediately via [email protected]

Hugo Award Winner, from an SF Grandmaster!Conquering warrior Francisco Pizarro found himself... somewhere. Somewhere strange. He didn't know where, but he was sure it wasn't where he should be. After some time, another warrior appeared...About this story Robert Silverberg writes: I wrote this one in October, 1987 for an anthology I was editing myself, the basic idea of which involved using computer-generated simulacra of actual historical figures set in conflict against one another. The ones I chose were Socrates and Francisco Pizarro, and the story very quickly became an exciting thing to write as these two powerful personalities began to clash. I think it's one of the major achievements of my career.It was published in ASIMOV'S SCIENCE FICTION and then in TIME GATE, my anthology, and it was picked for Gardner Dozois' 1989 YEAR'S BEST SCIENCE FICTION anthology. And at the World Science Fiction Convention in Holland in August, 1990, it brought me the Hugo award for Best Novelet.Robert Silverberg is a SFWA Grandmaster and winner of multiple Hugo and Nebula awards.

For more than forty years, Harry Turtledove has been the acknowledged master of one of science fiction's most durable sub-genres: the tale of alternate history. In the course of an incredibly prolific career, Turtledove has created a host of brilliantly imagined revisionist histories on subjects ranging from the American Civil War to the Byzantine Empire to the Second World War (in which an alien invasion plays an unexpected role.) His work includes standalone novels and multi-volume epics, along with an impressive array of short fiction, the best of which has been gathered in this generous, irreplaceable volume. The Best of Harry Turtledove opens with "Peace is Better," the first of three stories featuring Bill Williamson, the nine-foot-tall Sasquatch who serves as governor of the fictional state of Jefferson, a place where "everyone gets along, regardless of race or size." Or species. "Bonehunters" posits a world in which the extinction event that ended the reign of the dinosaurs never took place. Two subsequent stories, "Junior & Me" and the Melville-inspired novella, "The Quest for the Great Gray Mossy," continue to develop this scenario. "The Eighth Grade History Class Visits the Hebrew Home for the Aging" imagines a world in which Anne Frank survived and emigrated to the United States, where she recounts her experiences to a visiting middle school class. "But It Does Move" is the account of a fictional confrontation between Galileo and a leader of the Holy Inquisition. These are only a few of the people, places, and historical epochs you will encounter in this magisterial collection. The twenty-four stories in The Best of Harry Turtledove constitute a master class both in the technique of alternate history and in the art of narrative itself. Longtime Turtledove readers will take this book to their hearts. Newcomers will find themselves searching for more of the author's inimitable--and highly addictive--fiction. They have a lot to look forward to.

The most famous collection of short fiction by acclaimed Yugoslavian writer Danilo Kis. In these nine stories Kis depicts human relationships, encounters, landscapes--the multitude of details that make up a human life. Kis combines fiction and history in postmodern style, and in a postscript provides fascinating historical backgrounds and other notes for the reader that add interest and context. An enduring classic of Slavic literary fiction.

In 'the stifling heat of equatorial Newark', a terrifying epidemic is raging, threatening the children of the New Jersey city with maiming, paralysis, life-long disability, even death. This is the startling and surprising theme of Roth's wrenching new book: a wartime polio epidemic in the summer of 1944 and the effect it has on a closely-knit, family-oriented Newark community and its children. At the centre of Nemesis is a vigorous, dutiful, twenty-three-year old playground director, Bucky Cantor, a javelin thrower and a weightlifter, who is devoted to his charges and disappointed with himself because his weak eyes have excluded him from serving in the war alongside his contemporaries. Focusing on Cantor's dilemmas as polio begins to ravage his playground - and on the everyday realities he faces - Roth leads us through every inch of emotion such a pestilence can breed: the fear, the panic, the anger, the bewilderment, the suffering, and the pain. Moving between the smouldering, malodorous streets of besieged Newark and Indian Hill, a pristine children's summer camp high in the Poconos - whose 'mountain air was purified of all contaminants' - Roth depicts a decent, energetic man with the best intentions struggling in his own private war against the epidemic. Roth is tenderly exact at every point about Cantor's passage into personal disaster and no less exact about the condition of childhood. Through this story runs the dark question that haunts all four of Roth's late short novels, Everyman , Indignation , The Humbling , and now, Nemesis : what choices fatally shape a life? How powerless is each of us up against the force of circumstances?

A wild girl with a mysterious past When her adopted father is slain by a strange beast, Atalanta is determined to take care of herself. She is happy in the forest with only her friend Urso -- a giant bear -- for company. She wants nothing to do with the world of men. But the ferocious creature that killed her father is still out there, and Atalanta can't resist the opportunity to hunt it down, even if that means she has to join forces with a group of hunters to do so. Atalanta must prove that she is as strong and brave as any of the others, as they search together for the deadly Arcadian Beast.

This sequel to "The Immigrants" depicts the life of Barbara Lavette, daughter of the son of a poor Italian immigrant and a woman of San Francisco's elite, from the Depression through World War II.

"To open this book is to enter the perilous, thrilling world of Billy Bathgate, the brazen boy who is accepted into the inner circle of the notorious Dutch Schultz gang. Like an urban Tom Sawyer, Billy takes us along on his fateful adventures as he becomes good-luck charm, apprentice, and finally protégé to one of the great murdering gangsters of the Depression-era underworld in New York City. The luminous transformation of fact into fiction that is E. L. Doctorow’s trademark comes to triumphant fruition in Billy Bathgate, a peerless coming-of-age tale and one of Doctorow’s boldest and most beloved bestsellers." -- From publisher's website.

A forty-year-old schoolteacher from Ohio still reeling from the tragedies of the Great War and the influenza epidemic comes into a modest inheritance that allows her to take the trip of a lifetime to Egypt and the Holy Land. Arriving at the Semiramis Hotel, site of the 1921 Cairo Peace Conference, she meets Winston Churchill, T. E. Lawrence, and Lady Gertrude Bell. With her plainspoken American opinions, she becomes a sounding board for these historic luminaries who will, in the space of a few days, invent the nations of Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, Israel, and Jordan. While neither a pawn or a participant at the conference, she is drawn into the geopolitical intrigue surrounding the conference.

Alfred Rosenberg, a Nazi ideologue, is convinced of German cultural greatness but he becomes haunted by the intellectual legacy of his hero, Goethe, when he discovers the poet's regard for the Jewish philosopher Baruch Spinoza.

A penultimate entry in the series that includes the best-selling Hitler's War builds on the events of the previous four novels to reimagine a desperate Nazi response to a war on two fronts from the perspectives of famous leaders, everyday soldiers and civilians.

Harold Brodkey's haunting, lyrical portrait of his most beloved city. Venice is a separate country," Harold Brodkey wrote of the fabled city that became his literary muse. "It floats at anchor inside its own will, among its domes and campanili, independent and exotic at its heart."The author's love of Venice--its churches and vaporetti, its capacity to bewilder and seduce--brought him back time and again to the shores of the Adriatic in search of fresh inspiration. Brodkey's Venice is marked by powerful contrasts: pride beside humility, the sacred alongside the profane, solemn tradition coexisting with exuberant mercantile optimism. Illustrated with eleven stunning black-and-white portraits by the legary Italian photographer Giuseppe Bruno, My Venice combines passages from several of Brodkey's great works with previously unpublished notes and essays to create a text as rich, subtle, and beguiling as the city itself.

From award-winning author Guy Gavriel Kay, who "stands among the world's finest fantasy authors" (Montreal Gazette), comes a sweeping tale evocative of the Celtic and Norse cultures of the ninth and tenth centuries, filled with the human passion and epic adventure he is noted for.

When Hazel becomes the personal physician to Princess Charlotte, the sickly granddaughter of King George III, she is dragged into the glamor and romance of the British court, but she soon realizes malicious forces are at work in the monarchy, and she may be the only one capable of setting things right.

"Paris, 1958: Rose, a seamstress at a fashionable atelier, has been entrusted with sewing a Grace Kelly-look-alike gown for a wealthy bride-to-be. But when, against better judgment, she finds herself falling in love with the bride's handsome brother, Rose must make an impossible choice, one that could put all she's worked for at risk: love, security and of course, the dress. Sixty years later, tech CEO Rachel, who goes by the childhood nickname "Rocky," has inherited the dress for her upcoming wedding in New York City. But there's just one problem: Rocky doesn't want to wear it. A family heirloom dating back to the 1950s, the dress just isn't her. Rocky knows this admission will break her mother Joan's heart. But what she doesn't know is why Joan insists on the dress - or the heartbreaking secret that changed her mother's life decades before, as she herself prepared to wear it. As the lives of these three women come together in surprising ways, the revelation of the dress's history collides with long-buried family heartaches. And in the lead-up to Rocky's wedding, they'll have to confront the past before they can embrace the beautiful possibilities of the future."--Publisher description

A Washington Post Best Book of the Year An Oprah.com Best Book of the Year In 1945, on the outskirts of Salzburg, American soldiers discover a train filled with unspeakable riches: gold watches and wedding rings, picture frames and Shabbat candlesticks. Jack Wiseman is the lieutenant tasked with guarding this treasure in the chaotic aftermath of war—a responsibility that grows more complicated when he meets Ilona, a fierce, beautiful Hungarian woman who has lost everything in the ravages of the Holocaust. Seventy years later, amid the shadowy world of art dealers who profit off the sins of previous generations, Jack gives a necklace to his granddaughter, Natalie, and charges her with returning it to its owner. And as Natalie searches for the woman whose portrait and unknown fate have come to haunt her, she will come to understand the secret her grandfather took to his grave.

Fictional biography of John Paul Jones.

A stray dog secretly adopted by the men of a U.S. Coast Guard base in San Francisco Bay proves to be a hero.

Narrated in Lincoln’s own voice, the tragicomic I Am Abraham promises to be the masterwork of Jerome Charyn’s remarkable career. Since publishing his first novel in 1964, Jerome Charyn has established himself as one of the most inventive and prolific literary chroniclers of the American landscape. Here in I Am Abraham , Charyn returns with an unforgettable portrait of Lincoln and the Civil War. Narrated boldly in the first person, I Am Abraham effortlessly mixes humor with Shakespearean-like tragedy, in the process creating an achingly human portrait of our sixteenth President. Tracing the historic arc of Lincoln's life from his picaresque days as a gangly young lawyer in Sangamon County, Illinois, through his improbable marriage to Kentucky belle Mary Todd, to his 1865 visit to war-shattered Richmond only days before his assassination, I Am Abraham hews closely to the familiar Lincoln saga. Charyn seamlessly braids historical figures such as Mrs. Keckley—the former slave, who became the First Lady's dressmaker and confidante—and the swaggering and almost treasonous General McClellan with a parade of fictional extras: wise-cracking knaves, conniving hangers-on, speculators, scheming Senators, and even patriotic whores. We encounter the renegade Rebel soldiers who flanked the District in tattered uniforms and cardboard shoes, living in a no-man's-land between North and South; as well as the Northern deserters, young men all, with sunken, hollowed faces, sitting in the punishing sun, waiting for their rendezvous with the firing squad; and the black recruits, whom Lincoln’s own generals wanted to discard, but who play a pivotal role in winning the Civil War. At the center of this grand pageant is always Lincoln himself, clad in a green shawl, pacing the White House halls in the darkest hours of America’s bloodiest war. Using biblically cadenced prose, cornpone nineteenth-century humor, and Lincoln’s own letters and speeches, Charyn concocts a profoundly moral but troubled commander in chief, whose relationship with his Ophelia-like wife and sons—Robert, Willie, and Tad—is explored with penetrating psychological insight and the utmost compassion. Seized by melancholy and imbued with an unfaltering sense of human worth, Charyn’s President Lincoln comes to vibrant, three-dimensional life in a haunting portrait we have rarely seen in historical fiction.

This volume covers a pivotal era in the formation of American identity. Four leading scholars connect the literature with the massive historical changes then underway. Richard Brodhead describes the foundation of a permanent literary culture in America. Nancy Bentley locates the origins of nineteenth century Realism in an elite culture's responses to an emergent mass culture, embracing high literature (writers like William Dean Howells and Henry James) as well as a wide spectrum of cultural outsiders: African Americans, women, and Native Americans. Walter Benn Michaels emphasizes the critical role that turn-of-the-century fiction played in the re-evaluation of the individual at the advent of modern bureaucracy. Susan L. Mizruchi analyzes the literary responses to a new national heterogeneity that helped shape the multicultural future of modern America. Together, these narratives constitute the richest, most detailed account to date of American literature and culture between 1860 and 1920.