In resolving the suicide of his friend, Philip Strayhorn explores the dividing line between good and evil in this fantasy novel, from the same author who wrote Sleeping in Flame, Bones of the Moon and Voice of our Shadow. He is the 1988 World Fantasy Award winner for short stories.

"For Leslie, the heroine of this searching novel, the cost of living - and loving - is getting higher and higher. First of all, she is miserable for having lost her lover, Valerie, to another woman. And she has begun to doubt just about everything about her life. Now, she is involved in a strange erotic triangle with Honor, an adolescent virgin who has romantic ideals and Bernie, a homosexual street hustler trying to settle down. Leslie and Bernie both want Honor. They also want each other. But all Honor wants is a little spice in her life. Here is a powerful, searing novel of three young dreamers caught up in a lifestyle they can neither accept nor change."--Author's website (viewed May 1, 2023).

This novel by the young Stephen Spender was written as an experiment in 1930 but abandoned in draft and forgotten until rediscovered by a researcher. Believed to be autobiographical, it tells the story of a young English poet on vacation in Hamburg in 1929 and his response to the Weimar world.

Poppy, newly recruited cub reporter at the Downingham Post, is determined to prove to the editor that he's wrong in his belief that 'Women are a nuisance in the office'. He certainly doesn't think she's a nuisance when it's time for the tea round - a job which never fails to fall to the only female reporter. What Poppy lacks in experience, she makes up for in spirit and ambition. She'll make the Downingham Post the best regional newspaper there is - even if she occasionally gets the names wrong in court hearings. Life, for a single professional woman in the post-war years, certainly has its challenges - from finding a room, when the tyrannical landlady doesn't consider Poppy to be quite respectable, to changing her editor's deeply entrenched ways. This semi-autobiographical novel, recounted with Monica Dickens's wit, warmth and wry observation, will charm all who read it.

In this novel Dr. Patrick Cory is approached by the CIA, which wants him to try an experiment.

"Michael Ayrton, was an English artist and writer, known as a painter, printmaker, sculptor and designer, and also as a critic, broadcaster and novelist. He was a stage and costume designer, working with John Minton on the 1942 John Gielgud production of Macbeth from age 19; and a book designer and illustrator, for Wyndham Lewis's The Human Age trilogy and William Golding. He also collaborated with Constant Lambert. His work is in several important collections including the Tate Gallery, London, National Portrait Gallery, London, Museum of Modern Art, New York, Fry Art Gallery, Essex."--

First half of The Astounding-Analog Reader, Volume One, an anthology series of two volumes edited by Harry Harrison and Brian W. Aldiss, collecting some of the best short stories from John W. Campbell's legendary science fiction magazine Astounding (later renamed Analog). Stories in this book date from 1937 to 1941. 1. Forgetfulness (1937) novelette by John W. Campbell, Jr. [as by Don A. Stuart] 2. Seeds of the Dusk [When Earth Is Old] (1938) novelette by Raymond Z. Gallun 3. Farewell to the Master (1940) novelette by Harry Bates 4. Trouble on Tantalus (1941) novelette by P. Schuyler Miller 5. Time Wants a Skeleton (1941) novella by Ross Rocklynne 6. Nightfall (1941) novelette by Isaac Asimov 7. By His Bootstraps (1941) novella by Robert A. Heinlein [as by Anson MacDonald]

This comic romance is set at a small bohemian liberal arts college in Vermont. Embarking on his first teaching job in a longed-for idyllic New England country setting, Richie Schuster’s marriage to snarky and glamorous wife, Sally, soon goes up in flames, along with his academic career as he declares war on his fellow faculty members. Contains many excellent farcial blackouts and sharp, Pinter-like dialogue.This was James Howard Kunstler’s second novel, published in 1981, some time before he became better known as a social critic and author of the acclaimed non-fiction books The Geography of Nowhere, The Long Emergency, and Too Much Magic. Reviewers pilloried Kunstler as “just another unhappy divorced college professor writing about his sorry life,” but Kunstler had never taught school at any level and had never been married when he wrote the book.

Outstanding political satires are rare in literature, especially if they are eminently readable, but this artfully camouflaged lampoon on war may prove to be the Candide of our era. Indeed, both Arthur Koestler and James Jones have compared it with Voltaire's famous work. Yet THE TOOTH MERCHANT has qualities of its own, combining the picaresque and the improbably to produce a work praised by Lawrence Durrell and termed 'a marvelous experience' by Irwin Shaw.The hero of Sulzberger's novel is an Armenian petty crook of limitless talent and few discernible morals who is blackmailed into Turkish espionage work but escapes to adventure on his own account. In the course of his travels he discovers a secret as astonishing as the creation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and attempts to sell it to world leaders as far apart in doctrine and geography as Stalin and Eisenhower or Ben Gurion and Nasser. This career as a traveling merchant of death is embellished by the company of a series of lubricious women -- Armenian, Druse, Georgian, Turkish, Coptic and, above all, a golden-haired Soviet Greek girl married to an Abkhazian fish farmer.Initially the reader may be under the impression that he is engrossed only in a beautifully written thriller. However, it will dawn upon him slowly that there is deep significance to the irony that accompanies Kevork Sasounian, the eminently corruptible linguist-poet, as he strides with gusto across these pages from a whorehouse in Istanbul to the White House in Washington, leaving behind a litter of broken hearts and broken heads. Only at the very end does it become apparent how profound is the philosophy that lies beneath the gaudy Levantine carousals which cloak but do not obscure THE TOOTH MERCHANT's purpose.

A first-person account of a rather ordinary married man trapped in a domestic triangle with his father and his wife. A powerful novel of social satire, black comedy and first-rate entertainment.

The setting of Nathalie Sarraute's Do You Hear Them? is a dinner conversation between a father and his old friend about a recently acquired pre-Columbian statue. As they discuss the merits of the piece and art in general, the father hears his children upstairs giggling. This childish mirth is barbaric and devastating to the father, for in their laughter he hears them mocking his "old-fashioned" viewpoint and the energy he wastes by collecting lifeless objects. In his mind, they have no respect for what has been of greatest importance in his life.

Lieutenant-Commander, the hero of this novel, is axed from the Navy at the age of 36, one of many thousands obliged to re-plan their lives as the result of cuts in the armed services. A widower with a small daughter, he has no experience or knowledge outside submarines and the Royal Navy. His whole life had been that of a sailor since he joined up direct from school at the beginning of the war. This is not only the story of his struggles and adventures when he tries to find some way of earning his living; it is the story of his difficulty in adjusting himself to an unfamiliar civilian world. Monica Dickens's novel is the story of all such men in any of the services who find themselves so rudely thrust into the ordinary life of their country which, though they have served unselfishly, they find they are ill-equipped to live in. Written with the lighter humorous touch of some of her earlier books, it is a sympathetic presentation of the human side of one of those mass adjustments forced on society by the changing nature of the world and its affairs. Great granddaughter to Charles Dickens, Monica (1915-1992) was born into an upper middle class family. Disillusioned with the world she was brought up in—she was expelled from St Paul's Girls School in London for throwing her school uniform over Hammersmith Bridge—Dickens then decided to go into service, despite coming from the privileged class; her experiences as a cook and general servant would form the nucleus of her first book, One Pair Of Hands in 1939. Dickens married an American Navy officer, Roy O. Stratton, and spent much of her adult life in Massachusetts and Washington D.C., but the majority of writing continued to be set in Britain. Her book of 1953, No More Meadows, reflected her work with the NSPCC and she later helped to found the American Samaritans in Massachusetts. Between 1970 and 1971 she wrote a series of children's books known as The Worlds End Series which dealt with rescuing animals, and to some extent children. After the death of her husband in 1985, Dickens returned to England where she continued to write until her death aged 77.

A multidimensional explosion hurls a starship's few passengers across the galaxies & onto an uncharted barren tundra. With no technical skills & scant supplies, the survivors face a bleak end on an alien world. One brave woman holds the daring answer, but it is the most desperate one possible.Elegant & electric, We Who Are About To brings us face to face with our basic assumptions about our will to live. While most of the stranded tourists decide to defy the odds & insist on colonizing the planet & creating life, the narrator decides to practice the art of dying. When she's threatened with compulsory reproduction, she defends herself with lethal force. Originally published in 1977, this is one of the most subtle, complex & exciting sf novels ever written about the attempt to survive a hostile alien environment. It's characteristic of Russ's genius that such a readable novel is also one of her most intellectually intricate.

"It is the summer of 1967, and Andy Newmark, a 17-year-old New Yorker, takes a maintenance job at a Thunder (read Fire) Island resort. The reader is carried along by Andy's sense of exploration as he works, makes friends, surfs, and experiments with drugs, alcohol and sex. All the while, the fear of not being accepted to college and so being drafted into Vietnam hovers over him. Gradually overcoming personal conflictshis parents' divorce, his fear of failure and the social ills he encounters: the war, the prejudice he experiences as a Jew at a Catholic club, the decadence of Thunder Island by summer's end, Andy feels comfortable with himself and the dimensions of the adult world he is entering. Andy and his friends are likable, even if they seem as deeply characterized as the people in the rock songs that play everywhere on Thunder Island. And, like many novels of initiation, the adults are portrayed as ridiculous stuffed-shirts. Overall, though hackneyed expressions and trite situations diminish the effect of its simple story of innocence and discovery, this novel has charm. Steeped in the news and social events of the time as they appeared to young adults then, Thunder Island offers a sentimental, nostalgic version of adolescence in the late '60s and will be a welcome read on the beach in the late '80s."--Publishers weekly

Written by the author of "Moll Cutpurse: Her True History" and "The Fires of Bride", this is a fantastic, political and satirical novel set into time past and time present, taking a piercing and surreal look at the politics of the 1980s and 1990s.

One day in the desert, Veronica Smiles, a professional explorer, meets God. Apparently she'd called out to Him (at least, that's His story, she hadn't considered Him in years). A relationship reluctantly emerges, however, and as it develops Veronica finds herself enjoying some extremely uncharacteristic situations. Humour and grief are boldly combined in this extraordinary novel.