The story begins in the aftermath of a nuclear war that has reduced our world to ashes. Luckily, a few found their way to the stars and into immortality. In the year 3000, nostalgic for the past, they return to Earth in an effort to reconstruct the lives of the people who lived there.

A remarkable collection, Robots through the Ages includes stories from some of the best writers of science fiction, both old and new. This anthology, with an introduction by Robert Silverberg, offers a sweeping survey of robots as depicted throughout literature. Since the Iliad--in which we are shown golden statues built by Hephaestus "with minds and wisdoms"--humans have been fascinated by the idea of artificial life. From the Argonautica to the medieval Jewish legend of the Golem and Ambrose Bierce's tale of a chess-playing robot, the idea of what robots are--and who creates them--can be drastically different. This book collects a broad selection of short stories from celebrated authors such as Philip K. Dick, Seanan McGuire, Roger Zelazny, Connie Willis, and many more. Robots through the Ages not only celebrates the history of robots and the genre of science fiction, but the dauntless nature of human ingenuity.

American cancer specialist Dr. Alex Cousins is on a covert mission to the USSR. His task: to save the life of Soviet Politburo Chief Viktor Moiseyevich Dimitrov. But the tenuous alliance between the two crumbles one night. Alex stumbles upon Dimitrov's sinister plans for a nuclear strike on China. The Russians dispatch Alex on a six-thousand-mile journey aboard the infamous Trans-Siberian Express - thus ensuring he won't get home in time to warn the US of the imminent attack.As the train lumbers east across snow-cloaked mountains, watchful eyes rest on the American doctor. Surrounding him are people beaten and broken by life, each drawn to this emperor of trains in search of a brighter future. But most curious is Anna Petrovna Valentinova, the hauntingly beautiful history professor.The Trans-Siberian Express roars onward through a cavern of hopes and memories. A train attendant yearns for love, a persecuted Jewish couple runs to a new home, and a passionate romance transcending political barriers unfolds under KGB surveillance.

From the creator of the HBO series Bored to Death , the story of a young alcoholic writer and his personal valet, a hilarious homage to the Bertie and Jeeves novels of P.G. Wodehouse. Alan Blair, the hero of Wake Up, Sir! , is a young, loony writer with numerous problems of the mental, emotional, sexual, spiritual, and physical variety. He's very good at problems. But luckily for Alan, he has a personal valet named Jeeves, who does his best to sort things out for his troubled master. And Alan does find trouble wherever he goes. He embarks on a perilous and bizarre road journey, his destination being an artists colony in Saratoga Springs. There Alan encounters a gorgeous femme fatale who is in possession of the most spectacular nose in the history of noses. Such a nose can only lead to a wild disaster for someone like Alan, and Jeeves tries to help him, but...well, read the book and find out!

"It was...unnecessary for me to fret about who the murderer was: Everybody was." A haunting, never-before-translated, autobiographical novella by the 2002 Nobel Prize winner. An unnamed narrator recounts a simple anecdote, his sighting of the Union Jack—the British Flag—during the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, in the few days preceding the uprising's brutal repression by the Soviet army. In the telling, partly a digressive meditation on "the absurd order of chance," he recalls his youthful self, and the epiphanies of his intellectual and spiritual awakening—an awakening to a kind of radical subjectivity. In his Nobel address Kertesz remembered: "I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded—and which I had to take back from 'History', this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone..." The Contemporary Art of the Novella series is designed to highlight work by major authors from around the world. In most instances, as with Imre Kertész, it showcases work never before published; in others, books are reprised that should never have gone out of print. It is intended that the series feature many well-known authors and some exciting new discoveries. And as with the original series, The Art of the Novella, each book is a beautifully packaged and inexpensive volume meant to celebrate the form and its practitioners.

A classic time-travel adventure about altering the outcome of the War Between the States. On the fields where Civil War battles have yet to be fought, a black sergeant takes on a mad colonel with a machine gun and $25 million in gold--with the winner to determine the course of history.

The Bear Boy is a story specific to time and place, and about the dislocation of time and place too. It is set in 1935 at the only moment in history when the idea of socialism flickered to life in the United States, when Jewish intellectuals were fleeing out of the country where they were once respected writers and professors, and when a great many people were equal to each other in that the most had little material wealth. The oversize Mitwisser clan are German refugees who survive at the whim of their vagabond benefactor, James Albair. James is heir to the fortune amassed by his father, the author of a wildly popular series of children's books called The Bear Boy. Wayward, feckless and with money to burn, James has taken up the eccentric Mitwissers - scholarly patriach, invalid wife, and five scrappy children - as his latest caprice. Into this chaotic household comes Rose Meadows, orphaned at the age of eighteen. Rose quickly becomes indispensable as assistant to Professor Mitwisser in his research on an arcane sect and then, inevitably, as general nursemaid, nanny and companion to the entire family. Her sole inheritance is a book: the first title in the Bear Boy series. When the actual Bear Boy appears on the Mitwisser doorstep, Rose must resist the pull of his reckless orbit as she pursues her own desires. The Bear Boy evokes Depression-era New York from the perspective of perpetual outsiders. Brought together by coincidence and fate, the hard times they inherit still hold glimmers of past wonders and future dreams.

Modiano's debut novel is a sardonic, often grotesque satire of France during the Nazi occupation. We are immediately plunged into the hallucinatory imagination of Raphael Schlemilovitch, a young Jewish man, torn between self-aggrandisement and self-loathing, who may be the heir to a Venezuelan fortune, may have lived during the Nazi Occupation, may have rubbed shoulders with the most notorious collaborators and anti-Semites of the time, may even have been the lover of Eva Braun...or he may have been none of these things. But at the centre of this vortex is 'La Place de l'Etoile' - the Place of the Star - which is both the geographical and moral centre of Paris, and that place next the heart where French Jews were compelled to wear the yellow star, the symbol of their persecution.

340 pages.

A fictionalized memoir of the Spanish Civil War by the last commander of the Lincoln Brigade. The protagonist is Mitch Castle, a 21-year-old youth from Brooklyn who enrolls as a water carrier and rises to become the brigade commander. Against the background of trench warfare, the novel analyzes the bravery of non-military men who are fighting for a cause.

In 1931 Worcester, Massachusetts, Joey Singer, the teenaged son of Jewish immigrants, suffers with his family through the early part of the Great Depression, trying to finish high school, working a milk delivery route, marching on Washington, and eventually even becoming a hobo, all the while trying to figure out how to go to college and realize his dream of becoming a writer. Includes author's note about the Depression.

Philip IV is dead and his great kingdom is in disarray. It seems the fatal curse of the Templars is plaguing the royal house of France. His son has been enthroned as Louis X; but with his disgraced wife Marguerite imprisoned in the Chateau Gaillard for her adultery, Louis can produce no heir with which to secure the succession. But neither can he marry again while she lives ? The web of scandal, murder and intrigue that once wove itself around the court of the Iron King continues to draw in his descendants, as the destruction of his dynasty continues apace.

When Benito Mussolini announces a worldwide competition for a monument to celebrate his victory over Ethiopia, the winning design is an almost unimaginable mile-high tower, La Vittoria, created by the famed American architect, Amos Prince. In his struggle to bring this modern Babel to completion in the face of every conceivable obstaclei̮ncluding Mussolini's wavering support and loss of power, and the vicissitudes of a world warP̮rince will losehis family, his native country, and perhaps even his mind.

A Soviet theater troupe dares to put on Shakespeare's King Lear, but shortly before the performance, the actor playing the title role falls ill. The prop manager, a lumbering, largely silent bear of a man — completely inappropriate for the part, according to common perception — finds himself literally thrust into the spotlight. His performance becomes the talk of Moscow, and he falls under the direct scrutiny of Joseph Stalin, who controls whether the show will proceed and the actors will live to give another performance. An audacious winter's tale, The Green Lantern is an exploration of Shakespeare, the Soviet Union, and what it is to "perform," by one of the great American writers.

Explores the French Revolution from the points of view of Joseph Ignace Guillotin, inventor of the machine; Charlotte Corday, an idealist eager to help the cause of the revolutionaries; and Jean-Paul Marat, an impotent yet power-hungry autocrat

Beginning in the Sudan and London of 1884 and played out against the shambolic end of the Empire. An Honourable Man draws on the lives of two real men: Charles Gordon, an heroic, hubristic, career army man whose refusal to obey orders helped bring down the Gladstone government, and W T Stead, editor of the Pall Mall Gazette, the father of tabloid journalism. Their story is intercut with the tale of a poor, working woman in London. This is a book about destiny and about how wrong men can be; about foreign adventure and heroism doomed to failure; about women struggling to carve a place for themselves in the world; about political compromise and military mayhem.

Jerusalem 1967: everyone is reeling from the aftermath of the 6-Day War. The Palestinians are stunned and cannot comprehend their losses, whilst the Israelis are waking up to a new political reality - and their new responsibilities.

In a time of Rasputin's magic and Romanov mystery, a young girl finds herself at the heart of the royal family. She was an orphan, ushered into the royal palace on the prayers of her majestry. Yet, decades later, her time spent in the embrace of the Romanovs haunts her still. Is she responsible for those murderous events that changed everything? If only she can find the heir, maybe she can put together the broken pieces of her own past-maybe she can hold on to the love she found

In August 1948, 545 passengers boarded an overcrowded, clapped-out vessel in Marseilles to face an uncertain future in Australia and New Zealand. they came from displaced persons camps in Germany, death camps in Poland, labour camps in Hungary, gulags in Siberia and stony Aegean islands. there were those who had been hunted by the Nazis and those who had welcomed them; those who had followed the Communists and those who had fled from them. the epic voyage lasted almost three months and was marked by conflict and controversy until it seemed as though this hellship had absorbed the traumas of its passengers. As the conditions on board deteriorated, tension and violence simmered above and below decks. But romances and seductions also flourished, and lifelong bonds were formed. Diane Armstrong set sail on the Derna with her parents when she was nine years old. Like a detective searching for clues, she has located over a hundred of the passengers. through their recollections and memorabilia, as well as archival documents, she has recreated the voyage and traced what became of their hopes and dreams. the result is the unique portrayal of a migrant ship and its passengers.