A kind, blundering Czech engineer is pressured by the Nazi government to hand over his invention, which could be key to their military operations. He flees to Paris, hoping to sell his invention to the French government instead; yet when the Germans invade France, he is forced into hiding, and spends months in a dark, damp cellar. Alone, he dwells on his memories - of his troubled marriage, and his decision to leave his wife behind in Czechoslovakia. When he is given the unexpected chance to redeem himself, both to his wife and history, he seizes it with utter determination - even though this heroic act will be his last. A powerful and moving novel about one man's final, fatal, heroic act of resistance in Nazi France.

Like most people, Vic Mullan, habitual drug-user, professional layabout, and amoralist extraordinaire, can remember where he was and what he was doing on the day of Princess Diana's death. Yes, he can remember it particularly well: he was at home, beginning an affair with Emma, his best friend's wife.The opening sections of David Baddiel's second novel chart the history of an intense and passionately sexual liaison set against the background of the most hysterical - in both senses of the word - time in recent memory. But as the months wear on, and life and love return to normal, so things become more complex between Vic and Emma. And then, tragedy - a real, local, small-scale tragedy, as opposed to a national, iconic, mythological one - intervenes. Part-satire, part-love story, part-whodunnit, and part-meditation on the nature of sex and death, Whatever Love Means is truly a tale for our times

First there was Jar Jar Binks Must Die, the Hugo-Award finalist collection of essays discussing science fiction film which Analog called "intelligent and entertaining" and F&SF called "terrific." Then came Shh! It's a Secret, the comedy science fiction novel that Publishers Weekly called "a freewheeling, laugh-out-loud satire." Now Daniel M. Kimmel is back with Time On My Hands, his quirky take on time travel, lost love, divided loyalties, and the eternal search for really good scotch. Time On My Hands investigates the myriad time travel troubles over which most science fiction readers have pondered, but it presents a fresh take on the time travel novel by adhering to the Aristotelian Unity of Time: it all takes place within a single day. In the book, Professor Price tells the story of how he came to be in possession of a time travel device (which he may or may not have invented), and how he found his future hiding in his past. But the discovery of time travel will necessitate far more than just building a really cool machine: it'll take the efforts of many people to figure out how to talk about time travel, the requirements necessary to be an ethical time traveler, and just whose office it is when my yesterday becomes your tomorrow without the courtesy of a knock on the door. Film critic and professor Daniel M. Kimmel has taught film and media classes at Emerson College, Boston University, and Suffolk University. His book on the history of FOX TV, The Fourth Network, received the Cable Center Book Award. His other books include a history of DreamWorks, The Dream Team, and I'll Have What She's Having: Behind the Scenes of the Great Romantic Comedies. He earned his undergraduate degree from the University of Rochester (where much of Time On My Hands is set) and his law degree from Boston University.

A history assignment to explore her roots propels a high school junior into a search for her biological parents.

What would you do first if you were elected President of the United States? Hope is the story of Alexander Hope, a young American who comes back from Vietnam, falls in love with a bright, beautiful girl, and with her starts a pioneering computer business. Thirty years later he's a billionaire, and alone in life. He decides to leave behind everything he created to write books and teach history at a private college. A handful of admiring students half-jokingly enlist him as a candidate for a third party Presidential nomination. In an astonishing but plausible scenario, Hope wins the Presidency, and commences an ambitious program of enforcing the Constitution and Bill of Rights as they were written. Enemies arise from all sides aiming to obstruct, discredit, impeach, and even assassinate him. It's a story of one man's love for his country -- and for the principles that brought it into being -- for his family, for his friends, and especially for the lovely and brilliant young Internet reporter who believes in him. 440 pages.

Hailed as a masterpiece when it was first published in France in 1977, The Desert tells the story of al-Mammi, a young exiled prince of a now-destroyed Jewish kingdom in southern Morocco in the late fourteenth century. Fighting battles in the service of kings and narrowly escaping imprisonment, the prince travels the Islamic world absorbing lessons, often painfully, on how to govern himself, as well as a country. At that same time, al-Mammi engages upon a spiritual journey to obtain inner wisdom rather than material riches. Memmi chronicles the prince’s fortunes as they rise and fall, drawing upon the traditions of Maghrebian storytelling and Arabian tales to offer a highly imaginative and allegorical novel that provocatively blends history with fiction.

Adam Kindl is assigned to be the judge of a murder trial putting him in the spotlight of politics and evoking painful memories.

Maeve begins her royal fosterage but her new companions are full of secrets and jealousy, her only friends are an elderly lady-in-waiting and Kian, the prince who rescued her kestrel, Ea, and her future promises only household management and childbearing until someone from her past brings a message about her true love.

No-vo-si-birsk. No-vo-si-birsk. I repeat the word over and over, trying to turn it into something ordinary instead of the name of the strange new place a million miles from home. Our train journey is over at last. The city of Novosibirsk, Siberia, is our final stop. Surely nothing can be worse than life on Train Two, Carriage One? But ... what if it is worse?

"Newlyweds just barely out of their childhood, the ben-Yichyas make their new home in Jerusalem, in the shadows of the dark towering walls of stone and amid a community of devout Jews living in squalor. Who among these impoverished neighbors will buy the exquisite jewelry that Ezra fashions from gold and silver? And how will the young Yemenite couple maintain their ancient traditions and customs while struggling to weave themselves into the vivid tapestry of immigrants from distant lands who comprise the old Yishuv?"--from jacket.

International intrigue, professional rivalry, the criminal underworld of nineteenth-century Moscow, and an irresistible femme fatale: if Erast Fandorin was hoping for a quiet homecoming, he is about to be disappointed.Erast Fandorin returns to Moscow after an absence of six years, only to find himself instantly embroiled in court politics and scandal. His old friend General Sobolev - the famous 'Russian Achilles' - has been found dead in a hotel room, and Fandorin suspects foul play.Using his now-famous powers of detection - powers that belie his twenty-six years - Fandorin embarks on an investigation, during which the political and the personal may become dangerously blurred. With the assistance of some formidable martial arts skills, acquired whilst Fandorin was in Japan, our eccentric and ingenious hero must endeavour to discover not so much whodunit, as why ...

Harold Fisch explores the biblical influence on the style and the structure of landmark novels by Fielding, Defoe, Gearge Eliot, Kafka, Dostoevsky and others. These turn out, again and again, to be re-readings of biblical stories. This echoing is sometimes explicit as in Joseph Andrews , where Fielding offers us a comic revision of the career of the biblical Joseph. But it can be inexplicit and even unconscious as in Kafka's The Trial , which, without mentioning Job, reads (as Northop Frye has noted) like a midrashic commentary on that book. In a study remarkable for its range and subtlety, the author develops the notion of the novel as midrash but argues that while the great novelists were held in thrall by the biblical patterns and stories, they were also regularly compelled to throw off this thraldom. They could not manage without the Bible but at the same time "it would not do." Fisch discusses the adversial realation to the biblical text with reference to two archetypal narratives: the Job story and the Dinding of Isaac. Of particluar interest are the chapters devoted to the Israeli novelist S.Y. Agnon and A.B. Yehoshua.

This is a classic science fiction novella by Stanley G. Weinbaum that was originally published in Astounding Stories in 1935. This is the only of Weinbaum's stories to be set on the planet Pluto, written only five years after the planet's discovery. The tale starts with a spaceship called Aardkin that gets boarded by the notorious pirate ship the Red Peri. One year on Frank Keene and astrophysicist Solomon Nestor crash land on Pluto and find themselves captives of the Red Peri herself, the nineteen year-old daughter of the man who built the Red Peri. During their ordeal the secret of the reason behind her forays into piracy are revealed. This work is part of our Vintage Sci-Fi Classics Series, a series in which we are republishing some of the best stories in the genre by some of its most acclaimed authors, such as Isaac Asimov, Marion Zimmer Bradley, and Robert Sheckley. Each publication is complete with a short introduction to the history of science fiction.

Based on an intriguing alternative history hypothesis, this novel imagines a world where the Moors never left Southern Spain after their 800-year reign but instead expanded their empire across Europe. This fascinating premise is explored through the chaotic lens of a bumbling film crew in the Sahara desert. The director, lost in a haze of Moroccan kif, has embraced the local culture a little too enthusiastically. With the scriptwriters gone and the leading actor in a perpetual sulk inside his Airstream, the production is at a standstill. Enter Tinctorio Indigolin, a bitcoin billionaire on the run from a Shakespeare-quoting Irish assassin. In a bid to leverage a tax loss, Indigolin acquires the film rights, injecting a new lease of life into the project. Mysteriously, a captivating screenplay begins to appear on set, page by page, night after night. Penned by an enigmatic writer, the script proposes a world where the Moors didn't just resist expulsion in 1492 but went on to dominate Spain, France, and Italy, creating an Islamic State of Europe. As the screenplay unfolds, it transforms the lives of everyone involved in the film. The narrative weaves through a labyrinth of twists, assassinations, and narrow escapes, employing the most unexpected methods, only to culminate in the most uplifting conclusion you'll encounter this year.

As with so many members of his generation, down-on-his-luck writer-filmmaker Milton Siegel has what some might call an unhealthy fixation on the TV shows, movies, books, music, and celebrities from his childhood that spanned the 1980s and 1990s. Unlike many of his generation, Milt has spent most of his life as an adult (so to speak) chronicling this same pop culture of his youth. Hey, it's a living ... sometimes. After quitting his job at a regional newspaper (or after having been fired, depending on who you ask), Milt finds himself on what becomes a quixotic quest to promote his latest pop culture history project around the country over one progressively insane and hilarious month. Throughout his many misadventures to come, Milt must contend with: a horde of salivating manic nerds, an inexplicable rash of natural disasters, clickbait-concocting media pundits, overly ambitious pseudo-celebrities, bafflingly incompetent event coordinators, a desperately hemorrhaging bank account, a super seductive stripper, ultra-competitive frenemies, and his own sense of the precarious future while being so embroiled in his childish past. In the end, it's up to Milt to make it through the month-long nomadic tour of laughter, tears, and revelations ahead without losing his mind. If he's really lucky, he might even make rent, keep his new wife from fleeing in terror, and perhaps have a little fun along the way. --from Amazon.

Ivan Klima has been acclaimed by The Boston Globe as "a literary gem who is too little appreciated in the West" and a "Czech master at the top of his game." In No Saints or Angels, a Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Klima takes us into the heart of contemporary Prague, where the Communist People's Militia of the Stalinist era marches headlong into the drug culture of the present. Kristyna is in her forties, the divorced mother of a rebellious fifteen-year-old daughter, Jana. She is beginning to love a man fifteen years her junior, but her joy is clouded by worry -- Jana has been cutting school, and perhaps using heroin. Meanwhile Kristyna's mother has forced on her a huge box of personal papers left by her dead father, a tyrant whose Stalinist ideals she despised. No Saints or Angels is a powerful book in which "Mr. Klima's keen sense of history, his deep compassion for the ordinary people caught up in its toils, and his abiding awareness of the fragility and resilience of human life shine through.... Like Anton Chekhov, Mr. Klima is a writer able to show us what's extraordinary about ordinary life." (The Washington Times). "Ultimately, it's Prague, with its centuries of glory and misery, that gives No Saints or Angels its humane power." -- Melvin Jules Bukiet, The Washington Post Book World" A compassionate realist, [Klima] unflinchingly presents the problems facing modern Prague and civilization in general ... [and] fills it with mercy." -- Jennie Yabroff, San Francisco Chronicle "Stirring and valuable." -- Jules Verdone, The Hartford Courant

A woman enters a room. The phone rings. A male voice on the other end of the line seems to know everything about her, down to the most intimate details. Someone is watching. The woman has just fled her homeland, but the whereabouts of her lover, Martin, remain a mystery. Is Martin in danger? Can the voice on the phone be trusted? Is she telling the truth? Has Martin betrayed his country, or his cause, or her? A tense, political allegory that inevitably challenges our assumptions about character, the foundations of our knowledge, and the making of history, Konfidenz stands as Ariel Dorfman's most fully realized fiction to date.

“SOPHISTICATED AND SUSPENSEFUL . . . TAUTLY WRITTEN . . . Wilentz knows the world she writes about very well, and her descriptions have a solid specificity that lends authority to her fiction.” –The New York Times Book Review “At a closed Israeli checkpoint, Marina, a Palestinian mother, clutches her ailing boy, desperate for access to Jerusalem and its doctors. When a young Israeli soldier waits too long before deciding to disobey orders, a martyr is born. Thus begins a graceful, painful, illuminating novel of the Middle East. . . . [Wilentz’s] prose tugs at the reader. . . . The characters are magnetic. . . . [This] is a very human tale of regrets, revenge, and the elusive nature of absolution.” –Entertainment Weekly “SO PRECISE, SO STARTLING, SO UNFORGETTABLE. . . . These characters are all pawns of history and politics, but Wilentz makes them live.” –Los Angeles Times “MAGNIFICENT . . . Wilentz writes with a prose style reminiscent of The New Yorker ’s highest ambitions: crystalline, pure, faultlessly communicative. . . . Like the best documentaries, Martyrs’ Crossing allows us unprecedented access to a little-understood and often misrepresented part of the world.” –Chicago Tribune “A BRILLIANTLY RESEARCHED MEDIDATION ON THE CRISIS IN THE MIDDLE EAST . . . Martyr’s Crossing matches Damascus Gate in the quality of research and the mass of intriguing characters–and yet it remains a lean thriller.” –The New York Observer

Follows the century-long life story of Rose Smith, who is born in 1900, loses her mother in childhood, and witnesses firsthand the remarkable history-making events, changes, and advances taking place in America.