A warrior woman and her dark twin are destined to remake the world in this "powerful" tale, the first in a trilogy by a World Fantasy Award winner ( Newsweek ). Legend foretold the child named Jenna, who was three-times orphaned before she could crawl, a fate that would leave her in the hands of women who worshipped the benevolent goddess Great Alta. In this world without men, Jenna comes of age, learning quickly the skills of close combat. But her most powerful gift lies elsewhere: a mirror sister who emerges only in the darkness--a twin named Skada--and shares the soul of the young, white-haired warrior who might well be the goddess reborn. But if Jenna is, in truth, the one whose coming is awaited, there is cause for great alarm among those who rule the Dales, for the prophecy speaks of upheaval and change, and a devastating end of all things. An incomparable world-builder and one of America's premier fantasists, the remarkable Jane Yolen begins a three-part saga as inventive, intelligent, and exciting as anything that has ever been produced in the literature of the fantastic. Brilliantly contrasting the "true" story of Jenna with the later myths, poetry, and so-called scholarship that her coming engendered, Yolen creates a culture as richly imagined as those found in the acclaimed novels of Ursula K. Le Guin. A truly magnificent work, Sister Light, Sister Dark takes fantasy fiction to wondrous places it has never gone before.

Featuring a brand new introduction from Sunday Times bestselling author, Louise Candlish, talking about what Jackie and her books mean to her! 'For all her trademark sass, there is a moralist at work here' LOUISE CANDLISH 'Jackie Collins's daring, unapologetic stroke of the pen, combined with her glorious wit, has single-handedly given creative license to new generations of authors and storytellers' COLLEEN HOOVER A killer is playing a deadly game inside the exclusive mansions of L.A. Drawn into this dangerous world are a high-class call girl looking for a way out...a ruthless agent playing for high stakes...and a beautiful journalist chasing the story of her career. They are about to discover the rules of survival in this city of dreamers and deceivers. There have been many imitators, but only ever one Jackie Collins. With millions of her books sold around the world, and thirty-one New York Times bestsellers, she is one of the world's top-selling novelists. From glamorous Beverly Hills bedrooms to Hollywood movie studios; from glittering rock concerts to the yachts of billionaires, Jackie chronicled the scandalous lives of the rich, famous, and infamous from the inside looking out. 'A true inspiration, a trail blazer for women's fiction' JILLY COOPER 'Jackie shows us all what being a strong, successful woman means at any age' MILLY JOHNSON 'Jackie will never be forgotten, she'll always inspire me to #BeMoreJackie' JILL MANSELL 'Legend is a word used too lightly for so many undeserving people, but Jackie is the very definition of the word' ALEX KHAN 'What Jackie knew how to do so well, is to tell a thumping good story' ROWAN COLEMAN 'Jackie wrote with shameless ambition, ruthless passion and pure diamond-dusted sparkle' CATHERINE STEADMAN 'Here is a woman who not only wanted to entertain her readers, but also to teach them something; about the world and about themselves' ISABELLE BROOM 'Lessons galore on every page... about feminism, equality, tolerance and love' CARMEL HARRINGTON 'Jackie wrote about Hollywood with total authenticity, breaking all the rules and taboos' BARBARA TAYLOR BRADFORD 'Collins was saying that women didn't have to centre round men, either in books or in life' JESSIE BURTON 'Jackie lived the Hollywood dream, but, she looked sideways at it, and then shared the dirt with her readers' JULIET ASHTON 'What radiates from her novels, is a sense that women are capable of great things' ALEXANDRA HEMINSLEY

A New York Times Bestselling AuthorThe prequel to all of Jackie Collins' Lucky Santangelo novels, featuring fifteen-year-old Lucky -- a wild child ready to discover life, love and independence.Daughter of the notorious Gino, Lucky Santangelo discovers her mother's murdered body floating in the family swimming pool at the tender age of four. Since then Gino has kept her protected from life, closeted in their Bel Air mansion. But when Lucky runs away from boarding school, the adventures begin. Boys, sex, drugs and rock n' roll -- Lucky explores it all in preparation for the strong, kick-ass woman she eventually becomes.

"Wake up! Act! A call to address global climate change from two masters of science fiction. Isaac Asimov and Frederik Pohl are among the greatest science fiction writers who ever lived. Their talent for envisioning the future, and their clarity in writing about that future, made their novels enduring classics. In Our angry Earth, they applied those skills to a careful survey of the state of Planet Earth and the probable effect of our carbon-burning culture on it. Their cleared-eyed call to action is as fresh and timely as it was twenty-five years ago, when this book was published. The new introduction and afterword by Kim Stanley Robinson bring the book completely up to date. Robinson is one of the greatest modern SF writers, author of the bestselling Mars trilogy, the New York Times bestselling 2312, and the current climate change-focused bestseller New York 2140. He has written fiction and nonfiction about climate change for the past thirty years. In 2008, Time named Robinson a "Hero of the Environment."--Page 4 of cover.

Although remembered mostly for her audacious bestseller, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Gertrude Stein was a unique literary artist of the twentieth century who left a voluminous body of work, including novels, essays, poetry, and prose. Stymied--just once--by a case of writer's block, Stein forayed into the world of mystery fiction to rediscover her path to creativity. Combining elements of free association and interior monologue that earned her reputation as an avant-garde stylist, Stein drew from a summer's worth of mysterious events at her French country home for inspiration. Blood on the Dining-Room Floor is the brilliant result. A possible murder disrupts the peaceful setting when, in a nearby village, Madame Pernollet is found on the cement courtyard of her husband's hotel. Did she fall from a window above . . . or was she pushed? Was there someone who wanted the preoccupied woman out of the way? In a departure from the typical whodunit, with nary a detective to lead the way, Stein lays out a series of crimes and clues, enticing readers to come up with their own verdict on the baffling events of one unnatural summer.

"Past and Present brings together almost two dozen newly collected essays by the distinguished American historian and cultural critic, Gertrude Himmelfarb. Their common theme is the intriguing, often unexpected ways in which the past illuminates the present. The novelist William Faulkner wrote that "The past is never dead. It's not even past." In these essays, Himmelfarb shows the truth of this statement. She helps us find a new perspective on contemporary issues by bringing to bear a trenchant analysis of debates and thinkers of the past. She allows the past to inform the present without distorting either past or present. The essays, unified by the common theme of present and past, are varied. The topics range from the disorders of modern democracy to the challenges of postmodernism, from the Victorian ethos to the Jewish question. The thinkers range from Edmund Burke to Leo Strauss, from Cardinal Newman to Lionel Trilling. The political figures range from Benjamin Disraeli to Winston Churchill, from the American founders to Queen Elizabeth II. The underlying premise and principle of the essays is the conviction that the pursuit of knowledge and truth, however difficult or discomforting, eminently matters, in the "practical life,"as Trilling put it,as in the "moral life."Past and Presentis a notable contribution to this endeavor-to understanding where we have been, where we are now, and where we may be-or should be-going"--

From Two Live Crew's controversial comedy to Ice Cube's gangsta styling and the battle rhymes of a streetcorner cypher, rap has always drawn on deep traditions of African American poetic word-play, In Talking 'Bout Your Mama, author Elijah Wald explores one of the most potent sources of rap: the viciously funny, outrageously inventive insult game known as "the dozens." So what is the dozens? At its simplest, it's a comic chain of "yo' mama" jokes. At its most complex, it's an intricate form of social interaction that reaches back to African ceremonial rituals. Wald traces the tradition of African American street rhyming and verbal combat that has ruled urban neighborhoods since the early 1900s. Whether considered vernacular poetry, aggressive dueling, a test of street cool, or just a mess of dirty insults, the dozens is a basic building block of African-American culture. A game which could inspire raucous laughter or escalate to violence, it provided a wellspring of rhymes, attitude, and raw humor that has influenced pop musicians from Jelly Roll Morton and Robert Johnson to Tupac Shakur and Jay Z. Wald goes back to the dozens' roots, looking at mother-insulting and verbal combat from Greenland to the sources of the Niger, and shows its breadth of influence in the seminal writings of Richard Wright, Langston Hughes, and Zora Neale Hurston; the comedy of Richard Pryor and George Carlin; the dark humor of the blues; the hip slang and competitive jamming of jazz; and in its ultimate evolution into the improvisatory battling of rap. From schoolyard games and rural work songs to urban novels and nightclub comedy, and pop hits from ragtime to rap, Wald uses the dozens as a lens to provide new insight into over a century of African American culture. A groundbreaking work, Talking 'Bout Your Mama is an essential book for anyone interested in African American cultural studies, history and linguistics, and the origins of rap music.

"A New York Times bestselling author traces her father's life from turn-of-the-century Warsaw to bustling New York City in an intimate memoir about family, memory, and the stories we tell. Long before she was the acclaimed author of a groundbreaking book about women and men, and praised by Oliver Sacks as having "a novelist's ear for the way people speak," Deborah Tannen was a little girl who adored her father. Though he was often absent during her childhood, Deborah was profoundly influenced by his love of language and gift for writing and storytelling. As she grew up and he grew old, she spent untold hours with her father, recording their conversations and taking notes. He handed her a journal he kept when he was young--and showed her another he said she could have after his death, all for the account of his life she promised him she'd write. In this memoir, Deborah fulfills her promise to her father, embarking on the poignant, yet perilous, quest to piece together the puzzle of her father's life. Beginning with his astonishingly vivid memories of the Hasidic community in Warsaw that he was born into in 1908, she traces his journey: arriving in New York City in 1920, he quit high school at fourteen to become sole support of his mother and sister, yet attended law school at night and eventually established the largest workmen's compensation practice in New York. In the intervening years, he became active in the Communist Party, then New York's Liberal Party, running for Congress on its ticket. As Deborah comes to better understand her father's--and her own--relationship to Judaism, she also uncovers aspects of her father's life she would never have imagined. When she discovers letters from another woman he might have married, she is forced to rethink her assumptions about her parents' marriage. Finding My Father is a memoir of Eli Tannen's life and the ways it reflects the near century that he lived. But even more than that, it's about a daughter's struggle to see her father clearly, to know him more deeply, and to tell a more truthful story about her family and herself."--

Overview: Celebrated novelist David Treuer has gained a reputation for writing fiction that expands the horizons of Native American literature. In Rez Life, his first full-length work of nonfiction, Treuer brings a novelist's storytelling skill and an eye for detail to a complex and subtle examination of Native American reservation life, past and present. With authoritative research and reportage, Treuer illuminates misunderstood contemporary issues like sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation. He traces the convoluted waves of public policy that have deracinated, disenfranchised, and exploited Native Americans, exposing the tension and conflict that has marked the historical relationship between the United States government and the Native American population. Through the eyes of students, teachers, government administrators, lawyers, and tribal court judges, he shows how casinos, tribal government, and the Bureau of Indian Affairs have transformed the landscape of Native American life. A member of the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota, Treuer grew up on the Leech Lake Reservation, but was educated in "mainstream" America. Treuer traverses the boundaries of American and Indian identity as he explores crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of his native language and culture. Rez Life is a strikingly original work of history and reportage, a must read for anyone interested in the Native American story.

In a Disney-dominated future, a transhuman teenager engages in high velocity adventures until he meets the meat girl of his dreams and is forced to choose between immortality and sex in one of Cory Doctorow's most daring novellas. Also included in this collection is Creativity vs. Copyright, a transcript of Doctorow's historic address to the 2010 World Science Fiction Convention, dramatically presenting his controversial case for open-source models not only in information but art as well, and Outspoken Interview, in which Doctorow reveals the surprising inspirations for his writing.Cory Efram Doctorow is a Canadian-British blogger, journalist, and science fiction author who serves as co-editor of the blog Boing Boing. He is an activist in favour of liberalising copyright laws and a proponent of the Creative Commons organization, using some of their licenses for his books. Some common themes of his work include digital rights management, file sharing, and post-scarcity economics. Doctorow began selling fiction when he was 17 years old and sold several stories followed by the publication of his story Craphound in 1998.

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.

"Welcome to Heaven, Inc., the grossly mismanaged corporation in the sky. For as long as anyone can remember, the founder and CEO (known in some circles as "God") has been phoning it in. Lately, he's been spending most of his time on the golf course. And when he does show up at work, it's not to resolve wars or end famines, but to Google himself and read what humans have been blogging about him. When God decides to retire (to pursue his lifelong dream of opening an Asian Fusion restaurant), he also decides to destroy Earth. His employees take the news in stride, except for Craig and Eliza, two underpaid angels in the lowly Department of Miracles. Unlike their boss, Craig and Eliza love their jobs - uncapping city fire hydrants on hot days, revealing lost keys in snow banks - and they refuse to accept that earth is going under. The angels manage to strike a deal with their boss. He'll call off his Armageddon, if they can solve their toughest miracle yet: getting the two most socially awkward humans on the planet to fall in love. With doomsday fast approaching, and the humans ignoring every chance for happiness thrown their way, Craig and Eliza must move heaven and earth to rescue them - and the rest of us, too." -- back cover

In snowy upstate New York, Ari, a struggling mother of a one-year-old, and Mina, a nine-months-pregnant woman who is new to town, become comrades-in-arms.--Provided by publisher.

An Egyptian-Jewish Harvard graduate student trying to assimilate into American culture in 1977 befriends an impetuous, loud Arab cab driver and must choose between his dream or his friend.

Bellow was America's writer, and in this superb collection of nonfiction essays he demonstated his vigilance of and loyalty to his country over a span of 45 years. From his earliest piece, a war report from Spain written for the Partisan Review (1948), to his Novel Prize lecture (1976), to a Forbes article entitled "There Is Simply Too Much To Think About," Bellow was consumed by the idea of America--so great, so accomplished, so magical--destroying its soul.

A pilgrimage leads to a shocking revelation in this "deeply affecting and evocative extraterrestrial novel" from the Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author (Locus). The village of Jespodar nestles in the foothills of a world-dominating mountain known to all as "The Wall." Poilar Crookleg has grown up in Jespodar training hard and hoping that he will be chosen for the annual Pilgrimage, a group journey to the top of the mountain from which no pilgrim has ever returned both alive and sane. The pilgrims seek to replicate the legendary journey of a distant ancestor who scaled the mountain and, so the story goes, met with the gods. The Pilgrimage is a a life journey, an overwhelming challenge and a sacred honor and Poilar feels blessed when he is finally chosen to lead it. But not all is as it first seems. Along the journey lie hazards of all kinds, both vilently dangerous and seductively beguiling and to triumph in the climb is to confront a revelation so surprising and so disturbing that none, not even the smartest and best prepared, are likely to survive. What belief and what devotion leads so many to hope for such a challenging task and what will be the ultimate result of such dedication? Only The Wall itself can reveal the destiny for those who undertake the Pilgrimage.

From New York Times bestselling author Harry Turtledove, the modern master of alternate history, a novel of alien contact set in the tumultuous year of the Watergate scandal. It's 1974, and Jerry Stieglitz is a grad student in marine biology at UCLA with a side gig selling short stories to science fiction magazines, just weeks away from marrying his longtime fiancée. Then his life is upended by grim-faced men from three-letter agencies who want him to join a top-secret "Project Azorian" in the middle of the north Pacific Ocean—and they really don't take "no" for an answer. Further, they're offering enough money to solve all of his immediate problems. Joining up and swearing to secrecy, what he first learns is that Project Azorian is secretly trying to raise a sunken Russian submarine, while pretending to be harvesting undersea manganese nodules. But the dead Russian sub, while real, turns out to be a cover story as well. What's down on the ocean floor next to it is the thing that killed the sub: an alien spacecraft. Jerry's a scientist, a longhair, a storyteller, a dreamer. He stands out like a sore thumb on the Glomar Explorer , a ship full of CIA operatives, RAND Corporation eggheads, and roustabout divers. But it turns out that he's the one person in the North Pacific who's truly thought out all the ways that human-alien first contact might go. And meanwhile, it's still 1974 back on the mainland. Richard Nixon is drinking heavily and talking to the paintings on the White House walls. The USA is changing fast—and who knows what will happen when this story gets out? Three Miles Down is both a fresh and original take on First Contact, and a hugely enjoyable romp through the pop culture, political tumult, and conspiracies-within-conspiracies atmosphere that was 1974.

Perfectly preserving the tone and mood of the novel whilst condensing it into two acts, David Malouf, with the gift for language already evident from his novels and poetry, presents afresh the timeless story of Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, one of the most enduring literary classics of all time. The love between Jane and Mr Rochester, and the mystery of the woman behind the locked door, are here set to music in the opera composed by Michael Berkeley.

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?

Wallace Stegner was the premier chronicler of the twentieth-century western American experience, and his novels, the Pulitzer Prize–winning Angle of Repose and the National Book Award–winning The Spectator Bird, brought the life and landscapes of the West to national and international attention. Now, in this illuminating biography, Philip L. Fradkin goes beyond Stegner’s iconic literary status to give us, as well, the influential teacher and visionary conservationist, the man for whom the preservation and integrity of place was as important as his ability to render its qualities and character in his brilliantly crafted fiction and nonfiction. From his birth in 1909 until his death in 1993, Stegner witnessed nearly a century of change in the land that he loved and fought so hard to preserve. We learn of his hardscrabble youth on the Canadian frontier and in Utah, and of his painful relationship with his father, a bootlegger and gambler. We follow his intellectual awakening as a young man and his years as a Depression-era graduate student at the University of Iowa, during its earliest days as a literary center. We watch as he finds his home, with his wife, Mary, in the foothills above Palo Alto, which provided him with a long-awaited sense of belonging and a refuge in which he would write his most treasured works. And here are his years as the legendary founder of the Stanford Creative Writing Program, where his students included Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Robert Stone, and Wendell Berry. But the changes wrought by developers and industrialists were too much for Stegner, and he tirelessly fought the transformation of his Garden of Eden into Silicon Valley. His writings on the importance of establishing national parks and wilderness areas—not only for the preservation of untouched landscape but also for the enrichment of the human spirit—played a key role in the passage of historic legislation and comprise some of the most beautiful words ever written about the natural world. Here, too, is the story—told in full for the first time—of the accusations of plagiarism that followed the publication of Angle of Repose, and of the shadow they have cast on his greatest work. Rich in personal and literary detail, and in the sensual description of the country that shaped his work and his life—this is the definitive account of one of the most acclaimed and admired writers, teachers, and conservationists of our time.