Ten years have passed since the fall of Communism. B., a writer of great repute -whose birth and survival in Auschwitz defied all probability -has taken his own life. His friend Kingbitter discovers among his papers a play entitled Liquidation, in which he reads an erie foretelling of the personal and political crises that he and B.'s other friends now face. Having survived the Holocaust and the years of Communist rule, having experienced the surge of hope that rose up from the rubble of the Wall, they are left with little other than a sense of chaos and an utter loss of identity.Kingbitter's find precipitates a frantic search for the novel that B. may or may not have left behind. That B. was having an affair with Sarah, one of Kingbitter's companions, while Kingbitter himself was having an affair with B.'s ex-wife Judit, serves only to complicate matters further.An intricately layered story of history and humanity -powerful, disturbing, lyrical, achingly suspenseful and brilliantly told.

2014 Reprint of 1950 Edition. Full facsimile of the original edition, not reproduced with Optical Recognition Software. "Ralph 124C 41+" by Hugo Gernsback is an early science fiction novel, written as a twelve-part serial in "Modern Electrics" magazine beginning in April 1911. It was compiled into novel/book form in 1925. It is considered one of the most influential science fiction stories of all time. The title itself is a play on words, ( 1 2 4 C 4 1 + ) meaning "One to foresee for one another". Some successful predictions from this novel include television (and channel surfing), remote-control power transmission, the video phone, transcontinental air service, solar energy in practical use, sound movies, synthetic milk and foods, artificial cloth, voiceprinting, tape recorders, and spaceflight. It also contains "...the first accurate description of radar, complete with diagram..." according to Arthur C. Clarke in his "non-genre" novel "Glide Path." (1963)

'A . . . tender love story . . . This book is alive. It pulses with warmth and intelligence' The Times A wickedly observed novel about falling in love at the end of your life, by the Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Finkler Question. At the age of ninety-something, Beryl Dusinbery is forgetting everything - including her own children. She spends her days stitching morbid samplers and tormenting her two carers with tangled tales of her husbands and affairs. Shimi Carmelli can do up his own buttons, walks without a frame and speaks without spitting. Among the widows of North London, he's whispered about as the last of the eligible bachelors. He forgets nothing -especially not the shame of a childhood incident that has long hung over him. There's very little left remaining for either of them. . . But perhaps just enough to heal some of the hurt inflicted along the way, and find new meaning in what's left. * SHORTLISTED FOR THE WINGATE LITERARY PRIZE 2020*

First published in the US in 1932, The Sleepwalkers is about three protagonists "sleepwalking", that is, living between vanishing and emerging ethical systems just as the somnambulist exists in a state between sleeping and waking. Together they present a panorama of German society and its progressive deterioration of values that culminated in defeat and collapse at the end of World War I. The novel explores what Broch described as "the loneliness of the I" in its three parts. The protagonists of the first two parts of the book are represented as holding to certain sets of values. Broch describes the struggles they undergo as their codes for living, or values, prove inadequate to the realities of the social environment they find themselves in. Joachim von Pasenow in the first part is "the romantic". In the second part, August Esch tries to live according to the motto "business is business". Eventually, in the third part, the amoral Huguenau's only standard for behavior is his personal profit. He follows this maxim in all his actions, swindling and murdering without remorse. Ultimately, he reaches a point of zero values without remorse and his dealings bring him finally to the zero point of values. Although Broch doesn't hold Huguenau up as someone to admire, he does present him as the inevitable harbinger of fascism. As one reviewer noted, "His characters are sleepwalkers because their own lives are shaped by the forces of the nightmare reality in which they live."

In a gripping novel of alternate history, King Avram, determined to restore unity to the kingdom of Detina and free the blond serfs, finds the civil war between the North and South coming to a head when the use of sorcery becomes extremely unpredictable, forcing the South to battle the North.

Irina Davydovna is a cleaner. She has no time for politics or even for that matter, people: 'rules and rulers may come and go, but dirt never changes.' Boris Aleksandrovich is a revolutionary. He thinks he understands power. But this is Leningrad in 1933 and Stalin is about to turn against their city. When the life of his beloved daughter Natasha is threatened and his old friend Anton saves a skinny little orphan he finds on a Moscow train, Boris' faith in his ideals are put to the test. While Irina, watching it all, must learn the power of loyalty and love. 'Powerful and moving, Ice Road is a novel whose epic scope never obscures the individual lives that are lived in the shadow of great events. I shall never forget Natasha and Kolya's love story . . . or Irina, whose sturdy self respect and determination to survive, seems, at times, to speak for an entire people. Gillian Slovo excels in depicting complex human beings, full of passion, love, ambition, self-interest, who are caught up in their country's history and swept along by it.' Pat Barker

The Making of Americans is not really a novel, as Gertrude Stein's narrator says-"not just an ordinary kind of novel with a plot and conversations to amuse you"-but an attempt at a thorough and exacting distillation of the essential properties of peoples' behavior. Through sentences that seem to repeat themselves, we are presented, on the surface, with a portrait of the "simple middle class monotonous tradition" as enacted by generations of the Dehning and Hersland families and their acquaintances. Underneath this is a slow, sieved attempt at something like total knowledge, an excavation of an overwhelming impulse "to understand the complete being in each one and all the details of their coming to have in them their kind of feeling...anything in them that gives to them inside them the feeling of being distinguished to themselves inside them."

A Magazine of Science Fiction and Fantasy ISSUE 12: May 2016 Mike Resnick, Editor Jean Rabe, Assistant Editor Shahid Mahmud, Publisher Stories by: Auston Habershaw, Kij Johnson, Shephard, Nick DiChario, George R. R. Martin, Stewart C Baker, Jeff Calhoun, Jack McDevitt, Tina Gower, Jean-Claude Dunyach, Paul Di Filippo, Sheila Finch Serialization: The Long Tomorrow by Leigh Brackett Columns by: Barry Malzberg, Gregory Benford Book Reviews: Jody Lynn Nye and Bill Fawcett Interview: Joy Ward interviews George R. R. Martin Galaxy's Edge is a Hugo-nominated bi-monthly magazine published by Phoenix Pick, the science fiction and fantasy imprint of Arc Manor, an award winning independent press based in Maryland. Each issue of the magazine has a mix of new and old stories, a serialization of a novel, columns by Barry Malzberg and Gregory Benford, book reviews by Jody Lynn Nye and Bill Fawcett and an interview conducted by Joy Ward.

Girl Unwrapped is a girl's coming-of-age story set in 1960s Montreal about the burdens and blessings of history, the divided self, and the quest to be whole. Toni Goldblatt's awakening to taboo desire conflicts with her Holocaust-scarred parents' expectations. Yearning to reinvent herself, she flees to Israel in the wake of the 1967 war, but the Zionist dream doesn't save her; only on her return, when she discovers kindred spirits in the underground lesbian bar scene, does Toni begin to find her own path. Girl Unwrapped is a novel about love, isolation, and the search for personal truth despite the stranglehold of family.

In this darkly funny autopsy on what happens when pain opens up a crack in the everyday, Deborah Levy has created a novel about the sometimes outlandish defences of childhood. Billy and Girl's trashy world is full of secret corners and surprising beauty.

Dr. Apelles, a translator of ancient texts, has made an unsettling discovery: a manuscript that has languished for years, written in a language that only he speaks. Moving back and forth between the scholar and his text, from a lone man in a labyrinthine archive to a pair of beautiful young Indian lovers in an unspoiled and snowy woodland, David Treuer weaves together two love stories. Enthralling and suspenseful, The Translation of Dr. Apelles dares to redefine the Native American novel.

"It is the Saturday after the 2016 presidential election, and in a plush weekend house in Connecticut, an intimate group of friends, New Yorkers all, has gathered to recover from what they consider the greatest political catastrophe of their lives. They have just sat down to tea when their hostess, Eva Lindquist, proposes a dare. Who among them would be willing to ask Siri how to assassinate Donald Trump? Liberal and like-minded-editors, writers, a decorator, a theater producer, and one financial guy, Eva's husband, Bruce-the friends have come to the countryside in the hope of restoring the bubble in which they have grown used to living. Yet with the exception of one brash and obnoxious book editor, none is willing to accept Eva's challenge. Shelter in Place is a novel about house and home, furniture and rooms, safety and freedom and the invidious ways in which political upheaval can undermine even the most seemingly impregnable foundations. Eva is the novel's polestar, a woman who moves through her days accompanied by a roving, carefully curated salon. She's a generous hostess and more than a bit of a control freak, whose obsession with decorating allows Leavitt to treat us to a slyly comic look at the habitués and fetishes of the so-called shelter industry. Yet when, in her avidity to secure shelter for herself, she persuades Bruce to buy a grand if dilapidated apartment in Venice, she unwittingly sets off the chain of events that will propel him, for the first time, to venture outside the bubble and embark on a wholly unexpected love affair. A comic portrait of the months immediately following the 2016 election, Shelter in Place is also a meditation on the unreliable appetites-for love, for power, for freedom-by which both our public and private lives are shaped"--

Joanna Hirsch is an aspiring off-Broadway actress whose complex life has finally shattered. Having tried to normalize relations with her mother, Georgia, a world-renowned sculptress who left her family nearly twenty years before to pursue her art, Joanna unexpectedly learns that Georgia has flown again - this time from her SoHo loft in New York to the Umbrian mountains of Italy. Joanna's lover of the last ten years, theater director Nigel Easden, has also gone, leaving a goodbye note on top of a pile of newspapers that contain scathing reviews of his most recent production. And Joanna's oldest and most complicated relationship, with her childhood friend Billy Overmeyer, has ended in random urban tragedy. Suddenly, Joanna is all alone. Fugitive Blue is a richly told story about a daughter's love for her brilliant and difficult mother. Lyrical and unflinching, this new novel by an author whose "language sings of Fitzgerald" (New York Times) takes Joanna Hirsch on a journey from her lonely suburban childhood to a life as forcibly created as one of her mother's chiseled from the ashes, the wreckage of her past.

How can you tell your Faulkner from your Franzen if you haven't actually read either? Schwartz expounds on the most important (aka white male) writers of western literature. From Shakespeare's greatest mystery to the true meaning of Kafkaesque, she tests your knowledge of which Jonathan-- Franzen, Lethem, or Safran Foer-- hates Twitter and lives in Brooklyn. So instead of politely nodding along next time you make an acquaintance at a housewarming party in Brooklyn, you can roll up your sleeves and get to work schooling them in character arcs and the experimental form of your next great American novel. -- adapted from back cover

This masterpiece novel -- by the internationally acclaimed, young South African writer Damon Galgut--about E.M. Forster, his life, struggles with homosexuality, and the writing of his universally loved novel A Passage to India will call to mind the international success of Colm Toibin's The Master . For readers of Colm Toibin, Ian McEwan, and J.M. Coetzee. In 1912, the SS Birmingham approaches India. On board is Morgan Forster, novelist and man of letters, who is embarking on a journey of discovery. As Morgan stands on deck, the promise of a strange new future begins to take shape before his eyes. The seeds of a story start to gather at the corner of his mind: a sense of impending menace, lust in close confines, under a hot, empty sky. It will be another twelve years, and a second, and much longer time spent in India, before A Passage to India , E.M. Forster's most beloved work of literature, is completed. During these years, Morgan will come to a recognition of his homosexuality and of the infinite subtleties and complexities of human nature. Arctic Summer is an intimate portrait of the man who became one of Britain's finest novelists, his struggle to find a way of living and being, and a stunningly vivid evocation of the mysterious alchemy of the creative process. Galgut animates the literary times in which Forster lived with encounters with some of the writers of the day, including Virginia and Leonard Woolf and D.H. Lawrence . Galgut also brilliantly and poignantly describes Forster's two closest relationships, enduring and sadly unfulfilled. Arctic Summer is a literary masterpiece, by one of the finest writers of his generation."

The hero of Carl Reiner's nutty and wonderful novel, Nat Noland, is hard at work on his fifth book, his own version of Genesis, concentrating on the relationship between Cain and Abel. While investigating their relationship, he starts to investigate his relationship with himself. His doting wife, Glennie, gets worried when she hears him having a loud, heated discussion while he's alone in the basement. Because he is unaware that he is talking to himself -- in two distinct voices -- she encourages him to seek the help of the famous Viennese psychiatrist Dr. Frucht. After a few sessions, Dr. Frucht elicits descriptions of Nat's recurring childhood dreams and the fact that he never knew his biological parents. In the lobby, when Nat bumps into the lovely Dr. Gertrude Trampleasure, an empathologist, she tells him how much he resembles her old teenage sweetheart, Buddy Keebler: "You two could be twins!" With the assistance of a private eye, Nat embarks on a quest to search for this "twin" and his unknown past, while continuing to work on his biblical novel, "NNNNN.

In the gritty mining town of Copper City, the death of copper magnate Buck Mason sets off a chain reaction of greed and desire. His beautiful widow, Rust, is determined to seize control of his empire, employing her seductive wiles and ruthless ambition to manipulate those around her. Hal Weber, a tenacious newspaperman, finds himself drawn into the vortex of power struggles and forbidden romance. As he investigates the truth behind Buck's death, Hal uncovers a web of corruption and betrayal, forcing him to confront his own moral compass and the seductive allure of Rust's dangerous game. "It Rhymes with Lust" is a classic noir tale that explores the dark side of human nature, where ambition, lust, and the pursuit of power can lead to devastating consequences. It Rhymes with Lust is a fascinating early example of a graphic novel, published in 1950. Written by Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller, it presents a compelling noir narrative that explores themes of power, corruption, and desire. Now fully colorized and remastered. A landmark edition to read and treasure.

"In her nonfiction books (Letters from a War Zone) and her first novel Ice and Fire) Dworkin established a reputation as a provocative writer of feminist literature. She gives her own name to the protagonist/narrator of this powerful, almost frenzied, admittedly autobiographical novel that chronicles her life and sexual victimization. "Andrea" gets her first taste of sex at age nine when she is molested in a movie theater. A rebellious teenager, she hangs out in Greenwich Village, idolizes Allen Ginsberg and is swept up into the peace movement. Penniless, streetwise but not street-smart, Andrea is continually and brutally raped by lovers, acquaintances, strangers. The novel's unparagraphed prose--like Andrea, intense, jumpy, impassioned--brilliantly captures the narrator's mental and physical degradation. As her life disintegrates, she repeats three facts--her name, her place of birth and the poet Walt Whitman's address in Camden, N.J., on a street where she was born--as a mantra anchoring her to reality. The most sexually graphic and horrifying scenes involve her marriage to a European revolutionary who abuses and burns her as she desperately tries to be a good bourgeois housewife. It is no wonder that the novel's ending finds Andrea committed to the women's movement. While Andrea's high-pitched voice is at first hard to take, its vehemence and candor build to a convincing indictment of a society that tolerates violence against women."--Publisher'sWeekly via amazon.com.

The second novel in Amelia Atwater-Rhodes's dazzling Mancer trilogy, Of the Divine takes place seventy-one years before Of the Abyss, in a world where sorcery is still practiced freely—but at what cost? Henna is one of the most powerful sorcerers in the Order of Napthol, and her runes ’s runes tell her that the future of Kavet is balanced on the edge of the knife. The treaties between Kavet and the dragon-like race known as the Osei have become intolerable. The time has come for the royal house to magically challenge Osei dominion. Prince Verte, Henna' lover, is to serve as the nexus for the powerful but dangerous spell, with Naples--an untested young sorcerer from the Order of Napthol--a volatile but critical support to its creation. Amid these plans, Dahlia Indathrone’s arrival in the city shouldn’t matter. She has no magic and no royal lineage, and yet, Henna immediately knows Dahlia is important. She just can’t see why. As their lives intertwine, the four will learn that they are pawns in a larger game, one played by the forces of the Abyss and of the Numen—the infernal and the divine. A game no mortal can ever hope to win.

Alfred Bester's first science fiction novel since The Stars My Destination was a major event -- a fast-moving adventure story set in Earth's future. A band of immortals -- as charming a bunch of eccentrics as you'll ever come across -- recruit a new member, the brilliant Cherokee physicist Sequoya Guess. Dr. Guess, with the group's help, gains control of Extro, the super-computer that controls all mechanical activity on Earth. They plan to rid Earth of political repression and to further Guess's researches -- which may lead to a great leap in human evolution to produce a race of supermen. But Extro takes over Guess instead and turns malevolent. The task of the merry band suddenly becomes a fight in deadly earnest for the future of Earth. Sequoya Guess, whom they love, must be killed. And how do you kill an immortal? THE COMPUTER CONNECTION is a jam-packed extraordinary science fiction novel -- what Alfred Bester's readers have been experiencing for over five decades.