Armchair fiction presents extra large editions of the best in classic science fiction novels and short stories. Here's a top-of-the-line novel by one of sci-fi's most heralded authors, Robert Silverberg. Against the night sky, the nearly completed World's Fair Satellite gleamed like a shiny new penny. You could see it even with low-powered field glasses as it moved in its stately orbit around the Earth: a giant copper-hued globe, the biggest space satellite ever constructed. The Fair's opening day?October 12, 1992?was only some six weeks away. And in very much less time than that, Bill Hastings was going to be up there to begin his year in space. From every loudspeaker in Denver Spaceport came the booming message: ?Attention, passengers for Flight 100 Special Transit to the World's Fair. Boarding has now begun? Don't miss this tremendous sequel to ?Regan's Planet.'

A novel of airport intrigue. She was young. She was beautiful. And in more danger than she knew. Rebel Martin worked out of National Airport in Washington DC as a stewardess for Coastal Airlines. She lived in the high rent section of Alexandria, VA courtesy of one friend. She had a wardrobe that would make a movie star envious, courtesy of another. And she played the field, in the sky and on the ground. There was Pilot Jim Lindsay, who had a wife and two children. He wanted to marry Rebel. So did young Robert Denham, a handsome ramp agent who didn't make enough to keep Rebel in cosmetics. One man involved with Rebel who didn't want to marry her was Frak Gilcannon, Coastal's executive vice president....Captain McDermott, recently reassigned from Coastal's Chicago office to Washington as a check pilot on the Boeing 727, had formerly been a homicide detective. Now, reluctantly, he finds himself back on the homicide trail seeking the person who'd strangled Rebel. And he finds his answer in two places. In the sky. And on the ground

In a novel that probes the inner workings of the Manhattan publishing world--the prestige, power, money, sex, and love--young Patty Lane writes a first novel that transforms her into an overnight cult figure

In this erotic, metaphysical, and theological novel, the spirits of medieval Templar monks gather on the anniversary of their Grand Master's torment and execution. Together they commit the sexual perfidies and blasphemous acts of which they had been forced to accuse one another before a tribunal.

It's the second decade of 21st Century Earth's 29th Configuration. Zack Carver, an alcoholic archeologist, discovers a craft, apparently built for flight, dating back amillion millennia. Carver teams up with Leslee Myles, an attorney, and a stunning, alien humanoid to battle the most malevolent forces in the universe, including bio-terrorists, shadow-military operatives, a renegade administration and Dax Wolf, a sociopath genius. However, the trio'smost daunting challenge is to outfox the Custodians-supreme beings who were born out of galactic cataclysm and whose sole purpose is to find civilizations that have reached their doom-point and then delete all evidence of their existence so that an entirely new life-form may emerge. As with Earth's previous 28 Configurations, the current 29th is rushing toward self-annihilation. Can Zack, Leslee and their otherworldly companion prevent the Custodians from activating the Null Quotient? Is it possible for the three heroes to convince the Nine Custodians to spare their blue-and-green planet and not revert it to the stardust that is the essential ingredient of the primordial slime?Philip Margo is a founding member of The Tokens, the vocal group that made the classic recording of The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Mr. Margo has worked as a record producer with eleven gold records to his credit, is a songwriter, television producer and writer and a personal manager for celebrities. He is currently writing the sequel to his novel and lives in Beverly Hills, California with his wife of forty-three years, Abbie. They are the proud parents and grandparents of three children and seven grandchildren.

Product Description A riot of confession, complaint, and sensual detail, this novel charts the first year alone of a man who has abandoned his wife, life, family, and homeland, seeking an impossible ideal: freedom. Having abandoned his wife, life, family, and homeland, the narrator of My Year of Love flees to Paris to begin his life over again, and finds himself having to rescue himself from the freedom he believed he desired: “I would never have believed that freedom could be a form of captivity, freedom can be like a primeval forest or like the ocean, you can drown in it or disappear and never, never ever find your way out again . . .” With a combination of confession, complaint, and sensual detail, a break is made with the narrator’s past, and through writing this very novel the days of his year of love find an order and expression. About the Author Paul Nizon was born in Berne in 1929. After an early career as an art historian and critic, he turned to writing full time in 1962, and moved to Paris in 1977, where he still resides. His work has won numerous awards, including the prestigious Austrian State Prize for European Literature in 2011. Jean M. Snook lives with her husband on the easternmost tip of North America, the Avalon Peninsula on the island of Newfoundland, where she has taught German language and literature at Memorial University since 1984. She received the 2011 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator’s Prize for her translation of Gert Jonke’s The Distant Sound.

Product description INCLUDES 23 STORIES WRITTEN BETWEEN 1954 AND 1984. HIGHLY AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL, THE STORIES ARE ALL ABOUT A MAN IN VARIOUS STAGES OF LIFE FROM BOYHOOD TO TH E RCAF IN WORLD WAR 2, RAISING A FAMILY OF DAUGHTERS IN ENGLAND, TO BECOMING A SUCCESSFUL WRITER. THE CHRONOLOGICAL ARRANGEMENT OF THE STORIES IS SUCH THAT THEY READ LIKE A NOVEL. From Publishers Weekly The son of Polish Jews who emigrated to Canada, Levine grew up in Ottawa, joined the Royal Canadian Air Force during World War II and thereafter lived in England for 31 years, where he wrote, married and raised a family. A good number of the 23 stories in this exceptional collection were written between 1958 and 1978 and are clearly autobiographical, centering on a Canadian writer living in England who relives his youth through trips back to Canada and visits from Canadian relatives. The narrator of Levine's stories recalls his past effortlesslyfamily relationships, lost loves, old friendships. And with pleasure the reader participates in these journeys, sharing Levine's experiences of fulfillment, disappointment and nostalgia. One doesn't easily leave Levine's tales behind, for as the narrator of the title story says in the volume's concluding line: "I would carry that sound with me long after I left." NovemberCopyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc.

- The author's most recent novel, What Remains (Warner, 2000, 0-446-52416-6), received rave reviews and was selected as a New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice. His previous novels for Warner include Old Scores (1997) and In the Name of Mercy (1995). - Nicholas Delbanco is the Robert Frost Collegiate Professor of English Literature and Language at the University of Michigan. He is the award-winning author of 20 fiction and nonfiction books and has taught at Columbia and Iowa Universities, as well as at Bennington, Skidmore, Trinity, and Williams Colleges. - Delbanco is the co-founder, with the late John Gardner, of the Bennington Writing Workshops, and currently administers the prestigious Hopwood Awards at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor.

Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, was--as Nicholas Delbanco writes--"world famous in his lifetime," yet now he has been "almost wholly forgotten." Like Delbanco himself, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson--the narrator of this novel and the Count's fictional, last-surviving relative--is "haunted" by one of history's most fascinating and remarkable figures. On par with Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin, Count Rumford was, among many other things, a politician, a spy, a philanthropist, and above all, a scientist. Based on countless historical documents, including letters and essays by Thompson himself, The Count of Concord brings to life the remarkable career of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford.

"An all-access ticket to the celebrated and wholly original mind of Mark Leyner, "one of the smartest and funniest humans since Aristophanes" (Jay McInerney). Praised as "chaotic and vibrant" (Charles Yu), "visionary" (Sam Lipsyte), and "supremely original" (John Cusack), the work of Mark Leyner has inspired a generation of contemporary novelists and has long deserved its place of recognition among the literary superstars of the seismic postmodernism-influenced movement of the early 21st century. A Shimmering, Serrated Monster!: The Mark Leyner Reader samples the staggering highlights from Leyner's extraordinary career in all of its bizarre and infatuating glory, with excerpts spanning from his groundbreaking early novels My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist (1990) and Et Tu, Babe (1992) to his modern masterpieces The Sugar-Frosted Nutsack (2012) and The Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit (2021). Appreciations from modern masters introduce each novel and the book includes original pieces in Leyner's irrepressible voice, including a timeline ("The Story So Far") and a new Afterword ("The Highlighted Passages"). This comprehensive volume is the perfect entry point for readers attracted to mind-expanding prose, and a bouquet of delights for those who have loved any of his past works"--

In this utterly unconventional, autobiographical novel, Mark Leyner gives a reading in the food court of a mall. Besides Mark's mother, who's driven him to the mall and introduces him before he begins, and a few employees of fast food chain Panda Express who ask a handful of questions, the reading is completely without audience. The action of Gone with the mind takes place exclusively at the food court, but the territory covered on these pages has no bounds. Existential, self-aware, and very much concerned with the relationship between a complicated mother and an even more complicated son, Leyner's story--with its bold, experimental structure--is a moving work of genius.--Amazon.com

A "shamelessly funny" ( Kirkus ) and utterly original new novel from Mark Leyner about a father and his intense and devout relationship with his daughter and with alcohol. An anthropologist and his daughter travel to Kermunkachunk, the capital of Chalazia, to conduct research for an ethnography on the Chalazian Mafia Faction (a splinter group of the Chalazian Children's Theater). The book takes place over the course of a night at the Bar Pulpo, Kermunkachunk's #1 spoken-word karaoke bar. Moreover, it's Thursday, "Father/Daughter Nite," when the bar is frequented by actual fathers and daughters as well as couples cosplaying fathers and daughters. Somehow emanating from the letters on an optometrist's eye chart, from karaoke screens in the bar, and from posters on a piazza that's the scene of phantasmagorical and unending mob wars, Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit relentlessly pulls the rug out from under itself, leaving you suspended in a state of perpetual exhilaration. Leyner, one of the most blazingly imaginative and influential writers of the last thirty years, has not only written his funniest novel, he's broken through to something entirely unprecedented. Imagine tripping on a hallucinogen made by an alien intelligence and then wanting to immediately call your dad (in this world or the next) and tell him that you love him--that's what reading Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is like. It's a novel about the deep pleasures of reading and drinking, the tumultuous reign of a cabal of mystic mobsters, and, of course, the transcendent love of a father for his daughter. Last Orgy of the Divine Hermit is like nothing else you've ever read before.

Siblings Ismael, Rosie and Cristina are deaf, and so are many in their Maya village. The deaf and hearing alike communicate in sign language, forming a tightly-knit community with an unsophisticated, simple lifestyle. But when Ismael gets into a fight at the local fiesta and flees the village, leaving Rosie and Cristina to fend for themselves, the daily rhythms of village life are disrupted, and all that they trust in comes under threat. Ismael and His Sisters is a remarkable debut novel from the acclaimed author of Chattering. It conjures up a world set apart, made visceral through its concentrated language, where sign language bridges exterior and interior worlds and gives a physical shape to the way we experience the world. It explores the interplay between the powerful forces within us and the dark elemental forces beyond our control, exposing the 'bottomless, hostile ocean' in which we all flounder. This is an extraordinary novel about the power of familial bonds, the barriers we build out of language, the dark elemental forces that threaten to overwhelm us, and above all, what it is like to be human.

A remarkable insight into Jewish history in Britain, 'My Mother's House' is a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine. The first novel from the acclaimed author of Eunice Fleet - a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine. First novel from the acclaimed author of EUNICE FLEET a poignant story of belonging, nationhood and identity set in Wales, England and Palestine Simon is a troubled young manborn in Wales, of Jewish heritage, and in love with Englishness and an English heiress. He determines to reject his Jewish and Welsh identity and the industrial valleys he grew up in and seeks to fulfil his ambition to rise in the Civil Service. His experiences in love and his professional life see him reject Edith on discovering that she is not what he believed her to be, and taking up arms in the fight against Englands enemies in the Great War. Ultimately, he must embrace his family and his heritage before he can experience a sense of wholeness. Simons experience raises questions of belonging, language, nationhood and identity that are as relevant now as they were in 1931 when the novel was first published. Lily Tobiass sensitive individual and communal portraits illuminate some of the most topical personal, social and political issues of the twenty-first century.

Death By Deadline is a mystery thriller that takes you deep into the heart of local TV News, with heroes, villains, and a look at how the battle to be first with a story can climax in unbelievable catastrophe. Can local news kill people? That's the essential question as the author takes you through a mosaic of politics. the underworld, government, and the life of a big city as seen through the prism of courageous journalists and their corrupt and devious counterparts. Death by Deadline is a story of murder, mayhem, and hope. accompanied by unforgettable characters, and some of the most unusual newsroom humor that you will ever read. This is not for the fainthearted, but is IS for people who want to walk the fine line between solid reporting and the tragedy of journalistic deceit. The people are not real. Can it happen? Maybe, on some dark day in the future, unless it is too late. "Too late" is a real possibility. But in the meantime, the thread of corruption, sexual tension, heroes and villains fighting an internal struggle, produces a newsroom full of tightrope walkers in a novel with so many surprises, that the reader must be prepared to face the unthinkable.

Lester (The Last Tales of Uncle Remus, 1994, etc.) offers a potentially controversial and intimate account of the life and death of a black civil rights leader as told 25 years later by the leader himself and the people who loved him. John Calvin Marshall—a fictional Martin Luther King Jr.- -speculates about the movement he led and its unintended consequences. Were the costs too high? As John grapples with this question, three casualties of the movement assess its cost to their own lives in an effort to free themselves from John's burdensome legacy: Andrea, the wife who resented his work during his lifetime and became a national symbol of it as his widow; Lisa Adams, John's white personal secretary and lover who lost everything when he died and she was thrust from the movement; and Bobby Card, the black organizer who sacrificed his youth and sanity for love of John. The three of them are reunited as Andrea lies dying of a stroke in a hospital in Nashville. Lisa leaves her mountain in Vermont to sit with the comatose Andrea and ask for forgiveness and perhaps for permission to move on. Amazingly, Andrea is able to give her both and, at the same time, free herself. In her turn, Lisa helps Bobby forgive himself for not hating whites enough, a terrible weakness in his mind. Lisa and Bobby leave each other with real hope for the future. The future of the movement is more doubtful, however, just as its past is ambiguous. The answer to John's original question is never stated explicitly, but perhaps hope can be found in the Andrea-Lisa-Bobby microcosm. Ultimately, however, Lester leaves John Calvin Marshall's question unanswered because it is unanswerable. A forceful and startling look into the minds and hearts of those involved in the civil rights movement, this novel raises compelling questions about the successes and failures of that movement. -

A couple of years ago, on the very verge of the illness that subsequently overwhelmed me, I took a small furnished house in Pineland. I made no inspection of the place, but signed the agreement at the instance of the local house-agent, who proved little less inventive than the majority of his confreres. Three months of neuritis, only kept within bounds by drugs, had made me comparatively indifferent to my surroundings. It was necessary for me to move because I had become intolerant of the friends who exclaimed at my ill looks, and the acquaintances who failed to notice any alteration in me. One sister whom I really loved, and who really loved me, exasperated me by constant visits and ill-concealed anxiety. Another irritated me little less by making light of my ailment and speaking of neuritis in an easy familiar manner as one might of toothache or a corn. I had no natural sleep, and if I were not on the borderland of insanity, I was at least within sight of the home park of inconsequence. Reasoned behaviour was no longer possible, and I knew it was necessary for me to be alone. [...] This historic book is the reprint of the original novel published in 1916.

Product Description Constance "Connie" Gueyer and Peter Tarker each conduct research in laboratories at Bailey Medical College in New York City. Connie is a 48 year-old virologist (the study of viruses) and working with the Congo River virus. Peter is a 37 year-old geneticist (the study of genes). Virology and genetics are closely connected, so getting each other's opinions at work was the excuse they used to get together. They soon had a relationship going. Connie feels a bit self conscious due to the age difference between them. So she decides to take things slowly. Connie's studies show her the region of the brain that seems to control aging. Since Peter has identified the factor that causes aging, they begin an intense collaboration. The results set the scientific community on its ear! Then Connie sees Peter with his young assistant and believes (wrongly) the worst. In a moment of depression, and while under the influence of some medication, Connie takes a dose of the viral preparation they have been using in tests with lab mice. Shortly afterward though, the mice in those tests began to have serious problems. Review Four Stars: What a wonderful debut novel for Dr. Judith Sulzberger! The characters are well developed and the plot believable. -- Detra Fitch, Huntress Reviews, February 5, 2004 About the Author Judith Sulzberger practiced medicine before turning her attention to writing. For several years, she wrote a health column for the East Hampton Star, currently serves on the Health Science Advisory Board of Columbia University School of Medicine, and is an advisor to the Genome Center at that same university. She spends most of her time in East Hampton with her husband.

Armchair Fiction presents extra large editions of classic science fiction double novels. The first novel is by sci-fi/fantasy master Frank Belknap Long, "Woman From Another Planet." This is the unusual and sensual story of David Loring, an artist, and his beautiful fiancée, Janice Reece. David loved Janice but the Martian Empire had a plan to entice David away from his beloved. With their plan for world domination at stake the Martians selected these two lovers' for their first attack. Together, David and Janice became involved in a highly emotional and physical conflict that broke through the barriers of outer space itself. Join renowned horror and sci-fi author Frank Belknap Long for a 1960 sci-fi tale he wrote for Chariot Books, a book company famous for their sexually provocative paperback novels. Although this tale is fairly tame by today's standards, it's interesting to see how Long weaves the elements of sex and science fiction together. The second novel is "Homecalling," by Judith Merril. The ship had crash landed on an alien world, burning to death the two parents of two small children on board. Although thoroughly jostled and bruised, Dee and her little brother Petey had somehow survived. Comprehending their horrible situation wasn't easy for a child of eight! But, gathering up all the courage she could muster, she set off exploring the area near the ship. What she found, was a large garden, and a lot of very big, ugly, and overly curious, bugs! Veteran science fiction author Judith Merril has presented here a fascinating and convincing picture of the thought-processes of a different species on a far-off world. It's a tale filled with unusual adventure and thought-provoking situations.

Novel, first published in 1964, exploring the themes of migration and assimilation in today's multicultural society. Part of the Halstead Classics series. Joshua Kuperschmidt's life is a journey through the 20th century. His journey takes him from the frontiers of Russia and Poland, out of his tight-knit community, to a strange land on the other side of the Earth. It details the perils of mutual intolerance and eventual acceptance into a safe open society. This edition includes a new Afterword by novelist Hsu Ming Teo. Author (1911-85) wrote 'Alien Son' and 'Scenes from a Revolutionary Life'.