A darkly brilliant novel of self-discovery the cutting edge of experimental fiction. It leads from nowhere to nowhere, the mysterious world-spanning structure on which everyone seems to live. Rescued from the sea, devoid of personality or memory, all John Orr knows is the Bridge, his persistent dreams of war, and his desire for Chief Engineer Arrol’s provocative daughter, Abberlaine.
Recently voted the greatest fantasy of all time, after The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, Gene Wolfe's The Book of the New Sun is an extraordinary epic, set a million years in the future, on an Earth transformed in mysterious and wondrous ways, in a time when our present culture is no longer even a memory. Severian, the central character, is a torturer, exiled from his guild after falling in love with one of his victims, and journeying to the distant city of Thrax, armed with his ancient executioner's sword, Terminus Est. This edition contains the first four volumes of the series.
Amidst disillusioned saints hiding in wrestling rings, mothers burnt by glowing halos, and a Baby Nostradamus who sees only blackness, a gang of flower pickers heads off to war, led by a lonely man who cannot help but wet his bed in sadness. Part memoir, part lies, this is a book about the wounds inflicted by first love and sharp objects.
Unique Elements Two of Wells’s best-loved science fiction novels
The Time Machine , H. G. Wells ’s first novel, was published in 1895. It is a tale of Darwinian evolution taken to its extreme. Its protagonist, a young scientist, travels 800,000 years into the future and discovers a dying earth inhabited by two bizarre humanoid the brutal Morlocks and the kind but nearly helpless Eloi.
The Invisible Man, first published in 1897 , tells the story of an adventurous scientist discovering the formula for invisibility—a secret that drives him mad. It combines chilling terror, suspense, and acute psychological insight.
The Sirens of Titan is an outrageous romp through space, time, and morality. The richest, most depraved man on Earth, Malachi Constant, is offered a chance to take a space journey to distant worlds with a beautiful woman at his side. Of course there's a catch to the invitation—and a prophetic vision about the purpose of human life that only Vonnegut has the courage to tell.
An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations... It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving and alarmingly provocative novel, widely acclaimed as among Robbins's very best. As a dessert spoon mystifies, a waitress takes
The acclaimed author of Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude returns with a roar with this gorgeous, searing portrayal of Manhattanites wrapped in their own delusions, desires, and lies.
Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.
Into Chase's cloistered city enters Perkus Tooth, a wall-eyed free-range pop critic whose soaring conspiratorial riffs are fueled by high-grade marijuana, mammoth cheeseburgers, and a desperate ache for meaning. Perkus's countercultural savvy and voracious paranoia draw Chase into another Manhattan, where questions of what is real, what is fake, and who is complicit take on a life-shattering urgency. Along with Oona Laszlo, a self-loathing ghostwriter, and Richard Abneg, a hero of the Tompkins Square Park riot now working as a fixer for the billionaire mayor, Chase and Perkus attempt to unearth the answers to several mysteries that seem to offer that rarest of artifacts on an island where everything can be bought: Truth.
Like Manhattan itself, Jonathan Lethem's masterpiece is beautiful and tawdry, tragic and forgiving, devastating and antic, a stand-in for the whole world and a place utterly unique.
If history is just a sick joke, then who exactly is telling it and why? Could it be John Scogin, Edward IV's court jester, whose favourite pastime was to burn people alive? Or is it Andrew Boarde, Henry VIII's physician, who kindly wrote Scogin's biography? This is a modern tale about two familiar subjects - love and jealousy.
Imagine there are American MIAs who chose to remain missing after the Vietnam War. Imagine a family in which four generations of strong, alluring women share a mysterious connection to an outlandish figure from Japanese folklore. Imagine them part of a novel that only Tom Robbins could create? A magically crafted work as timeless as myth yet as topical as the latest international threat. But no matter how hard you try, you'll never imagine what you'll find inside the Villa Incognito: a tilt-a-whirl of identity, masquerade, and disguise that dares to pull off "the false mustache of the world" and reveal the even greater mystery underneath. For neither the mists of Laos nor the Bangkok smog, neither the overcast of Seattle nor the fog of San Francisco, neither the murk of the intelligence community nor the mummery of the circus can obscure the pure linguistic phosphor that illuminates every page of one of America's most consistently surprising and inventive writers.
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