Something has gone wrong. A group of American bombers armed with nuclear weapons is streaking past the fail-safe point, beyond recall, and no one knows why. Their destination—Moscow. In a bomb shelter beneath the White House, the calm young president turns to his Russian translator and says, “I think we are ready to talk to Premier Kruschchev.” Not far away, in the War Room at the Pentagon, the secretary of defense and his aides watch with growing anxiety as the luminous blips crawl across a huge screen map. High over the Bering Strait in a large Vindicator bomber, a colonel stares in disbelief at the attack code number on his fail-safe box and wonders if it could possibly be a mistake. First published in 1962, when America was still reeling from the Cuban missile crisis, Fail-Safe reflects the apocalyptic attitude that pervaded society during the height of the Cold War, when disaster could have struck at any moment. As more countries develop nuclear capabilities and the potential for new enemies lurks on the horizon, Fail-Safe and its powerful issues continue to respond

Golden Mirage The losers or World War II and their descendants have carved out their own little slice of heaven in the mountains of Argentina. In this staging area to the Fourth Reich, the promise of the dream reborn dawned as bright as a new German mark. But when the Destroyer's brain was downloaded onto disks, he took the whole matter very personally. That put an end to the whole affair - almost. Adolf Kluge, the head of the secret organization known as IV, has an eleventh-hour plan that may just refinance the whole sweet dream. He's come into some money: a centuries-old treasure belonging to the venerable house of Sinanju. But then, he isn't aware just how sensitive the Master of Sinanju is regarding this precious metal.... At first the idea of a trilogy turned me off.  But then I thought about what I'm doing now - reading all the Friend books , then all the Nuihc books, then the Mr.Gordons, and so on. Basically taking the super-baddies and reading them in series. The downside is the years that pass, the upside is the continuity in the character.  With this mini-series, it should be all upside!

Gene Kranz was present at the creation of America’s manned space program and was a key player in it for three decades. As a flight director in NASA’s Mission Control, Kranz witnessed firsthand the making of history. He participated in the space program from the early days of the Mercury program to the last Apollo mission, and beyond. He endured the disastrous first years when rockets blew up and the United States seemed to fall further behind the Soviet Union in the space race. He helped to launch Alan Shepard and John Glenn, then assumed the flight director’s role in the Gemini program, which he guided to fruition. With his teammates, he accepted the challenge to carry out President John F. Kennedy’s commitment to land a man on the Moon before the end of the 1960s. Kranz was flight director for both Apollo 11, the mission in which Neil Armstrong fulfilled President Kennedy’s pledge, and Apollo 13. He headed the Tiger Team that had to figure out how to bring the three Apollo 13 astronauts safely back to Earth. (In the film Apollo 13, Kranz was played by the actor Ed Harris, who earned an Academy Award nomination for his performance.) In Failure Is Not an Option, Gene Kranz recounts these thrilling historic events and offers new information about the famous flights. What appeared as nearly flawless missions to the Moon were, in fact, a series of hair-raising near misses. When the space technology failed, as it sometimes did, the controllers’ only recourse was to rely on their skills and those of their teammates. Kranz takes us inside Mission Control and introduces us to some of the whiz kids—still in their twenties, only a few years out of college—who had to figure it all out as they went along, creating a great and daring enterprise. He reveals behind-the-scenes details to demonstrate the leadership, discipline, trust, and teamwork that made the space program a success. Finally, Kranz reflects on what has happened to the space program and offers his own bold suggestions about what we ought to be doing in space now. This is a fascinating firsthand account written by a veteran mission controller of one of America’s greatest achievements

Patricia Briggs, the #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Mercy Thompson novels, "always enchants her readers." (Lynn Viehl, New York Times bestselling author) Now her Alpha and Omega series—set in a world of shifting shapes, loyalty, and passion—brings werewolves out of the darkness and into a society where fear and prejudice could make the hunters prey... They say opposites attract. And in the case of werewolves Anna Latham and Charles Cornick, they mate. The son—and enforcer—of the leader of the North American werewolves, Charles is a dominant alpha. While Anna, an omega, has the rare ability to calm others of her kind. Now that the werewolves have revealed themselves to humans, they can't afford any bad publicity. Infractions that could have been overlooked in the past must now be punished, and the strain of doing his father's dirty work is taking a toll on Charles. Nevertheless, Charles and Anna are sent to Boston, when the FBI requests the pack's help on a local serial killer case. They quickly realize that not only the last two victims were werewolves—all of them were. Someone is targeting their kind. And now Anna and Charles have put themselves right in the killer's sights

Winner of the 2009 Bernard Shaw Prize for Translation Fair Play is the type of love story that is rarely told, a revelatory depiction of contentment, hard-won and exhilarating. Mari is a writer and Jonna is an artist, and they live at opposite ends of a big apartment building, their studios connected by a long attic passageway. They have argued, worked, and laughed together for decades. Yet they’ve never really stopped taking each other by surprise. Fair Play shows us Mari and Jona’s intertwined lives as they watch Fassbinder films and Westerns, critique each other’s work, spend time on a solitary island (recognizable to readers of Jansson’s The Summer Book), travel through the American Southwest, and turn life into nothing less than art. Fair Play could in fact be called a novel of friendship, of rather happy tales about two women who share a life of work, delight and consternation. They are very unlike each other, but perhaps that is why they manage to play the game successfully, with patience and, of course, a great deal of love

Когда играющий тренер «Локомотива» выкинул рассказчика из юношеской футбольной школы, ему открылась прелесть лаун-тенниса. Его партнером на корте стал Владимир Осипович Роскин…

The fast-paced and inventive “Fair Verona” is up to R. Garcia y Robertson’s usual high standards. Mr. Garcia’s latest books include The Virgin and the Dinosaur (1996) and its sequel Atlantis Found (spring 1997). Both novels were published by AvoNova, and both are partly based on stories published in Asimov’s. The author’s next book, a collection of short fictions entitled The Moon Maid and Other Fantastic Stories, will be out soon from Golden Gryphon Press. The book will provide a hard-cover home for a number of tales that first appeared in our pages

Jack McEvoy is a reporter with a track record in finding killers. But he’s never been accused of being one himself. Jack went on one date with Tina Portrero. The next thing he knows, the police are at his house telling Jack he’s a suspect in her murder. Maybe it’s because he doesn’t like being accused of a crime he didn’t commit. Or maybe it’s because the method of her murder is so chilling that he can’t get it out of his head. But as he uses his journalistic skills to open doors closed to the police, Jack walks a thin line between suspect and detective — between investigation and obsession — on the trail of a killer who knows his victims better than they know themselves

Фэйри «Файрфлай» – не оцененный по достоинству истребитель-бомбардировщик Второй Мировой войны – появился на свет благодаря тому, что в ходе его создания в первоначальное техническое задание вносились многочисленные изменения. Длительный период разработки самолетов в то время был характерным для отношений, которые сложились между авиастроительными фирмами и правительством Великобритании. В те дни Министерство Авиации (Air Ministry) контролировало все заказы по созданию новых самолетов, в том числе и для авиации военно-морского флота (FAA, Fleet Air Arm), выпуская спецификации (технические задания) в соответствии с требованиями военных и передавая их авиастроителям. В ответ до полудюжины фирм, надеявшихся получить заказ, представляли свои решения, и Министерство Авиации могло позволить себе роскошь выбирать победителя среди двух и более прототипов самолетов, в наибольшей степени отвечавших требованиям спецификации. Так произошло и с Фэйри «Файрфлайем»

In the Five Hundred Kingdoms, the Tradition is always hard at work, trying to make everyone's life fit a fairy tale. But there are only so many Sleeping Princesses, or Noble Princes, to go around. So Elena Klovis, ground down by her wicked stepmother and two cruel sisters, awaits her prince. But he's only 11, and so completely unsuitable. But eventually, her Fairy Godmother turns up to help, in a rather unexpected way

Two hundred years ago, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm published the first volume of Children’s and Household Tales. Now, at a veritable fairy-tale moment — witness the popular television shows Grimm and Once Upon a Time and this year’s two movie adaptations of “Snow White” — Philip Pullman, one of the most popular authors of our time, makes us fall in love all over again with the immortal tales of the Brothers Grimm. From much-loved stories like “Cinderella” and “Rumpelstiltskin,” “Rapunzel” and “Hansel and Gretel” to lesser-known treasures like “Briar-Rose,” “Thousandfurs,” and “The Girl with No Hands,” Pullman retells his fifty favorites, paying homage to the tales that inspired his unique creative vision — and that continue to cast their spell on the Western imagination

"Hanns Heinz Ewers was born in Dusseldorf in 1871. He gained notoriety at an early age with a volume of satiric poetry and held onto it by forming a controversial itinerant theater company He produced several volumes of short stories and a series of remarkable novels, "The Sorcerer's Apprentice " "Alraune" (filmed in the 1920's) and "Vampire," between 1907 and 1922. He went on to achieve limited prominence as a Nazi, dying in Berlin in 1943." "Ewers rejected the literary conventions of his day, and is regarded as a minor literary figure in Germany today. His stories and novels are often regarded as works of fantasy, though there is really very little of the supernatural in them. They are more properly horror stories with an emphasis on the extremes of human experience, displaying an unhealthy, but fascinating, interest in pain, madness, and perversity. Ewers never forgot entirely the folk tales at the base of all Germanic fiction, and many of his stories resemble evil fables. The brief example that follows is typical." — William Wallace

Once upon a time, Prentice Cameron loved Isabella Austin until he discovered she was a spoiled, rich girl who spent her summers toying with his heart. Life led Prentice to his own fairytale, the love of the full-of-life Fiona Sawyer. That being so, that fairytale was torn away when Fiona died of a brain tumor leaving Prentice with a house to keep clean, piles of laundry to be done, a business to run and two children who were getting tired of takeaway. But Isabella comes back to Prentice’s tiny fishing town and she sweeps into his children’s lives like a beautiful, well-dressed fairy godmother who bakes exquisite chocolate cakes and gives the perfect manicure to six year old girls. Then Prentice finds out Isabella’s soul destroying secrets, secrets that explain why she left him so many years ago. Fiona, stuck in her village and forced to haunt her family and watch Prentice and Isabella’s crazy dance, finds the impossible happening. She’s cheering for Bella and Prentice to rekindle their love. Then she finds out why she’s caught in her heartbreaking haunting and discovers she must embrace her magic and keep Bella safe or Bella’s fairytale will never come true

Derrière moi, il y a le passage à niveau où l'homme se fit ratatiner par un rapide… Je laisse ma voiture sur le bord du fossé et je me mets en quête du numéro 12… Pas marle à dénicher… C'est une petite construction sans étage, couverte d'ardoise… M'est avis qu'il s'agissait d'un pavillon de chasse situé au fond d'un parc. La voie ferrée a coupé le parc et on a vendu le morcif de terrain avec la masure. Schwob l'a fait réparer, mais il y a un certain temps, car elle n'est plus très fraîche… Les volets sont clos… Dans la lumière blafarde de la lune, ce pavillon a quelque chose d'inquiétant. J'ai comme l'impression de l'avoir déjà vu sur la couverture de « Mystère-Magazine » !

Voici un San-Antonio d'horreur. Mon premier. Pourquoi ai-je tant attendu avant d'aborder ce genre délicat? Mystère. Car enfin, l'horreur, je sais ce que c'est. Chaque fois que, rentrant de voyage, je trouve un mètre de courrier sur mon bureau, ou que ma petite bonne portugaise laisse brûler le gratin de cardons, ou encore que je me trouve dans un banquet aux côtés d'un vieux gland surdécoré, l'horreur me livre toutes ses sensations fortes. Eh bien, malgré ma connaissance approfondie de la question, j'hésitais à plonger. Mais maintenant, c'est fait. Et tu vas voir comme! Pour mettre le paquet, j'ai mis le paquet! Si tu trouves que c'est trop, va m'attendre dans le prochain. Tu le trouveras à ta mesure car ce sera une histoire de cons

Allons, sois gentille, fais-moi des choses. Des choses de la vie. Des choses du vit. Des choses du vice. Des choses qui te font perdre l'usage de la parole. Des choses avec les doigts. Des choses avec le reste. Des choses à la Camille-cinq-sens. Oublie un instant ton existence merdique. Entre avec Bérurier dans la ronde. Dépose ta pudeur et ton slip au vestiaire. Et pénètre dans ce livre. Tu n'y auras pas froid : il est climatisé. Allez, viens ! Viens ! Viens ! Viens et, je t'en supplie, fais-moi des choses. Je t'en ferai aussi, salope !

One of the biggest problems of a remote research outpost is equipment maintenance—which means more and requires more imagination than you might think!

Si vous aimez les frissons, alors là vous serez servis, et pas qu'un peu. Tout d'abord il y a ceux, ineffables à combien, qui vous transportent au septième ciel, dont je ne suis pas avare, mes chéries, qui me connaissez bien comme moi je vous sais. Et puis les autres, ceux qui vous flanquent la Sibérie dans l'entresol, transformant vos espérances (c'est bien le mot pour la majorité, non ?) en flétrissures ectoplasmiques. Je sens déjà que vous salivez d'avidité libidineuse et castagnettez de délicieuse frayeur anticipée avant même de mouiller votre doigt pour… toumer la première page de ce récit hautement édifiant

Faith Cross, a beautiful and purely innocent young black woman, is told by her dying mother to go and get herself "a good thing." Thus begins an extraordinary pilgrim's progress that takes Faith from the magic and mysticism of the rural South to the promises and perils of modern-day Chicago. It is an odyssey that propels Faith from the degradation of prostitution, drugs, and drink into a faceless middle-class reality, and finally into a searing tragedy that ironically leads to the discovery of the real Good Thing. National Book Award-winner Charles Johnson's first novel, originally published in 1974, puts the life-affirming soul of the African-American experience at the summit of American storytelling

John McCain is one of the most admired leaders in the United States government, but his deeply felt memoir of family and war is not a political one and ends before his election to Congress. With candor and ennobling power, McCain tells a story that, in the words of Newsweek, “makes the other presidential candidates look like pygmies.” John McCain learned about life and honor from his grandfather and father, both four-star admirals in the U.S. Navy. This is a memoir about their lives, their heroism, and the ways that sons are shaped and enriched by their fathers. John McCain’s grandfather was a gaunt, hawk-faced man known as Slew by his fellow officers and, affectionately, as Popeye by the sailors who served under him. McCain Sr. played the horses, drank bourbon and water, and rolled his own cigarettes with one hand. More significant, he was one of the navy’s greatest commanders, and led the strongest aircraft carrier force of the Third Fleet in key battles during World War II. John McCain’s father followed a similar path, equally distinguished by heroic service in the navy, as a submarine commander during World War II. McCain Jr. was a slightly built man, but like his father, he earned the respect and affection of his men. He, too, rose to the rank of four-star admiral, making the McCains the first family in American history to achieve that distinction. McCain Jr.’s final assignment was as commander of all U.S. forces in the Pacific during the Vietnam War. It was in the Vietnam War that John McCain III faced the most difficult challenge of his life. A naval aviator, he was shot down over Hanoi in 1967 and seriously injured. When Vietnamese military officers realized he was the son of a top commander, they offered McCain early release in an effort to embarrass the United States. Acting from a sense of honor taught him by his father and the U.S. Naval Academy, McCain refused the offer. He was tortured, held in solitary confinement, and imprisoned for five and a half years. Faith of My Fathers is about what McCain learned from his grandfather and father, and how their example enabled him to survive those hard years. It is a story of three imperfect men who faced adversity and emerged with their honor intact. Ultimately, Faith of My Fathers shows us, with great feeling and appreciation, what fathers give to their sons, and what endures.From the Hardcover edition

A novel of the nobility of the human spirit. A novel of ideas. New York Times bestselling author Terry Goodkind returns with an extraordinary new novel of the majestic Sword of Truth. Richard, the Lord Rahl and the Seeker of Truth, has returned to his boyhood home, Hartland. When a Sister of the Dark captures Richard, he makes a desperate sacrifice to ensure that his beloved Kahlan remains free. Taken deep into the Old World and forced to labor for the tyrannical evil he’s sworn to defeat, he is determined to remain defiant even in the heart of darkness. Kahlan, left behind and unwilling to abandon the cause of the Midlands, violates prophecy and breaks her last pledge to Richard. Finally she will come face to face with the architect of the terror sweeping her land—the mad dreamwalker, Emperor Jagang. While Kahlan faces Jagang’s vast horde, Richard discovers the truth of the Imperial Order’s rule. Forced to endure his ordeal without magic, without the Sword of Truth, without his love, he stands against the despair and soulnumbing regime of the Old World, his hope kept alive only by the knowledge of the rightness of his cause

Early in 2004, two writers and Red Sox fans, Stewart O’Nan and Stephen King, decided to chronicle the upcoming season, one of the most hotly anticipated in baseball history. They would sit together at Fenway. They would exchange emails. They would write about the games. And, as it happened, they would witness the greatest comeback ever in sports, and the first Red Sox championship in eighty-six years. What began as a Sox-filled summer like any other is now a fan’s notes for the ages. Fans watching the 2004 baseball playoffs were often treated to shots of Stephen King sitting in the stands, notebook in hand. Given the bizarre events on the field, from the Red Sox’s unprecedented comeback against their most hated rivals to their ace pitcher’s bleeding, stitched-together ankle--not to mention the Sox’s first championship in 86 years--you could be forgiven for thinking King was writing the script as he went along, passing new plot twists down to the dugouts between innings. What he was writing, though, along with his friend and fellow novelist Stewart O’Nan, was Faithful, a diary of the 2004 Red Sox season. Faithful is written not from inside the clubhouse or the press room, but from the outside, from the stands and the sofa in front of the TV, by two fans who, like the rest of New England, have lived and died (mostly died) with the Sox for decades. From opposite ends of Red Sox Nation, King in Maine and O’Nan at the border of Yankees country in Connecticut, they would meet in the middle at Fenway Park or trade emails from home about the games they’d both stayed up past midnight to watch. King (or, rather, “Steve”) is emotional, O’Nan (or “Stew”) is obsessively analytical. Steve, as the most famous Sox fan who didn’t star in Gigli, is a folk hero of sorts, trading high fives with doormen and enjoying box seats better than John Kerry’s, while Stew is an anonymous nomad, roving all over the park. (Although he’s such a shameless ballhound that he gains some minor celebrity as "Netman" when he brings a giant fishing net to hawk batting-practice flies from the top of the Green Monster.) You won’t find any of the Roger Angell-style lyricism here that baseball, and the Sox in particular, seem to bring out in people. (King wouldn’t stand for it.) Instead, this is the voice of sports talk radio: two fans by turns hopeful, distraught, and elated, who assess every inside pitch and every waiver move as a personal affront or vindication. Full of daily play-by-play and a season’s rises and falls, Faithful isn’t self-reflective or flat-out funny enough to become a sports classic like Fever Pitch, Ball Four, or A Fan’s Notes, but like everything else associated with the Red Sox 2004 season, from the signing of Curt Schilling to Dave Roberts’s outstretched fingers, it carries the golden glow of destiny. And, of course, it’s got a heck of an ending. Of all the books that will examine the Boston Red Sox’s stunning come-from-behind 2004 ALCS win over the Yankees and subsequent World Series victory, none will have this book’s warmth, personality or depth. Beginning with an e-mail exchange in the summer of 2003, novelists King and O’Nan started keeping diaries chronicling the Red Sox’s season, from spring training to the Series’ final game. Although they attended some games together, the two did most of their conversing in electronic missives about the team’s players, the highs and lows of their performance on the field and the hated Yankees (“limousine longballers”). O’Nan acts as a play-by-play announcer, calling the details of every game (sometimes quite tediously), while King provides colorful commentary, making the games come alive by proffering his intense emotional reactions to them. When the Red Sox find themselves three games down during the ALCS, King reflects on the possibilities of a win in game four: “Yet still we are the faithful… we tell ourselves it’s just one game at a time. We tell ourselves the impossible can start tonight.” After the Sox win the Series, O’Nan delivers a fan’s thanks: “You believed in yourselves even more than we did. That’s why you’re World Champions, and why we’ll never forget you or this season. Wherever you go, any of you, you’ll always have a home here, in the heart of the Nation.” (At times, the authors’ language borders on the maudlin.) But King and O’Nan are, admittedly, more eloquent than average baseball fans (or average sportswriters, for that matter), and their book will provide Red Sox readers an opportunity to relive every nail-biting moment of a memorable season

Winner of the 2014 National Book Award for Poetry. A luminous, seductive new collection from the “fearless” (The New York Times) Pulitzer Prize — winning poet. Louise Glück is one of the finest American poets at work today. Her Poems 1962–2012 was hailed as “a major event in this country’s literature” in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it’s the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight’s undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you’ve always known, that first primer where “on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball” and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, “the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball.” Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder

The course of Frank Mackey's life was set by one defining moment when he was nineteen. The moment his girlfriend, Rosie Daly, failed to turn up for their rendezvous in Faithful Place, failed to run away with him to London as they had planned. Frank never heard from her again. Twenty years on, Frank is still in Dublin, working as an undercover cop. He's cut all ties with his dysfunctional family. Until his sister calls to say that Rosie's suitcase has been found. Frank embarks on a journey into his past that demands he reevaluate everything he believes to be true

When bored young housewife Simone Hollingsworth misses bell-ringing practice-her latest effort to find something to do-no one is surprised. In fact, if old Mrs. Molfrey, her neighbor, didn't report it to Detective Chief Inspector Barnaby, Simone's disappearance might have gone unrecorded in Fawcett Green. But ever Barnaby isn't concerned-until a body is found. Soon Barnaby is uncovering the passionate entanglements beneath the placid surface of Fawcett Green-and perhaps jeopardizing his career. Now, if he misconstrues the clue buried in Simone's garden-and a subtlety of human behavior his experienced eye should spot-a brutal killer may go free

The gripping new thriller from international bestseller Karin Slaughter A walk in the woods takes a sinister turn for police chief Jeffrey Tolliver and pediatrician Sara Linton when they stumble across the body of a young girl. Incarcerated in the ground, she has quite literally been scared to death. Detective Lena Adams is called in from vacation to help with the investigation, and the trail leads to a neighbouring county – and to a long-buried secret in Sara's mother's past. Forced to go undercover to protect the people she loves most, Sara – along with Jeffrey and Lena – soon learns that nothing comes without a price