In the end, the zombie apocalypse was nothing more than a waste disposal problem. Burn them in giant ovens? Bad optics. Bury them in landfill sites? The first attempt created acres of twitching, roiling mud. The acceptable answer is to jettison the millions of immortal automatons into orbit. Soon earth’s near space is a mesh of bodies interfering with the sunlight and having an effect on our minds that we never saw coming. Aggressive hypochondria, rampant depressive disorders, irresistible suicidal thought—resulting in teenage suicide cults, who want nothing more than to orbit the earth as living dead. Life on earth has slowly become not worth living. And death is no longer an escape. Horror can be a hard thing to recommend. What might be standard fare for one reader is far beyond the boundaries of another, and The n-Body Problem gleefully probes and pulls apart whatever comfort zones it encounters. With a fresh take on the undead genre and excellent execution—horror delivered with all the craft of literary fiction—the book is a finely wrought and exciting work, but one that has the capacity to disarm, disgust and profoundly distress. For a test of literary hard limits, and an exploration of the darker aspects of the human imagination, The n-Body Problem excels. Just as the post-cataclysmic world Burgess builds creates a crucible in which the human mind is melted down, the reading experience is similarly harrowing. It’s a novel that’s inflicted upon the reader

The Naked Communist was a best seller in the early 1960s, selling more than 1.5 million copies. It found its way into the libraries of the CIA, the FBI, the White House, and homes all across America and overseas in Spanish and excerpted in other languages. In this hard-hitting book an urgent need is finally fulfilled. In one exciting, readable volume, the incredible story of Communism is graphically told. We believe this to be the most vivid and comprehensive book on the subject ever published. It contains a distillation of more than a hundred books and treatises on Communism, many written by Marxist authors. We see the Communist the way he sees himself—stripped of propaganda and pretense. Hence the title, “The Naked Communist.” Here is explained Communism’s amazing appeal, its history, and its basic and unchanging concepts—even its secret time-table of conquest! Vital questions are clearly answered—Who gave Russia the A-bomb? How did the FBI fight the battle of the underground? Why did the West lose 600 million allies after World War II? What really happened in Korea? What is Communism’s great secret weapon? Is there an answer to Communism? What lies ahead? Best viewed with CoolReader

Hell just went quantum . . . The Confederation is starting to collapse politically and economically, allowing the possessed to infiltrate more worlds. Quinn Dexter is loose on Earth, destroying the giant arcologies one at a time. As Louise Kavanagh tries to track him down, she manages to acquire some strange and powerful allies whose goal does not quite match her own. The campaign to liberate Mortonridge from the possessed degenerates into a horrendous land battle of the kind which hasn't been seen by humankind for six hundred years. Then some of the protagonists escape in a very unexpected direction . . . Joshua Calvert and Syrinx now fly their starships on a mission to find the Sleeping God - which an alien race beleives holds the key to finally overthrowing the possessed. On Earth, satanist Quinn Dexter possesses a new army of the damned, using them to initiate The Night's Dawn, the entropic annihilation of all Creation. At the same time Joshua Calvert, master of the Lady Macbeth, seeks a miracle in a haystack: the truth behind a legend that 15,000 years ago the alien Tyrathca intercepted a single message from unexplored space beyond Orion: "IT SEES THE UNIVERSE. IT CONTROLS EVERYTHING. OUR ARRIVAL WOKE IT." Could a God be sleeping somewhere between the stars? And can Joshua possibly find this unknown Deity before The Night's Dawn devours the cosmos?

Hell just went quantum . . . The Confederation is starting to collapse politically and economically, allowing the possessed to infiltrate more worlds. Quinn Dexter is loose on Earth, destroying the giant arcologies one at a time. As Louise Kavanagh tries to track him down, she manages to acquire some strange and powerful allies whose goal does not quite match her own. The campaign to liberate Mortonridge from the possessed degenerates into a horrendous land battle of the kind which hasn't been seen by humankind for six hundred years. Then some of the protagonists escape in a very unexpected direction . . . Joshua Calvert and Syrinx now fly their starships on a mission to find the Sleeping God - which an alien race beleives holds the key to finally overthrowing the possessed.  Faced with an interstellar war in which the only weapon is exorcism, the Confederation dissolves into anarchy. For in a desperate act of triage, a few wealthy worlds prepare to sacrifice the mass of humankind to the risen dead souls from the Beyond. Meanwhile, the Possessed are destroying whole planets as they flee the universe in a transdimensional quest to find Heaven. But there are far worse things than death-or resurrection. And the Possessed are about to discover that chasing paradise is the most horrific, irrevocable mistake they could make

A millennium into the future, two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the Galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. On the beautiful Outer World planet of Solaria, a handful of human colonists lead a hermit-like existence, their every need attended to by their faithful robot servants. To this strange and provocative planet comes Detective Elijah Baley, sent from the streets of New York with his positronic partner, the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve an incredible murder that has rocked Solaria to its foundations. The victim had been so reclusive that he appeared to his associates only through holographic projection. Yet someone had gotten close enough to bludgeon him to death while robots looked on. Now Baley and Olivaw are faced with two clear impossibilities: Either the Solarian was killed by one of his robots unthinkable under the laws of Robotics or he was killed by the woman who loved him so much that she never came into his presence!

Seven stories of Lew Archer’s investigations

Battle-tested project leader at a PR firm and slippery bachelor, Sakuma sees himself as a player. His smug self-regard doesn’t seem entirely unfounded, both in love and at work. When is idea for a mini-theme park is dismissed as too costly and vacuous at the last minute by a major client he seems to have met his match. Katsuragi, an heir and executive at the global car maker, Nissei Auto, is back from a marketing stint in the US with an authentic conviction that everything is a game. Once the man’s daughter by a former mistress teams up with Sakuma so she can come into her inheritance in an expeditious manner — Juri is indeed her father’s flesh and blood — the game is good to go! And the name of this game is a kidnapping!

Set in Italy in the Middle Ages, this is not only a narrative of a murder investigation in a monastery in 1327, but also a chronicle of the 14th century religious wars, a history of monastic orders, and a compendium of heretical movements

I have stolen princesses back from sleeping  barrow kings. I burned down the town of Trebon. I have spent the night with Felurian and left with both my sanity and my life. I was expelled from the University at a younger age than most people are allowed in. I tread paths by moonlight that others fear to speak of during day. I have talked to Gods, loved women, and written songs that make the minstrels weep. You may have heard of me. So begins the tale of Kvothe—from his childhood in a troupe of traveling players, to years spent as a near-feral orphan in a crime-riddled city, to his daringly brazen yet successful bid to enter a difficult and dangerous school of magic. In these pages you will come to know Kvothe as a notorious magician, an accomplished thief, a masterful musician, and an infamous assassin. But THE NAME OF THE WIND is so much more—for the story it tells reveals the truth behind Kvothe’s legend

The acclaimed author of Jesus' Son and Already Dead returns with a beautiful, haunting, and darkly comic novel. The Name of the World is a mesmerizing portrait of a professor at a Midwestern university who has been patient in his grief after an accident takes the lives of his wife and child and has permitted that grief to enlarge him. Michael Reed is living a posthumous life. In spite of outward appearances — he holds a respectable university teaching position; he is an articulate and attractive addition to local social life — he's a dead man walking. Nothing can touch Reed, nothing can move him, although he observes with a mordant clarity the lives whirling vigorously around him. Of his recent bereavement, nearly four years earlier, he observes, "I'm speaking as I'd speak of a change in the earth's climate, or the recent war." Facing the unwelcome end of his temporary stint at the university, Reed finds himself forced "to act like somebody who cares what happens to him. " Tentatively he begins to let himself make contact with a host of characters in this small academic town, souls who seem to have in common a tentativeness of their own. In this atmosphere characterized, as he says, "by cynicism, occasional brilliance, and small, polite terror," he manages, against all his expectations, to find people to light his way through his private labyrinth. Elegant and incisively observed, The Name of the World is Johnson at his best: poignant yet unsentimental, replete with the visionary imaginative detail for which his work is known. Here is a tour de force by one of the most astonishing writers at work today

The novel by the Hungarian classic gives an account of the Hungary during the war against Napoleon in 1809

Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and still a moving examination of family, loss, and the amorphous and magical potential of language itself, The Names stands with any of DeLillo's more recent and highly acclaimed works. *** "The Names not only accurately reflects a portion of our contemporary world but, more importantly, creates an original world of its own."-Chicago Sun-Times *** "DeLillo sifts experience through simultaneous grids of science and poetry, analysis and clear sight, to make a high-wire prose that is voluptuously stark."-Village Voice Literary Supplement *** "DeLillo verbally examines every state of consciousness from eroticism to tourism, from the idea of America as conceived by the rest of the world to the idea of the rest of the world as conceived by America, from mysticism to fanaticism."-New York Times

The fifth dynamic outing for freelance London exorcist Felix Castor resolves a long-running arc, and finds Castor making a brutal choice They say the road to hell is paved with good intentions, but if you ask Castor he'll tell you there's quite a bit of arrogance and reckless stupidity lining the streets as well. He should know. There are only so many times you can play both sides against the middle and get away with it. Now, the inevitable moment of crisis has arrived and it’s left Castor with blood on his hands. Well, not his hands—it’s always someone else who pays the bill:  friends, acquaintances, and bystanders. So Castor drowns his guilt in cheap whiskey, while an innocent woman lies dead and her daughter comatose, his few remaining friends fear for their lives and there’s a demon loose on the streets. It's not just any demon—this one rides shotgun on his best friend’s soul and can’t be expelled without killing him. It seems that Felix Castor’s got some tough choices to make, because expel the demon he must or all Hell will break loose—literally

BCA Crime Thriller of the Year July 2005, and the G8 leaders have gathered in Scotland. With daily marches, demonstrations, and scuffles, the police are at full stretch. Detective Inspector John Rebus, however, has been sidelined, until the apparent suicide of an MP coincides with clues that a serial killer may be on the loose. The authorities are keen to hush up both, for fear of overshadowing a meeting of global importance – but Rebus has never been one to stick to the rules, and when his colleague Siobhan Clarke finds herself hunting down the identity of the riot cop who assaulted her mother, it looks as though both Rebus and Clarke may be up pitted against both sides in the conflict. THE NAMING OF THE DEAD is a potent mix of action and politics, set against a backdrop of the most devastating week in recent British history

At first no one noticed when the flower was delivered to Julia Evans, owner of Event Horizon, but this flower has genes millions of years in advance of terrestrial DNA. Where did the plant come from? Greg Mandel, telepathic investigator, must find out-before the Nano Flower blooms

Island hoping across the South Pacific, the esteemed Dr. Saunders is offered passage by Captain Nichols and his companion Fred Blake, two men who appear unsavory, yet any means of transportation is hard to resist. The trip turns turbulent, however, when a vicious storm forces them to seek shelter on the remote island of Kanda. There these three men fall under the spell of the sultry and stunningly beautiful Louise, and their story spirals into a wicked tale of love, murder, jealousy, and suicide.\n\nA tense, exotic tale of love, jealousy, murder and suicide, which evolved from a passage in Maugham’s earlier masterpiece, The Moon and Sixpence

From Publishers Weekly There's a gravitas to the mystery/thrillers of Michael Connelly, a bedrock commitment to the value of human life and the need for law enforcement pros to defend that value, that sets his work apart and above that of many of his contemporaries. That gravitas is in full force in Connelly's newest, and as nearly always in the work of this talented writer, it supports a dynamite plot, fully flowered characters and a meticulous attention to the details of investigative procedure.There are also some nifty hooks to this new Connelly: it features his most popular series character, retired L.A. homicide cop Harry Bosch, but it's also a sequel to his first stand-alone, The Poet (1996), and is only his second novel (along with The Poet) to be written in both first and third person. The first-person sections are narrated by Bosch, who agrees as a favor to the widow to investigate the death of Bosch's erstwhile colleague and friend Terry McCaleb (of Blood Work and A Darkness More Than Night). Bosch's digging brings him into contact with Rachel Walling, the FBI agent heroine of The Poet, and the third-person narrative concerns mostly her. Though generally presumed dead, the Poet-the serial killer who was a highly placed Fed and Walling's mentor-is alive and killing anew, with, we soon learn, McCaleb among his victims and his sights now set on Walling. The story shuttles between Bosch's California and the Nevada desert, where the Poet has buried his victims to lure Walling. The suspense is steady throughout but, until a breathtaking climactic chase, arises more from Bosch and Walling's patient and inspired following of clues and dealing with bureaucratic obstacles than from slash-and-dash: an unusually intelligent approach to generating thrills. Connelly is a master and this novel is yet another of his masterpieces

Béatrice, a solitary young jazz singer from a genteel Parisian suburb, meets a mysterious woman named Polina. Polina visits her at night and whispers in her ear: ‘There are people who leave their bodies and their bodies go on living without them. These people are named Natasha.’ César, a lonely Mexican actor working in a call centre, receives the opportunity of a lifetime: a role as a serial killer on a French TV series. But as he prepares for the audition, he starts falling in love with the psychopath he is to play. Béatrice and César are drawn deeper into a city populated with visions and warnings, taunted by the chorusing of a group of young women, trapped in a windowless room, who all share the same name… Natasha. A startlingly original novel that recalls the unsettling visual worlds of Cindy Sherman and David Lynch and the writing of Angela Carter and Haruki Murakami, The Natashas establishes Yelena Moskovich as one of the most exciting young writers of her generation

The buying and selling of human beings for the worldwide sex industry is organized crime’s fastest-growing business with up to two million people globally—mostly women and children—being trafficked into the sex trade every year. In The Natashas, leading investigate journalist Victor Malarek details the tragic lives of the women and girls ensnared in the most recent wave of this brutal trade. He unearths evidence of training centers in Serbia where teenage girls from Ukraine, Moldova and Romania are viciously indoctrinated into the world of prostitution. He travels to war-torn countries such as Kosovo and Bosnia where he exposes corruption involving United Nations peacekeepers. And he uncovers scandalous situations throughout Europe, Israel and North America where the trafficking trade continues to flourish. Shocking stories of corrupt cops, complicit government officials and complacent politicians combine to form a powerful truth—one that Malarek hopes will not be ignored

The Natural, Bernard Malamud's first novel. published in 1952, is also the first — and some would say still the best — literary novel written about baseball. In it Malamud, usually appreciated for his unerring portrayals ot postwar Jewish life, takes on very different material — the story of a superbly gifted "natural' at play in the fields of the old daylight baseball era — and invests it with the hardscrabble poetry, at once grand and altogether believable, that runs through all his best work. Four decades after the novel's publication, Alfred Kazin's comment still holds true: "Malamud has done something which — now that he has done it! — looks as if we have been waiting for it all our lives. He has really raised the whole passion and craziness and fanaticism of baseball as a popular spectacle to its ordained place in mythology"

Claudio Fratta is a garden designer at the height of his career; a naturally solitary man, a tender, playful companion to his nephews, and a considerate colleague. But under his amiable exterior simmers a quiet rage, and a desire to punish the Mafioso who bankrupted his father and ruined his family. And when an enigmatic, alluring woman becomes entangled in Claudio's life after a near-fatal car crash, his desire for her draws him ever closer to satisfying that long-held fantasy of revenge

Seventeen-year-old Cassie is a natural at reading people. Piecing together the tiniest details, she can tell you who you are and what you want. But it’s not a skill that she’s ever taken seriously. That is, until the FBI come knocking: they’ve begun a classified program that uses exceptional teenagers to crack infamous cold cases, and they need Cassie. What Cassie doesn’t realize is that there’s more at risk than a few unsolved homicides— especially when she’s sent to live with a group of teens whose gifts are as unusual as her own. Sarcastic, privileged Michael has a knack for reading emotions, which he uses to get inside Cassie’s head—and under her skin. Brooding Dean shares Cassie’s gift for profiling, but keeps her at arm’s length. Soon, it becomes clear that no one in the Naturals program is what they seem. And when a new killer strikes, danger looms closer than Cassie could ever have imagined. Caught in a lethal game of cat and mouse with a killer, the Naturals are going to have to use all of their gifts just to survive

The Nature of Blood is an unforgettable novel about loss and persecution, about courage and betrayal, and about the terrible pain yet absoulte necessity of human memory. A young Jewish woman growing up in Germany in the middle of the twentieth century and an African general hired by the Doge to command his armies in sixteenth century Venice are bound by personal crisis and momentous social conflict. What emerges is Europe's age-old obsession with race, with sameness and difference, with blood

The editors of the nation’s two leading journals on foreign policy were asked to examine the nature of the post-cold war world and America’s transitional role. These essays represent the views of Charles William Maynes, editor of Foreign Policy, and William G. Hyland, former editor of Foreign Affairs. Charles Maynes reviews the major transitions that marked 45 years of Soviet-American strategic confrontation. Predictably, the U.S. global role and defense resources are declining as old threats decrease and domestic problems move higher up on the policy agenda. Less predictably, the relative defense spending of small powers is likely to increase, adding to the potential for regional instability. These trends and the proliferation of weapons technology, including weapons of mass destruction, will drive the major powers toward their third attempt in this century to deal with global instability through collective security. Power will become more evenly distributed as America’s military dominance recedes and others’ economic power increases. Such trends, Mr. Maynes believes, should not be disturbing so long as prudent retrenchment does not become a foolish retreat from an American global role. William Hyland believes that no president since Calvin Coolidge has inherited an easier foreign policy agenda. Presidents from Truman through Bush did the cold war “heavy lifting,” and the Clinton transitional era should mark the ascendancy of domestic over foreign policy issues. Economic power is essential to America’s future and the country faces the difficult task of economic recovery while avoiding the political expedience of protectionism or other forms of belligerence toward our trading partners. This would accelerate international fragmentation, undermining the political trends toward a collective security regime that is vital to the new world order and is the best alternative to the extremes of U.S. isolationism or global policeman

Makin’ a list, and rocking it…twice. Perpetual good girl Lacey McGuire has two Christmas wish lists. One suitable for public consumption…and a private one that’s too hot to handle. Right at the top: wild, wicked fantasies about her best buddies and business partners Ryan Hollister and Bram Colton. Besides the fact they’re both poster boys for Hunks ’R’ Us, they’ve been there for her through thick, thin and the heartbreak of a cheating fiancé. So what if her boys will never know they star in her sexiest daydreams? In her fantasy world, her heart will never get trampled again. Ry and Bram are pretty sure Lacey never meant to email a list of some of her raunchiest wants. Particularly the one that tightens their shorts—she wants a threesome. With them. Although they’ve loved her for years, they made a pact to keep Lacey off limits in order to protect their friendship. Now all bets are off. And the quest to give her all she wants—and more—is on. Warning: This book contains a wickedly hot M/F/M ménage that will heat up the holidays. Friends steaming things up in a hot tub. Bondage and blindfolds. Sexy shenanigans at a Christmas tree lot. And maybe even a glimpse of Santa…in a Speedo