Why, asks Daniel Rancour-Laferriere in this controversial book, has Russia been a country of suffering? Russian history, religion, folklore, and literature are rife with suffering. The plight of Anna Karenina, the submissiveness of serfs in the 16th and 17th centuries, ancient religious tracts emphasizing humility as the mother of virtues, the trauma of the Bolshevik revolution, the current economic upheavals wracking the country—these are only a few of the symptoms of what The Slave Soul of Russia identifies as a veritable cult of suffering that has been centuries in the making. Bringing to light dozens of examples of self-defeating activities and behaviors that have become an integral component of the Russian psyche, Rancour-Laferriere convincingly illustrates how masochism has become a fact of everyday life in Russia. Until now, much attention has been paid to the psychology of Russia’s leaders and their impact on the country’s condition. Here, for the first time, is a compelling portrait of the Russian people’s psychology

An American-born girl, Tressa Norne, has been held in bondage in the Temple of Erlik, an Oriental devil-god of Central Asia. After many years of captivity, Tressa finally escapes to America knowing that a worldwide organization of murderous black magicians, made up of Yezidees and Hassani, are plotting to take over and enslave the world. A secret agent, Victor Cleves, protects and loves Tressa, and with his support, Tressa battles the black magicians who are trying to kill her. Will White Magic triumph over Black?

In an underground apartment building called “the Burrow”-essentially purgatory—“twilight souls” inhabit the space between life and death. Interwoven with their stories are those of inhabitants of the living world: a retired sea captain, a psychotic former child actor (possibly the sea captain’s illegitimate son?), and the technicians who monitor the Burrow, making sure its occupants have a constant supply of oxygen and food. Through all of their stories, and the ways in which their lives, past and present, intertwine, Krusoe creates a poignant story about what constitutes a life, what remains when we die, and what we possibly carry with us into the next world

The penultimate novel in the Strangers and Brothers series takes Goya's theme of monsters that appear in our sleep. The sleep of reason here is embodied in the ghastly murders of children that involve torture and sadism

Doppelgängers, a murderer’s guilt, pulp noir, fanatical police, and impossible romances — these are the pieces from which German master Wolfgang Hilbig builds a divided nation battling its demons. Delving deep into the psyches of both East and West Germany, The Sleep of the Righteous reveals a powerful, apocalyptic account of the century-defining nation’s trajectory from 1945 to 1989. From a youth in a war-scarred industrial town to wearying labor as a factory stoker, surreal confrontations with the Stasi, and, finally, a conflicted escape to the West, Hilbig creates a cipher that is at once himself and so many of his fellow Germans. Evoking the eerie bleakness of films like Tarkovsky’s Stalker and The Lives of Others, this titan of German letters combines the Romanticism of Poe with the absurdity of Kafka to create a visionary, somber statement on the ravages of history and the promises of the future

A tense, gripping psychological thriller, with Hitchcockian overtones, perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn's GONE GIRL and Sophie Hannah. Lara Finch is living a lie. Everyone thinks she has a happy life in Cornwall, married to the devoted Sam, but in fact she is desperately bored. When she is offered a new job that involves commuting to London by sleeper train, she meets Guy and starts an illicit affair. When Lara vanishes from the night train without leaving a trace, only her friend Iris disbelieves the official version of events, and sets out to find her. For Iris, it is the start of a voyage that will take her further than she's ever travelled and on to a trail of old crimes and dark secrets. For Lara, it is the end of a journey that started a long time ago. A journey she must finish, before it destroys her

For drugged mankind, Paradise was the reality, the real world a painful nightmare... Only two men dared to look beyond the dream — to the green, forbidden valleys of Earth, where for a thousand years no human foot had trod!

A vivid psychological suspense novel. A diving instructor makes a gruesome discovery in Cranwell Lake – the body of a teenager who has clearly been in the water for many years. Detective Peter Porteous is called to the scene. After trailing through the missing persons files, he deduces that the corpse is Michael Grey, an enigmatic and secretive young man who was reported missing by his foster parents in 1972. As the police investigation gets under way in Cranwell, on the other side of the country prison officer Hannah Morton is about to get the shock of her life. For Michael was her boyfriend, and she was with him the night he disappeared. The news report that a body has been found brings back dreaded and long buried memories from her past…

Special Agent Kathryn Dance – introduced in The Cold Moon – stars in the latest thriller from New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver. When Special Agent Kathryn Dance is sent to interrogate the convicted killer Daniel "Son of Manson" Pell as a suspect in a newly unearthed crime, she feels both trepidation and electrifying intrigue. Pell is serving a life sentence for brutal murders years earlier that mirrored those perpetrated by Charles Manson in the 1960s. But Pell and his cult members left behind a survivor who – because she was in bed hidden by her toys – was dubbed the Sleeping Doll. Pell has long been both reticent and unrepentant about the crime. But Dance sees an opportunity to pry a confession from him for the recent murder – and to learn more about the depraved mind of this career criminal. But when Dance's plan goes terribly wrong and Pell escapes, leaving behind a trail of dead and injured, she finds herself in charge of her first manhunt. As the idyllic Monterey Peninsula is paralyzed by the elusive killer, Dance turns to the past to find the truth about what Daniel Pell is really up to. She tracks down the now-teenage Sleeping Doll to learn what really happened that night, and arranges a reunion of three women who were in his cult at the time of the killings. The lies of the past and the evasions of the present boil up under the relentless probing of Kathryn Dance, but will the truth about Daniel Pell emerge in time to stop him from killing again?

Masters of weapons and martial arts, Mercenaries Dhulyn Wolfshead and Parno Lionsmane have just saved one of the Marked, those gifted with special powers, from a mob that appears to be under the influence of a priest of the Sleeping God. Learning that this is not an isolated incident and realizing that Dhulyn's own unique gift will make them a target, the two take ship for safer climes. Once ashore the partners take on a seemingly simple mission of escorting a young woman to distant relatives. But not even Dhulyn's talent can warn them of the threat that awaits at the far end of their journey

Fallon DeVries has a sister who lives only in his mind. Paying the price of magic gone wrong, Aurienne is trapped watching a world she cannot touch, only able to communicate with her brother while he sleeps. And it’s slowly killing him. Fallon and Auri’s best chance of untangling their lives is to win the help of a mage of unparalleled ability. But how can they ask for help when the warped spell prevents him from speaking? Besides, Rennyn Claire - once the most powerful mage in the world - is a shadow of her former self: ill, injured and unlikely to recover unless she can hunt down the monster who once tried to make her his slave. But that Wicked Uncle is nowhere to be found, and other dangers, once slumbering dormant, are stirring…

VIOLENCE PASSION TERROR There was a streak of madness in the ancient and honorable Devereux family. No one, not even the family doctor, could tell when, or in whom, it might make its ugly appearance. Their own grandmother said of the two beautiful Devereux girls: "One of my granddaughters is all right But I've been worried about the other since she was a little child." Now one of the girls was dead, murdered. And no one knew which of the sisters—the dead Margot, or the lovely, living Celia— was a cunning, sexually deranged, exceedingly dangerous madwoman. ♦THE SLEEPING SPHINX-JOHN DICKSON CARR AT HIS BEST!"

Spanning India in the 70s to New Mexico in the 80s to Seattle in the 90s, The Sleepwalker's Guide to Dancing is a winning, irreverent debut novel about a family wrestling with its future and its past. When brain surgeon Thomas Eapen decides to cut short a visit to his mother's home in India in 1979, he sets into motion a series of events that will forever haunt him and his wife, Kamala; their intellectually precocious son, Akhil; and their watchful daughter, Amina. Now, twenty years later, in the heat of a New Mexican summer, Thomas has begun having bizarre conversations with his dead relatives and it's up to Amina-a photographer in the midst of her own career crisis-to figure out what is really going on. But getting to the truth is far harder than it seems. From Thomas's unwillingness to talk, to Kamala's Born Again convictions, to run-ins with a hospital staff that seems to know much more than they let on, Amina finds herself at the center of a mystery so thick with disasters that to make any headway at all, she has to unravel the family's painful past

In Murphy, North Carolina, a tragic accident occurs claiming the lives of several elementary school children. Alyssa’s brother Adam is the only child spared, and what seems like a tragic ending is merely invitation to an ancient horror as the town’s remaining children begin disappearing. Alyssa realizes that she and her brother are among those suffering from a mysterious ailment and haunted by sinister apparitions. Alyssa sees a sometimes amorphous, sometimes man-like shadow. Her peers see their deceased loved ones, and then disappear. As each day passes, more children are taken, and Alyssa knows that the ominous figure is responsible. Now if Alyssa wants to save herself and her brother from becoming the next victims, she has to figure out what it is and how to fight it, before it’s too late. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b_CGGO-pHIg

As children of feuding Derbyshire landowners, Mary Penley and Kit Stansell eloped against their families' wishes. But neither their ardor nor their marriage could survive their own restless natures. Nine years later, Kit is a rising star in the military while Mary has made her way in a raffish, intellectual society of poets and reformers. A chance meeting re-ignites their passion, but still they have very different values. Yet when Kit uncovers a political conspiracy that threatens all of England, they agree to put their differences aside. Amid danger and disillusionment, Kit and Mary rediscover the bonds that are stronger than time, the selves who have never really parted-and the love that is their destiny

What would happen if you invited Lorrie Moore, Mona Simpson, Tom Perrotta, and Steven Wright to a suburban barbecue? Something like this wry and wistful new novel of marriage, lust, and disconnection, from the author of What He's Poised to Do. William and Louisa Day are a suburban husband and wife with no children confronting the question of what their relationship means to them, and if and how it will survive. One day, after weeks of bizarre behavior-disappearing in the middle of parties, hoarding mail-Louisa approaches William with a simple appeal: "I want you to build us a house." Caught off-guard by the request, William is suddenly forced to reckon with his own hopes and desires, his growing discomfort at home and work, and, in the end, the fight-or-flight ultimatum his wife has posed for their future. Complicating these questions are the ghosts of other relationships in William's past, both ancient and recent-from the ex-girlfriend whose child is a kind of surrogate son, to his new neighbor, his partner in a recent indiscretion now uncomfortably returned to the foreground. Ben Greenman is a poet of romantic angst in contemporary American life, hailed for his whimsical yet unbearably poignant portraits of people grasping at connection through the fog of crumbling relationships. The Slippage is an emotionally powerful work, marked by Greenman's trademark blend of yearning and mordant wit

The Slithering Shadow (also known as Xuthal of the Dusk) is one of the original short stories starring the fictional sword and sorcery hero Conan the Cimmerian, written by American author Robert E. Howard and first published in the Weird Tales magazine. It is set in the pseudo-historical Hyborian Age and concerns Conan finding a lost city in a remote desert and encountering therein a Lovecraftian-esque demon known as Thog

As well as being one of Israel’s preeminent writers of fiction, Amos Oz was one of the first voices of conscience in Israel to advocate the creation of a Palestinian state and has been a leading figure of the Peace Now movement since 1977. This superb collection of essays offers Oz’s cogent views on Israel’s offensive into Lebanon in 1982; fanaticism of all stripes; the PLO; Israeli terrorism; the new militarism and the growing intolerance toward the Arab population in Israel; Jewish attitudes toward the Holocaust, and its misappropriation by the right and left alike; Claude Lanzmann’s film Shoah; the dream of Zionism and its failures; and much more

**AUTHOR’S FOREWORD** You might not want to buy this book. I know, that’s not the sort of thing an author is supposed to say. The marketing people aren’t going to like this. My editor is going to have a fit. But I’d rather be honest with you right out of the gate. First, if you haven’t read my other books, you don’t want to start here. My first two books are *The Name of the Wind* and *The Wise Man’s Fear*. If you’re curious to try my writing, start there. They’re the best introduction to my world. This book deals with Auri, one of the characters from that series. Without the context of those books, you’re probably going to feel pretty lost. Second, even if you have read my other books, I think it’s only fair to warn you that this is a bit of a strange story. I don’t go in for spoilers, but suffice to say that this one is ... different. It doesn’t do a lot of the things a classic story is supposed to do. And if you’re looking for a continuation of Kvothe’s storyline, you’re not going to find it here. On the other hand, if you’d like to learn more about Auri, this story has a lot to offer. If you love words and mysteries and secrets. If you’re curious about the Underthing and alchemy. If you want to know more about the hidden turnings of my world... Well, then this book might be for you. Deep below the University, there is a dark place. Few people know of it: a broken web of ancient passageways and abandoned rooms. A young woman lives there, tucked among the sprawling tunnels of the Underthing, snug in the heart of this forgotten place. Her name is Auri, and she is full of mysteries. *The Slow Regard of Silent Things* is a brief, bittersweet glimpse of Auri’s life, a small adventure all her own. At once joyous and haunting, this story offers a chance to see the world through Auri’s eyes. And it gives the reader a chance to learn things that only Auri knows... In this book, Patrick Rothfuss brings us into the world of one of *The Kingkiller Chronicle’s* most enigmatic characters. Full of secrets and mysteries, *The Slow Regard of Silent Things* is the story of a broken girl trying to live in a broken world

Tatyana Tolstaya's powerful voice is one of the best in contemporary Russian literature. She wrote many a commentary on modern-day Russia for the New York Review of Books before moving back to Moscow to complete her first novel, The Slynx. Tolstaya is a descendant of the great Leo Tolstoy but that might be beside the point. The Slynx is a brilliantly imaginative satire set in a hypothetical Moscow two hundred years after an event termed "the Blast." The Blast has forever altered the landscape of Moscow. People now live with mutations, called Consequences. Some have cockscombs growing everywhere, some have three legs and then there are the Degenerators who are humans in doglike bodies. Some "Oldeners" still linger on. Their only Consequence is that they remain unchanged and seemingly live forever. They remember life before the Blast and moan the primitive cultural mores of the society they live in, where only the wheel has been invented thus far and the yoke is just catching on. This feudal landscape is ruled by Fyodor Kuzmich, Glorybe, a tyrant who rules with an iron hand. Kuzmich passes off all Russian literature as his own works and issues decrees at the drop of a hat to keep the public ignorant and docile. The primary protagonist of The Slynx is a young scribe, Benedikt. His job is to copy all of Kuzmich's "works" on to bark, for use by the public. Benedikt marries a coworker, Olenka, and discovers the wonder of books through his father-in-law, Kudeyar Kudeyarich. His father-in-law, however, harbors nefarious plans to oust the current regime. Benedikt's love of books soon turns ugly and Kudeyarich channels this force to implement his own evil designs. The Slynx is translated fluidly by Jamey Gambrell. One wonders how she worked in intelligent phrases such as: "You feel sorry for someone. Must be feelosophy." Tolstaya's descriptions of the futuristic backdrop where people eat and trade mice as currency are bizarre yet not hugely so. Sometimes she seems to be so in love with her own creation that the storyline tends to wander. But she does not stray too far and her prose dripping with rich imagery more than makes up for it. Tolstaya's futuristic Russia might not be very different from the one she often complains about. "Why is it that everything keeps mutating, everything?" laments an Oldener, "People, well all right, but the language, concepts, meaning! Huh? Russia! Everything gets twisted up in knots." The perils of a society in which "Freethinking" is a crime and where an indifferent populace can be "evil" are ably brought out by the gifted Tolstaya. "There is no worse enemy than indifference," she warns, "all evil in fact comes from the silent acquiescence of the indifferent." The scary "Slynx," in the novel, is a metaphor for all the evil that is waiting to rear its ugly head on a sleeping people. The Slynx's descriptions of a tyrannical society might be too simplistic to apply to Russia. Its reception in the country has been mixed. The newspaper Vechernaya Moskva commented: "After all that we have read and thought over about Russia during the last fifteen years, this repetition of old school lessons is really confusing. There is a surfeit of caricatures of the intellegentsia, of anti-utopias depicting the degradation and decay of the national consciousness, and postmodernistic variations on the theme of literary-centrism." That having been said, Tolstaya's haunting prose serves as a chilling reminder of the way things could be, especially when government censorship and other controls move silently back in. The "Slynx" is never too far away. History, as they say, does tend to repeat itself