Best of
Modern-Classics

2019

The Brother’s Creed Box Set: The Complete Zombie Apocalypse Series (Books 1-5)


Joshua C. Chadd - 2019
    As the nation succumbs to an outbreak unlike anything ever seen, the brothers must gather their supplies and set out on a road trip to save their parents from a fate worse than death itself. Their naïve optimism quickly fades, and the choices they confront will leave them scarred for life.Meanwhile, Emmett Wolfe, along with his daughter and ex-wife, leave Texas bound for a safe haven in Alaska. Along the way, they rescue a mysterious young woman from a shopping mall, but the cost of their daring recovery will leave them reeling. The U.S. quickly falls into chaos, and Emmett learns early on that there are dangers far worse than the undead.Tank finds himself amidst a group of survivors heading north, but their convoy is stopped dead in its tracks when they’re ambushed by a gang of ruthless killers. Escaping the attack, Tank and two others are hunted through Wyoming by the bloodthirsty Reclaimers. With no other choice, Tank has to face the reality that sacrifices are necessary if they are to survive.As the virus spreads across America, the remaining survivors must band together to fight not only the walking dead, but the living as well. Their journey to the Alaskan wilderness is met with constant hardship, betrayal, and death. But as the world crumbles around them, they will come to realize they cannot lose what makes them human. They must hold on to faith and hope or all is lost and they will not survive the coming apocalypse. Get the award-winning and best-selling series that has a combined total of over 550 FIVE STAR reviews on Amazon! This box set includes the COMPLETE Brother’s Creed series: OutbreakBattlebornWolf PackBad CompanyLast Hope PLUS two bonus short stories:TankedLife After (Box Set exclusive)

Vasko Popa


Vasko Popa - 2019
    Charles Simic, a master of contemporary American poetry, has been translating Popa’s work for more than a quarter century. This revised and greatly expanded edition of Simic’s Popa is a revelation.

The Penguin Book of Oulipo: Queneau, Perec, Calvino and the Adventure of Form


Philip Terry - 2019
    An exhilarating feat of in-depth reading, and translating, it takes its place as the definitive anthology in English for decades to come.' - Marina WarnerBrought together for the first time, here are 100 pieces of 'Oulipo' writing, celebrating the literary group who revelled in maths problems, puzzles, trickery, wordplay and conundrums.Featuring writers including Georges Perec, Raymond Queneau and Italo Calvino, it includes poems, short stories, word games and even recipes. Alongside these famous Oulipians, are 'anticipatory' wordsmiths who crafted language with unusual constraints and literary tricks, from Jonathan Swift to Lewis Carroll.Philip Terry's playful selection will appeal to lovers of word games, puzzles and literary delights.

Charisma and Disenchantment: The Vocation Lectures


Max Weber - 2019
    Among his most significant works are the so-called vocation lectures, published shortly after the end of World War I and delivered at the invitation of a group of student activists. The question the students asked Weber to address was simple and haunting: In a modern world characterized by the division of labor, economic expansion, and unrelenting change, was it still possible to consider an academic or political career as a genuine calling? In response Weber offered his famous diagnosis of “the disenchantment of the world,” along with a challenging account of the place of morality in the classroom and in research. In his second lecture he introduced the notion of political charisma, assigning it a central role in the modern state, even as he recognized that politics is more than anything “a slow and difficult drilling of holes into hard boards.”Damion Searls’s new translation brings out the power and nuance of these celebrated lectures. Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon’s introduction describes their historical and biographical background, reception, and influence. Weber’s effort to rethink the idea of a public calling at the start of the tumultuous twentieth century is revealed to be as timely and stirring as ever.

Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister


Robert Musil - 2019
    Ulrich is intellectual and skeptical and rebellious and yet for all that rule-bound, held hostage by his attraction to the systematic, even if every existing system—political, ethical, metaphysical—strikes this onetime mathematician as fundamentally suspect. When, however, after many years Ulrich and his younger sister, Agathe, reunite over the bier of their dead father, a celebrated lawyer, both siblings are electrified. They are, for one thing, almost each other’s spitting image, while Agathe, who has just separated from her husband, is even more resistant to any kind of status quo than her brother. Engaging in a series of ever more intense and questioning “holy conversations,” brother and sister progressively enlarge the boundaries of sexuality, sensuality, and identity, seeking to arrive at a new conception of reality that they are sure lies within each other to discover.Musil’s Agathe, or the Forgotten Sister is one of the most unexpected and breathtaking adventures of twentieth-century fiction, while Joel Agee’s new English translation captures all the nuance of Musil’s famously acute and penetrating style.

Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958 to 1963): Yesterday's Luminaries Introduced by Today's Rising Stars


Gideon MarcusSydney J. Van Scyoc - 2019
    Yet the stories of this era, especially those by women, have been largely unreprinted, unrepresented, and unremembered.Until Now.Rediscovery: Science Fiction by Women (1958-1963) features fourteen selections of the best science fiction of the Silver Age by the unsung women authors of yesteryear, introduced by today's rising stars:Unhuman Sacrifice (1958) by Katherine MacLean, introduced by Natalie Devitt Wish Upon a Star (1958) by Judith Merril, introduced by Erica Frank A Matter of Proportion (1959) by Anne Walker, introduced by Erica Friedman The White Pony (1960) by Jane Rice, introduced by T.D. Cloud Step IV (1960) by Rosel George Brown, introduced by Andi Dukleth Of All Possible Worlds (1961) by Rosel George Brown, introduced by Cora Buhlert Satisfaction Guaranteed (1961) by Joy Leache, introduced by A.J. Howells The Deer Park (1962) by Maria Russell, introduced by Claire Weaver To Lift a Ship (1962) by Kit Reed, introduced by Gideon Marcus The Putnam Tradition (1963) by Sonya Hess Dorman, introduced by Lorelei Marcus The Pleiades (1963) by Otis Kidwell Burger, introduced by Gwyn Conaway No Trading Voyage (1963) by Doris Pitkin Buck, introduced by Marie Vibbert Cornie on the Walls (1963) by Sidney van Scyoc, introduced by Rosemary Benton Unwillingly to School (1958) by Pauline Ashwell, introduced by Janice Marcus"Female authors wrote stories about coming of age...cautionary tales...stories set beyond our universe...You'll find these themes and more in this anthology. I hope that as you read their stories you don't try to 'feminine' versus 'masculine' elements. What you are about to read is really good science fiction, plain and simple."(from the foreword by Dr. Laura Brodian Freas Beraha)

The Inner Life: Inner Land--A Guide Into the Heart of the Gospel, Volume 1


Eberhard Arnold - 2019
    It is hard to exaggerate the significance of Innerland, either for Eberhard Arnold or his readers. It absorbed his energies off and on for most of his adult life--from World War I, when he published the first chapter under the title War: A Call to Inwardness, to 1935, the last year of his life.Packed in metal boxes and buried at night for safekeeping from the Nazis, who raided the author's study a year before his death (and again a year after it), Innerland was not openly critical of Hitler's regime. Nevertheless, it attacked the spirits that animated German society: its murderous strains of racism and bigotry, its heady nationalistic fervor, its mindless mass hysteria, and its vulgar materialism. In this sense Innerland stands as starkly opposed to the zeitgeist of our own day as to that of the author's.At a glance, the focus of Innerland seems to be the cultivation of the spiritual life as an end in itself. Nothing could be more misleading. In fact, to Eberhard Arnold the very thought of encouraging the sort of selfish solitude whereby people seek their own private peace by shutting out the noise and rush of public life around them is anathema. He writes in The Inner Life "These are times of distress. We cannot retreat, willfully blind to the overwhelming urgency of the tasks pressing on society. We cannot look for inner detachment in an inner and outer isolation...The only justification for withdrawing into the inner self to escape today's confusing, hectic whirl would be that fruitfulness is enriched by it. It is a question of gaining within, through unity with eternal powers, a strength of character ready to be tested in the stream of the world."Innerland, then, calls us not to passivity, but to action. It invites us to discover the abundance of a life lived for God. It opens our eyes to the possibilities of that "inner land of the invisible where our spirit can find the roots of its strength and thus enable us to press on to the mastery of life we are called to by God." Only there, says Eberhard Arnold, can our life be placed under the illuminating light of the eternal and seen for what it is. Only there will we find the clarity of vision we need to win the daily battle that is life, and the inner anchor without which we will lose our moorings.