The story of a lost dog, and the discovery of first love on the streets of Jerusalem are portrayed here with a gritty realism that is as fresh as it is compelling.When awkward and painfully shy sixteen-year-old Assaf is asked to find the owner of a stray yellow lab, he begins a quest that will bring him into contact with street kids and criminals, and a talented young singer, Tamar, engaged on her own mission: to rescue a teenage drug addict.A runaway bestseller in Israel, in the words of the Christian Science Monitor: "It's time for Americans to fall in love with Someone to Run With."

    There's a bonus, a story not seen for more than 70 years!'My name is Hercule Poirot and I am probably the greatest detective in the world.' The dapper, moustache-twirling little Belgian with the egg-shaped head, curious mannerisms and inordinate respect for his own 'little grey cells' has solved some of the most puzzling fictional crimes of the century. Appearing in Agatha Christie's very first novel in 1920 and her very last in 1975, Hercule Poirot became the most celebrated detective since Sherlock Holmes, appearing in 33 novels, a play, and these 51 short stories. These short stories provide a feast for hardened Agatha Christie addicts as well as those who have grown to love the detective through his many film and television appearances. This edition also includes Poirot in "The Regatta Mystery, "an early version of an Agatha Christie story not published since 1936!Some may dispute whether "all" is the correct word. Several Poirot short stories have earlier, alternate, or expanded versions, and we shouldn't forget the dozen or so not here; they were re-purposed into the 1927 novel "The Big Four." Others appeared under different titles. Most importantly, "Hercule Poirot The Complete Short Stories" will delight newcomers to Christie's famous detective, as well as those who just want to remember how good their read was the first time around.The stories in order are: (1) The Affair at the Victory Ball, (2) The Jewel Robbery at the Grand Metropolitan, (3) The King of Clubs, (4) The Disappearance of Mr. Davenheim, (5) The Plymouth Express, (6) The Adventure of The Western Star, (7) The Tragedy at Marsdon Manor, (8) The Kidnapped Prime Minister, (9) The Million Dollar Bond Robbery, (10) The Adventure of the Cheap Flat, (11) The Mystery of Hunter's Lodge, (12) The Chocolate Box, (13) The Adventure of the Egyptian Tomb, (14) The Veiled Lady, (15) The Adventure of Johnnie Waverly, (16) The Market Basing Mystery, (17) The Adventure of the Italian Nobleman, (18) The Case of the Missing Will, (19) The Incredible Theft, (20) The Adventure of the Clapham Cook, (21) The Lost Mine, (22) The Cornish Mystery, (23) The Double Clue, (24) The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding, (25) The Lemesurier Inheritance, (26) The Under Dog, (27) Double Sin, (28) Wasps' Nest, (29) The Third-Floor Flat, (30) The Mystery of the Spanish Chest, (31) Dead Man's Mirror, (32) How Does Your Garden Grow? (33) Problem at Sea, (34) Triangle at Rhodes, (35) Murder in the Mews, (36) Yellow Iris, (37) The Dream, (38) The Labours of Hercules, the Foreword, (39) The Nemean Lion, (40) The Lernean Hydra, (41) The Arcadian Deer, (42) The Erymanthian Boar, (43) The Augean Stables, (44) The Stymphalean Birds, (45) The Cretan Bull, (46) The Horses of Diomedes, (47) The Girdle of Hyppolita, (48) The Flock of Geryon, (49) The Apples of the Hesperides, (50) The Capture of Cerberus, and (51) Four-and-Twenty Blackbirds.Librarian's note: this entry is for the collection, "Hercule Poirot The Complete Short Stories." Entries for each of the individual stories can be found elsewhere on Goodreads.

    With The Ruined Map, he crafted a mesmerizing literary crime novel that combines the narrative suspense of Chandler with the psychological depth of Dostoevsky.Mr. Nemuro, a respected salesman, disappeared over half a year ago, but only now does his alluring yet alcoholic wife hire a private eye. The nameless detective has but two clues: a photo and a matchbook. With these he embarks upon an ever more puzzling pursuit that leads him into the depths of Tokyo’s dangerous underworld, where he begins to lose the boundaries of his own identity. Surreal, fast-paced, and hauntingly dreamlike, Abe’s masterly novel delves into the unknowable mysteries of the human mind.Translated from the Japanese by E. Dale Saunders.

    At the close of the 17th century, Iceland is an oppressed Danish colony, suffering from extreme poverty, famine, and plague. A farmer and accused cord-thief named Jon Hreggvidsson makes an improper joke about the Danish king and soon after finds himself a fugitive charged with the murder of the king’s hangman.In the years that follow, the hapless but resilient rogue Hreggvidsson becomes a pawn entangled in political and personal conflicts playing out on a far grander scale. Chief among these is the star-crossed love affair between Snaefridur, known as “Iceland’s Sun,” a beautiful, headstrong young noblewoman, and Arnas Arnaeus, the king’s antiquarian, an aristocrat whose worldly manner conceals a fierce devotion to his downtrodden countrymen. As their personal struggle plays itself out on an international stage, Iceland’s Bell creates a Dickensian canvas of heroism and venality, violence and tragedy, charged with narrative enchantment on every page.

    Filled with slang and obscenities and written in raw, colloquial language, Journey to the End of the Night is a literary symphony of violence, cruelty and obscene nihilism. This book shocked most critics when it was first published in France in 1932, but quickly became a success with the reading public in Europe, and later in America where it was first published by New Directions in 1952. The story of the improbable yet convincingly described travels of the petit-bourgeois (and largely autobiographical) antihero, Bardamu, from the trenches of World War I, to the African jungle, to New York and Detroit, and finally to life as a failed doctor in Paris, takes the readers by the scruff and hurtles them toward the novel's inevitable, sad conclusion.

    Now she’s set her eyes on a backwater burg—where, while posing as an innocent (albeit drop-dead gorgeous) newcomer to town, she means to sniff out old grudges and engineer new opportunities, deftly playing different people and different interests against each other the better, as always, to make a killing. But then something snaps: the master manipulator falls prey to a pure and wayward passion.Aimée has become the avenging angel of her own nihilism, exacting the destruction of a whole society of destroyers. An unholy original, Jean-Patrick Manchette transformed the modern detective novel into a weapon of gleeful satire and anarchic fun. In Fatale he mixes equal measures of farce, mayhem, and madness to prepare a rare literary cocktail that packs a devastating punch.

    Perec's spellbinding puzzle begins in an apartment block in the XVIIth arrondissement of Paris where, chapter by chapter, room by room, like an onion being peeled, an extraordinary rich cast of characters is revealed in a series of tales that are bizarre, unlikely, moving, funny, or (sometimes) quite ordinary. From the confessions of a racing cyclist to the plans of an avenging murderer, from a young ethnographer obsessed with a Sumatran tribe to the death of a trapeze artist, from the fears of an ex-croupier to the dreams of a sex-change pop star to an eccentric English millionaire who has devised the ultimate pastime, Life is a manual of human irony, portraying the mixed marriages of fortunes, passions and despairs, betrayals and bereavements, of hundreds of lives in Paris and around the world.But the novel is more than an extraordinary range of fictions; it is a closely observed account of life and experience. The apartment block's one hundred rooms are arranged in a magic square, and the book as a whole is peppered with a staggering range of literary puzzles and allusions, acrostics, problems of chess and logic, crosswords, and mathematical formulae. All are there for the reader to solve in the best tradition of the detective novel.

    Playing cards and getting drunk, he uses all his cunning and genial subterfuge to deal with the police, clergy, and officers who chivy him toward battle.Cecil Parrott's vibrant translation conveys the brilliant irreverence of this classic about a hapless Everyman caught in a vast bureaucratic machine.

    The first draft was written while Genet was incarcerated in a French prison; when the manuscript was discovered and destroyed by officials, Genet, still a prisoner, immediately set about writing it again. It isn't difficult to understand how and why Genet was able to reproduce the novel under such circumstances, because Our Lady Of The Flowers is nothing less than a mythic recreation of Genet's past and then - present history. Combining memories with facts, fantasies, speculations, irrational dreams, tender emotion, empathy, and philosophical insights, Genet probably made his isolation bearable by retreating into a world not only of his own making, but one which he had total control over.

    Veering between nervous excitability and debilitating ennui, he gluts his aesthetic appetites with classical literature and art, exotic jewels (with which he fatally encrusts the shell of his tortoise), rich perfumes, and a kaleidoscope of sensual experiences. The original handbook of decadence, Against Nature exploded like a grenade (in the words of Huysmans) and has enjoyed a cult readership from its publication to the present day.

    Did he want her badly enough to commit murder? And if Madvig was innocent, which of his dozens of enemies was doing an awfully good job of framing him? Dashiell Hammett's tour de force of detective fiction combines an airtight plot, authentically venal characters, and writing of telegraphic crispness.

    Extensively revised by Nabokov in 1965 - thirty years after its original publication -Despair is the wickedly inventive and richly derisive story of Hermann Karlovich, a man who undertakes the perfect crime - his own murder.

    It is is a story of friendship and betrayal, of terrible violence, of an astonishing modern city and its dark side.Seven years in the making, Sacred Games is an epic of exceptional richness and power. Vikram Chandra's novel draws the reader deep into the life of Inspector Sartaj Singh—and into the criminal underworld of Ganesh Gaitonde, the most wanted gangster in India. Sartaj, one of the very few Sikhs on the Mumbai police force, is used to being identified by his turban, beard and the sharp cut of his trousers. But "the silky Sikh" is now past forty, his marriage is over and his career prospects are on the slide. When Sartaj gets an anonymous tip-off as to the secret hide-out of the legendary boss of G-Company, he's determined that he'll be the one to collect the prize. Vikram Chandra's keenly anticipated new novel is a magnificent story of friendship and betrayal, of terrible violence, of an astonishing modern city and its dark side. Drawing inspiration from the classics of nineteenth-century fiction, mystery novels, Bollywood movies and Chandra's own life and research on the streets of Mumbai, Sacred Games evokes with devastating realism the way we live now but resonates with the intelligence and emotional depth of the best of literature.

    Underlying this libertine fantasy is a profound meditation on contemporary life: about the secret bond between slowness and memory, about the connection between our era's desire to forget and the way we have given ourselves over to the demon of speed. And about "dancers" possessed by the passion to be seen, for whom life is just merely a perpetual show emptied of every intimacy and every joy.

    The kids listen idly to rockabilly on the radio and waste their weekends at the Dairy Queen. And an undetected menace simmers under the heat that clings to the skin like molasses... For thirteen-year-old Stanley Mitchell, the end of innocence comes with his discovery of the mysterious long-ago demise of two very different young women. In his quest to unravel the truth about their tragic fates, Stanley finds a protector in Buster Lighthorse Smith, a black, retired Indian-reservation cop and a sage on the finer points of Sherlock Holmes, the blues, and life's faded dreams. But not every buried thing stays dead. And on one terrifying night of rushing creek water and thundering rain, an arcane, murderous force will rise from the past to threaten the boy in a harrowing rite of passage... Vintage Lansdale, A Fine Dark Line brims with exquisite suspense, powerful characterizations, and the vibrant evocation of a lost time.