The Riddle of the Traveling Skull is perhaps his best-loved work. The adventure begins when a poem and a mysterious handbag lead a man to the grave of Legga, the Human Spider — and things just get stranger from there.

    The vital foodstuffs supplied by its Martian colony are being poisoned. Working in secret, the ruling Council of Science sends David Starr, its youngest member, to the Martian farmlands to discover the truth behind the murders...

    

    After a high-priced hooker is killed and one of the world's biggest diamonds is stolen, Joe Speaker, a strip-joint barker and dope addict, stumbles onto the missing jewel, is hunted down and put away for the murder. In prison, he finds that his troubles are just beginning.

    A seedy Depression-era boardinghouse in Chicago plays host to a game of emotional chairs (Guardian) in a novel initially condemned for its frank depiction of abortion, homosexuality, and life on the margins of American society."

    Begun in 1927, Crazy Cock is the story of Tony Bring, a struggling writer whose bourgeois inclinations collide with the disordered bohemianism of his much-beloved wife, Hildred, particularly when her lover, Vanya, comes to live with them in their already cramped Greenwich Village apartment. In a world swirling with violence, sex, and passion, the three struggle with their desires, inching ever nearer to insanity, each unable to break away from this dangerous and consuming love triangle.

    He’s waiting for Dorothy, his fiancée, and tonight is the last night they’ll be meeting here, for it’s May 31st, and June 1st marks their wedding day. But she’s late, and Johnny soon learns of a horrible accident—an accident involving a group of drunken men, a low-flying charter plane, and an empty liquor bottle. In one short moment Johnny loses all that matters to him and his life is shattered. He vows to take from these men exactly what they took from him. After years of planning, Johnny begins his quest for revenge, and on May 31st of each year—always on May 31st—wives, lovers, and daughters are suddenly no longer safe.

    Reprint. K.

    In prose of astonishing clarity and intensity, Agee captured the portrait of an appealing and very real boy - serious, pitiable, funny - at the moment of his initiation into a feared yet fascinating world.

    Jonathan Scrivener. Much to his surprise, he is hired at a lavish salary despite never even meeting Scrivener, and he is told to take up residence at once in the flat of his new employer, who has suddenly disappeared. Mystified by Scrivener’s strange conduct and desperate to learn something about him, it seems Wrexham will get the answers he seeks when Scrivener’s friends begin to visit the flat: Pauline Mandeville, an ethereal beauty, Francesca Bellamy, a widow who may be responsible for the death of her husband, Andrew Middleton, a disillusioned alcoholic, and Antony Rivers, a handsome playboy. But as each of them unfolds his story about Scrivener, it seems that none of them are describing the same person, though all are obsessed with finding him. Why has he hired Wrexham, and why does he seem to have thrust this unlikely group of people together? Is Scrivener engaged in an inscrutable experiment, or could he be laying some kind of trap? Popular in his time for his psychological thrillers, Claude Houghton (1889-1961) was admired by writers as diverse as P. G. Wodehouse, Henry Miller, Hugh Walpole, and Graham Greene, but has fallen into neglect in the past half-century. This new edition restores his masterpiece I Am Jonathan Scrivener (1930) to print and includes Walpole’s introduction from the 1935 edition and an essay by Pulitzer Prize-winning critic and Washington Post columnist Michael Dirda.“So remarkable in truth is this novel that I cannot understand why it is not universally known and admired.” - Hugh Walpole“I Am Jonathan Scrivener remains a tantalizing, highly diverting philosophical novel of rare elegance and wit.” - Michael Dirda

    Hanson, an African-American professor of the History of Slavery, who is in North Africa on a mysterious foundation grant, sets off across the Sahara on a series of wild adventures. He first meets Hamid, a mad Moroccan who turns him on, takes him over and teaches him to pass as a Moor. Mya, the richest woman in creation, and her seventh husband, the hereditary Bishop of the Farout Islands, also cross his path with their plans to steal the Sahara and make the stoned professor the puppet Emperor of Africa.

    An earthquake, rending the earth beneath the ruins, has now heralded her return. Dorian Belecamus, a beautiful and bewitching archaeology professor, sees an opportunity to do more than dig into the past: this is her chance to seize control of her country's future—by becoming the Oracle of Delphi! And she's found just the man to help her consummate her scheme. He's brash, he's reckless, and he's fallen under her spell. His name: Indiana Jones.Their adventure spans the globe from Chicago to Paris to Greece, where, bullwhip in hand, Indy descends into the bottomless pit of the serpent god and finds a sacred stone that holds the key to the oracle's prophecies. But Dorian has designed an even more sinister fate for young Indy: she means to make him her lover, her priest, and her pawn in a plot to kill the king. Will Indy find the source of Pythia's powers—or will he find himself sacrificed at Dorian's altar, a victim of her deadly ambition and desire?

    Regularly appears on "Greatest science fiction" lists.

    Spurned by his wife at home and by superiors at work, Earl Summerfield hunkers down in his cramped San Francisco apartment and keeps a diary that is a scratched record of a world going to pieces. The words he overhears, the words he wants to say, swim in his head, turning into fantasies of ambition, love, and retribution. He is sorry for himself. He is angry at everyone. He takes to going out at night, slipping into other people's houses. He is looking for something, and he fixes on one woman.

    But in the slums of Kingston James found himself fighting for his life – while Cora found her own path to destruction, in the arms of another man. Available for the first time in more than 50 years, this lost novel by legendary pulp author David Goodis is a stunning, shocking tale of cruelty, danger, desperationâ�¦and the possibility of redemption.