While Hall’s devoted readers will recognize many of his long-standing preoccupations—baseball, the family farm, love, sex, and friendship—what will strike them as new is the fierce, pitiless poignancy he reveals as his own life’s end comes into view. The Back Chamber is far from being death-haunted but rather is lively, irreverent, sexy, hilarious, ironic, and sly—full of the life-affirming energy that has made Donald Hall one of America’s most popular and enduring poets.

    But those are just whispers of a past lost to time. The summer of 2000 was different. Iggy in the Baptist church. Gasoline and a match. Twenty-five people dead. This, Harmony couldn’t forget. Told in a kaleidoscope of timelines and voices, Michael Bible examines every dimension of a tragic but all-too-American story in The Ancient Hours. The victims, witnesses, perpetrators, and condemned comingle and evolve as the passage of time works its way through their lives. What emerges is a fable of the American South in the highest tradition: soaring, tragic, and eternally striving for redemption.

    In Light Boxes the inhabitants of one closely-knit town are experiencing perpetual February. It turns out that a god-like spirit who lives in the sky, named February, is punishing the town for flying, and bans flight of all kind, including hot air balloons and even children's kites. It's February who makes the sun nothing but a faint memory, who blankets the ground with snow, who freezes the rivers and the lakes. As endless February continues, children go missing and more and more adults become nearly catatonic with depression. But others find the strength to fight back, waging war on February.

    Ranging from tiny sketches and prose poems to longer, more conventional narratives, the stories included here are:A Country Doctor - In the Gods - An Old Folio - Before the Law - Jackals and Arabs - A Visit to the Mine - The Next Village - An Imperial Message - A Paterfamilias Perplexed - Eleven Sons - A Fratricide - A Dream - Bucket Rider - Of Metaphors - The Silence of the Sirens - Gracchus the Hunter - The Knock on the Courtyard Door - Advocates - The Vulture - At Night - A Little Fable.This e-book has a total length of around 16,000 words.

    Klinger, editor and compiler of all three volumes of the Annotated Sherlock Holmes, this collection of ten original stories brings light to one of the least examined periods in the life of the great detective--his time in the former colonies, the United States. This Holmes is a youthful one--a young man not yet set upon his course in life and in his famous lodgings at 221B Baker Street. In Richard Lupoff 's Inga Sigerson Weds, he's come to America to represent the family at his sister's wedding. In My Silk Umbrella, Mark Twain narrates his fateful encounter with Holmes at a baseball game in Hartford, Connecticut; Steve Hockensmith narrates the meeting of the young William Gillette and the object of his later, most famous turn upon the stage; and Peter Tremayne reveals the intersection of Holmes and the Irish in the 19th century American midwestern landscape. With further stories by Marta Randall, Rhys Bowen, Peter Beagle, and others, the legend, the mythology and even the history of the world's greatest detective is further enhanced by these charming, clever and mystifying tales.

    After a night out with his girlfriend in one of the country's remote provinces, he wakes to find himself in a pitch-black coffin—and quickly running out of oxygen. With only his cell phone and his own wits to rely on, it's a race against time to escape the claustrophobic death trap. SIX BULLETS The end of civilization arrived in the form of a giant asteroid thirteen months ago. For Burt James, a survivalist, it was not a complete surprise. He'd spent much of his adult life prepping for such a catastrophe. Consequently, while the majority of the population scoured the post-apocalyptic landscape for water and food, regressing into primitive killers, he bunkered down in his fortified hilltop home in a small town in the middle of the Australian Outback. But now he's out of food and down to his last six bullets, and he will have to make the most difficult choice of his life. THE MAILMAN Los Angeles, 1985. Never was the motto sex, drugs, and rock n’ roll more apt than the scene on the legendary Sunset Strip with the arrival of the underground Hollywood glam bands. While Mick Freeman, a record executive with a major label, works tirelessly to sign five toxic rockers whom he believes might flip the entire music world on its head, his wife, Jade, spends her days bored and alone at home, struggling with a midlife crisis that threatens to topple their twenty-year marriage. And then she meets the new mailman. Young and handsome, he sweeps her off her feet—straight into a nightmare the likes of which she could never have imagined. RE-ROLL In the near future, breathtakingly humanoid robots called Mechs are for sale, and they're designed to fulfill whatever role you want: husband, wife, best friend, slave. Manufacturers allow new owners one free "roll" to randomly determine their Mech's three leading characteristics. But as everybody knows, scoring your ideal traits is a crapshoot, though you can always re-roll—at a price.

     A photographer reluctantly agrees to take images of an abandoned manor house on the Dorset cliff tops only to find the building is not completely empty. . .

    As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.Now translated into thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes, it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.

    The unreal becomes real and the good gets a taste for the great.

    'It is the kingdom of the frozen will,' comes the reply. 'There is no going back.'Sylvia Plath's strange, dark tale of independence over infanticide, written not long after she herself left home, grapples with mortality in motion.Bringing together past, present and future in our ninetieth year, Faber Stories is a celebratory compendium of collectable work.

    In her debut collection of fifteen short stories, Amina Cain makes ordinary worlds strange and spare and beautiful. A woman carves invisible images onto ice, a pair of black wings appears in front of a house, and a restless teacher sits in a gallery of miniature rooms. As Miranda Mellis describes, "The revelatory pleasure and hope [in these stories] emanate from an artistry driven by ethical desire." "I highly recommend reading I Go To Some Hollow," says Bhanu Kapil, "because of what it teaches you about love, and the relationship between love and writing." I GO TO SOME HOLLOW is published as part of the TrenchArt: Tracer Series, with an Introduction by Bhanu Kapil and collaborative visual art by Ken Erhlich and Susan Simpson.

    War Dances brims with Alexie’s poetic and revolutionary prose, and reminds us once again why he ranks as one of our country’s finest writers.With bright insight into the minds of artists, entrepreneurs, fathers, husbands, and sons, Alexie populates his stories with average men on the brink of exceptional change: In the title story, a son recalls his father’s “natural Indian death” from alcohol and diabetes, just as he learns that he himself may have a brain tumor; “The Ballad of Paul Nonetheless,” dissects a vintage clothing store owner’s failing marriage and courtship of a Puma-clad stranger in airports across the country; and “Breaking and Entering” recounts a film editor’s fateful confrontation with an thieving adolescent.Brazen and wise War Dances takes us to the heart of what it means to be human. The new beginnings, successes, mistakes, and regrets that make up our daily lives are laid bare in this wide-ranging new work that is quintessential.

    Born in the village of Skhvitori (Imereti region of western Georgia) on June 9, 1840, to a prominent Georgian aristocratic family; his father was Prince Rostom Tsereteli. Following an old family tradition, Akaki Tsereteli spent his childhood years living with a peasant’s family in the village of Savane. He was brought up by peasant nannies, all of which made him feel empathy for the peasants’ life in Georgia. He graduated from the Kutaisi Gymnasium in 1852 and the University of Saint Petersburg Faculty of Oriental Languages in 1863. The young adult generation of Georgians during the 1860s, led by Chavchavdze and Tsereteli, protested against the Tsarist regime and campaigned for cultural revival and self-determination of the Georgians. He is an author of hundreds of patriotic, historical, lyrical and satiric poems, also humoristic stories and autobiographic novel. Akaki Tsereteli was also active in educational, journalistic and theatrical activities.

    The beauty of these stories and poems lies in their readability: ideal for sharing aloud around the campfire or for a quick, thrilling dip . . . under the covers with a flashlight. The writing itself sends as many awe-inspired shivers down the spine as do the ghosts and goblins on these pages.Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the horror story and the chiming lyric poem, opens the volume with his best-loved stories: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Black Cat," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Premature Burial," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "Berenice," and "Ligeia." Every bit as chilling now as on the day they were written, these tales retain their power to stir the reader again and again. Poe, who was as well known for his poems as for his stories, is also represented by such verse standards as "The Raven," "Lenore," "To Helen," "Ulalume," and "Annabel Lee," among others.Numerous other practitioners of the supernatural story are included: Edith Wharton, with her gripping "Afterward"; Charles Dickens and his famed ghost story "The Signalman"; W. W. Jacobs, with this compilation's inspiration, "The Monkey's Paw." Also here are Saki's engrossing "Sredni Vashtar"; O. Henry's story of love lost and hopes dashed, "The Furnished Room"; Wilkie Collins's lively "A Terribly Strange Bed"; and "The Boarded Window," Ambrose Bierce's tale of the bizarre. A year-round collection for reading aloud--and frightening your friends--The Raven and the Monkey's Paw will gratify all manner of thrill-seekers.The Modern Library has played a significant role in American cultural life for the better part of a century. The series was founded in 1917 by the publishers Boni and Liveright and eight years later acquired by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer. It provided the foundation for their next publishing venture, Random House. The Modern Library has been a staple of the American book trade, providing readers with affordable hardbound editions of important works of literature and thought. For the Modern Library's seventy-fifth anniversary, Random House redesigned the series, restoring as its emblem the running torchbearer created by Lucian Bernhard in 1925 and refurbishing jackets, bindings, and type, as well as inaugurating a new program of selecting titles. The Modern Library continues to provide the world's best books, at the best prices.

    But she has something else entirely in mind.Kal Carter is disciplined and focused and those things have served him well while training for the Olympics. But in preparing for fatherhood, he learns that neither one of those traits is worth a damn.