A. a grand opening celebration is in full swing at the new American headquarters of the immense Japanese conglomerate. On the forty-sixth floor, in an empty conference room, the dead body of a beautiful woman is discovered. The investigation immediately becomes a thrilling chase through a twisting maze of industrial intrigue, a no-holds barred conflict in which control of a vital American technology is the fiercely coveted prize - and the Japanese saying 'business is war' takes on a terrifying reality. Rising Sun is a powerful, compulsive thriller from a master of the genre. Andromeda Strain Five prominent biophysicists give the United States government an urgent warning: sterilisation procedures for returning space probes may be inadequate to guarantee uncontaminated re-entry to the atmosphere. Two years later, Project Scoop sends seventeen satellites into the fringes of space in order to 'collect organisms and dust for study'. Then a probe falls to the earth, landing in a desolate area of northeastern Arizona. A little while later, in the nearby town of Piedmont, bodies are discovered heaped and flung across the ground, faces locked in frozen surprise. But the terror has only just begun, because when they try to find the cause of death, the scientists don't realise just what kind of unearthly danger they are dealing with... Brilliantly filmed by Robert Wise in 1971, The Andromeda Strain was the first book to introduce Michael Crichton's audacious combination of believable plots and white-knuckled excitement to a wide audience. Binary Political radical John Wright is plotting an act of mass destruction and federal agent John Graves has him under surveillance. When a government computer is hacked and a high-security shipment of nerve gas gets hijacked, Graves puts the pieces together but can he stop Wright from unleashing his weapon and killing a million peopleincluding the U.S President?

    This complete Professor Challenger collection contains the following works:The Lost WorldThe Poison BeltThe Land of MistThe Disintegration MachineWhen the World Screamed

    On the twenty-fourth morning after the decampment of his wife, Patty Lareine, he awakens with a hangover, considerable sexual excitement, and, on his upper arm, a red tattoo bearing a name from the past. Of the night before, he remembers practically nothing. What he soon learns is that the front passenger seat of his Porsche is soaked with blood and that in a secluded corner of his marijuana stash in a nearby woods rests a blonde head, severed at the throat.Is Madden therefore a murderer? He has no way of knowing. As in many novels of crime, the narrative centers on violence--physical, sexual, and emotional--but these elements move in their orbits through a rich constellation of character as Madden tries to reconstruct the missing hours of a terrible evening. In the course of this in-quiry a bizarre and vividly etched gallery of characters reappears to him as in a dream--ex-prizefighters, sexual junkies, mediums, former cons, a police chief, a world-weary former girl friend, and Mad-den's father, old now but still a Herculean figure, a practitioner of the sternest backroom ethics."Tough Guys Don't Dance" represents Mailer at the peak of his powers with a stunningly conceived novel that soon transcends its origins as a mystery to become a relentless search into the recesses and buried virtues of the modern American male. Rarely, as many readers will discern, have the paradoxes ofmachismo and homosexuality been so well explored.

    At thirty-five, Mary Frazier Armstrong, called "Frazier" by friends and enemies alike, is a sophisticated woman with a thriving art gallery, a healthy bank balance, and an enviable social position.  In fact, she has everything to live for, but she's lying in a hospital bed with a morphine drip in her arm and a life expectancy measured in hours.  "Don't die a stranger," her assistant says on her last hospital visit.  "Tell the people you love who you are."  And so, as her last act on earth, Frazier writes letters to her closest family and friends, telling them exactly what she thinks of them and, since she will be dead by the time they receive the letters, the truth about herself: she's gay.The letters are sent.  Then the manure hits the fan in Charlottesville, Virginia, because the funny thing is, Frazier Armstrong isn't going to die after all.

    That alien beings are here--now--walking among us in human form. These men are members of an agency dedicated to tracking and policing the movements of these aliens--a top secret organization known only as...Men in Black.James Edwards is a tenacious, streetwise NYPD cop who's recruited by Agent Kay of the Men in Black. He will step into a world where his identity will be erased, where nothing is what it seems on the surface. His first case will threaten to make Earth the battleground for two warring races...and end humanity's rule in a fiery apocalypse.

    24 stories, by the Master...

    He was laying on his hard, as it were armor-plated, back and when he lifted his head a little he could see his domelike brown belly divided into stiff arched segments on top of which the bed quilt could hardly keep in position and was about to slide off completely. His numerous legs, which were pitifully thin compared to the rest of his bulk, waved helplessly before his eyes." With it's startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first opening, Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant beetle-like insect, becomes an object of disgrace to his family, an outsider in his own home, a quintessentially alienated man. A harrowing—though absurdly comic—meditation on human feelings of inadequacy, guilt, and isolation, The Metamorphosis has taken its place as one of the most widely read and influential works of twentieth-century fiction. As W.H. Auden wrote, "Kafka is important to us because his predicament is the predicament of modern man."

    One of them is horribly scarred, blind and almost entirely mute. Moved by his condition, a few civilian fellow travellers decided to see him home to Georgia, to a family who believed him dead, and a fiancée who grew tired of waiting. Faulkner's first novel deals powerfully with lives blighted by war.

    In the title story, a journalist visiting a celebrated but reclusive painter is intrigued by the elderly artist's relationship with two beautiful young women. John Fowles reputation as a master storyteller was further advanced by this collection, which echoed themes and preoccupations from his other books.

    A mysterious night-swimmer climbs aboard, and, in keeping the presence of this fugitive a secret, the skipper risks both his captaincy and the safety of his ship. A test of nerve in the Gulf of Siam ensues.

    The key to Williams' mystically oriented theological thought, Descent into Hell (arguably Williams' greatest novel) is a multidimensional story about human beings who shut themselves up in their own narcissistic projections, so that they are no longer able to love, to 'co-inhere.' The result is a veritable hell.

    Their old friend from college days, Sam Sharp, who has since become a successful screenplay writer, drops by unexpectedly on the way to Los Angeles. Sam is fuming over a scathing profile of himself by Fanny Tarrant, one of the new breed of pugnacious interviewers, in that day's newspaper. Together, Sam and Adrian plan to take revenge on the journalist, though Adrian is risking what he values most: his privacy. What follows is unexpected and upsetting for all of them, including Fanny.David Lodge's delicious novella examines with characteristic wit and insight the tensions between private life and public interest in contemporary culture.

    The Telfairs are stonemasons and have been for generations. Ben Telfair has given up his education to apprentice himself to his grandfather, Papaw, a man who knows that "true masonry is not held together by cement but...by the warp of the world." Out of the love that binds these two men and the gulf that separates them from the Telfairs who have forsaken -- or dishonored -- the family trade, Cormac McCarthy has crafted a drama that bears all the hallmarks of his great fiction: precise observation of the physical world; language that has the bite of common speech and the force of Biblical prose; and a breathtaking command of the art of storytelling.

    In 1930, as economic catastrophe and poliltical upheaval blight the world, two friends uncover the well's secret. The two men will become legends--one a champion of justice known as Statesman, the other a reclusive criminal mastermind whose diabolical schemes will shake the globe. Their epic conflict begins in Paragon City, a once-great American metropolis brought low by the depression and crippled by corruption. but the battle cannot be won by Statesman alone. For justice to triumph, Paragon will have to become a city of Heroes.

    James T. Kirk and the crew of the U.S.S. Enterprise™ have finally gone their separate ways. Spock, McCoy, Sulu, and the others are spread out across the galaxy, pursuing their individual destinies -- until an interstellar crisis touches all their lives.Bored with retirement and ill-suited to teaching at Starfleet Academy, Kirk jumps at the chance to help his nephews colonize an uninhabited planet in a distant corner of the Alpha Quadrant. He even manages to persuade Scotty and Chekhov to come along for the ride.But Kirk soon discovers that the hardy human colonists are not alone on the planet they call Sanctuary. An alien race, of whom little is known, has also establish an outpost on Sanctuary for its own mysterious reasons. Suspicious, Kirk investigates, only to discover a terrifying threat that strikes at the security of the entire Federation.Light-years from Strafleet Command, without a ship or a crew to call his own, Kirk thinks he faces the menace alone. yet the bonds of loyalty transcend even the awesome distances of space, bringing together a legendary crew for one final, fantastic adventure.