In this series of perfectly rendered vignettes, written just as he was starting to find his comic voice, Kurt Vonnegut paints a warm, wise, and funny portrait of life in post—World War II America–a world where squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. Here are tales both cautionary and hopeful, each brimming with Vonnegut's trademark humor and profound humanism. A family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. A man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. A quack psychiatrist turned "murder counselor" concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. While these stories reflect the anxieties of the postwar era that Vonnegut was so adept at capturing– and provide insight into the development of his early style–collectively, they have a timeless quality that makes them just as relevant today as when they were written. It's impossible to imagine any of these pieces flowing from the pen of another writer; each in its own way is unmistakably, quintessentially Vonnegut.Featuring a Foreword by author and longtime Vonnegut confidant Sidney Offit and illustrated with Vonnegut's characteristically insouciant line drawings, Look at the Birdie is an unexpected gift for readers who thought his unique voice had been stilled forever–and serves as a terrific introduction to his short fiction for anyone who has yet to experience his genius. Contents: Letter from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr., to Walter J. Miller, 1951. Confido F U B A R Shout About It from the Housetops Ed Luby's Key Club A Song for Selma Hall of Mirrors The Nice Little People Hello, Red Little Drops of Water The Petrified Ants The Honor of a Newsboy Look at the Birdie King and Queen of the Universe The Good Explainer

    

    

    - Mark V • (1976)Getting Through Sunday Somehow (1962)Have I Got a Chocolate Bar for You! (1973)Interval in Sunlight (1954)Long After Midnight (1963)One Timeless Spring (1946)Punishment Without Crime (1950)The Better Part of Wisdom (1976)The Blue Bottle (1950)The Burning Man(1975)The Messiah (1973)The Miracles of Jamie (1946)The October Game (1948)The Parrot Who Met Papa(1972)The Pumpernickel (1951)The Utterly Perfect Murder (1971)The Wish (1973)

    In this ultimate collection you will find 25 works by the amazing Victorian novelist- Thomas Hardy! All in one elegantly formatted Book for ease of use and enjoyment on your Kindle device works include : 13 Novels • FAR FROM THE MADDING CROWD • THE RETURN OF THE NATIVE • THE MAYOR OF CASTERBRIDGE • TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES • JUDE THE OBSCURE • DESPERATE REMEDIES • A PAIR OF BLUE EYES • UNDER THE GREENWOOD TREE • THE WOODLANDERS • A LAODICEAN: A STORY OF TO-DAY • THE TRUMPET-MAJOR JOHN LOVEDAY • THE HAND OF ETHELBERTA • TWO ON A TOWER A dozen minor novels • A CHANGED MAN AND OTHER TALES ++ also a little bonus a Thomas Hardy Biography with links for further reading enjoy !!

    Merwin --Magic barrel / Bernard Malamud --About marriage / Denise Levertov --from Jane Austen / Virginia Woolf --Princess and the tin box / James Thurber.

    And since the missing box is ancient, has no keyhole and holds tremendous darkness inside, Kaylin knows unknown forces are once again playing with her destiny—and her life.CAST IN FURYWhen a minority race of telepaths is suspected of causing a near-devastating tidal wave, Private Kaylin Neya is again drawn into a world of politics…and murder. To make matters worse, Marcus, her trusted sergeant, gets stripped of his command, leaving Kaylin vulnerable. Now she's juggling two troubling cases, and her dreaded magic lessons are starting to look good by comparison…CAST IN SILENCEPrivate Kaylin Neya has sacrificed much to earn the respect of the winged Aerians and immortal Barrani she works alongside. But when the city's oracles warn of brewing unrest in the outer fiefdoms, a mysterious visitor from Kaylin's past casts her under a cloud of suspicion.

    Follow counterterrorism operative and ex-SEAL Scot Harvath’s action-packed exploits, and discover why Brad Thor has been called “America’s favorite author” (KKTX). The Athena Project When a terrorist attack in Rome kills more than twenty Americans, four of Delta Force’s best and brightest women—part of a top-secret program codenamed the Athena Project—are tasked with hunting down a Venetian arms dealer. But as team members Gretchen Casey, Julie Ericsson, Megan Rhodes, and Alex Cooper close in on their target, the deadly assignment unearths a grisly discovery in the jungles of South America...and a foreign spy penetrating a mysterious secret hidden in the American West. With an unthinkable second attack already set in motion, the women of the Athena Project race to uncover the greatest of threats: the secrets kept by their own government. Full Black Born in the shadows and kept from heads of state, some missions are so deadly, so sensitive, that they simply don’t exist. When one such mission goes horribly wrong, only former Navy SEAL Team 6 member turned covert counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath can carry out an audacious plan to prevent the United States from facing complete and total collapse. But as the identities of the perpetrators are laid bare, Harvath will be left with only one means to save America. Unable to trust anyone, he will be forced to go full black. Black List Somewhere…deep inside the United States government is a closely guarded list. Once your name is on the list, it doesn’t come off…until you’re dead. Someone…has just added counterterrorism operative Scot Harvath’s name. Somehow…Harvath must evade assassination long enough to untangle who has targeted him and why. Somewhere, someone, somehow…can put all the pieces together. But Harvath must get to that person before the United States suffers the most withering terrorist attack ever conceived.

    . . THE PRESIDENT'S SHADOW There are stories no one knows. Hidden stories. I find those stories for a living. To most, it looks like Beecher White has an ordinary job. A young staffer with the National Archives in Washington, D.C., he's responsible for safekeeping the government's most important documents . . . and, sometimes, its most closely held secrets. But there are a powerful few who know his other role. Beecher is a member of the Culper Ring, a 200-year-old secret society founded by George Washington and charged with protecting the Presidency.Now the current occupant of the White House needs the Culper Ring's help. The alarming discovery of the buried arm has the President's team in a rightful panic. Who buried the arm? How did they get past White House security? And most important: What's the message hidden in the arm's closed fist? Indeed, the puzzle inside has a clear intended recipient, and it isn't the President. It's Beecher, himself. Beecher's investigation will take him back to one of our country's greatest secrets and point him toward the long, carefully hidden truth about the most shocking history of all: family history.

    Linked, equal but opposite, these blades are destined to be wielded by two of the greatest heroes of the Age of Darkness. And as the spears themselves, Appolonian and Dionysian, are equal and opposite, so too are those to whom they were gifted. This is their story too. The warrior-scholar, a savant and a servant. The warrior-king, a savage and a soldier. Their fates entwined in ways they do not understand, they carry the blades as both gift and curse, fulfilment of destiny unseen by any save the Master of Mankind. Read It Because This is truly a Horus Heresy story unlike any other. Chris Wraight crafts an elegiac look at two heroes of the Heresy, through the blades that bond them and forge a destiny that may well extend far beyond the stories that have yet been told…

    

    Torn away from the girl he wants to marry, he spends many bitter years in the grim island prison of the Chateau d'If. A fellow prisoner, the Abbe Faria, tells him the secret of the treasure hidden on the island of Monte Cristo. Now, if only he can escape from the fortress, he can become rich - and be revenged on the people who betrayed him all those years ago...The Count of Monte Cristo has been abridged and simplified by Beatrice Conway

    Over three thousand pages of Medieval adventure! Welcome to Epic Knights of Legend and Steel. Six books. Six amazing tales of chivalry and passion. This collection contains books related to one another although not necessarily series. Each hero is his own epic knight, born of legend, forged in steel, an alpha male who is a giant among men. Sweeping adventures of Medieval England come together in this fabulous, not-to-be-missed collection all from the works of USA Today bestseller Kathryn Le Veque. This collection contains: The Questing - A knight, a widow, and a promise that could cost them everything. Swords and Shields - Betrayal lurks in a new love. The Whispering Night - An agent for William Marshal falls in love with an enemy. Netherworld - Evil lurks in a dark Welsh castle. The Warrior Poet - Bitter enemies become lovers in this Medieval Romeo and Juliet saga. The Legend - The greatest knight in the realm lays down his sword. Can love give him back what he's lost?

    Behind everything crouched the brooding, festering horror of the ancient town, and of the moldy, unhallowed garret gable where he wrote and studied and wrestled with figures and formulae when he was not tossing on the meager iron bed. His ears were growing sensitive to a preternatural and intolerable degree, and he had long ago stopped the cheap mantel clock whose ticking had come to seem like a thunder of artillery. At night the subtle stirring of the black city outside, the sinister scurrying of rats in the wormy partitions, and the creaking of hidden timbers in the centuried house, were enough to give him a sense of strident pandemonium. The darkness always teemed with unexplained sound—and yet he sometimes shook with fear lest the noises he heard should subside and allow him to hear certain other fainter noises which he suspected were lurking behind them.

    So why is Sir Hugo Drax cheating at cards? Bond has just five days to uncover the sinister truth behind a national hero, in Ian Fleming's third 007 adventure.Diamonds are Forever'The twentieth century looked out at him from the piece of newsprint and bared its teeth in a sneer'From the diamond mines of Sierra Leone to the jewellers of Hatton Garden, from race track to casino... Bond must infiltrate and destroy the criminal network of the Spangled Mob in Fleming's fourth 007 adventure.