The Bloody Chamber and Other Stories


Angela Carter - 1979
    K. Rowling, Kelly Link, and other contemporary masters of supernatural fiction. In her masterpiece, The Bloody Chamber—which includes the story that is the basis of Neil Jordan’s 1984 movie The Company of Wolves—she spins subversively dark and sensual versions of familiar fairy tales and legends like “Little Red Riding Hood,” “Bluebeard,” “Puss in Boots,” and “Beauty and the Beast,” giving them exhilarating new life in a style steeped in the romantic trappings of the gothic tradition.

The Iliad/The Odyssey


Homer
    Combining the skills of a poet and scholar, Robert Fagles brings the energy of contemporary language to this enduring heroic epic. If 'The Iliad' is the world's greatest war story, then 'The Odyssey' is literature's greatest evocation of every man's journey through life. Here again, Fagles has performed the translator's task magnificently, giving us an Odyssey to read aloud, to savor, and to treasure for its sheer lyrical mastery. Each volume contains a superb introduction with textual and critical commentary by renowned classicist Bernard Knox.

Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street


Stephen Sondheim - 1974
    Dunstan's Church, just a few blocks away from the Royal Courts of Justice. On this site, they say, he robbed and murdered more than 150 customers. To dispose of their remains, he carried them through underground tunnels to the bakery of one Mrs. Lovett a few blocks away, where they supplied the stuffing for her meat pies, the favorite mid-day repast of the lawyers who worked nearby and got their shaves from Sweeney Todd. The man you lunched with yesterday could be your lunch today!The story first appeared in 1846 as a best-selling "penny dreadful", a sensational thriller published in installments. Before the final chapters even had a chance to hit the stands, the first stage version was packing them in at the Royal Britannia Saloon. Since then, there have been numerous stage and literary versions of the story.This script has been specially commissioned by Blackstone Audio, Inc., based on the original sources of the tale.

Doctor Zhivago


Boris Pasternak - 1957
    One of the results of its publication in the West was Pasternak's complete rejection by Soviet authorities; when he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 he was compelled to decline it. The book quickly became an international best-seller.Dr. Yury Zhivago, Pasternak's alter ego, is a poet, philosopher, and physician whose life is disrupted by the war and by his love for Lara, the wife of a revolutionary. His artistic nature makes him vulnerable to the brutality and harshness of the Bolsheviks. The poems he writes constitute some of the most beautiful writing featured in the novel.

Android Karenina


Ben H. Winters - 2010
    Winters is back with an all-new collaborator, legendary Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy, and the result is Android Karenina an enhanced edition of the classic love story set in a dystopian world of robots, cyborgs, and interstellar space travel.As in the original novel, our story follows two relationships: the tragic adulterous romance of Anna Karenina and Count Alexei Vronsky, and the much more hopeful marriage of Konstantin Levin and Kitty Shcherbatskaya.These four, yearning for true love, live in a steampunk-inspired 19th century of mechanical butlers, extraterrestrial-worshiping cults, and airborne debutante balls. Their passions alone would be enough to consume them-but when a secret cabal of radical scientific revolutionaries launches an attack on Russian high society's high-tech lifestyle, our heroes must fight back with all their courage, all their gadgets, and all the power of a sleek new cyborg model like nothing the world has ever seen."Filled with the same blend of romance, drama, and fantasy that made the first two Quirk Classics New York Times best sellers, Android Karenina brings this celebrated series into the exciting world of science fiction.

The Box: Uncanny Stories


Richard Matheson - 2008
    . . someone you don't know. Would you still push the button?"Button, Button," Richard Matheson's chilling tale of greed and temptation, is now the basis of The Box, the new film from the director of Donnie Darko. In addition, this outstanding collection also contains many other unforgettable stories by Matheson, the award-winning author of I Am Legend and What Dreams May Come."The inventive plots and spare but convincing portraits of ordinary men and women caught up in forces beyond their control demonstrate why Stephen King has called Matheson his most significant influence."--Publishers Weekly

The Philip K. Dick Reader


Philip K. Dick - 1997
    Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for the best novel of 1963 for The Man in the High Castle. In the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep ?This collection includes some of Dick's earliest short and medium-length fiction, including "We Can Remember it for You Wholesale" (the story that inspired the motion picture Total Recall), "Second Variety" (which inspired the motion picture Screamers), "Paychecks", "The Minority Report", and 21 more.Content: "Fair Game" (1959) "The Hanging Stranger" (1953) ""The Eyes Have It"" (1953) "The Golden Man" (1954) "The Turning Wheel" (1954) "The Last of the Masters" (1954) "The Father-Thing" (1954) "Strange Eden" (1954) "Tony and the Beetles" (1954) "Null-O" (1958) "To Serve the Master" (1956) "Exhibit Piece" (1954) "The Crawlers" (1954) "Sales Pitch" (1954) "Shell Game" (1954) "Upon the Dull Earth" (1954) "Foster, You're Dead!" (1955) "Pay for the Printer" (1956) "War Veteran" (1955) "The Chromium Fence" (1955) "We Can Remember It for You Wholesale" (1966) "The Minority Report" (1956) "Paycheck" (1953) "Second Variety" (1953)