Credited with revitalizing the short story as a genre in Russian literature, he was posthumously honored with the Soviet Union's highest literary prize following his untimely death at the age of forty-five. Stories from a Siberian Village introduces Shukshin to English readers with twenty-five stories that reflect the Siberian origins of his artistic identity. These stories, most of which have never before appeared in English, are set in a remote Siberian village caught in transition between rural traditions and modern Soviet life. There Shukshin's peasants—survivors of revolution, collectivization, and war—seek their identity in a "brave new world." Eccentrics and oddballs, Shukshin's protagonists are restless freedom seekers whose dreams and foibles are as broad and inexplicable as their native Siberian landscape. As touchy as artists and as unpretentious as truck drivers, they struggle with questions of life and death, faith and reason, custom and progress. From their mutual misapprehensions and the gap between their dreams and reality arises Shukshin's biting humor.

    Le Guin is one of the greatest science fiction writers and many times the winner of the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Her career as a novelist was launched by the three novels contained in Worlds Of Exile And Illusion. These novels, Rocannon's World, Planet Of Exile, and City Of Illusions, are set in the same universe as Le Guin's ground-breaking classic, The Left Hand Of Darkness.Tor is pleased to return these previously unavailable works to print in this attractive new edition.

    War will force her to make history.This bargain-priced edition contains all three novels in the Warchild series, over 600 pages of thrilling young adult suspense."Caroline [is a] strong yet vulnerable heroine who isn't afraid to do what must be done." -- Rysa Walker, author of Timebound and winner of the 2013 Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award Grand Prize.Warchild: Pawn (4.3 out of 5 stars - over 150 Amazon reviews)Rise up. Lead them. Be a hero....all before your fifteenth birthday.The United States collapsed long before Caroline Mathers was born. She's strong, mature beyond her age, but she knows nothing of cell phones, computers, or even hot showers--they're remnants of history, wistful stories told around campfires. Life as a dutiful scout has her patrolling the surrounding forests, hiding, observing, and warning the families of her tiny outpost when danger is near. They survive by sticking together. It's a quiet existence......until the day Caroline hears the terrifying beat of distant drums echoing throughout their peaceful valley. An army is marching. War is coming, and nothing less than the power of the Kinders could save her people now. But the Kinders are just legends, ghosts from long ago...aren't they?***As a quarter-finalist in Amazon's Breakthrough Novel Award contest, Lindsey's Warchild: Pawn, is a "...coming-of-age action-adventure dominated by a young girl just coming into her powers. A fine, durable, inaugural volume brimming with imagination and sparkling, inventive characters." --Publishers WeeklyThe first book of the Warchild trilogy is a young adult dystopian thriller full of fast-paced action, ideal for fans of The Hunger Games and Divergent.***READER NOTE : SPOILERS BELOW***Warchild: Judas (4.6 out of 5 stars - 49 Amazon reviews)Hope alone can not win the war.Caroline Mathers, Forward Scout of the People's Republic of Virginia, leads her people to safety after a harrowing escape through the Appalachian Mountains. But, the security of their capitol city won't last for long...maybe even less than a night. Old friends are left behind, while inside the walls, new alliances are formed and trust betrayed.Empowered by the strength of a massive army, their northern enemies suffocate the city outside the walls, preparing to take control of what they believe is rightfully theirs: citizen slaves.With the help of her fellow Kinder, Finn, and an ill-equipped group of volunteer soldiers, Caroline must defend her city to the last breath or watch her people marched away in chains.Warchild: Spirit (4.5 out of 5 stars - 35 Amazon reviews)For the citizens of the People's Republic of Virginia, their last hope of freedom has faded with their spirits. The eternal rains continue to fall. Tired, hungry, and soaked to fragile bones, there's nothing left to do but march toward the only fate they have left: a life in slavery.But not if Caroline can help it. She's out of options, but giving up was never one of them.Facing overwhelming new challenges and old enemies, Caroline soon learns that even when the bullets stop flying, the war is never over.

    Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profund as it is playful. Now in his new novel, David Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . .Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.

    Now Schoken Associates, one of the big players, has a new challenge for star copywriter Mitch Courtenay. Volunteers are needed to colonise Venus. It's a hellhole, and nobody who knew anything about it would dream of signing up. But by the time Mitch has finished, they will be queuing to get on board the spaceships.Biographical NotesPohl and Kornbluth started writing together as early as 1940, although both authors produced a wide variety of stories separately, under their own names and pseudonyms.Each wrote sections, starting where the other left off, and through long experience they developed an almost telepathic awareness of each other's intentions.

    With the Nazis recently defeated, Stalin gathers half a dozen of the top Soviet science fiction authors in a dacha in the countryside. Convinced that the defeat of America is only a few years away—and equally convinced that the Soviet Union needs a massive external threat to hold it together—Stalin orders the writers to compose a massively detailed and highly believable story about an alien race poised to invade the earth. The little group of writers gets down to the task and spends months working until new orders come from Moscow to immediately halt the project. The scientists obey and live their lives until, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, the survivors gather again, because something strange has happened: the story they invented in 1946 is starting to come true.

    Now they want her dead. In a society where the genetically enhanced rule all, Brie Melrose only ever wanted to blend in. Unfortunately, for a girl with a secret past, hunted by the authorities, and hidden by her guardian who raised her as an orphan, that’s impossible. Life in Outer Haven, where the Unenhanced live, is simple for Brie. Care for the other orphans. Keep her head down. And above all, don’t attract unnecessary attention. One day, however, a routine job turns into something much more, and Brie finds herself under the watchful eye of the Savants, the highest order of the Enhanced. Blessed with supreme intellect, they consider emotions to be pointless. And, in some cases, dangerous… Soon, she is to be invited into Inner Haven, the sanctuary of the Enhanced where she’ll come into contact with some strange and dangerous people. People who want things from her. People who know things about her past. And before long, threats she never even knew existed will begin to close in, and Brie will learn that her world, and the city of Haven, isn’t quite what she thought it was. And neither is she… Included in this collection: 1. The Enhanced 2. Hybrid 3. Nameless 4. Assassin 5. Captive 6. Renegade 7. Invader 8. Avenger 9. Defender 10. Nemesis

    In The Anna Karenina Fix, Groskop mines these and other works, as well as the lives of their celebrated creators and her own experiences as a student of Russian, to answer the question “How should you live your life?” or at least be less miserable. This is a charming and fiercely intelligent book, a love letter to Russian literature.

    Authorities confine the blind to an empty mental hospital, but there the criminal element holds everyone captive, stealing food rations and assaulting women. There is one eyewitness to this nightmare who guides her charges—among them a boy with no mother, a girl with dark glasses, a dog of tears—through the barren streets, and their procession becomes as uncanny as the surroundings are harrowing. As Blindness reclaims the age-old story of a plague, it evokes the vivid and trembling horrors of the twentieth century, leaving readers with a powerful vision of the human spirit that's bound both by weakness and exhilarating strength.

    Is there a plot here? Well, yes and no. Aksyonov (The Steel Bird, The Island of Crimea) offers a narrator/hero named Tolya von Steinbock – a quasi-autobiographical figure who is variously metamorphosed into a scientist, a jazz musician, a sculptor, a writer, a doctor. Through this flexible alter ego, then, Aksyonov can bring in everything – starting with memories of his own childhood in the Siberian prison-camp town of Magadan.

    Rarely do they even leave their own rooms, in which all of their needs are met by the Machine. The Machine allows the humans to communicate "ideas" with one another, which is essentially their only activity. It doesn't stop them from leaving their rooms, but they have little desire to do so anyway. They've started to believe the Machine is omnipotent and omniscient, not to be questioned. And when it begins to malfunction, they trust that it knows what it's doing--forgetting they invented it in the first place . . .From the author of A Passage to India, A Room with a View, and other classic novels, and a sixteen-time nominee for the Nobel Prize in Literature, this remarkable science fiction story, which was included in a Science Fiction Hall of Fame anthology, was published in 1909--yet becomes more relevant and thought-provoking with each passing day of the twenty-first century.

    While United Nations diplomats endlessly debate a possible first contact mission, the Society of Jesus quietly organizes an eight-person scientific expedition of its own. What the Jesuits find is a world so beyond comprehension that it will lead them to question what it means to be "human".