With a cast of characters that includes the gardener Ludwig Wittgenstein, these weird stories will intrigue and entrance.

    H. Lawrence]- The Phantom of the Opera [Gaston Leroux]- The Call of the Wild [Jack London]- The Great God Pan [Arthur Machen]- Moby Dick [Herman Melville]- Swann's Way [Marcel Proust]- Frankenstein [Mary Shelley]- The Red and the Black [Stendhal]- The Strange Case Of Dr. Jekyll And Mr. Hyde [Robert Louis Stevenson]- Dracula [Bram Stoker]- The Art of War [Sun Tzu]- Gulliver's Travels [Jonathan Swift]- Vanity Fair [William Makepeace Thackeray]- Anna Karenina [Leo Tolstoy]- The Death of Ivan Ilyich [Leo Tolstoy]- War and Peace [Leo Tolstoy]- The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn [Mark Twain]- The Picture of Dorian Gray [Oscar Wilde]Also available : 50 Masterpieces you have to read before you die Vol: 2 (Golden Deer Classics)

    Fleming and six other authors will each contribute a story from different points of view: M.T. Anderson, Jennifer Donnelly, Stephanie Hemphill, Deborah Hopkinson, Linda Sue Park, and Lisa Ann Sandell.

    Then comes "The Space Between," where it is revealed that the Comte St. Germain is not dead, Master Raymond appears, and a widowed young wine dealer escorts a would-be novice to a convent in Paris. In "A Plague of Zombies," Lord John unexpectedly becomes military governor of Jamaica when the original governor is gnawed by what probably wasn't a giant rat. "A Leaf on the Wind of All Hallows" is the moving story of Roger MacKenzie's parents during World War II. In "Virgins," Jamie Fraser, aged nineteen, and Ian Murray, aged twenty, become mercenaries in France, no matter that neither has yet bedded a lass or killed a man. But they're trying. . . . "A Fugitive Green" is the story of Lord John's elder brother, Hal, and a seventeen-year-old rare book dealer with a sideline in theft, forgery, and blackmail. And finally, in "Besieged," Lord John learns that his mother is in Havana--and that the British Navy is on their way to lay siege to the city.Filling in mesmerizing chapters in the lives of characters readers have followed over the course of thousands of pages, Gabaldon's genius is on full display throughout this must-have collection.

    Now, in her newest novel, international bestseller Hazel Gaynor reimagines their story.1917… It was inexplicable, impossible, but it had to be true—didn’t it? When two young cousins, Frances Griffiths and Elsie Wright from Cottingley, England, claim to have photographed fairies at the bottom of the garden, their parents are astonished. But when one of the great novelists of the time, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, becomes convinced of the photographs’ authenticity, the girls become a national sensation, their discovery offering hope to those longing for something to believe in amid a world ravaged by war. Frances and Elsie will hide their secret for many decades. But Frances longs for the truth to be told.One hundred years later… When Olivia Kavanagh finds an old manuscript in her late grandfather’s bookshop she becomes fascinated by the story it tells of two young girls who mystified the world. But it is the discovery of an old photograph that leads her to realize how the fairy girls’ lives intertwine with hers, connecting past to present, and blurring her understanding of what is real and what is imagined. As she begins to understand why a nation once believed in fairies, can Olivia find a way to believe in herself?

    Had Britain's defences collapsed, Hitler would have dominated all of Europe and been able to turn his full attention east to the Soviet Union.The German invasion of France and the Low Countries in May 1940 was unlike any the world had ever seen. It hit with a force and aggression that no-one could counter and in just a few short weeks, all in their way crumbled under the force of the Nazi hammer blow. With France facing defeat and with British forces pressed back to the Channel, there were few who believed Britain could possibly survive.Soon, it seemed, Hitler would have all of Europe at his feet.Yet Hitler's forces were not quite the Goliath they at first seemed, while her leadership lacked the single-minded purpose, vision and direction that had led to such success on land.Nor was Britain any David.Thanks to a sophisticated defensive system and the combined efforts of the RAF, Royal Navy as well as the mounting sense of collective defiance led by a new Prime Minister, Britain was not ready to roll over just yet.From clashes between coastal convoys and Schnellboote in the Channel to astonishing last stands in Flanders, and from the slaughter by the U-boats in the icy Atlantic to the dramatic aerial battles over England, The Battle of Britain tells this most epic of stories from all sides, drawing on extensive new research from around the world. In so doing, it paints a complete picture of that extraordinary summer - a time in which the fate of the world truly hung by a thread.

    A Burnable Book is an irresistible thriller, reminiscent of classics like An Instance of the Fingerpost, The Name of the Rose and The Crimson Petal and the White. London, 1385. Surrounded by ruthless courtiers—including his powerful uncle, John of Gaunt, and Gaunt’s flamboyant mistress, Katherine Swynford—England’s young, still untested king, Richard II, is in mortal peril, and the danger is only beginning. Songs are heard across London—catchy verses said to originate from an ancient book that prophesies the end of England’s kings—and among the book’s predictions is Richard’s assassination. Only a few powerful men know that the cryptic lines derive from a “burnable book,” a seditious work that threatens the stability of the realm. To find the manuscript, wily bureaucrat Geoffrey Chaucer turns to fellow poet John Gower, a professional trader in information with connections high and low. Gower discovers that the book and incriminating evidence about its author have fallen into the unwitting hands of innocents, who will be drawn into a labyrinthine conspiracy that reaches from the king’s court to London’s slums and stews--and potentially implicates his own son. As the intrigue deepens, it becomes clear that Gower, a man with secrets of his own, may be the last hope to save a king from a terrible fate.Medieval scholar Bruce Holsinger draws on his vast knowledge of the period to add colorful, authentic detail—on everything from poetry and bookbinding to court intrigues and brothels—to this highly entertaining and brilliantly constructed epic literary mystery that brings medieval England gloriously to life.

    In this volume Chomsky convincingly argues that humanitarianism was not the moving force behind NATO's intervention in Yugoslavia, and that there, as in East Timor, strategic concerns were dominant and the fate of civilian populations incidental.Author Biography: Noam Chomsky is Institute Professor in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of many books including American Power and the New Mandarins, Manufacturing Consent (with Ed Herman), Deterring Democracy, Year 501, World Orders Old and New, Powers and Prospects, Profits over People, and The New Military Humanism: Lessons of Kosovo.

    

    There would never be another departure like it.And aboard one of the ships was Manuel Tetuan, a young Moroccan orphan shanghaied from a Franciscan monastery. “Black Air” is the multiple award nominated and World Fantasy Award-winning novelette of Manuel’s beatific innocence, of his compassion in the face of war, and of the miracles that enabled him to survive the tragedy of the doomed Armada.Robinson’s extraordinary range of interests is demonstrated in haunting stories of: tourists looting the beautiful, sunken ruins of Venice; an amoral future sleuth who, with her bumbling Watson, must find the forger of Monets on a planet of wealthy esthetes; three friends, one brain-damaged, who confront eternity and subtle magic in the snowbound Sierras; a repertoire company of hypnotically trained, surgically altered actors, and an unknown psychopath whose murders mock the scripts of Elizabethan and Jacobean drama; the historic effects of the Second World War’s last traitor, the pilot who deliberately fails to A-bomb Hiroshima; impoverished Uranian miners who seek fame in an interplanetary music competition by reviving an ancient, lost form—Dixieland Jazz; and a dilapidated Arizona grill-souvenir shop that becomes the focus of a drifter’s encounters with Time and destiny.

    A page-turning true story of international scandal and corruption at the very highest levels of corporate America, this thriller unveils botched crimes, courtroom drama, suicide attempts, and an immense tangle of lies and deception.

    As 1918 opened, the Allies and Central Powers remained locked in a desperate, bloody stalemate, despite the deaths of millions of soldiers over the previous three and a half years. The arrival of the Americans "over there" by the middle of the year turned the tide of war, resulting in an Allied victory in November.In these pages participants on both sides, from enlisted men to generals and prime ministers to monarchs, vividly recount the battles, sensational events, and behind-the-scenes strategies that shaped the climactic, terrifying year. It's all here—the horrific futility of going over the top into a hail of bullets in no man's land; the enigmatic death of the legendary German ace, the Red Baron; Operation Michael, a punishing German attack in the spring; the Americans' long-awaited arrival in June; the murder of Russian Czar Nicholas II and his family, the growing fear of a communist menace in the east; and the armistice on November 11. The different points of view of Germans, Americans, British, French, and Russians add depth, complexity, and understanding to the tragedies and triumphs of the War to End All Wars.

    Whether fictionalizing his dramatic exploits as a Royal Air Force pilot during World War II or concocting the ingeniously plotted fables that were dramatized on television as Tales of the Unexpected, Dahl was brilliant at provoking in his readers the overwhelming desire to know what happens next—and at satisfying that desire in ways that feel both surprising and inevitable.In this collection:-A Fine Son-Death of an Old Man-Parson’s Pleasure-Poison-The Hitch-Hiker-The Wish-Mrs. Bixby and the Colonel’s Coat-Dip in the Pool-The Landlady-Skin-Lamb to the Slaughter-Man from the South-The Way Up to Heavan-The Umbrella Man-Taste-The Swan-William and MaryFilled with devilish plot twists, his tales display a tantalizing blend of macabre humor and the absurdly grotesque. Dahl’s creations amuse and shock us in equal measure, gleefully reminding us of what might lurk beneath the surface of the ordinary.

    Our heroes are the Slick Six, a group of international criminals who set out to alleviate the worst of these conditions and put America on the road to recovery. Liberation is a story about living down the past, personally and nationally; about being able to laugh at the punch line to the long, dark joke of American history.Slattery's prose moves seamlessly between present and past, action and memory. With Liberation, he celebrates the resilience and ingenuity of the American spirit.

    History at its most interesting is complex, a fascinating whirl of events, personalities, and forces, and few periods of history offer us such captivating complexity as Europe's 19th "century"—the often-broadly defined period from the French Revolution to World War I that formed the foundation of the modern world.How was that foundation built? And what did that transition to modernity mean for peasants, workers, the middle class, aristocrats, women, and minorities?Why did an era that began with the idealism of the French Revolution and the power of the Industrial Revolution culminate in the chaos of World War I, considered by most historians to be the greatest tragedy of modern European history? Did nationalism and imperialism inevitably lead in such a direction, or were there other factors involved?Even these questions, as important as they are, can only hint at the complexity of this period, just as this course can really only put us on a path toward the answers.