Here, a powerful computer designed to help people starts to supplant them . . . The Great Automatic Grammatizator is taken from the short story collection Someone Like You, which includes seventeen other devious and shocking stories, featuring the wife who serves a dish that baffles the police; a curious machine that reveals the horrifying truth about plants; the man waiting to be bitten by the venomous snake asleep on his stomach; and others. 'The absolute master of the twist in the tale.' (Observer ) This story is also available as a Penguin digital audio download read by Will Self. Roald Dahl, the brilliant and worldwide acclaimed author of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, James and the Giant Peach, Matilda, and many more classics for children, also wrote scores of short stories for adults. These delightfully disturbing tales have often been filmed and were most recently the inspiration for the West End play, Roald Dahl's Twisted Tales by Jeremy Dyson. Roald Dahl's stories continue to make readers shiver today.

    Now he turns his eye to an array of technologies that could change our relationship not with the rest of nature but with ourselves. He explores the frontiers of genetic engineering, robotics, and nanotechnology—all of which we are approaching with astonishing speed—and shows that each threatens to take us past a point of no return. We now stand, in Michael Pollan's words, "on a moral and existential threshold," poised between the human past and a post-human future. McKibben offers a celebration of what it means to be human, and a warning that we risk the loss of all meaning if we step across the threshold. Instantly acclaimed for its passion and insight, this wise and eloquent book argues that we cannot forever grow in reach and power—that we must at last learn how to say, "Enough."

    Bush seriously and puts his spotlight on Bush's claims to be a president who knows what is good and what is evil.

    David Stark, an adolescent and mainstay of a family of women nearing physical or emotional collapse, hitchhikes from Southern California to San Francisco to locate a wandering sister and encounters adulthood.

    Over the past hundred years, there have been more than two dozen attempts to build a socialist society, from the Soviet Union to Maoist China to Venezuela. All of them have ended in varying degrees of failure. But, according to socialism's adherents, that is only because none of these experiments were "real socialism". This book documents the history of this, by now, standard response. It shows how the claim of fake socialism is only ever made after the event. As long as a socialist project is in its prime, almost nobody claims that it is not real socialism. On the contrary, virtually every socialist project in history has gone through a honeymoon period, during which it was enthusiastically praised by prominent Western intellectuals. It was only when their failures became too obvious to deny that they got retroactively reclassified as "not real socialism".

    But the victory can come through struggle. John White knows this balance and gives us the encouragement to persevere. Here is a guide through the basic areas of Christian living we wrestle with throughout our lives: faith, prayer, temptation, evangelism, guidance, Bible study, fellowship, work. In this very personal book he offers new Christians sound first steps and older Christians refreshing insights into the struggles and the joys of freedom in Christ.

    In Better Off Without ’Em, the biggest book of his career, Thompson offers a heavily researched, serious inquiry into national divides that is unabashedly controversial, often uproarious, and always thought-provoking.     By crunching numbers, interviewing experts, and traveling the not-so-former Confederacy, Thompson—an openly disgruntled liberal Northwesterner—makes a compelling case for Southern secession. Along the way, he interacts with possum-hunting conservatives, trailer park lifers, prayer warriors, and other regional trendsetters, showing that the South’s perverse church-driven morality, politics, and personality never have and never will define the region as a fully committed part of the United States. Better Off Without ’Em is a deliberately provocative book whose insight, humor, fierce and fearless politics, and sheer nerve will spark a national debate that is perhaps long overdue.

    Not since Terry McMillan's Breaking Ice have so many African-American writers been brought together in one volume. A stellar collection of works from more than fifty hot names in fiction, Gumbo represents remarkable synergy. Edited by bestselling luminaries Marita Golden and E. Lynn Harris, this collection spans new and previously published tales of love and luck, inspiration and violation, hip new worlds and hallowed heritage from voices such as: Edwidge Danticat , Eric Jerome Dickey, Kenji Jasper, John Edgar Wideman, Terry McMillan, David Anthony Durham, Bertice Berry, and many, many more. Also featuring original stories by Golden and Harris themselves, Gumbo heralds the debut of the Hurston / Wright Legacy Awards for Published Black Writers (scheduled for October 2002), and all advances and royalties from the book will support the Hurston/ Wright Foundation. Combining authors with a variety of flavorful writing, Gumbo will have readers clamoring for second helpings.

    A box set consisting of three Bill Bryson books, 'Notes from a Small Island', 'Notes from a Big Country' and 'A Walk in the Woods'.

    This volume covers a wide range of enthusiasms, criticisms, tributes, and reflections from the former National Review editor.

    We discover why the stomach--which is capable of breaking down everything from porridge to pizza--refrains from digesting itself.  Informed by sympathy for human suffering and an erudition that includes poetry and the Talmud as well as the medical canon, How We Live is science writing of the rarest kind--lucid, poetic, and genuinely uplifting. Originally published under the title The Wisdom of the Body

    Pond' is G. K. Chesterton's final collection of detective stories, published after his death in 1936. The main characters in the book are Mr. Pond, his friend Captain Peter Gahagan, a romantic and impulsive Irishman, and a well-known government official, Sir Hubert Wotton. Also mentioned in more than one chapter are Violet Varney, an actress, and her sister Joan, to whom Gahagan proposes after being suspected of having an affair with Lord Crome's wife in "Ring of Lovers". Joan, now married to Gahagan, appears in the framing sequence of "A Tall Story".

    For the novice, this work is an introduction to the baffling world of meditation, Eastern thought and the galaxy of philosophies that make up the expanding horizon of human awareness, and for the veteran, it integrates the inner quest with the experience of daily life.

    Germain is one of the most baffling personalities of modern history. His activities are traceable for more than one hundred: years between 1710 and 1822, leading Frederick the Great to refer to him as "the man who does not die." An outstanding scholar and linguist, a great musician and painter, as well as a chemist with skill so profound he could change base metals into gold, he was also enormously wealthy and was on intimate terms with the crowned heads of Europe. Nothing is known about the source of St. Germain's occult knowledge; he merely admitted he was obeying the orders of a power higher than himself, saying that his father was the Secret Doctrine and his mother the Mysteries.

    In Steele’s universe, the stars are cold, space is big, and it’s the normal people who make things interesting.