Lowry's name, of course, is synonymous with his singular, doom-ridden masterpiece of 1930s Mexico, Under the Volcano, but much of his later work was written in and about his adopted home of Canada. Like all of Lowry's lesser-known works, Hear Us O Lord is an uneven book, sometimes great, sometimes embarrassingly bad. Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place is dominated by two particularly compelling novellas. "Through the Panama," a drunken, meditative journal of a voyage from Vancouver to Europe, revisits territory made familiar by Under the Volcano and is haunted by spectres from Lowry's earlier work. Lowry's combines his shipboard journal with "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner," resulting in a bizarre accumulation of artistic rumination, gallows humour, and dread. "Through the Panama" also contains one of the most brilliant--and damning--paragraphs on Canada ever written, defining a Canadian as, among other things, "a conservationist divided against himself." The other novella, "The Forest Path to the Spring" was, according to Lowry's editors, intended to serve as a coda to his oeuvre, and is among his most direct and optimistic works. The story, which Lowry dedicated to his wife, Margerie, presents a clear and almost sentimental picture of their life in British Columbia. While analogies that call this story the Paradiso to Under the Volcano's Inferno are overly simplistic, "The Forest Path" does function as a counterpoint to the Mexican hell of Lowry's one great work. Fans of Under the Volcano who have never attempted to read more of Lowry's work would do well to seek out Hear Us O Lord from Heaven Thy Dwelling Place. --Jack Illingworth

    She is headed for the Panopticon, a home for chronic young offenders. She can't remember what’s happened, but across town a policewoman lies in a coma and Anais’s school uniform is covered in blood.Raised in foster care from birth and moved through twenty-three placements before she even turned seven, Anais has been let down by just about every adult she has ever met. Now a counter-culture outlaw, she knows that she can only rely on herself. And yet despite the parade of horrors visited upon her early life, she greets the world with the witty, fierce insight of a survivor.Anais finds a sense of belonging among the residents of the Panopticon – they form intense bonds, and she soon becomes part of an ad hoc family. Together, they struggle against the adults that keep them confined. When she looks up at the watchtower that looms over the residents though, Anais knows her fate: she is an anonymous part of an experiment, and she always was. Now it seems that the experiment is closing in.Named one of the best books of the year by the Times Literary Supplement and the Scotsman, The Panopticon is an astonishingly haunting, remarkable debut novel. In language dazzling, energetic and pure, it introduces us to a heartbreaking young heroine and an incredibly assured and outstanding new voice in fiction.

    And in the air, a lone plane struggles to reach its destination. Over the course of seven pulse-pounding hours, a tense human drama plays out as a brilliant airport manager, an arrogant pilot, a tough maintenance man, and a beautiful stewardess strive to avert disaster.Featuring a diverse cast of vibrant characters, Airport is both a realistic depiction of the airline industry and a novel of nail-biting suspense.

    

    Women are breeders, kept as cattle, while men in this post-Hitlerian world are embittered automatons, fearful of all feelings, having abolished all history, education, creativity, books, and art. The plot centers on a “misfit” who asks, “How could this have happened?”

    As death follows unspeakable death, Vicki is forced to renew her tempestuous relationship with her former partner, Mike Celluci, to stop these forces of dark magic—along with another, unexpected ally…Henry Fitzroy, the illegitimate son of King Henry VIII, has learned over the course of his long life how to blend with humans, how to deny the call for blood in his veins. Without him, Vicki and Mike would not survive the ancient force of chaos that has been unleashed upon the world—but in doing so, his identity may be exposed, and his life forfeit.Blood TrailSecond in the “scary and sexy” (Judith and Garfield Reeve-Stevens, authors of The Chronicles of Galen Sword) Blood series. For centuries, the werewolves of Toronto have managed to live in peace and tranquility, hidden quietly away on their London, Ontario farm. But now, someone has learned their secret—and is systematically massacring this ancient race.The only one they can turn to is Henry Fitzroy, Toronto-based vampire and writer of bodice rippers. Forced to hide from the light of day, Henry can’t hunt the killer alone, so he turns to Vicki Nelson for help. As they race against time to stop the murderer, they begin to fear that their combined talents may not be enough to prevent him from completing his deadly plan.

    In the process she is dragged into the black market world of erotica and shady, infatuated men, where a cat-and-mouse chase for an erotic film rumored to 'star' Adolf Hitler leads to trickery, maneuvering, and bloodshed. With streamlined prose and a thriller's narrative pace, Running Dog is a bright star in the modern master's early career.

    The title character of Monsignor Quixote is a village priest, elevated to the rank of monsignor through a clerical error, who travels to Madrid accompanied by his best friend, Sancho, the Communist ex-mayor of the village, in Greene's lighthearted variation on Cervantes.

    First introduced into the West in 1704, the stories of The Thousand and One Nights are most familiar to American readers in sanitized children's versions. This modern edition, based on Richard F. Burton's unexpurgated translation, restores the lushness of the original Arabic. Here are the famous adventures of Sinbad, "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves," and "Aladdin and the Magic Lamp." Here too are less familiar stories, such as "Prince Behram and the Princess Al-Datma," a delightful early version of The Taming of the Shrew, and "The Wily Dalilah and her Daughter Zaynab," a hilarious tale about two crafty women who put an entire city of men in their place. Intricate and imaginative, these stories-within-stories told over a thousand and one nights continue to captivate readers as they have for centuries. "Arabian Nights: The Marvels and Wonders of The Thousand and One Nights, Volume 2 of 2, Adapted By Jack Zipes"

    Not even politicians lie, and weirdly frank notices abound—such as warning: this elevator maintained by people who hate their jobs: ride at your own risk. In this dystopia of mandatory candor, every preadolescent citizen is ruthlessly conditioned, through a Skinnerian ordeal called a “brainburn,” to speak truthfully under all circumstances.Jack Sperry wouldn’t dream of questioning the norms of Veritas; he’s happy with his life and his respectable job as a “deconstructionist,” destroying “mendacious” works of art—relics from a less honest era. But when his adored son, Toby, falls gravely ill, the truth becomes Jack’s greatest enemy. Somehow our hero must overcome his brainburn and attempt to heal his child with beautiful lies.

    More than one hundred years later, his great-grandson found the handwritten, never-before published manuscript in a safe. That manuscript was Paris in the Twentieth Century, an astonishingly prophetic view into the future by one of the most renowned science fiction writers of our time . . .

    It is. For behind the town's idyllic facade lies a terrible secret—a secret so shattering that no one who encounters it will ever be the same.At once a masterpiece of psychological suspense and a savage commentary on a media-driven society that values the pursuit of youth and beauty at all costs, The Stepford Wives is a novel so frightening in its final implications that the title itself has earned a place in the American lexicon.

    Here, many famous names are mentioned and there is obviously a grave risk that families and friends are going to take offence... Uncle Oswald discovers the electrifying properties of the Sudanese Blister Beetle and the gorgeous Yasmin Howcomely, a girl absolutely soaked in sex, and sets about seducing all the great men of the time for his own wicked, irreverent reasons.

    Sixty years later, this novel follows the adventures of an immigrant boy and deals with Prohibition, anti-Semitism, racism, sexuality, and the alienation that followed the Great War.

    In this forbidding climate, a small tribe of nomadic human survivors travels toward the equator ahead of glaciers moving down from the North Pole, carrying with them a handful of relics from the 21st century—and racing against the ice to preserve them from annihilation.This collection is a showcase of groundbreaking stories that wrestle with the moral, psychological, and ethical implications of scientific advancement—written by one of the foremost science fiction authors of our time.Table of contents:IntroductionForeword1. Travel by Wire!2. How We Went to Mars3. Retreat from Earth4. Reverie5. The Awakening6. Whacky7. Loophole8. Rescue Party9. Technical Error10. Castaway11. The Fires Within12. Inheritance13. Nightfall14. History Lesson15. Transience16. The Wall of Darkness17. The Lion of Comarre18. The Forgotten Enemy19. Hide-and-Seek20. Breaking Strain21. Nemesis22. Guardian Angel23. Time's Arrow24. A Walk in the Dark25. Silence Please26. Trouble With the Natives27. The Road to the Sea