Robin Cook's signature cutting-edge suspense and bold strokes of reality. The consequences of managed health care in an age when even the wariest consumer may be at risk is the catalyst for Contagion, while a sinister cabal involved with unacceptable medical ethics provides the nerve-jangling backdrop for Chromosome 6. Invasion, published in hardcover for the first time, preys on our deepest fears as it explores a sudden outbreak of a disease unlike anything humankind has ever seen.

    So when he comes across teenage runaway Chancy Deel sleeping in his garage, he sees an opportunity for both of them. Giving Chancy a home just might keep him from losing his. But in securing a place to live, these lonely hearts discover a place to belong.

    

    A deadly challenge. The fate of the world is on Astra’s shoulders.Twenty-five-year-old Astra Ching has never sought the spotlight. So when a mysterious black orb appears with a challenge for Earth and selects her to compete in its strange—and very public—game, she’s not pleased to find herself a sudden superstar.The rules are bewildering, and there are no second chances for losers. Yet while Astra fights to stay alive and save the world from imminent destruction, the people of Earth are more interested in tabloids and gossip, like whether or not she’s engaging in a scandalous love affair with a fellow contestant . . . or the mysterious alien known only as Eleven.In her struggle to survive, Astra forms tentative alliances with a handful of trustworthy friends. But as the global gossip seeps into the game and contestants are eliminated with each round, Astra’s celebrity threatens to become infamy and the line between friend and foe blurs.Will she emerge from the arena a hero, or just another headline?

    But gradually, as Sebald's precise, almost dreamlike prose begins to draw their stories, the four narrations merge into one overwhelming evocation of exile and loss.Written with a bone-dry sense of humour and a fascination with the oddness of existence The Emigrants is highly original in its heady mix of fact, memory and fiction and photographs.

    It’s the late eighties in Long Island, New York, and eighteen-year-old Harlan Kessler plays in a band, parties with friends, and struggles with a family that offers anything but a Kodak moment. The one ray of hope in Harlan’s life is Sarah DeRosa. With her by his side, Harlan just might make the right choices between love and aggression, intimacy and absence, finding himself and losing his mind. . . .

    . . . "Social Disease" . . . is really about the three major issues of our time: sex, hair, and the telephone" (Paul Rudnick, "New York Magazine").

    In this early work, Böll’s style is already powerful and evocative, engaging in the moral drama that will come to fruition in such later works as Billiards at Half-Past Nine, The Clown, Group Portrait with Lady, and The Lost Honor of Katharina Blum.

    

    Each casebook reprints documents relating to a work's historical context and reception, presents the best critical studies, and, when possible, features an interview with the author. Accessible and informative to scholars, students, and nonspecialist readers alike, the books in this series provide a wide range of critical and informative commentaries on major texts. Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude is arguably the most important novel in twentieth-century Latin American literature. This Casebook features ten critical articles on Garcia Marquez's great work. Carefully selected from the most important work on the novel over the past three decades, they include pieces by Carlos Fuentes, Iris Zavala, James Higgins, Jean Franco, Michael Wood, and Gene H. Bell-Villada. Among the intriguing aspects of the work discussed are its mythic dimension, its "magical" side, its representations of women, its relationship with past chronicles of exploration and discovery, its portrayals of Western power and imperialism, its astounding diffusion throughout the globe and the media, and its simple truth-telling, its fidelity to the tangled history of Latin America. The book incorporates several theoretical approaches--historical, feminist, postcolonial; the first English translation of Fuentes's renowned, oft-cited, eight page meditation on the work; a general introduction; and a 1982 interview with Garcia Marquez.

    Johann Fausten dem wietbeschreyen Zauberer und Schwartzkunstler, or History of Dr John Faust the notorious Magician and Necromancer, as written by his familiar servant and disciple Christopher wagner, now for the first time Englished from the Low German.

    In Schneider's Berlin, real people cross the Wall not to defect but to quarrel with their lovers, see Hollywood movies, and sometimes just because they can't help themselves—the Wall has divided their emotions as much as it has their country."An honest, rich book. . . . It is one those rare books that come back at odd moments to intrude on your comfortable conclusions and easy images."—Robert Houston, Nation

    Eighteen going on eight-and-a-half. Fast-food worker. Queen fan. Last in the queue for luck. On waking from an accident in which he saves a child, he has the distinct impression that all is far from right. What are these curious lights that seem to surround people? Why are animals and machines trying to speak to him? And can he really control time? Is it just his imagination, or has Adam Spark been chosen to become Scotland's first, and only, superhero? This, however, is the least of his problems. The local gang is luring him into deeper and darker peril. His sister and lone carer, Jude, is giving all her love to another woman. And if Jude abandons Adam - or Adam drives her away - all the superpowers in the world won't be able to save him.

    When she discovers that there's more truth to myth than she thought, she finds herself in danger.

    Selected from New Directions' collections of Saroyan's early stories (The Man With the Heart In the Highlands) and his later work (Madness In the Family), Fresno Stories spans his whole remarkable career.