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A passionately realized novel about an affair between a wandering American and cutting-edge female novelistClancy Sigals fourth novel centers on expatriate Gus Black, a freethinker who moves to England in search of a new life. He absorbs the native culture by plunging into its dark corners. Amid the upheavals, he lands a job at Vogue, consorting with models like Twiggy and Jean Shrimpton, and commences a passionate affair with Rose OMalley, a brilliant writer loosely based on Sigals real-life lover Doris Lessing.Set in the swinging London of the fifties and sixties, The Secret Defector is a portrait of an American on the loose striving to define himself against an alien yet oddly familiar culture. Sigals frequent themes of the working class, the counterculture, and Marxism are in evidence, as is his self-deprecating wit. This quasi-autobiographical novel takes Clancys trademark energy to confront the decline of the left and the rise of feminism.

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In this satisfyingly suspenseful urban fantasy, a demon teams up with a human detective on the Singapore police force (Booklist). Zhu Irzh is having trouble adjusting to life on Earth. The food is bland, the colors dim, and the weather much too chilly for a demon used to the balmy climate of the underworld. Recently attached to the Singapore Three police department, Zhu Irzh has been assigned to help humans like Detective Inspector Chen investigate cases that overlap this world and the world to come. But how dedicated can a demon be to justice when his last assignment was to Hells vice squadwhose job is not to prevent vice, but to promote it?  Zhu Irzh is pondering these philosophical questions when he catches his first murder case: the savage killing of a rich would-be witch outside of the occult market. Chen is on a well-deserved vacation, so the demon takes charge himself, unearthing a supernatural conspiracy that proves Hell holds no monopoly on evil.The Demon and the City is the second of the five Detective Inspector Chen Novels, which also include Snake Agent and Precious Dragon. 

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A supernatural detective in Singapore tries to save his wifeand the universein this thoroughly original fantasy by the author of Snake Agent (Publishers Weekly).  Detective Inspector Chen is getting used to visiting Heaven. It is a peaceful place, but the eerie calm and ever-present scent of peaches make him yearn for the chaos of Singapore Three. He has come to visit Mhara, the Emperor of Heaven, who ascended to the celestial throne after his father went mad and launched an ill-advised invasion of Hell. Order has been restored to the cosmos, and Mhara is characteristically serene, but trouble is lurking for this handsome young god. Someone is trying to kill the Emperor of Heaven, and Chen does not have his demonic partner, Zhu Irzh, to fall back on. Zhu Irzh has vanished, Chens wife is in danger, and a psychotic Bollywood star is on the warpath. Its another day in the office for the occult detectivea day that, if he doesnt restore order quickly, could be the universes last.The Shadow Pavilion is the fourth of the five Detective Inspector Chen Novels, which begin with Snake Agent and The Demon and the City. 

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A college instructor embarks on a fanatical quest to save his joband enact righteous revengein this brilliantly acerbic satire of university politics during the early Cold War yearsHenry Mulcahys future is in question. An instructor of literature at Jocelyn College, an institute of higher learning renowned for its progressive approach to education, he has just received word that he will not be teaching next semester. He strongly suspects that his dismissal has been engineered by his nemesis, the college president, who Henry believes resents his superior skills as an educator. Or perhaps he is being targeted by the government in this Cold War era, now that Senator Joseph McCarthys communist witch hunt is in full swing, especially since Henrys dedication to independent thinking is, he believes, renowned. Whatever the case, Henry Mulcahy wants justiceand vengeanceand he will not go quietly without a fight. But the battle might expose too much of Henrys true nature . . .Witty and biting, Mary McCarthys The Groves of Academe is a deliciously pointed satire of the world of higher education and its petty despots, tiny wars, and internal politics.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the authors estate.

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Part alien adventure and part existential exploration, this top-notch tale establishes Williams as an author to watch. Publishers Weekly, starred review Latent Emanation is a cruel world where ordinary people do everything they can to stay out of the way of their vicious masters, the mysterious Night Lords. Apprentice alchemist Alivet Dee is more cautious than most, having devoted her life to making enough money to buy back her imprisoned sister from the Night Lordsbut trouble is about to find her. When a client dies during a routine alchemical session, Alivet fleespursued by the Night Lords, their minions, and a dark force that haunts her dreams. She is rescued by Ghairen, a Poison Master from another world who offers her a chance to save her sisterand humanity, as well. He is charming and handsome, with ruby-red eyes that glow in the nightbut how can she trust a professional assassin? As she proceeds warily alongside the Poison Master, Alivet finds a chance not just to save mankind, but to unlock the mysteries of humanitys very existence.  

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A supernatural mystery set in Singapore featuring a detective whose beat reaches to the fringes of Heaven and Hell, by the author of Snake Agent (Booklist).  No mortal has ever heard of the Book, and few in Heaven even believe it is real. Instead, they regard the stories of a bound volume older than time itself as something of a creation myth. But Mhara, the Emperor of Heaven, knows the Book is very real, very powerful, and very much missing. It has a mind of its own, and it appears to have wandered offtaking the secrets of the universe with it. To find it, Mhara calls Detective Inspector Chen, a supernatural sleuth with previous experience in saving the universe. Chen has a lot on his plate at the moment: His wife is pregnant, his demonic partner is tracking the movement of an immortal horde, and he hasnt had a vacation in years. But for the sake of the Emperor, hell do his best to return order to the cosmos. If he doesnt, who will?The Iron Khan is the final volume of the Detective Inspector Chen Novels, which begin with Snake Agent and The Demon and the City. 

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The Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher

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Finalist for the National Book Award: Thirty-six stories by O. Henry Awardwinning novelist Hortense CalisherThe Collected Stories of Hortense Calisher gathers short pieces that chart the authors best-loved themes of mindful consciousness and social worlds. This collection includes one of her well-known New Yorker stories, In Greenwich There Are Many Gravelled Walks, in which a young man drops his mother off at a sanitarium and acquires a new friend who finally awakens him to the world. Also included are The Sound of Waiting, one of the chapters in the Elkin family saga; the chilling, Jamesian The Scream on Fifty-seventh Street, in which a New York widow hears a scream late one night but cannot decide how to investigate without appearing to her neighbors to have gone mad; and the nearly novella-length The Summer Rebellion.

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The Railway Police and The Last Trolley Ride

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Two novellas from award-winning author Hortense Calisher offering very different journeys: the first looking hopefully forward, and the second, into a painful pastThe characters in these two novellas take introspective, poignant excursions both to where they want to be (The Railway Police) and where they have been (The Last Trolley Ride). In the first, a woman with hereditary premature baldness decides to embrace her unadorned head and hopes to start a fresh life without attachments to the trappings of days gone by. In the second, an elderly man with a working replica of a trolley line in his basement reminisces about the fateful last ride he took on that very line many years ago. In both stories, Calisher probes the characters senses of isolation from their respective worlds.

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This smash bestseller about privileged Vassar classmates shocked America in the sixties and remains juicy . . . witty . . . brilliant (Cosmopolitan).  At Vassar, they were known as the groupeight young women of privilege, the closest of friends, an eclectic mix of vibrant personalities. A week after graduation in 1933, they all gather for the wedding of Kay Strong, one of their own, before going their separate ways in the world. In the years that follow, they will each know accomplishment and loss in equal measure, pursuing careers and marriage, experiencing the joys and traumas of sexual awakening and motherhood, all while suffering through betrayals, infidelities, and sometimes madness. Some of them will drift apart. Some will play important roles in the personal dramas of others. But it is tragedy that will ultimately unite the group once again. A novel that stunned the world when it was first published in 1963, Mary McCarthys The Group found acclaim, controversy, and a place atop the New York Times bestseller list for nearly two years for its frank and controversial exploration of womens issues, social concerns, and sexuality. A blistering satire of the mores of an emergent generation of women, The Group is McCarthys enduring masterpiece, still as relevant, powerful, and wonderfully entertaining fifty years on. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the authors estate. 

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Introducing Singaporean DI, Wei Chen. This exotic amalgam of police procedural, SF, comic fantasy, and horror is a delight from start to finish (Locus). When the fourteen-year-old daughter of Singapore Threes most prominent industrialist dies of anorexia, her parents assume that Pearls suffering has come to an end. But somewhere along the way to the Celestial Shores, Pearls soul is waylaid, lured by an unknown force to the gates of Hell. To save their daughter from eternal banishment, they come to Detective Inspector Wei Chen, whose jurisdiction lies between this world and the next. A round-faced cop who is as serious as his beat is strange, Chen has a demon for a wife and a comfort with the supernatural that most mortals cannot match. But finding Pearl Tang will take him further into the abyss than ever beforeto a mystifying place where he will have to cooperate with a demonic detective if he wants to survive. Its easy, Chen will find, to get into Hell. The hard part is getting out.Snake Agent is the first of the five Detective Inspector Chen Novels, which continue with The Demon and the City and Precious Dragon. 

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The celebrated author of The Group offers a clever, witty, polished portrait of the 1940s NYC literary bohemia she knew so well in this debut novel (The New York Times).  Margaret Sargent is young and fearless, a deep thinker inspired by the bohemian energy that abounds in New York City in the years leading up to the Second World War. With careless abandon, she destroys her marriage and numerous love affairs as she moves through the social circles of artists and writers, playing at the fringes of political extremism. She is an enigma, often wanton and frivolous, but possessing intelligence and a razor-sharp wit, as well as a troubling core of inner darkness, self-doubt, and puzzling tendencies toward self-destruction. For Margaret, urban life in the 1930s is an ongoing adventureever-changing, always surprising, and deeply, profoundly unsatisfying. Mary McCarthy, author of the bestselling American classic The Group, burst boldly onto the literary scene with her provocative debut, The Company She Keeps. A brilliant, stylistically inventive novel, it offers a rich portrait of a truly fascinating protagonist in six revealing episodes. Love her, despise her, or fear for her, you will never forget Margaret Sargent.This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the authors estate. 

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A poet craving authenticity ventures into a gritty Philadelphia neighborhood in this novel by the award-winning author of The Chaneysville Incident.  Philadelphias South Street is a world of contradiction. The hardscrabble neighborhood is filled with prostitutes and gangsters; working stiffs mingle with winos at Lightnin Eds bar. But the streetwalkers are nearing retirement, the gangsters are unemployed, and a community is thriving in and around a place written off by officials and politicians as blighted. Black poet Adlai Stevenson Brown makes his way to South Street in search of authenticity in the form of a neighborhood to save. But the world of South Streetbeyond its grit and dangeris more than the cultured young fish out of water ever expected . . . and a lot more than he can handle. PEN/Faulkner Awardwinner David Bradleys marvelous debut novel is riotously funny and keenly insightful in equal measure. South Street is a magnificent evocation not only of a vanished time, but of an American archetype in Adlaia man in search of someone to save, unaware that he himself may need saving. 

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Winner of the PEN/Faulkner: "Rivals Toni Morrison's Song of Solomon as the best novel about the black experience in America since Ellison's Invisible Man" (The Christian Science Monitor).

 


Brilliant but troubled historian John Washington has left Philadelphia, where he is employed by a major university, to return to his hometown just north of the MasonDixon Line. He is there to care for Old Jack, one of the men who helped raise him when he was growing up on the Hill, an old black neighborhood in the little Pennsylvania townbut he also wants to learn more about the death of his father.


 


What John discovers is that his father, Moses Washington, left behind extensive notes on a mystery he was researching: why thirteen escaped slaves reached freedom in Chaneysville only to die there, for reasons forgotten or never known at all.


 


Based on meticulous historical research, The Chaneysville Incident explores the power of our pasts, and paints a vivid portrait of realities such as the Underground Railroad's activity in Bedford County, Pennsylvania, and the phenomenon of enslaved people committing suicide to escape their fate. This extraordinary novel, a finalist for the National Book Award, was described by the Los Angeles Times as "perhaps the most significant work by a new black male author since James Baldwin dazzled in the early '60s with his fine fury," and placed David Bradley in the front ranks of contemporary American authors.

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A dystopian tale about mass-entertainment-turned-toxic from the award-winning author of Towing Jehovahperfect for Philip K. Dick fans.  Cutting-edge virtual reality has emerged as a popular, albeit controversial, source of amusement. Devouring a cephapple or dreambean allows the eater to become the primary player in a preprogrammed narrative: love story, historical spectacle, horror thrillerthis medium encompasses all genres. Our protagonist, Quinjin, is a professional dreambean critic, rating the hallucinogenic adventures hidden within these remarkable fruits. But something has gone terribly wrong. An anonymous dreamweaver has created a cephapple that, by transporting its users to the core of an inescapable nightmare, drives them stark raving madjust the sort of ammunition the anti-dreambean movement needs to get the technology banned. Quinjin is hired to find the source of the poison and eradicate it. But the reviewers heroic quest becomes highly personal when the person he most cares abouthis teenage daughtereats the forbidden fruit and lapses into a coma. Dark and satiric, The Continent of Lies is a bravura demonstration of the bold originality that has won James Morrow two Nebula Awards, two World Fantasy Awards, and the Prix Utopia. 

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On a distant planet, two human societies keep an uneasy equilibriumone nonviolent, the other ferociousin this triumphant writing performance (Atlantic City Press).   A fact-finding mission has crash-landed on a harsh world, leaving entomologist Francis Lostwax and physicist Burne Newman marooned. The scientists are rescued by a mysterious society whose inhabitants are wholly incapable of murder, assault, rape, or any other form of aggression. Protected by a river made of liquid hate, the descendants of Quetzalias original human colonists have devised a strange techno-religion that has in turn engendered a culture of total pacifism. While Burne undertakes to rid the planet of the savage and menacing brain-eaters that flourish beyond the utopias walls, Francis cultivates his romantic feelings for Tez Yon, the Quetzalian surgeon who saved his life. But the entomologists obsession with Tezs soul leads him down a dark and twisted path, in time confronting him with a terrible dilemma. Should he murder the woman he loves to save a society he abhors? 

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Can an exotic summer fling in Italy turn into lasting love?Venice is high on April Stockwoods list of romantic ports of call. Things get off to an ominous start when she arrives in Italy and a mishap leaves her with no place to stay. But her bad karma turns into a lucky break when she reconnects with Hayden Calloway.Now a diplomat with the American consulate, Hayden was Aprils greatest crush when they attended high school together in Philadelphia. Suddenly, her Italian vacation is taking on thrilling new dimensions as Hayden shows her a side of the city most tourists never see.Did April travel halfway around the world to find the love of her life? Or is her lovera man with secretstoo good to be true?  

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A rollicking and audacious collection of stories featuring Martian invaders, time travel, voodoo queens, giant Hollywood monsters, Dr. Moreaulike mad scientists, and moreIn The Cats Pajamas, James Morrowcalled the most provocative satiric voice in science fiction by the Washington Posttakes the reader on thirteen wild and gleeful rides, each exploring a demented, dystopian, or provisionally desirable world.A tyrannical church wields terrifying power over peoples sex lives in the name of protecting the rights of the unconceived. The dead, raised by Caribbean magic, are put to benevolent use in a New Jersey suburb. A racist Supreme Court justice gets his karmic comeuppance. Columbus discovers a contemporary New York City. The island of Manhattan becomes a battlefield on which two alien races thrash out their philosophical disagreements. And in the remarkable title offering, a deranged doctor blesses his mutant creatures with ethical superiority, a simple matter of injecting them with a serum derived from the disembodied brain of the storys livingand understandably bewilderedprotagonist.

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Acclaimed for her moving depictions of interracial love, bestselling author Sandra Kitt delivers a passionate and provocative tale of modern romance

An artist trapped in an unfulfilling relationship, Leah Downey wants more out of life. But she plays it safe, never venturing too far from her comfort zone . . . not since the night she was mugged at knifepoint.


Beginning a relationship with a perfect stranger is completely out of character for Leah. But something about Jason Horn strikes a chord deep within her. They couldn't be more different. Jason is white, a streetwise New York cop haunted by his own demons. He's stunned by his instant attraction to this vibrant black woman who arouses both desire and his fiercest protective instincts.

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A city girl moves to Arkansas, where she discovers that the locals are not as welcoming as they appearWhen Valerie Wreyfords parents travel to the Middle East to do research for a new book, Valerie leaves the busy streets of New York City for the country quiet of Catalpa Ridge, Arkansas. While her parents are away, Valerie has volunteered to look after Granny deShan, whom shes never met. Grannys mind seems stuck in the past, and taking care of her full time is even harder than Valerie imagined. But when two local boys start showing an interest in Valerie, she decides that coming to live with Granny might not have been such a bad idea after all. Just as Valerie is settling into her new life in Arkansas, she begins receiving threatening messages and ominous late-night phone calls. Someone doesnt want her to stick around Catalpa Ridge. And this person is willing to do whatever it takes to make her leaveno matter who gets hurt in the process. 

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In bestselling author Sandra Kitts sizzling summer romance, a little down-home love goes a long way Jewelry designer Rachel Givens loses the mother figure in her life when Julia Winters dies. As it turns out, Julia harbored secretsincluding the existence of a handsome son, Lucas Monroe Scott. Now Rachel learns that she and Lucas have both inherited his mothers lovely summer cottage in Highland Beach, Maryland. But can she bear to share cramped quarters with the gorgeous yet openly hostile sax player?Lucas cant believe his mother left half his inheritance to a perfect stranger. But as he gets to know Rachel, his resentment fades and his feelings grow into something richer and much more intense. If he can come to terms with the mysteries of his past, he might just think about putting down roots in Highland Beach . . . 