The year is 2033. The world has been reduced to rubble. Humanity is nearly extinct. The half-destroyed cities have become uninhabitable through radiation. Beyond their boundaries, they say, lie endless burned-out deserts and the remains of splintered forests. Survivors still remember the past greatness of humankind. But the last remains of civilisation have already become a distant memory, the stuff of myth and legend.

More than 20 years have passed since the last plane took off from the earth. Rusted railways lead into emptiness. The ether is void and the airwaves echo to a soulless howling where previously the frequencies were full of news from Tokyo, New York, Buenos Aires. Man has handed over stewardship of the earth to new life-forms. Mutated by radiation, they are better adapted to the new world. Man's time is over.

A few score thousand survivors live on, not knowing whether they are the only ones left on earth. They live in the Moscow Metro - the biggest air-raid shelter ever built. It is humanity's last refuge. Stations have become mini-statelets, their people uniting around ideas, religions, water-filters - or the simple need to repulse an enemy incursion. It is a world without a tomorrow, with no room for dreams, plans, hopes. Feelings have given way to instinct - the most important of which is survival. Survival at any price. VDNKh is the northernmost inhabited station on its line. It was one of the Metro's best stations and still remains secure. But now a new and terrible threat has appeared.

Artyom, a young man living in VDNKh, is given the task of penetrating to the heart of the Metro, to the legendary Polis, to alert everyone to the awful danger and to get help. He holds the future of his native station in his hands, the whole Metro - and maybe the whole of humanity.

And Quiet Flows the Don or Quietly Flows the Don (Тихий Дон, lit. "The Quiet Don") is 4-volume epic novel by Russian writer Mikhail Aleksandrovich Sholokhov. The 1st three volumes were written from 1925 to '32 & published in the Soviet magazine October in 1928–32. The 4th volume was finished in 1940. The English translation of the 1st three volumes appeared under this title in 1934. The novel is considered one of the most significant works of Russian literature in the 20th century. It depicts the lives & struggles of Don Cossacks during WWI, the Russian Revolution & Russian Civil War. In 1965, Sholokhov was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. The authorship of the novel is contested by some literary critics & historians, who believe it wasn't entirely written by Sholokhov. However, following the discovery of the manuscript, the consensus is that the work is, in fact, Sholokhov’s.

Many thousands of readers consider Philip K. Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in Dick's works has continued to mount and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. The Philip K. Dick Award is now given annually to a distinguished work of science fiction, and the Philip K. Dick Society is devoted to the study and promulgation of his works.
This collection includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1954-1964. These fascinating stories include Service Call, Stand By, The Days of Perky Pat, and many others.
"A useful acquisition for any serious SF library or collection" -- Kirkus
"The collected stories of Philip K. Dick is awe inspiring". -- The Washington Post
"More than anyone else in the field, Mr. Dick really puts you inside people's minds". -- Wall Street Journal

Pauvre Cugel : alors qu'il pensait tenir sa revanche sur Iucounu, le magicien rieur, le voilà renvoyé de l'autre côté de l'océan des soupirs. Pour retourner en Almery et enfin se venger, Cugel se lance donc dans un nouveau périple foisonnant de dangers et de créatures farfelues... Une nouvelle fois, il lui faudra user de stratagèmes et de cette diplomatie sans scrupules qui lui ont si souvent permis de se sortir de situations compromettantes. Mais si la chance sourit aux audacieux, il semble bien que le pire menace toujours les filous. Et l'atout dont il dispose, cet objet magique et puissant qu'Iucounu convoite par-dessus tout, ne sera sans doute pas de trop pour l'aider à triompher de son perfide ennemi...

Scoundrel Cugel is sent far away, by a magician he has wronged, to retrieve magical lenses that reveal the Overworld. Goaded by a homesick monster magically attached to his liver, he journeys across wastelands home to Almery. With a cult group on a pilgrimage, he crosses the Silver Desert, and meets more danger and betrayal as he betrays others.

Seekers of wisdom and beauty include lovely lost women, eccentric wizards and man-eating melancholy deodands. Twk-men ride dragonflies and trade information for salt. There are monsters and demons. Each being is morally ambiguous: the evil are charming, the good are dangerous.

Contents:
Sail 25 (1962)
Ullward's Retreat (1958)
The Last Castle (1966)
Abercrombie Station (1952)
The Moon Moth (1961)
Rumfuddle (1973)

A spaceship, propelled by a prototype photon engine, sets off for Venus, which at that time, is an enigmatic and unexplored planet covered by clouds. The tasks of the crew are a) to test the prototype engine in field conditions and b) to locate and set radio beacons on the s.c. "Uranium Golconda" (a place with incredibly large heavy metals deposits), presumably, found somewhere on the second planet of the Solar System.
As the crew ventures into the depths of Venus, unknown dangers take them out one by one, so only a half of them returns home after accomplishing the mission—all badly damaged, both physically and mentally. However, their feat was the first milestone in colonizing Venus and the first step into the 22nd century.

The Bell Jar chronicles the crack-up of Esther Greenwood: brilliant, beautiful, enormously talented, and successful, but slowly going under—maybe for the last time. Sylvia Plath masterfully draws the reader into Esther's breakdown with such intensity that Esther's insanity becomes completely real and even rational, as probable and accessible an experience as going to the movies. Such deep penetration into the dark and harrowing corners of the psyche is an extraordinary accomplishment and has made The Bell Jar a haunting American classic.

This Everyman’s Library edition–containing in one volume all three cantos, Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso–includes an introduction by Nobel Prize—winning poet Eugenio Montale, a chronology, notes, and a bibliography. Also included are forty-two drawings selected from Botticelli's marvelous late-fifteenth-century series of illustrations.
Translated in this edition by Allen Mandelbaum, The Divine Comedy begins in a shadowed forest on Good Friday in the year 1300. It proceeds on a journey that, in its intense recreation of the depths and the heights of human experience, has become the key with which Western civilization has sought to unlock the mystery of its own identity.
Mandelbaum’s astonishingly Dantean translation, which captures so much of the life of the original, renders whole for us the masterpiece of that genius whom our greatest poets have recognized as a central model for all poets.

The novel begins in Monte Carlo, where our heroine is swept off her feet by the dashing widower Maxim de Winter and his sudden proposal of marriage. Orphaned and working as a lady's maid, she can barely believe her luck. It is only when they arrive at his massive country estate that she realizes how large a shadow his late wife will cast over their lives--presenting her with a lingering evil that threatens to destroy their marriage from beyond the grave.
First published in 1938, this classic gothic novel is such a compelling read that it won the Anthony Award for Best Novel of the Century.

This is the story of the rise to national power of a desperately poor young man from the Texas Hill Country. The Path to Power reveals in extraordinary detail the genesis of the almost superhuman drive, energy, and ambition that set LBJ apart. It follows him from the Hill Country to New Deal Washington, from his boyhood through the years of the Depression to his debut as Congressman, his heartbreaking defeat in his first race for the Senate, and his attainment, nonetheless, at age 31, of the national power for which he hungered. In this book, we are brought as close as we have ever been to a true perception of political genius and the American political process. Means of Ascent, Book Two of The Years of Lyndon Johnson, was a number one national best seller and, like The Path to Power, received the National Book Critics Circle Award. "Powerful and stirring. A monumental political saga...It's an overwhelming experience to read The Path to Power." -- Christopher Lehmann-Haupt, The New York Times "Stands at the pinnacle of the biographical art." -- Donald Morris, Houston Post "By every measure -- depth of research, brilliance of conception, the seamless flow of the prose -- The Path to Power is a masterpiece of biography." -- Dan Cryer, Newsday "A superb and unique biography...Meticulous in research, grand in scale, this is a major work that will remain a tower of its kind." -- Barbara Tuchman "An awesome achievement! Not only a historical but a literary event...An epic biography...What brings Caro's story -- and it is a story -- to life is his astonishing concern for the humanity of his characters: the plight of a Hill Country family; the reserve of Lady Bird Johnson; the lonely integrity of Sam Rayburn." -- Peter Prescott, Newsweek

America's top military leaders are scrutinized as Puryear ponders what prepared our generals for the terrible responsibilities they bore during World War II, Korea, Vietnam, the Gulf War and on to today.

"Great philosophical biographies can be counted on one hand. Monk's life of Wittgenstein is such a one."--"The Christian Science Monitor."

Acclaimed by many as the world's greatest novel,
provides a vast panorama of contemporary life in Russia and of humanity in general. In it Tolstoy uses his intense imaginative insight to create some of the most memorable characters in all of literature. Anna is a sophisticated woman who abandons her empty existence as the wife of Karenin and turns to Count Vronsky to fulfil her passionate nature - with tragic consequences. Levin is a reflection of Tolstoy himself, often expressing the author's own views and convictions.
Throughout, Tolstoy points no moral, merely inviting us not to judge but to watch. As Rosemary Edmonds comments, 'He leaves the shifting patterns of the kaleidoscope to bring home the meaning of the brooding words following the title, 'Vengeance is mine, and I will repay.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television “family.” But when he meets an eccentric young neighbor, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

When
first shocked, amazed, and delighted millions in the late 1960s, the novel was quickly recognized as a classic. Since then, its fame has grown steadily among the multitudes who have read the novel or seen the film based on it. Yet, along with almost universal acclaim, a host of questions has grown more insistent through the years:
Who or what transformed Dave Bowman into the Star-Child? What purpose lay behind the transformation? What would become of the Star-Child?
What alien purpose lay behind the monoliths on the Moon and out in space?
What could drive HAL, a stable, intelligent computer, to kill the crew? Was HAL really insane? What happened to HAL and the spaceship Discovery after Dave Bowman disappeared?
Would there be a sequel?
Now all those questions and many more have been answered. In this stunning sequel to his international bestseller, Clarke has written what will truly be one of the great books of the '80s. Cosmic in sweep, eloquent in its depiction of Man's place in the Universe, and filled with the romance of space, this novel is a monumental achievement.

One thousand years after the Jupiter mission to explore the mysterious Monolith had been destroyed, after Dave Bowman was transformed into the Star Child, Frank Poole drifted in space, frozen and forgotten, leaving the supercomputer HAL inoperable. But now Poole has returned to life, awakening in a world far different from the one he left behind--and just as the Monolith may be stirring once again . . .