I Am Legend and Other Stories

      Richard Matheson
$value['title']

Robert Neville is the last living man on Earth...but he is not alone. Every other man, woman, and child on Earth has become a vampire, and they are all hungry for Neville's blood. By day, he is the hunter, stalking the sleeping undead through the abandoned ruins of civilization. By night, he barricades himself in his home and prays for dawn. How long can one man survive in a world of vampires? I am legend -- Buried talents -- The near departed -- Prey -- Witch war -- Dance of the dead -- Dress of white silk -- Mad house -- The funeral -- From shadowed places -- Person to person.

Read online

  • 639

    On Green Dolphin Street

      Sebastian Faulks
$value['title']

Focusing on a richly significant time in our recent past, Sebastian Faulks, the bestselling author of Birdsong and Charlotte Gray, has written his first novel set in America. The year is 1960—a fascinating moment of transition in our country, when the comfortable Eisenhower years were drawing to a close and the ruthlessly competitive Nixon/Kennedy presidential campaign signaled the beginning of a starkly different decade. Mary van der Linden has recently moved from London to Washington, D.C., with her two children and her loving, admired husband, Charlie, who is posted to the British Embassy. Nearly forty, Mary has spent a lifetime as a loyal daughter, wife and mother. But in this year of so much change, she feels compelled to break away from her familiar world and is drawn to the freedom of New York City, which is effervescent with parties, jazz, three- martini lunches, girls in their summer dresses and men in their Sinatra hats and big ties. Greenwich Village is still charmingly bohemian, and Miles Davis’s hit tune “On Green Dolphin Street” is playing everywhere. Mary finds a hotel room in New York and then finds a lover, while back in Washington her husband drinks to forget the demands of his job, the absence of his wife and the Cold War paranoia that has overtaken the capital. Faulks breaks new ground with this novel: It is a love story, not a war story, and it is set in America rather than France. Yet readers of his two previous bestselling novels will recognize the close focus of the historical setting, the unforgettable characters and the gathering emotional power of the narrative. On Green Dolphin Street is a dramatic, tremendously moving novel that is certain to extend the American audience for this prodigiously talented author’s work.

Read online

  • 639

    Storm-Wake

      Lucy Christopher
$value['title']

Moss has grown up on the strangest and most magical of islands. Her father has a plan to control the tempestuous weather that wracks the shores. But the island seems to have a plan of its own once Callan -- a wild boy her age -- appears on its beaches. Her complex feelings for Callan shift with every tide, while her love for the island, and her father, are thrown into doubt... And when one fateful day, a young man from the outside world washes up on the beach, speaking of the Old World, nothing will ever be the same.

Read online

  • 639

    Murder Notes

      Lisa Renee Jones
$value['title']

“Must-read romantic suspense.” —USA Today’s *Happy Ever After* A heart-pounding thriller about a woman’s secrets—and a past that’s about to come out of hiding—from New York Times bestselling author Lisa Renee Jones. As an FBI profiler, it’s Lilah Love’s job to think like a killer. And she is very good at her job. When a series of murders surface—the victims all stripped naked and shot in the head—Lilah’s instincts tell her it’s the work of an assassin, not a serial killer. But when the case takes her back to her hometown in the Hamptons and a mysterious but unmistakable connection to her own life, all her assumptions are shaken to the core. Thrust into a troubled past she’s tried to shut the door on, Lilah’s back in the town where her father is mayor, her brother is police chief, and she has an intimate history with the local crime lord’s son, Kane Mendez. The two share a devastating secret, and only Kane understands Lilah’s own darkest impulses. As more corpses surface, so does a series of anonymous notes to Lilah, threatening to expose her. Is the killer someone in her own circle? And is she the next target?

Read online

  • 639

    Dark Surrendering

      Chelsea M. Cameron
$value['title']

Ryder Blythe is is a disaster. A red-headed, tattooed, dirty-talking disaster. But that doesn't stop Sloane Harris from being totally and absolutely attracted to him. She knows he's bad news, but she can't fight the way she feels. Plus, it's hard to avoid him since he's her best friend's fiancé's brother. But Sloane can't ignore the issues Ryder has following his unintentional overdose. Ryder flirts with darkness and Sloane's not sure if she can fight being dragged down with him. It seems like only a matter of time before Ryder will self-destruct. Is Sloane willing to take that risk? Or will Ryder finally get his life together and become the man she needs?

Read online

  • 639

    Num8ers

      Rachel Ward
$value['title']

Numbers that pop into her head when she looks into someone’s eyes. They’re dates, the numbers. Dates predicting with brute accuracy each person’s death. Burdened by such grim knowledge, Jem avoids relationships. Until she meets Spider, another outsider, and takes a chance. Maybe they can find happiness together, if only in the brief time that remains before his expiration date. But on a trip to London, Jem foresees a chilling chain of events: The city’s a target. The clock’s running out. The countdown is on to a blowup!

Read online

  • 639

    The Passion of the Purple Plumeria

      Lauren Willig
$value['title']

Colonel William Reid has returned home from India to retire near his children, who are safely stowed in an academy in Bath. Upon his return to the Isles, however, he finds that one of his daughters has vanished, along with one of her classmates. Having served as second-in-command to the Pink Carnation, one of England’s most intrepid spies, it would be impossible for Gwendolyn Meadows to give up the intrigue of Paris for a quiet life in the English countryside—especially when she’s just overheard news of an alliance forming between Napoleon and an Ottoman Sultan. But, when the Pink Carnation’s little sister goes missing from her English boarding school, Gwen reluctantly returns home to investigate the girl’s disappearance. Thrown together by circumstance, Gwen and William must cooperate to track down the young ladies before others with nefarious intent get their hands on them. But Gwen’s partnership with quick-tongued, roguish William may prove to be even more of an adventure for her than finding the lost girls…

Read online

  • 639

    Nuns and Soldiers

      Iris Murdoch
$value['title']

Set in London and in the South of France, this brilliantly structured novel centers on two women: Gertrude Openshaw, bereft from the recent death of her husband, yet awakening to passion; and Anne Cavidge, who has returned in doubt from many years in a nunnery, only to encounter her personal Christ. A fascinating array of men and women hover in urgent orbit around them: the "Count," a lonely Pole obsessively reliving his émigré father's patriotic anguish; Tim Reede, a seedy yet appealing artist, and Daisy, his mistress; the manipulative Mrs. Mount; and many other magically drawn characters moving between desire and obligation, guilt and joy. This edition of Nuns and Soldiers includes a new introduction by renowned religious historian Karen Armstrong.

Read online

  • 639

    Joe College

      Tom Perrotta
$value['title']

For many college students, spring break means fun and sun in Florida. For Danny, a Yale junior, it means two weeks behind the wheel of the "Roach Coach," his father's lunch truck, which plies the parking lots of office parks in central New Jersey. But Danny can use the time behind the coffee urn to try to make sense of a love life that's gotten a little complicated. There's loyal and patient hometown honey Cindy and her recently dropped bombshell to contend with, and there's also lissome Polly back in New Haven--with her shifting moods, perfect thrift store dresses, and inconvenient liaison with a dashing professor. If girl problems aren't enough, there's the constant menace of the Lunch Monsters, a group of thugs who think Danny has planted the Roach Coach in their territory. Joe College is Tom Perrotta's warmest and funniest fiction yet, a comic journey into the dark side of love, higher education, and food service.

Read online

  • 639

    Out of Place: A Memoir

      Edward W. Said
$value['title']

From one of the most important intellectuals of our time comes an extraordinary story of exile and a celebration of an irrecoverable past. A fatal medical diagnosis in 1991 convinced Edward Said that he should leave a record of where he was born and spent his childhood, and so with this memoir he rediscovers the lost Arab world of his early years in Palestine, Lebanon, and Egypt. Said writes with great passion and wit about his family and his friends from his birthplace in Jerusalem, schools in Cairo, and summers in the mountains above Beirut, to boarding school and college in the United States, revealing an unimaginable world of rich, colorful characters and exotic eastern landscapes. Underscoring all is the confusion of identity the young Said experienced as he came to terms with the dissonance of being an American citizen, a Christian and a Palestinian, and, ultimately, an outsider. Richly detailed, moving, often profound, Out of Place depicts a young man's coming of age and the genesis of a great modern thinker.

Read online

  • 639

    Born in Twilight

      Maggie Shayne
$value['title']

Meeting a starving and beautiful vampire, Jameson Bryant is unable to resist giving her his blood and spending a night of passion with her, nine months after which their child is born. Meeting a starving and beautiful vampire, Jameson Bryant is unable to resist giving her his blood and spending a night of passion with her, nine months after which their child is born.

Read online

  • 638

    The Marble Faun; Or, The Romance of Monte Beni - Volume 2

      Nathaniel Hawthorne
$value['title']

Excerpt: ...every two touches of his brush, in order to have made the finished picture such a visible prayer as we behold it, in the guise of a prim angel, or a saint without the human nature. Through all these dusky centuries, his works may still help a struggling heart to pray. Perugino was evidently a devout man; and the Virgin, therefore, revealed herself to him in loftier and sweeter faces of celestial womanhood, and yet with a kind of homeliness in their human mould, than even the genius of Raphael could imagine. Sodoma, beyond a question, both prayed and wept, while painting his fresco, at Siena, of Christ bound to a pillar. In her present need and hunger for a spiritual revelation, Hilda felt a vast and weary longing to see this last-mentioned picture once again. It is inexpressibly touching. So weary is the Saviour and utterly worn out with agony, that his lips have fallen apart from mere exhaustion; his eyes seem to be set; he tries to lean his head against the pillar, but is kept from sinking down upon the ground only by the cords that bind him. One of the most striking effects produced is the sense of loneliness. You behold Christ deserted both in heaven and earth; that despair is in him which wrung forth the saddest utterance man ever made, "Why hast Thou forsaken me?" Even in this extremity, however, he is still divine. The great and reverent painter has not suffered the Son of God to be merely an object of pity, though depicting him in a state so profoundly pitiful. He is rescued from it, we know not how

Read online

  • 638

    The Planet Strappers

      Raymond Z. Gallun
$value['title']

Armchair fiction presents extra large paperback editions of the best in classic science fiction novels. “The Planet Strappers,” written by Raymond Z. Gallun, is a fine tale about the wilds of outer space. They started out as “The Bunch,” a group of student-astronauts in the back room of a store in Jarviston, Minnesota. They wanted off Earth, and they begged, borrowed, and built what they needed to make it all happen. “The Planet Strappers” got what they wanted—a start on the road to the stars. But no one brought up on Earth could have imagined what was waiting for them out there…out there in the blackness of outer space. In “The Planet Strappers,” Rayond Z. Gallun has written a story of the Day After Tomorrow—a story of what it will be like for the men who cross the space frontier. A story that some of us will be living…someday.

Read online

  • 638

    The Winds of Time

      James H. Schmitz
$value['title']

James H. Schmitz was a heck of a writer, and this story -- "The Winds of Time" -- is fascinating stuff. Star ships, aliens from the future, time travel, romance, cannibalism, pet humans and mute-but-brilliant aliens. . . . and, of course, it's got a hero who solves every problem by being smarter and trickier and better-prepared than we'd ever imagine being. But what would you expect? This story first appeared in John W. Campbell's Analog. Analog heroes did it with their brains. Us? We have to work. Schmitz is best known as a writer of "space opera" and for his strong female characters (such as Telzey Amberdon and Trigger Argee) who didn't conform to the "damsel in distress" stereotype typical of science fiction of the time.

Read online

  • 638

    Patty and Azalea

      Carolyn Wells
$value['title']

Carolyn Wells (June 18, 1862 – March 26, 1942) was an American author and poet. Born in Rahway, New Jersey,[1] she was the daughter of William E. and Anna Wells. She died at the Flower-Fifth Avenue Hospital in New York City in 1942 Wells had been married to Hadwin Houghton, the heir of the Houghton-Mifflin publishing empire founded by Bernard Houghton. Wells also had an impressive collection of volumes of poetry by others. She bequeathed her collection of Walt Whitman poetry, said to be one of the most important of its kind for its completeness and rarity, to the Library of Congress. After finishing school she worked as a librarian for the Rahway Library Association. Her first book, At the Sign of the Sphinx (1896), was a collection of charades. Her next publications were The Jingle Book and The Story of Betty (1899), followed by a book of verse entitled Idle Idyls (1900). After 1900, Wells wrote numerous novels and collections of poetry. Carolyn Wells wrote a total of more than 170 books. During the first ten years of her career, she concentrated on poetry, humor and children's books. According to her autobiography, The Rest of My Life (1937), it was around 1910 that she heard one of Anna Katherine Green's mystery novels being read aloud and was immediately captivated by the unravelling of the puzzle. From that point onward she devoted herself to the mystery genre. Among the most famous of her mystery novels were the Fleming Stone Detective Stories which

Read online

  • 638

    An American Robinson Crusoe

      Daniel Defoe
$value['title']

The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (of York, Mariner Who lived Eight and Twenty Years all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, where in all the Men perished but Himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates) is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719 and sometimes regarded as the first novel in English. The book is a fictional autobiography of the title character, an English castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical island near Venezuela, encountering Native Americans, captives, and mutineers before being rescued. This device, presenting an account of supposedly factual events, is known as a "false document" and gives a realistic frame story. Daniel Defoe was an English writer, journalist and spy, who gained enduring fame for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is notable for being one of the earliest practitioners of the novel and helped popularize the genre in Britain. In some texts he is even referred to as one of the founders, if not the founder, of the English novel. A prolific and versatile writer, he wrote over five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics (including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology and the supernatural). He was also a pioneer of economic journalism. Source: Wikipedia

Read online

  • 638

    The White Company

      Arthur Conan Doyle
$value['title']

A historical adventure set during the Hundred Years' War. The story follows a young man as he leaves the shelter of an abbey in England and becomes involved with Edward, the Black Prince's campaign in Spain. Doyle later wrote a prequel, titled "Sir Nigel", concerning the early life of one of the heroes in this novel. “We go to France, and from thence I trust to Spain, in humble search of a field in which we may win advancement and perchance some small share of glory. For this purpose I would have you know that it is not my wont to let any occasion pass where it is in any way possible that honor may be gained. I would have you bear this in mind, and give great heed to it that you may bring me word of all cartels, challenges, wrongs, tyrannies, infamies, and wronging of damsels. Nor is any occasion too small to take note of, for I have known such trifles as the dropping of a gauntlet, or the flicking of a breadcrumb, when well and properly followed up, lead to a most noble spear-running.” - Sir Nigel, “The White Company”

Read online

  • 638

    Premeditated Suspense

      Dan Schwartz
$value['title']

A dark tale in every sense of the word. Some actions we take take little to no thought, and then there are those things we do which take more planning than anyone suspected.www.banocanut.comThis is free sample of a collection of legends and short stories from the world of The Serpent and the Unicorn. Strange, funny, sad, touching, varied are the tales found within.

Read online

  • 638

    The Osiris Invasion: Book Two of Seeds of a Fallen Empire

      Anne Spackman
$value['title']

In The Osiris Invasion, the Earth of the future is attacked by an alien force known as the Orians who come from the Orion Stars.In The Osiris Invasion, the Earth of the future is attacked by an alien force known as the Orians who come from the Orion Stars. The Earth has suffered a second Dark Ages in the 22nd and 23rd century and recovered enough that they are planning to send an exploration mission to alpha centauri. However, an alien starship crashes on Earth, pursued by another group of aliens called the Orians, and the Earth of the future must deal with this alien invasion…

Read online

  • 638

    The Red Man

      Anna Reith
$value['title']

An archaeological dig unearths an ancient Celtic secret that should have stayed buried.Judy Fitzwater's comic mystery tour de force, originally published by Ballantine Books, is finally available in electronic format.Jennifer Marsh is a mystery writer with a stack of eight unpublished manuscripts and rejection letters to match filling her closet. She's sure that if she can just get famous for something, someone will have to publish her books. Why not murder?She'll find a target so mean that she'd actually be doing the world a favor by bumping him or her off. And she knows just the person:Penney Richmond, a high-powered literary agent who's made it her job to ruin people's lives. All Jennifer has to do is frame herself, do the deed, and come out with an iron-clad alibi, and she'll be well on her way to getting a three book deal. So what if she chickens out at the last minute? A vegetarian good girl who rescued a greyhound could never actually kill someone. But when Penney is found murdered and the police think Jennifer did it, she’d better find the real murderer before she goes away... for life.Along with her eccentric writer's group, spunky old ladies with a nose for sleuthing, her neurotic greyhound, and a sexy, sarcastic reporter named Sam, Jennifer embarks on a journey filled with danger, deception, and disguises that could leave her Dying to Get Published...

Read online

  • 638