Appearing in book form for the first time, The Atheist in the Attic is a suspenseful and vivid historical narrative, recreating the top-secret meeting between the mathematical genius Leibniz and the philosopher Spinoza caught between the horrors of the cannibalistic Dutch Rampjaar and the brilliant “big bang” of the Enlightenment. Also Delany’s “Racism and Science Fiction” combines scholarly research and personal experience in the unique true story of the first major African-American author in the genre. This collection features a bibliography, an author biography, and the candid and uncompromising Outspoken Interview.

Dawn has a lot to do this summer: spend time with her family, see her Stoneybrook friends, and, of course, baby-sit as much as possible! Then she and the BSC land some new clients: a feuding family, searching for a treasure that will settle a tricky will left by their eccentric father. Now Dawn has even more things she'd like to do. She's going to take care of her new charges. . . and while she's at it, she'll try to patch up the feud and solve the inheritance mystery. Can she do it all before she has to go back to California?

Too young for the army, one boy takes saving the city into his own hands. The Russian city of Leningrad is darkening with winter and war, and Georgi's family prepares for the worst. His sister, Marya, packs up the great artwork at the Hermitage museum for safekeeping, and their mother tends to the wounded soldiers. But at fourteen years old, Georgi is too young to join the army, and he wonders how he can possibly help his friends and family. As the city slowly starves from lack of food and hope, Georgi knows he can help his people survive, but he must face dangers as real as the battles on the front lines.

What would you do if your best friend was: 1. Imaginary? 2. An oversize blue chimp in surfer shorts? (Potentially embarrassing, but hey, no one else can see him . . . right?) 3. Proposing a plan to help you improve your life? 4. Did we say imaginary? 5. Driving you crazy?!?! Now you have an idea of what Willie Ryan’s life is like when he meets Dodger. It’s the beginning of a lot of trouble—and a friendship you’ll never forget!

Three historical mysteries span from the court of Louis XIV to Victorian London. Meet Émilie d’Armand, a young woman who witnesses corruption and murder in seventeenth-century France (The Bishop’s Lady), and Katherine Holloway, an English cook sought after by the wealthy, who finds herself embroiled in murder, assisted only by the mysterious Daniel McAdam, who is more than he seems (A Soupçon of Poison). Finally, explore the darker side of Regency London in an alternate look at that period from the point of view of an army soldier whose family has lost face (A Matter of Honor).

Hello? I think there's been some mistake. The life I ordered was the one with the gorgeous, helpful husband, the two well-mannered, angelic children, and the self-cleaning dream house. Here's what was delivered: Matt, the sort-of soul mate with great stories and sketchy domestic skills; Emily, a sweet little girl who could get carsick on a tricycle; weirdly sensitive toddler Jonah; and a home perpetually coated in grit produced by the renovation from hell. I'm pretty sure I didn't sign on for this. But is it wrong to wax nostalgic for a time when I actually used my suede brush on suede? When sex was a priority instead of a luxury? There is a return policy, right? I'm sure there's a perfectly reasonable explanation for why Matt was seen (by my best friend, in broad daylight) cuddling up to Girl With Purple Hair. And I'll find out what it is, just as soon as I have the nerve to confront him. Until then, I'll take refuge in work, mothering, and the somewhat flirtatious attentions of the P.I. I hired to follow my husband around.

When I realized I'd slept with my wife's twin sister, I'd thought everything was going to be over. My marriage. My agreement with my father. But my wife didn't seem to know and I wanted to keep it that way. There was one little problem. I couldn't seem to let things go. Blayne Westmore has just found out that he hasn't been sleeping with his wife, gorgeous former model Livie Dusek. Instead, he's been sleeping with her identical twin, Katka. He knows he should break it off, but there's something about her that draws him to her. Now he just needs to figure out what that something is. Livie's thankful when her husband suddenly stops trying to make moves on her, but when she figures out why, she's surprised at how much it bothers her. She knows it shouldn't. Their marriage is business only, after all. She's all but expected Blayne to find women to warm his bed. She just never thought it would be her sister. And she never thought she would care. Don't miss out on book three of M.S. Parker's steamy series, Twisted Affair.

Presenting Vol. 2 of Blindfold, the brand new bestselling erotic romance series from MS Parker and Cassie Wild. I knew it wasn't my fault that my boss, Isadora Lang, had gone missing. I was just her assistant, not her bodyguard. Why, then, did I feel so guilty? Right, because I'd been fooling around with her older brother, Ash, when she'd been taken. Worst mistake of my life. When heiress Isadora Lang disappears from her house, her brother Ashford is convinced that she's been kidnapped. The police, however, do not believe him. They think she just left on her own. As more time passes, it becomes clear that something isn't right. Be sure to check out the second sizzling installment from M.S. Parker and Cassie Wild's Blindfold series.

From PEN Award–winning author Carol Lynch Williams comes an eerie and atmospheric coming-of-age tale about a girl who can talk to the dead—even if she would rather not. Evie Messenger knows that her family is different from other families. But it isn’t until her fifteenth birthday that the Messenger gift is revealed to her. Evie has the family’s gift—a special power. Soon she realizes she is able to see and talk to the dead—ghosts—often with no idea who the person was. Or as Evie says: “I see Dead People. It’s a Messenger gift.” That doesn’t mean she wants the Messenger gift. So Evie tries to ignore it but soon she finds she cannot. Can Evie find a way to live her life without letting her power take over? And what if the dead person is someone close to Evie’s family?

New York Times bestselling author Jim Harrison is one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. In The Ancient Minstrel, Harrison delivers three novellas that highlight his phenomenal range as a writer, shot through with his trademark wit and keen insight into the human condition Harrison has tremendous fun with his own reputation in the title novella, about an aging writer in Montana who spars with his estranged wife, with whom he still shares a home, weathers the slings and arrows of literary success, and tries to cope with the sow he buys on a whim and the unplanned litter of piglets that follow soon after. In Eggs, a Montana woman reminisces about staying in London with her grandparents, and collecting eggs at their country house. Years later, having never had a child, she attempts to do so. And in The Case of the Howling Buddhas, retired Detective Sunderson—a recurring character from Harrison’s New York Times bestseller The Great Leader and The Big Seven—is hired as a private investigator to look into a bizarre cult that achieves satori by howling along with howler monkeys at the zoo. Fresh, incisive, and endlessly entertaining, with moments of both profound wisdom and sublime humor, The Ancient Minstrel is an exceptional reminder of why Jim Harrison is one of the most cherished and important writers at work today.

Enslaved is book number 14 in the Brides of the Kindred series. It is a plus-length novel of around 168,000 words Anything for you Mistress… Thrace S’ver is an unwilling slave. Drugged and bound, he is taken to the Flesh Bazaar and put up for sale to the highest bidder. But this is not the first time Thrace has been on the auction block—he has a past full of horrors he doesn’t intend to repeat. Desperate to be free, he swears he’ll kill whoever buys him. Lonnara Trin is the Captain of a merchant ship from the all female planet of Zetta Prime where sexual relations with a male are considered unnatural and wrong. She has no use for males personally, but she needs a big, muscular slave or her business will suffer—Thrace fits the bill. Soon Mistress and slave are embroiled in a desperate conflict which draws them intimately together. To her surprise, Trin actually begins to have feelings for her slave. And though Thrace swore to be free, he finds himself devoted to his new Mistress. When their differences threaten to tear them apart, Trin tries to grant Thrace his freedom. But she doesn’t realize that his heart has already been… Enslaved.

There's a new psychic on the scene, and he's ready for action: introducing Lucas Jordan, the latest addition to Noah Bishop's crackerjack Special Crimes Unit. Lucas Jordan has an extraordinary psychic skill that police all over the country find invaluable: he locates missing people. And since being recruited by Noah Bishop for his FBI Special Crimes Unit, Lucas has learned to hone his remarkable ability so that what he does seems little short of miraculous. He's called in on what appear to be a series of ordinary kidnappings-for-ransom, but almost immediately Lucas realizes the situation is far from ordinary -- and more deadly than anything he's ever faced before. Because a brilliant, twisted madman is out to win a sick game, matching his wits against the best hunter he can find: Lucas. From the Hardcover edition.

The Rescue, book two in the series, is set in 1811 England. When Anne Gardiner slips from a ladder into the arms of a stranger, her father, Colonel Gardiner, deems the innocent embrace cause for immediate marriage. Weston eventually sees that the “marriage” was performed for the Colonel’s sake and that Anne had no choice. When he learns that she’s sacrificed her own reputation to protect his name, Weston finds himself drawn to Anne. But will these two guarded people give love a chance? And can they trust God enough to step into a new, real relationship?

The years since first he gained the Starburst Crown have been difficult ones for Coronal Lord Prestimion and the vast, unfathomable realm he rules. But finally peace has been restored to Majipoor. And now it is time for Prestimion to name the able Prince Dekkeret his succeeding Coronal and to descend to the Labyrinth as Pontifex. But a power from a dark past that both men believed was dead is stirring once again -- an evil more potent and devastating than either leader dares to remember. Once, decades past, a then knight-initiate Dekkeret had his dreams stolen from him. His quest for recovery led him to a remarkable helmet that could invade the psyches of sleeping foes, a device the newly anointed Coronal Prestimion later used to defeat his enemy Dantirya Sambail, tyrant of the continent Zimroel. In the fires of civil war, the terrible weapon was destroyed forever -- or so it was believed. The noxious weed of rebellion was torn out at its roots but its seeds have borne frightening fruit. Dantirya Sambail is dead, and the hungry jackals who ran at his heels now scheme to recover his lost lands and power. At their head is the tyrant's former henchman Mandralisca -- a villain of great wiles and icy heart, who somehow has unleashed a devastating plague of the mind upon Prestimion's subjects. Dark visions are invading the sleep of those loyal to the Lords and the Lady of Majipoor -- soul-shattering scenes of madness and monstrosity, driving those inflicted to commit horrible, destructive acts. And the dark wave is flowing ever-closer to the throne, seeping beneath the doors of the 30,000 rooms of the towering edifice atop Castle Mount ... and into sacrosanct depths of the Imperial Labyrinthitself.

No one does romantic suspense better than Jayne Ann Krentz. Now, the New York Times bestselling author of Trust No One and River Road delivers a novel that twists and turns into a read that will leave you breathless.Madeline and Daphne were once as close as sisters—until a secret tore them apart. Now it might take them to their graves.They knew his name, the man who tried to brutally attack twelve-year-old Madeline in her grandmother's hotel. They thought they knew his fate. He wouldn't be bothering them anymore...ever. Still their lives would never be the same. Madeline has returned to Washington after her grandmother's mysterious death. And at the old, abandoned hotel—a place she never wanted to see again—a dying man's last words convey a warning: the secrets she and Daphne believed buried forever have been discovered.Now, after almost two decades, Madeline and Daphne will be reunited in friendship and in...

Claire McIntyre tried to ignore the murders and the city's mounting fear. And she tried to remember the exquisite pleasure of her new life and her new love, Marc Bonnard. But as the brutal deaths continued, Claire realized she had to outwit a killer who would find her, no matter where she hid.

Set both in a real and imaginary Manchester, Jeff Noon's story concerns a revolutionary lottery game that is engulfing the city in a tide of gambling fever. As a group of mathematics students look at the mind-numbing probabilities involved, they soon find more sinister realities. The Company has developed the nymphomation, and has the power to devour the city's dreams

This groundbreaking retrospective collection features the classic science fiction stories of Clifford D. Simak (1904-1988). When the Science Fiction Writers of America began bestowing their Grand Master awards, Simak was the third writer so honored. Only Robert Heinlein and Jack Williamson preceded him, and he received his award before such luminaries as Fritz Leiber, Isaac Asimov, and Ray Bradbury. Simak earned this distinction by producing, over a long period of time, a significant body of popular, respected, often award-winning work, including his classics City and Way Station, and many shorter works, eight of which are contained in this collection. Readers unfamiliar with Simak are in for a treat. More than half of the stories here were among the best stories of their respective years. "The Big Front Yard" (1958) won a Hugo. "A Death in the House" (1959) was selected by Judith Merril for Year's Best SF: Fifth Annual Edition. "Over the River and Through the Woods" (1965) made the cut for World's Best Science Fiction: 1966 edited by Donald Wollheim. Contents: A Death in the House The Big Front Yard Goodnight Mr. James Dusty Zebra Neighbor Over the River & Through the Woods Construction Shack Grotto of the Dancing Deer [He] wrote for so long and always so well that his excellence came to be taken for granted, as we take sunlight for granted until we go blind. - Poul Anderson I read Cliff's stories with particular attention, and I couldn't help but notice the simplicity and directness of the writing - the utter clarity of it. I made up my mind to imitate it, and I labored over the years to make my writing simpler, clearer, more uncluttered, to present my scenes on a bare stage. - Isaac Asimov Without Simak, science fiction would have been without its most humane element, its most humane spokesman for the wisdom of the ordinary person and the value of life lived close to the land. - James Gunn Good fantasy - and that includes science fiction - takes off from the known for its flights into the new. Cliff Simak was a master of the art. His known was the rural Midwest that he loved. His new could reach to the ends of space and time, but never beyond reality. Even his cosmic aliens always had half human dimensions that made them believable. I loved him, as so many did, for his unfailing warmth and a wit that was keen but never cruel. I heard from him often during the painful time after his wife's death. His own death touched me deeply, and I'm happy to see him remembered with this collection of his best-loved stories. - Jack Williamson I always loved his stories, short or long. He made me love them -and the rural America of his childhood - as much as he did. - Lester del Rey Ten years ago it would have been inconceivable that a volume of the best stories of Clifford Simak (author of the classic City) would not have been published by Putnam or Del Rey, but today we have to be grateful to the one-man firm of Tachyon Publications for preserving Over the River and Through the Woods, which includes some of Simak's best stories, including two Hugo Award winners. After all, Simak is dead, which means his career is flatlined, even if Robert Heinlein said, "to read science fiction is to read Simak. The reader who does not like Simak stories does not like science fiction at all." Simak was a master of a special kind of nostalgic science fiction that reconciled the values of his youth (the rural Midwest of the 1920s) with the larger universe. Material that became ludicrous cliche in the hands of lesser writers - all those endless flying saucers landing in the hillbilly's back acre - was by Simak handled with elegance and dignity."A Death in the House" is typical: A farmer finds a dying alien. He does what he can, but that's very little. The farmer conceals the grave, wanting to give his "guest" that much dignity. But the alien is plantlike. It (or its young) sprouts out of the corpse. Human and alien struggle toward understanding. In "The Big Front Yard," a rural handyman finds his house transformed into a gateway to other worlds. The common people have the good sense; trouble starts when profiteers and the government get involved. The tone is light, friendly and clever. This is not to suggest that Simak was a writer with no hard edges. "Good Night Mr. James" is a horror story, about a duplicate human being created to destroy a particularly nasty alien illegally smuggled to Earth. But the gentler mode was more typical, and he could also write humor. "Dusty Zebra" is a long technological joke, maybe a bit slight to be included when a 50-year career must be distilled into 218 pages. Simak's last story, the last in the book, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," is about an immortal caveman, quite different from de Camp's "Gnarly Man." He is the original artist who painted that cave art the scientists keep finding; after all this time, he just has to tell someone. The story won both the Hugo and the Nebula for 1980, because both readers and fellow professionals wanted to say "thank you." - The Washington Post Book World Clifford D. Simak is another classic SF writer who staked out a distinctive territory based on his rural midwestern roots - only a couple hundred miles north of Bradbury's - but he never strayed very far from a few classic SF themes which he treated with considerably more rigor than Bradbury, if sometimes with as much sentimentality. Simak's City is at least as important to the history of SF as Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles - some would say more so, given its more challenging conceptual framework - and his other short stories are among the most enduring in the genre, as Over the River & Through the Woods, a new limited edition from Tachyon Publications, attests. Yet Simak, like Sturgeon, seems in danger of fading into the limbo of historical anthologies; while his work was once as widely available as that of any of the giants, today these stories seem almost like new discoveries - and are just as fresh. Part of the reason may be not that Simak's folksy language seems to belie the underlying sense of alienation and tragedy that characterizes much of his work; part may be due to the rediscovery of American regional idioms among younger SF writers from Terry Bisson to Nancy Kress . . . 'Over the River & Through the Woods' contains eight Simak stories from 1951 through 1980 - which means it includes none of the classic stories like "Desertion" or "Huddling Place", which later went to make up City, but does include his late Hugo and Nebula-winning masterpiece "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer" and the Hugo-winning "The Big Front Yard." One of the first things that comes to mind when rereading the latter story after several years - it concerns a characteristically laconic farmer with a dog named Towser (the only name Simak seems to have permitted for dogs) who finds on his property a gateway to distant worlds - is that few contemporary writers would have let such a simple and elegant premise be confined to a novella. Simak's focus is on the unimpressed rustic whose very lack of response to the wonder at his doorstep intensifies our own. When a rustic is impressed by an alien presence, such as in "A Death in the House," it is less likely to be from a sense of wonder than from a sense of companionship. Simak's roots may be firmly in SF, but he writes of alien encounters in a way Willa Cather might have written of them. Aliens are strange but unthreatening, and in some cases (as in "Neighbor") they can turn the entire neighborhood into a pastoral Shangri-la, isolated from the outside in a way that encapsulates what must be Simak's own drams of lost innocence. But Simak could write about more than wonderful things happening to remote farmers. "Good Night, Mr. James" is a very early treatment (1951) of what we would today call a cloning story, done with the kind of cynical humor that is needed for what is essentially a double- and triple-cross tale. It reveals Simak's healthy streak of humor, as does "Dusty Zebra," in which trivial objects are zapped into another dimension in return for high-tech wonders. "Construction Shack" ironically explores an almost Stapledonian notion of whole solar systems being engineered by ancient aliens (Pluto is the construction shack of the title), cast in terms of the matter-of-fact space jockeys so familiar from pulp SF. Simak may be at his best, however, when his theme is isolation and abandonment. The title story concerns children from the future sent back to the refuge of the 1890s. The best tale in the collection and one of the high points of Simak's late career, "The Grotto of the Dancing Deer," concerns an anthropologist who comes to realize that his assistant seems to know far too much about certain ancient cave paintings, and may in fact have been their creator. Simak's evocation, in a few pages, of the sheer loneliness of immortality and the daunting perspectives of time involved, again could be a lesson to a generation of younger writers, and reminds us brilliantly of what Simak was capable of. - Locus

Harvey is visited by a Caucasian man who wants spiritual healing from a First Nations man, but Harvey isn't the type of Indian to believe in spirits.It's been twenty-five years since the Shins and Briters escaped from Edge, and Perrin and Mahrree have enjoyed watching their posterity grow in peace. But nothing in the world is the same. With governments destroyed, villages renamed, and armies in control, chaos is swirling.None of that affects the General of Salem or Professor Shin, except for an old worldly story about Colonel Shin's downfall caused by his traitorous wife and his sergeant major, Shem Zenos.Lemuel Thorne, Perrin's former captain in Edge and now the general of the world's northern army, keeps the story alive as a painful and powerful reminder to his soldiers about treachery and heroism.While Perrin and Mahrree readily dismiss the tale, their adventure-hungry 18-year-old grandson, Young Perrin Shin, finds the story, the world, and even General Thorne too intriguing to ignore.Book 6 in the "Forest at the Edge" series: Part fantasy, part adventure, part humor, part romance, part mystery all equates to a wholly entertaining and unique family saga. You've never read anything quite like this before.

In this retelling of William Shakespeare’s classic , join C.E. Wilson as she breathes new life into Much Ado About Nothing, the first book in her Young Adult series Shakespeare for Everyone Else.Shakespeare’s work features some of the most memorable stories and characters ever created, yet for too many curious readers the combination of ultra-dense dialogue and unfamiliar historical settings make tackling the Bard’s work something between a tedious chore and a confusing mess of bird-bolts and quondam carpet-mongers.While it’s nearly impossible to replicate or improve on these works, it is (thanks to their timeless nature) possible to make them more accessible to a wider audience.In this retelling of William Shakespeare’s classic play, join C.E. Wilson as she breathes new life into Much Ado About Nothing, the first book in her Young Adult series Shakespeare for Everyone Else.