In 1903, a student at a military academy sent some of his verses to a well-known Austrian poet, requesting an assessment of their value. The older artist, Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926), replied to the novice in this series of letters — an amazing archive of remarkable insights into the ideas behind Rilke's greatest poetry. The ten letters reproduced here were written during an important stage in Rilke's artistic development, and they contain many of the themes that later appeared in his best works. The poet himself afterwards stated that his letters contained part of his creative genius, making this volume essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers, and anyone with an interest in Rilke, German poetry, or the creative impulse.

Rich is fifteen and plays guitar. When his girlfriend asks him to perform at protest rally, he jumps at the chance. Unfortunately, the police show up, and so does Rich’s dad. He’s in big trouble. Again. To make matters worse, this happens near the anniversary of his uncle’s death from a drug overdose years ago. Rich’s dad always gets depressed this time of year, but whenever Rich asks questions about his late uncle, his dad shuts down. Frustrated by his dad’s silence, Rich sneaks into his office and breaks into a locked cabinet that holds his dad’s prized possession: an electric guitar signed by Jimi Hendrix. Before he knows it, Rich is transported to the side of a road in Upstate New York with a beautiful girl bending over him. It will take him a while to realize it’s 1969, he’s at Woodstock, and the girl’s band of friends includes his fifteen-year-old dad and his uncle, who’s still alive. What Rich learns, who he meets, and what he does could change his life forever.

By turns brilliantly comic and emotionally moving, this New York Times #1 bestseller is hailed as a riveting entertainment and certainly one of the funniest novels of the year (Chicago Sun-Times).

A Hollywood millionaire with a terror of death, whose personal physician happens to be working on a theory of longevity-these are the elements of Huxley's caustic and entertaining satire on man's desire to live indefinitely. "A highly sensational plot that will keep astonishing you to practically the final sentence." -"The New Yorker."

Millionaire bad boy Jordan Fawkes has problems. **Big problems.** That molten-hot intern he hooked up with at Comic-Con is now his assistant. No one can know they’re the stars of the cosplay sex tape that broke the Internet. Business school hopeful April Weiss has drama. **Big drama.** Working under the CFO of Draco Multimedia should be the opportunity of a lifetime for her, but Jordan Fawkes is the boss from Hell—a *sexier-than-sin* boss from Hell who holds all the cards for her future career. **And then there’s the small problem of a certain video…** ***This novel can be read as a stand-alone***

"An extended love letter to a magical San Francisco." --New York Times Book Review When an ordinary househusband and his ambitious wife decide to start a family, they discover there's more to making a baby then meets the eye. Help arrives in the form of a grieving gay neighbor, a visiting monarch, and the dashing young lieutenant who defects from her yacht. Bittersweet and profoundly affecting, Babycakes was the first work of fiction to acknowledge the arrival of AIDS. "Armistead is a true original. His tales are bang up-to-date. They will surprise and maybe even shock you, but, I promise, they will make you laugh." --Ian McKellen "Maupin has a genius for observation. His characters have the timing of vaudeville comics, flawed by human frailty and fueled by blind hop." --Denver Post "Armistead Maupin's San Francisco saga careens beautifully on." -- New York Times Book Review

Part of a world I loathe. Part of a family who hates me more than I hate myself. Living with a girl who reminds me of my darkness. I'm. In. Hell. Also known as the Cosa Nostra. My life was over the minute I stepped off that plane. Son to a murdered mob boss. Heir to a throne of murder and lies. My name is Dante Nicolasi. And there will be blood.

From the bestselling author of Kafka on the Shore and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle comes this superb collection of twenty-four stories that generously expresses Murakami’s mastery of the form. From the surreal to the mundane, these stories exhibit his ability to transform the full range of human experience in ways that are instructive, surprising, and relentlessly entertaining. Here are animated crows, a criminal monkey, and an iceman, as well as the dreams that shape us and the things we might wish for. Whether during a chance reunion in Italy, a romantic exile in Greece, a holiday in Hawaii, or in the grip of everyday life, Murakami’s characters confront grievous loss, or sexuality, or the glow of a firefly, or the impossible distances between those who ought to be closest of all.

Still unattached and childless at fifty-nine, world-renowned anthropologist Gray Kaiser is seemingly invincible—and untouchable. Returning to make a documentary at the site of her first great triumph in Kenya, she is accompanied by her faithful middle-aged assistant, Errol McEchern, who has loved her for years in silence. When sexy young graduate assistant Raphael Sarasola arrives on the scene, Gray is captivated and falls hopelessly in love—before an amazed and injured Errol's eyes. As he follows the progress of their affair with jealous fascination, Errol watches helplessly from the sidelines as a proud and fierce woman is reduced to miserable dependence through subtle, cruel, and calculating manipulation.

A New York Times–bestselling trilogy about the ancient Greek kingdom of Macedon and its leader from an author hailed by Hilary Mantel as “a shining light.” Fire from Heaven is a gripping account of the formative years of Alexander’s life. The story tells of his complex relationship with his parents; of his two great bonds—to his horse, Oxhead, and to his dearest friend and eventual lover, Hephaistion—and of the army he commands when he is barely an adult. Coming of age during the battles for southern Greece, Alexander the Great first takes someone’s life at age twelve and swiftly eliminates his rivals as soon as he comes to power, emerging in this novel as a captivating and complex figure. The iconic Persian Boy centers on the Macedon king as seen through the eyes of his lover and most faithful attendant, the eunuch Bagoas. When Bagoas is very young, his father is murdered and he is sold as a slave to King Darius of Persia. Then, when Alexander conquers the land, he is given Bagoas as a gift, and the boy is besotted. This passion comes at a time when much is at stake—Alexander has two wives, conflicts are ablaze, and plots on his life abound. The result is a riveting account of a great conqueror’s years of triumph and, ultimately, heartbreak. In Funeral Games, a bloody struggle for power rages after the death ofAlexander, leaving an empire that extends from the Adriatic Sea to the Indus River. The power players include Ptolemy, two father-son teams, and a cadre of influential women—not least of whom is Eurydike, whose plan is to marry Alexander’s disabled brother, Arridaios. Brimming with outsize personalities, brazen plots, and a sweeping sense of history, Funeral Games brings to vivid life the world of Alexander the Great, and the seismic tumult in the wake of his death. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary Renault including rare images of the author.  “Mary Renault is a shining light to both historical novelists and their readers. She does not pretend the past is like the present, or that the people of ancient Greece were just like us. She shows us their strangeness; discerning, sure-footed, challenging our values, piquing our curiosity, she leads us through an alien landscape that moves and delights us.” —Hilary Mantel

Leonard English, a sad and intense young man recovering from a suicide attempt, comes to Provincetown on Cape Cod to take a job as a disc jockey-cum-private detective. Provincetown is a last outpost of civilization, an end of the earth, a resort town emptied by autumn, where many of those who wear skirts are not women and many of the women do not love men. On his first day there, English encounters a beautiful young woman at Mass and falls desperately in love with her, but Leanna turns out to be gay; and English's first assignment as a detective, a search for the elusive artist Gerald Twinbrook, is equally frustrating. As autumn turns to winter and Leonard's anguish mounts, his desperate quests - for Twinbrook, for love, for redemption - take on an increasingly apocalyptic coloring.

Willa Cather's best known novel; a narrative that recounts a life lived simply in the silence of the southwestern desert. BONUS: The edition includes an excerpt from The Selected Letters of Willa Cather. 

Molloy is Samuel Beckett’s most celebrated novel, and his first published work to be written in French, ushering in a period of concentrated creativity in the late 1940s and early 1950s which included the companion novels Malone Dies and The Unnamable . The tale of Molloy, old and ill, remembering and forgetting, scarcely human, begets a double plot involving the spinsterish Moran, a private detective sent to search him out, whose own deterioration during the quest shadows that of the hero. Above all, the eponymous narrator of Molloy calls into being a world and its tribulations at the end of a pencil, with finicking and irresistible certainty, while trading larger uncertainties with the reader.

Conservative and working-class, Jean Macquart is an experienced, middle-aged soldier in the French army, who has endured deep personal loss. When he first meets the wealthy and mercurial Maurice Levasseur, who never seems to have suffered, his hatred is immediate. But after they are thrown together during the disastrous Franco-Prussian war of 1870-71, the pair are compelled to understand one other. Forging a profound friendship, they must struggle together to endure a disorganised and brutal war, the savage destruction of France's Second Empire and the fall of Napoleon III. One of the greatest of all war novels, The Debacle is the nineteenth novel in Zola's great Rougon-Macquart cycle. A forceful and deeply moving tale of close friendship, it is also a fascinating chronicle of the events that were to lead, in the words of Zola himself, to 'the murder of a nation'.