These eight tales of mystery and the supernatural feature sorcerers, the Grim Reaper in a horse-drawn coach, a beguiling bird of death, a long-dead saint turned devil, and a whole retinue of creatures of the night. Claude Seignolle, distinguished French ethnographer and folklorist and author of more than twenty-three volumes of short stories and novels, is a master of the “rustic” tale, which depicts folklore and popular traditions of the French countryside. He incarnates Satan as an entity sharing human traits, an evil spirit who identifies himself with human suffering. Seignolle’s Gothic stories are not meant merely to terrorize, however; they are intended to revive an oral tradition in danger of becoming extinct. These vignettes, selected and translated into English by Eric H. Deudon, are charged with poetry and mystery; as Lawrence Durrell notes in his foreword, they are strong, truthful, and intense. Seignolle brings to life the wealth of popular legend; by intertwining the boundaries of the real and the supernatural, he reveals that the least conspicuous or most ordinary objects of everyday life can possess unexpected and formidable dimensions. Claude Seignolle’s fiction works have been translated into eight languages and adapted for both theater and cinema. These stories will delight anyone who enjoys Gothic tales and the enchanted territory of the fantastic. **

First published in 1983, Murder in the Darkis Margaret Atwood's seventh work of fiction or her tenth book of poetry, depending on how you slice it. These short prose forms range from fictionalized autobiography through prose-poetry, mini-romance, and miniscience fiction. A feast of comic entertainment, Murder in the Darkis Atwood at her wittiest, most thoughtful, and most provoking. From the eBook edition.

A sequel to Orbitsville . Alien beings, Ultrans, built an enormous sphere, millions of times the size of Earth, which contains its own sun as a trap for sentient beings of the universe. The artificial world attracts the world’s population to such an extent that soon Earth is a half-deserted historical curiosity. Scientist Garry Dallen learns of the Ultrans’ plans second before Orbitsville and its population are whisked millions of light years into outer space.

SUMMARY:The Confederacy's best operator is assigned to take over the mind of an assassin on the planet Medusa and overthrow the dictator, Lord Talant Ypsir

Sir Nicholas Grenville fought a disastrous duel for Laura Milbanke's honor, and, believing himself dying, he married her so she wouldn't be poverty-stricken. But the baronet didn't die. Laura took him to his home, King's Cliff, where beautiful Augustine Townsend awaited him. Laura had a decision to make: whether to fight for her husband or leave with attractive Daniel Tregarron for the New World. Regency Romance by Sandra Heath; originally published by Signet

DIRTY HARRY IS GUNNING FOR BLOOD—STALKING A KILLER PROTECTED BY THE POWER OF THE U.S. GOVERNMENT! The Magnum-powered action doesn't stop for Dirty Harry—not even on Christmas Eve. Now Harry’s after a killer who celebrates the holiday season by shoving women beneath the wheels of speeding subway trains. But when he unmasks the killer as a hit-man for a renegade government scientist, Harry himself is marked for death. With the most powerful handgun ever made in his hands, Harry must blow that scientist to kingdom come or never live to see the New Year himself.

More than three dozen of the best and most popular stories by the acknowledged master of the short science fiction story. The thirty-nine works contained in this volume—twenty-six from the author's ten other Open Road collections, plus thirteen additional pieces unique to this volume—include these vintage Sheckley stories: "The Eye of Reality," "The Language of Love," "The Accountant," "A Wind Is Rising," "The Robot Who Looked Like Me," "The Mnemone," "Warm," "The Native Problem," "Fishing Season," "Shape," "Beside Still Waters," "Silversmith Wishes," "Meanwhile, Back at the Bromide," "Fool's Mate," "Pilgrimage to Earth," "All the Things You Are," "The Store of the Worlds," "Seventh Victim," "Cordle to Onion to Carrot," "Is That What People Do?", "The Prize of Peril," "Fear in the Night," "Can You Feel Anything When I Do This?", "The Battle," "The Monsters," and "The Petrified World."This volume also includes the following uncollected Sheckley tales: "Five Minutes Early," "Miss...

“Anyone who has had experience of the sad and subtle ways in which human beings torment one another under license of family ties will appreciate the merits of A.B. Yehoshua’s A Late Divorce.” —London Review of BooksA powerful story about a family—and a country —in crisis.The father of three grown children comes back to Israel to get a divorce from his wife of many years; another woman, newly pregnant, awaits him in America. Narrated in turn by each family member—husband and wife, sons and daughter, young grandson—the drama builds to a crescendo at the traditional family gathering on Passover Eve.“Each character here is brilliantly realized . . . Thank goodness for a novel that is ambitious and humane and that is about things that really matter”—New Statesman"A master storyteller whose tales reveal the inner life of a vital, conflicted nation.” — Wall Street Journal

Never before published in English, Orhan Pamuk’s second novel is the story of a Turkish family gathering in the shadow of the impending military coup of 1980.In an old mansion in Cennethisar, a former fishing village near Istanbul, a widow, Fatma, awaits the annual summer visit of her grandchildren. She has lived in the village for decades, ever since her husband, an idealistic young doctor, ran afoul of the sultan’s grand vizier and arrived to serve the poor fishermen. Now mostly bedridden, she is attended by her constant servant Recep, a dwarf -- and the doctor’s illegitimate son. Despite mutual dependency, there is no love lost between mistress and servant, who have very different recollections -- and grievances -- from the early years, before Cennethisar grew into a high-class resort surrounding the family house, now in shambles.Though eagerly anticipated, Fatma’s grandchildren bring little consolation. The eldest, Faruk, a dissipated historian, wallows in alcohol as he laments his inability to tell the story of the past from the kaleidoscopic pieces he finds in the local archive; his sensitive leftist sister, Nilgün, has yet to discover the real-life consequences of highminded politics; and Metin, a high school nerd, tries to keep up with the lifestyle of his spoiled society schoolmates while he fantasizes about going to America -- an unaffordable dream unless he can persuade his grandmother to tear down her house. But it is Recep’s nephew Hasan, a high school dropout, lately fallen in with right-wing nationalists, who will draw the visiting family into the growing political cataclysm issuing from Turkey’s tumultuous century-long struggle for modernity. By turns deeply moving, hilarious, and terrifying, Silent House pulses with the special energy of a great writer’s early work even as it offers beguiling evidence of the mature genius for which Orhan Pamuk would later be celebrated the world over.

Gambler, rogue, and con-artiste, Lando Calrissian was born with a well-developed taste for the good life. More comfortable at the dealer's end of a fast shuffle than at the rear end of a blaster, Lando always had his sensors scanning for the chance to pick up easy credits. So when he heard that the planets of the Rafa System were practically buried in ancient alien treasure, he hopped aboard the Millennium Falcon and brushed up on his rusty astrogation. He never stopped to think that someone might be conning the con man!

Travel with your favorite Star Trek III characters into five new and original short stories. Join the Enterprise crew as they take their crippled starship into orbit around Azphari, where they meet the strange and dangerously curious people of that planet in THE AZPHARI ENIGMA. Go with Lieutenant Commander Uhura to her home in the United States of Africa where she finds her past and present colliding in life-and-death struggle in THE JUNGLES OF MEMORY. And on the drab and frozen planet of Osler, meet 7-year-old Pandora, sole survivor at an experiment gone wrong, a child with powers and the willingness to use them to protect her privacy and the secret she must hide in AS OLD AS FOREVER. These stories and more will thrill and enthrall all Star Trek fans!

Seven Against the Unknown For centuries the human outcasts of Mars lived wild, independent lives in the Martian outback called the Ruck. But then the mysterious men of the "New Clan" came to preach total rebellion against the Mother Planet—and that Earth's U.N. Command could not allow. So it sent a team of its best officers to learn the secrets of the "New Clan." Unfortunately, to do the job right, the Terrans would have to cooperate with their worst enemies—the Ruckers!

When Zane shot Death, he learned, too late, that he would have to assume his place, speeding over the world riding his pale horse, and ending the lives of others. Sooner than he would have thought possible, Zane found himself being drawn to Satan's plot. Already the Prince of Evil was forging a trap in which Zane must act to destroy Luna, the woman he loved…unless he could discover the only way out…. The first novel of the INCARNATIONS OF IMMORTALITY series.

Completed while he was dying, William Goyen's Arcadio is one of the most affecting and imaginative farewells to life ever written. Arcadio, whose voice is inimitably Goyenesque, is a creature from beyond the normal walk of life. Half man, half woman, raised in a whorehouse and for years the veteran exhibitionist in an itinerant circus sideshow, he has escaped from the show and has been wandering in a quest for his lost family. Speaking intimately to the reader, he tells the bizarre and fantastic tale of his life.