Ashen Sky

Barry Moser's extraordinarily detailed and evocative relief engravings decorate this translation of Pliny the Younger's two famous letters to Tacitus about the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in A.D. 79 and the death of his uncle, Pliny the Elder. Printed in black and white, the engravings are works of art that illustrate various descriptions in the letters. The text includes a brief description of the eruption of the volcano, concise biographies of Tacitus and of both Plinys, and a summary of how the texts of the two letters have survived until today.

I see your future, and I see my own. My future is terrifying. Ten years ago, on my twenty-first birthday, I discovered the bloodied body of my uncle who'd raised me. Rumor said a secret society known as The Whispers had tortured and killed him when he wouldn't turn over a magical pendant. Rumor said his niece-me-who'd disappeared right after, had the stone and chain. A series of small towns sheltered me before I landed in the beach city I've called home for seven years, eking out an anonymous living as a Tarot card reader. The cards help focus my far-sight. If you sit at my table, I will see your true future. I see my own, too. But my far-sight didn't warn me my apartment would be set on a fire or that a tiny blue dragon would save me from the flames. I certainly wasn't expecting Aiden Maddox-a too-good-looking trainer and bodyguard whom the dragon insists on hiring-or what his touch does to me. Now The Whispers are closing in. Again. An Ashen Sky features magic, romance, and a grumpy dragon with a deep and abiding love of bacon.

The book begins with the story of how Napoleon Bonaparte found himself in the house of Armand-Emmanuel du Plessis, the Duke of Richelieu and governor of Odessa, in 1807. A brief liaison with the duke’s 19-year-old Italian servant girl, Luisa Ravelli, resulted in the birth of a son. The bombing of Odessa by an Anglo-French squadron in 1854 and the landing of French troops in Odessa in 1918 had the objective of finding that illegitimate son.The protagonist of the book, Yevgeny Rivilis, is Bonaparte’s great-great-grandson and a Russian emigre who landed in New York in August 1996. His personal drama is compounded by the fact that his ex-wife, Sophia, from whom he is not formally divorced, proves to be the mistress of one of the terrorist leaders... This fact explains the additional interest that the security services have in him...Part two of the book recounts the cooperation and opposition between the FBI and the FSB, one of the successors to the KGB. The security services’ clandestine operations culminate in murders. Both sides suffer losses. An FBI agent and an FSB agent operating under diplomatic cover are victims of the secret war in New York. Sometime later two related murders occur: the killing in Moscow of Yuri Shchekochikhin, an opposition journalist and a member of the State Duma (July, 2003), and the slaying of Zelimkhan Yandarbiyev, the vice-president of Ichkeria in Doha, Qatar (February, 2004). Both events are indirectly linked to Sophia.The story unfolds in New York, Washington, Las Vegas, Paris, Copenhagen, Baghdad and Damascus.

This definitive anthology gathers stories, essays, memoirs, excerpts from novels, and poems by more than 130 Jewish writers of the past two centuries who worked in the Russian language. It features writers of the tsarist, Soviet, and post-Soviet periods, both in Russia and in the great emigrations, representing styles and artistic movements from Romantic to Postmodern. The authors include figures who are not widely known today, as well as writers of world renown. Most of the works appear here for the first time in English or in new translations. The editor of the anthology, Maxim D. Shrayer of Boston College, is a leading authority on Jewish-Russian literature. The selections were chosen not simply on the basis of the author's background, but because each work illuminates questions of Jewish history, status, and identity. Each author is profiled in an essay describing the personal, cultural, and historical circumstances in which the writer worked, and individual works or groups of works are headnoted to provide further context. The anthology not only showcases a wide selection of individual works but also offers an encyclopedic history of Jewish-Russian culture. This handsome two-volume set is organized chronologically. The first volume spans the nineteenth century and the first part of the twentieth century, and includes the editor's extensive introduction to the Jewish-Russian literary canon. The second volume covers the period from the death of Stalin to the present, and each volume includes a corresponding survey of Jewish-Russian history by John D. Klier of University College, London, as well as detailed bibliographies of historical and literary sources.

For more than a decade, actor John de Lancie has delighted and provoked audiences as Star Trek®'s most unpredictable antagonist, the enigmatic cosmic entity known only as Q. Now de Lancie has turned his talent and imagination to the creation of a whole new world, a startling vision of Earth on the brink of an evolutionary leap in human consciousness.... It is the day after tomorrow, early in the next millenia, and all over the world people begin experiencing bizarre mental transformations. The majority of men and woman find their minds shutting down, but a handful develop astounding new psychic abilities. They are the adepts. An ordinary family man. An autistic child. A beautiful Guatemalan revolutionary. A mysterious European traveler with vast ambitions and a secret agenda. As society breaks apart and new alliances form, these strangers become locked in a crucial battle to determine the future of a brave new world. But more than human minds are at war here, for deep beneath the earth, an alien intelligence, dormant for thirty million years, is stirring once again, and sending its psychic tendrils into the minds of a vulnerable multitude. This inhuman entity has its own plans for the Earth, and they do not include Homo sapiens. Fighting amongst themselves, the adepts can scarcely imagine the awesome and ancient intelligence that will ultimately test a new breed of humanity. Soldier Of Light is a profound and mind-warping exploration of the outer limits of the mind's potential -- written by innovative and always surprising personalities.

"You think I come from another world, don't you? Filled with all these strange things you've never seen...Well I do, I guess." Cormac McCarthy's post-apocalyptic novel was awarded the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for Fiction in 2006. Released shortly after his No Country for Old Men was turned into an Oscar-winning film, The Road's cinema version of the novel is directed by John Hillcoat, stars Viggo Mortensen and Charlize Theron and is an official selection for the 66th Venice Film Festival 2009. Joe Penhall's adaptation is a faithful, careful crafting of the book for the screen, fully evoking the atmosphere of menace and desperation. The Road is set a few years after an unexplained cataclysmic world disaster has left the earth poisoned, barren and hostile. While ash blocks out the sun and the earth no longer fosters plant or animal life, men either starve or join the maruading gangs of cannibals. The plot follows an unnamed father and son on a bleak epic across the wasteland and features a series of horrifc encounters in a merciless world starved of life and hope. This edition includes a full list of cast and crew credits.

A new omnibus collecting volumes thirteen, fourteen, and fifteen of the Vampire Hunter D horror novel series! The hunt continues in the bizarre far future of 12,090 A.D, where the immortal vampire lords who were the only winners of mankind’s nuclear war still oppress the human survivors who have pushed the blood-drinking fiends back to the lawless Frontier. Yet humanity too remains as quick as ever to prey upon itself, and where the law can’t bring safety or justice, the crescent blade of D will—assuming you meet the half-vampire wanderer’s price! Vampire Hunter D Omnibus Book Five collects in full two different multi-part novels! Twin-Shadowed Knight is a story in two parts—most apt, as the D’s investigation into a vampire’s dying words leads to a sorcery that splits the Hunter himself into two beings…the second D, full of passion, hunger, and carnal desire! Then, the three-part Dark Road brings triple the thrill, as D crosses over the southern border into the realm of General Gaskell. No ordinary vampire noble, this immortal warlord survived his supposed death under the sun to command the loyalty of a veritable army of the undead, who have been given their silent marching orders—eliminate D! The Vampire Hunter D Omnibus Book Five collects volumes 13, 14, and 15 in author Hideyuki Kikuchi’s adventure horror series: Twin-Shadowed Knight Parts One and Two, Dark Road Parts One and Two, and Dark Road Part Three. Illustrated by Final Fantasy artist Yoshitaka Amano, the legend of D endures!