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Random House, Inc.
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According to Vonnegut's alter ego, science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout a global timequake will occur in New York City on 13 February 2001. It is the moment when the universe suffers a crisis of conscience. Should it expand or make a great big bang? It decides to back up a decade to 1991, making everyone in the world endure ten years of deja vu and a total loss of free will-not to mention reliving every nanosecond of one of the tawdiest and most hollow decades. In 1996, dead centre of the 're-run' Vonnegut is wrestling again with Time-quake I, a book he couldn't write the first time and won't be able to now. As he struggles, he addresses, with his trademark wicked wit, the relationship between memory and deja vu, humanism, suicide, the Great Depression and World War II as the last generated character builders, the loss of American eloquence, the obsolescent thrill of reading books, and what 'extended family' really means. |
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Shows you how to bring the ambitious but rubbish philosophies of the world's most popular TV programme to your driving, containing advice on general motoring, as well as specific tips on how to deal with common eventualities like a rapidly sinking amphibious camper van, or a caravan airship that's just crashed into a small bush. |
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More than four hundred years ago, seven people — five of them women — were beheaded in the Tower of London. Three had been queens of England. The others were found guilty of treason. Why were such important people put to death? Alison Weir's gripping book tells their stories: from the former friend betrayed by a man set on being king, to the young girl killed after just nine days on the throne. Alison Weir is a wonderful storyteller. Through her vivid writing, history comes alive. |
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Sarah is a wedding planner who doesn't believe in love. Or, not for herself anyway. And now with all her working hours spent planning the wedding of the year, she certainly doesn't have time to even think about love... Or does she? From the Hardcover edition. |
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This work abandons the conventional distinctions between history and science. Diamond focuses on what ancient people were endowed with in the way of land, animals and plants, and on the confrontations between less and more advanced people to see how this led to today's inequalities. |
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Offers a guide to this extraordinary river and the towns and villages which line it. Exploring its history since prehistoric times, this book shows the fishes that swam in the river and the boats that plied its surface; about floods and tides; hauntings and suicides; miasmas and malaria; locks, weirs and embankments; bridges, docks and palaces. |
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Marvin Kreitman lives for sex, or at least he lives for women. Charlie Merriweather, on the other hand, loves just the one woman, also called Charlie. Once a week, the two friends meet for a Chinese lunch, contriving never quite to have the conversation they would like to have — about fidelity and womanising, and which makes happier. |
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Sefton Goldberg: mid-thirties, English teacher at Wrottesley Poly in the West Midlands; small, sweaty, lustful, definatly unappreciative of beer, nature and organised games; gnawingly aware of being an urban Jew islanded in a sea of country-loving Anglo-Saxons. Obsessed by failure — morbidly, in his own case, gloatingly, in that of his contemporaries — so much so that he plans to write a bestseller on the subject. In the meantime he is uncomfortably aware of advancing years and atrophying achievement, and no amount of lofty rationalisation can disguise the triumph of friends and colleagues, not only from Cambridge days but even within the despised walls of the Poly itself, or sweeten the bitter pill of another's success... |
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In 1970, one of Mississippi's more colourful weekly newspapers, The Ford County Times, went bankrupt. To the surprise and dismay of many, ownership was assumed by a 23 year-old college drop-out, named Willie Traynor. The future of the paper looked grim until a young mother was brutally raped and murdered by a member of the notorious Padgitt family. Willie Traynor reported all the gruesome details, and his newspaper began to prosper. The murderer, Danny Padgitt, was tried before a packed courtroom in Clanton, Mississippi. The trial came to a startling and dramatic end when the defendant threatened revenge against the jurors if they convicted him. Nevertheless, they found him guilty, and he was sentenced to life in prison. But in Mississippi in 1970, 'life' didn't necessarily mean 'life', and nine years later Danny Padgitt managed to get himself paroled. He returned to Ford County, and the retribution began. |
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From the master of literary mayhem and provocation, this is a full-frontal Triple-X novel that goes where no work of fiction has gone before. 'Six hundred dudes. One porn queen. A world record for the ages. A must — have movie for every discerning collector of things erotic'. 'Didn't one of us on purpose set out to make a snuff movie?' — Cassie Wright, porn priestess, intends to cap her legendary career by breaking the world record for serial fornication. On camera with six hundred men, Snuff unfolds from the perspectives of Mr 72, Mr 137 and Mr 600, who await their turn on camera in a very crowded green room. This wild, lethally funny and thoroughly researched novel brings the huge yet underacknowledged presence of pornography in contemporary life into the realm of literary fiction at last. Who else but Chuck Palahniuk would dare do such a thing? Who else could do it so well, so unflinchingly and with such an incendiary (you might say) climax? |
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Fixated on the crimes which have been committed against his people, but unable to live among them, Max moves away, and draws cartoon histories of Jewish suffering in which no one is much interested. He is drawn into the Holocaust obsessions from which he realises there can be, and should be, no release. This book is a comedy of cataclysm. |
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Ada grows up motherless in the Jewish pogroms of a Ukrainian city in the early years of the twentieth century. In the same city, Harry Sinner, the cosseted son of a city financier, belongs to a very different world. Eventually, in search of a brighter future, Ada moves to Paris and makes a living painting scenes from the world she has left behind. |
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Staring at the Sun charts the life of Jean Serjeant, from her beginning as a naive, carefree country girl before the war through to her wry and trenchant old age in the year 2020. We follow her bruising experience in marriage, her probing of male truths, her adventures in motherhood and in China and we learn cannot fail to be moved by the questions she asks of life and the often unsatisfactory answers it provides. |
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The world is changing — the government has seized control of every aspect of society, and now kids are disappearing. For fifteen-year-old Wisty and her older brother Whit, life turns upside-down when they are hauled out of bed one night, separated from their parents, and thrown into a secret compound for no reason they can comprehend. The new government is clearly trying to suppress life, liberty, and the pursuit of being a normal teenager. Imprisoned together and condemned to death, Wisty and Whit begin exhibiting strange abilities and powers they never dreamed of. Maybe there is a reason they were singled out. Can this newly discovered witch and a wizard master their skills in time to save themselves, their parents — and maybe the world? |
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Abbey of Ruac, rural France: A medieval script is discovered hidden behind an antique bookcase. Badly damaged, it is sent to Paris for restoration, and there literary historian Hugo Pineau begins to read the startling fourteenth-century text. Within its pages lies a fanciful tale of a painted cave and the secrets it contains and a rudimentary map showing its position close to the abbey. Intrigued, Hugo enlists the help of archaeologist Luc Simard and the two men go exploring. |
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Look at the Birdie evokes a world in which squabbling couples, high school geniuses, misfit office workers, and small-town Lotharios struggle to adapt to changing technology, moral ambiguity, and unprecedented affluence. In Confido, a family learns the downside of confiding their deepest secrets into a magical invention. In Ed Luby's Key Club, a man finds himself in a Kafkaesque world of trouble after he runs afoul of the shady underworld boss who calls the shots in an upstate New York town. In Look at the Birdie, a quack psychiatrist turned 'murder counsellor' concocts a novel new outlet for his paranoid patients. The stories are cautionary they also brim with his trademark humour. Wry, ironic, satirical and poignant Look at the Birdie reflects the anxieties of the postwar era in which they were written and provides an insight into the development of Vonnegut's early style. |
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Suitable for younger readers, this book covers the wonder and mysteries of time and space, the frequently bizarre and often obsessive scientists and the methods they used, and the extraordinary accidental discoveries which suddenly advanced whole areas of science when the people were actually looking for something else (or in the wrong direction). |
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In the depths of the Utah desert, long after the Flame Deluge has scoured the earth clean, a monk of the Order of Saint Leibowitz has made a miraculous discovery: holy relics from the life of the great saint himself, including the blessed blueprint, the sacred shopping list, and the hallowed shrine of the Fallout Shelter. In a terrifying age of darkness and decay, these artifacts could be the keys to mankind's salvation. But as the mystery at the core of this groundbreaking novel unfolds, it is the search itself — for meaning, for truth, for love--that offers hope for humanity's rebirth from the ashes. |
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William Gibson, author of the extraordinary multiaward-winning novel Neuromancer, has written his most brilliant and thrilling work to date... The Mona Lisa Overdrive, Enter Gibson's unique world — lyric and mechanical, erotic and violent, sobering and exciting — where multinational corporations and high tech outlaws vie for power, traveling into the computer-generated universe known as cyberspace. Into this world comes Mona, a young girl with a murky past and an uncertain future whose life is on a collision course with internationally famous Sense/Net star Angie Mitchell. Since childhood, Angie has been able to tap into cyberspace without a computer. Now, from inside cyberspace, a kidnapping plot is masterminded by a phantom entity who has plans for Mona, Angie, and all humanity, plans that cannot be controlled... or even known. And behind the intrigue lurks the shadowy Yazuka, the powerful Japanese underworld, whose leaders ruthlessly manipulate people and events to suit their own purposes... or so they think. |
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A millennium into the future, two advancements have altered the course of human history: the colonization of the Galaxy and the creation of the positronic brain. On the beautiful Outer World planet of Solaria, a handful of human colonists lead a hermit-like existence, their every need attended to by their faithful robot servants. To this strange and provocative planet comes Detective Elijah Baley, sent from the streets of New York with his positronic partner, the robot R. Daneel Olivaw, to solve an incredible murder that has rocked Solaria to its foundations. The victim had been so reclusive that he appeared to his associates only through holographic projection. Yet someone had gotten close enough to bludgeon him to death while robots looked on. Now Baley and Olivaw are faced with two clear impossibilities: Either the Solarian was killed by one of his robots — unthinkable under the laws of Robotics — or he was killed by the woman who loved him so much that she never came into his presence! |
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