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The Anglo-Russian author William Gerhardie was hailed by writers including Graham Greene, Edith Wharton, Evelyn Waugh and others as a “genius,” and this, his long-out-of-print second novel, is generally acclaimed as his comic masterpiece—not to mention “the most influential English novel of the twentieth century,” according to William Boyd.It tells the unforgettable tale of an eccentric Belgian family living in the Far East during the turbulent years just after the First World War, which displaced them, and the Russian Revolution, which impoverished them.Recounted by a conceited young English cousin who visits during a military mission, the story is filled with a host of fascinatingly idiosyncratic characters—depressives, obsessives, sex maniacs, and hypochondriacs—often forced to choose between absurdity and tragedy. Yet Gerhardie depicts them as both charming and poignant, as they each struggle for love and safety in tumultuous times . . . and the protagonist finds his conceit shredded as he falls head over heels in love with one of them.Gerhardie’s portraits of Europeans in exile, attempting to escape from the era’s upheavals, draws on his own experiences as an officer in the British Mission. He has summoned up a world adrift, where war and revolution have broken up the old order, but nothing has come to replace it. And he does it with unforgettable humor and a sharp eye for the absurd.Hilarious, poignant, panoramic in scope, The Polyglots redeems, from the Babel of the interwar period, a stirring vision of love and human sympathy.

The 20th anniversary edition of the classic steampunk novel With new commentary by the authors 1855: The Industrial Revolution is in full swing, powered by steam-driven cybernetic Engines. Charles Babbage perfects his Analytical Engine, and the computer age arrives a century ahead of its time. Three extraordinary characters race toward a rendezvous with the future: Sybil Gerard—fallen woman, politician’s tart, daughter of a Luddite agitator; Edward “Leviathan” Mallory—explorer and paleontologist; Laurence Oliphant—diplomat, mystic, and spy. Their adventure begins with the discovery of a box of punched Engine cards of unknown origin and purpose. Cards someone wants badly enough to kill for.Part detective story, part historical thriller, The Difference Engine took the science fiction community by storm when it was first published twenty years ago. This special anniversary edition features an Introduction by Cory Doctorow and a collaborative essay from the authors looking back on their creation. Provocative, compelling, intensely imagined, this novel is poised to impress a whole new generation.

William Gibson returns with his first novel since 2010’s New York Times–bestselling Zero History.Where Flynne and her brother, Burton, live, jobs outside the drug business are rare. Fortunately, Burton has his veteran’s benefits, for neural damage he suffered from implants during his time in the USMC’s elite Haptic Recon force. Then one night Burton has to go out, but there’s a job he’s supposed to do—a job Flynne didn’t know he had. Beta-testing part of a new game, he tells her. The job seems to be simple: work a perimeter around the image of a tower building. Little buglike things turn up. He’s supposed to get in their way, edge them back. That’s all there is to it. He’s offering Flynne a good price to take over for him. What she sees, though, isn’t what Burton told her to expect. It might be a game, but it might also be murder.

William Goldman is famous for his Academy Award-winning screenplays, infamous for the thriller that did for dentists what Psycho did for showers, beloved for his hilarious "hot fairy-tale," and notorious for his candid behind-the-scenes Hollywood chronicles. But long before Butch and Sundance, Buttercup, and the Tinsel-Town tell-alls, he made his mark as one of the great popular novelists of the twentieth century. Now his sweeping, classic tale of a generation's tumultuous coming-of-age is at last back in print.BOYS & GIRLS TOGETHERAaron, Walt, Jenny, Branch, and Rudy. They are children of America's post-war generation, as different from one another as anyone can be. Yet they are bound together by the traumas of their pasts, the desperate desire to capture their dreams and satisfy their passions, the stirring pleasures of sexual awakening--and the twists of fate that will inextricably link their lives in the turbulent world of 1960s New York City.

Acclaimed for such Academy Award—winning screenplays as Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid and such thrillers as Marathon Man, not to mention the bestselling classic The Princess Bride, William Goldman stands as one of the most beloved writers in America. But long before these triumphs, he caused a sensation with his brilliant first novel, a powerful story of reckless youth that was hailed as a worthy rival to The Catcher in the Rye. THE TEMPLE OF GOLDRay Trevitt is coming of age in the American midwest of the late 1950s. Handsome, restless, eager to live life and to find his place in the world, Ray hurtles headlong through a young man’s rite of passage–searching for answers and somewhere to belong. What he discovers is that within friendships and love affairs, army tours and married life, victory and tragedy, lie the experiences that will shape his destiny, scar his soul, and ultimately teach him profound lessons he never expected.

First published in 1968, In the Heart of the Heart of the Country established William Gass as one of America’s finest and boldest writers of fiction, and nearly fifty years later, the book still stands as a landmark of contemporary fiction. The two novellas and three short stories it contains are all set in the Midwest, and together they offer  a mythical reimagining of America’s heartland, with its punishing extremes of heat and cold, its endless spaces and claustrophobic households, its hidden and baffled desires, its lurking threat of violence. Exploring and expanding the limits of the short story, Gass works magic with words, words that are as squirming, regal, and unexpected as the roaches, boys, icicles, neighbors, and neuroses that fill these pages, words that shock, dazzle, illumine, and delight.

Moving back and forth between the 1880s and 1912, this sixth novel in William Kennedy’s acclaimed Albany cycle follows the lives of Edward Daugherty, a first generation Irish American who will break out beyond Albany as a playwright, and Katrina Taylor, a beautiful, seductive woman with complex attitudes towards life.  Their marriage is a passionate one, but a cataclysmic hotel fire changes it into something else altogether.  The Flaming Corsage evocatively portrays the seething, contradictory impulses of our humanity, lusts and furies that know no bounds of time or place.

After numerous essays, short stories and the heralded memoir A Hole in the Sky, William Kittredge gives us a debut novel that ratifies his standing as a leading writer of the American West.Rossie Benasco’s horseback existence begins at age 15 and culminates in a thousand-mile drive of more than 200 head of horses through the Rockies into Calgary. It’s a journey that leads him, ultimately, to Eliza Stevenson and a passion so powerful, his previously unfocused life gains clarity and purpose. From the settlers, cowboys, and gamblers who opened up this country to the landholders and politicians who ran it, this is an epic tale of love and wide open spaces that stretches over the grand canvas of the twentieth-century West.

Once upon a time in rural Maine, a big black bear found a briefcase under a tree. Hoping for food, he dragged it into the woods, only to find that all it held was the manuscript of a novel. He couldn’t eat it, but he did read it, and decided it wasn’t bad. Borrowing some clothes from a local store, and the name Hal Jam from the labels of his favorite foods he headed to New York to seek his fortune in the literary world. Then he took America by storm. The Bear Went Over the Mountain is a riotous, magical romp with the buoyant Hal Jam as he leaves the quiet, nurturing world of nature for the glittering, moneyed world of man. With a pitch-perfect comic voice and an eye for social satire to rival Swift or Wolfe, bestselling author William Kotzwinkle limns Hal’s hilarious journey to New York, Los Angeles, and the great sprawling country in between, where a bear makes good despite his animal instincts, and where money-hungry executives see not a hairy beast with a purloined novel, but a rough-hewn, soulful, media-perfect nature guy who just might be the next Hemingway. By turns sidesplittingly funny, stingingly ironic, and unexpectedly tender, The Bear Went Over the Mountain captures the zeitgeist of the 1990s dead-on, in a delicious bedtime story for grown-ups.

Written by a fourteenth-century cleric, this spiritual allegory explores man in relation to his ultimate destiny against the background of teeming, colorful medieval life.