Six friends are determined to escape for a debauched weekend in the countryBlitzed on uppers, downers, blue movies and bellinis, the six twenty-something friends ensconced at Appleseed Rectory for the weekend are reeling in an hallucinatory haze of sex and seduction. But mysterious 'Johnny' begins to unsettle the other guests. And as Friday melts into Saturday and Saturday spirals into Sunday and sobriety sets in, the romp descends into something altogether more sinister. 'It's transfixing - At first it's funny. It teases, exaggerates, deliberates. Then it becomes ferocious, stricken, moving' The Times 'Very funny, extremely clever' Guardian

Twenty-first century London: rich and poor, black and white, joyful and melancholy, boring and deviant—occasionally lethal. Somewhere in the northwest of the city stands the Caldwell housing estate, a relic of '70s urban planning. Leah, an administrator for the lottery, grew up there. So did her best friend, Natalie, now a barrister, and Felix, an MG car mechanic. Thirty years later these Caldwell kids and their partners live only a few streets apart, yet inhabit separate worlds. Until the day a desperate local woman comes to Leah's door seeking help—and forces Leah out of her isolation. But is Shar a stranger or a friend? Sincere or a fraud? A connection to the past or a threat to the future? From private dinner tables to public parks, at work and at play, in this delicate but devastating novel of encounters Zadie Smith's Londoners find themselves navigating an increasingly atomized society. For some the city remains a place of happy accidents and chance good...

'Lock up your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind.'One of the greatest arguments for female emancipation, A Room of One's Own began as a lecture series at Cambridge University defending women's independence. In this extended essay, Virginia Woolf brings to life the many issues facing women of her era and pioneered the path toward a more equal future.Passionate, insightful, and beautifully written, A Room of One's Own is a tour-de-force by one of the 20th century's greatest writers.

FAIRY is a humorous person sadly out of fashion at present, who has had, nevertheless, in the actors' phrase, a long and prosperous run on this planet. When we speak of fairies nowadays, we think only of small sprites who live in a kingdom of their own, with manners, laws, and privileges very different from ours. But there was a time when "fairy" suggested also the knights and ladies of romance, about whom fine spirited tales were told when the world was younger. Spenser's Faery Queen, for instance, deals with dream-people, beautiful and brave, as do the old stories of Arthur and Roland; people who either never lived, or who, having lived, were glorified and magnified by tradition out of all kinship with common men. Our fairies are fairies in the modern sense. We will make it a rule, from the beginning, that they must be small, and we will put out any who are above the regulation height. Such as the charming famous Melusina, who wails upon her tower at the death of a Lusignan, we may as well skip; for she is a tall young lady, with a serpent's tail, to boot, and thus, alas! half-monster; for if we should accept any like her in our plan, there is no reason why we should not get confused among mermaids and dryads, and perhaps end by scoring down great Juno herself as a fairy! Many a dwarf and goblin, whom we shall meet anon, is as big as a child. Again, there are rumors in nearly every country of finding hundreds of them on a square inch of oak-leaf, or beneath the thin shadow of a blade of grass. The fairies of popular belief are little and somewhat shrivelled, and quite as apt to be malignant as to be frolicsome and gentle. We shall find that they were divided into several classes and families; but there is much analogy and vagueness among these divisions. By and by you may care to study them for yourselves; at present, we shall be very high-handed with the science of folk-lore, and pay no attention whatever to learned gentlemen, who quarrel so foolishly about these things that it is not helpful, nor even funny, to listen to them. A widely-spread notion is that when our crusading forefathers went to the Holy Land, they heard the Paynim soldiers, whom they fought, speaking much of the Peri, the loveliest beings imaginable, who dwelt in the East. Now, the Arabian language, which these swarthy warriors used, has no letter P, and therefore they called their spirits Feri, as did the Crusaders after them; and the word went back with them to Europe, and slipped into general use.

This book was converted from its physical edition to the digital format by a community of volunteers. You may find it for free on the web. Purchase of the Kindle edition includes wireless delivery.

Vintage Readers are a perfect introduction to some of the great modern writers presented in attractive, accessible paperback editions."Amis throws off more provocative ideas and images in a single paragraph than most writers get into complete novels." --The Seattle TimesEqually at home in satirical novels and biting critical essays, wickedly funny short stories and intimate autobiography, Martin Amis is widely regarded as one of the most influential yet inimitable voices in contemporary fiction, a writer whose prose captures the warp-speed rush of modernity. Vintage Amis displays this versatility in an excerpt from the author's award-winning memoir, Experience; the "Horrorday" chapter from London Fields; a vignette from his novel Money; the stories "State of England," "Insight at Flam Lake," and "Coincidence of the Arts"; and the essays "Visiting Mrs. Nabokov," "Phantom of the Opera." Also included, for...

Wonder what happened to the little girl that Derek saved at the beginning of Wasteland Rules: Kill or Be Killed? Now she is all grown up and kicking butt thanks to his timely intervention. She now resides in the remains of Vegas and fights to stop the flow of illegal slaves into the Strip. This story takes place approximately six years after the original book.Did you wonder what happened to the little girl that Derek saved at the beginning of Wasteland Rules: Kill or Be Killed? Now she is all grown up and kicking butt thanks to his timely intervention. She now resides in the remains of Vegas and fights to stop the flow of illegal slaves into the Strip. This story takes place approximately six years after the original book but also explores how she became the woman she is today.Approximately 17,000 words in length. No DRM.If you like this story you can get full length books on Amazon to experience more of the World After. Book 1, Wasteland Rules: Kill or Be Killed, is available and Book 2, Wasteland Rules: Born to Fight is also now available.

Of all the literary genres, humor has the shortest shelf life—except for Archy and Mehitabel, that is. First published in 1916, it is a classic of American literature. Archy is a cockroach, inside whom resides the soul of a free-verse poet; he communicates with Don Marquis by leaping upon the keys of the columnist's typewriter. In poems of varying length, Archy pithily describes his wee world, the main fixture of which is Mehitabel, a devil-may-care alley cat.

"A spellbinding literary thriller packed with psychological suspense and profound questions about motherhood, trauma and how death illuminates life."—Amy Tan, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and Where the Past Begins"Barbara Graham is a literary alchemist. What Jonah Knew not only grabs you from the first page, it makes the mystical believable and the human predicament shine with wit, wisdom, and love."—Tara Brach, meditation teacher and bestselling author of Radical Acceptance and Radical CompassionA seven-year-old boy inexplicably recalls the memories of a missing 22-year-old musician in this psychological thriller about the fierce love between mothers and sons across lifetimes, a work of gripping suspense with a supernatural twist that will mesmerize fans of Chloe Benjamin and Lisa Jewell.Helen Bird will stop at nothing to find Henry, her musician son who has mysteriously disappeared...

Winner of the Cervantes Prize   Carlos Fuentes, one of the world’s most acclaimed authors, is at the height of his powers in this stunning new novel—a magnificent epic of passion, magic, and desire in modern Mexico, a rich and remarkable tapestry set in a world where free will fights with the wishes of the gods. Josué Nadal has lost more than his innocence: He has been robbed of his life—and his posthumous narration sets the tone for a brilliantly written novel that blends mysticism and realism. Josué tells of his fateful meeting as a skinny, awkward teen with Jericó, the vigorous boy who will become his twin, his best friend, and his shadow. Both orphans, the two young men intend to spend their lives in intellectual pursuit—until they enter an adult landscape of sex, crime, and ambition that will test their pledge and alter their lives forever. Idealistic Josué goes to work for a high-tech visionary whose stunning assistant will introduce him to a life of desire; cynical Jericó is enlisted by the Mexican president in a scheme to sell happiness to the impoverished masses. On his journey into a web of illegality in which he will be estranged from Jericó, Josué is aided and impeded by a cast of unforgettable characters: a mad, imprisoned murderer with a warning of revenge, an elegant aviatrix and addict seeking to be saved, a prostitute shared by both men who may have murdered her way into a brilliant marriage, and the prophet Ezekiel himself. Mixing ancient mythologies with the sensuousness and avarice and need of the twenty-first century, Destiny and Desire is a monumental achievement from one of the masters of contemporary literature. From the Hardcover edition.

God is Talking to You! Yea You! is a book that I wrote because God has blessed me with a word that should be spread. In this book you will understand that God loves you. This book will give you comfort when you need comfort.With a word count of less than 5,000, this Christmas short story holds horror and thrills based on two fables: the Kallikantzaroi and Santa Claus. In a rustic cabin in the woods, Britta awaits the arrival of her newborn child. But a few minutes before midnight on Christmas Eve, her family is confronted by an unusual creature, a Kallikantzaroi. Legend has it that any child born during the Christmas season could be taken by a Kallikantazoi or, worse yet, change into one.

Hamlin Garland was a popular 20th century American writer best known for writing about hardscrabble life on the Plains and the frontier. His stories resonated in an era known for the Depression and the Dust Bowl.

Virginia Woolf’s Orlando ‘The longest and most charming love letter in literature’, playfully constructs the figure of Orlando as the fictional embodiment of Woolf’s close friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. Spanning three centuries, the novel opens as Orlando, a young nobleman in Elizabeth’s England, awaits a visit from the Queen and traces his experience with first love as England under James I lies locked in the embrace of the Great Frost. At the midpoint of the novel, Orlando, now an ambassador in Costantinople, awakes to find that he is a woman, and the novel indulges in farce and irony to consider the roles of women in the 18th and 19th centuries. As the novel ends in 1928, a year consonant with full suffrage for women. Orlando, now a wife and mother, stands poised at the brink of a future that holds new hope and promise for women.

FOREWORD BY ALI SMITH WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY FRANCESCA WADE Who better to serve as a guide to great books and their authors than Virginia Woolf? In the early years of its existence, the Times Literary Supplement published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper's defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars. The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad: all are here, in anonymously published pieces, in which may be glimpsed the thinking behind Woolf's works of fiction and the enquiring, feminist spirit of A Room of One's Own. Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one moment, a playful hypothesis and, at another, a judgement laid down with the authority of a twentieth-century Dr Johnson. Here is Woolf...

Over the course of his 60 years, Christopher Hitchens has been a citizen of both the United States and the United Kingdom. He has been both a socialist opposed to the war in Vietnam and a supporter of the U.S. war against Islamic extremism in Iraq. He has been both a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous places and a legendary bon vivant with an unquenchable thirst for alcohol and literature. He is a fervent atheist, raised as a Christian, by a mother whose Jewish heritage was not revealed to him until her suicide. In other words, Christopher Hitchens contains multitudes. He sees all sides of an argument. And he believes the personal is political. This is the story of his life, lived large.