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Harlan Ellison

"From the psychedelic, witty mind of Harlan Ellison comes some of the most outrageous short stories and novellas found in the realm of science fiction, fantasy, and speculative fiction. This omnibus edition features some of Ellison's best-known works, including 'I Have No Mouth, and I Must Scream,' with its unhinged artificial intelligence bent on torturing the remainder of humanity, and 'Jeffty Is Five,' featuring a young boy with mysterious, time-bending powers. This deluxe collector's edition also contains Harlan Ellison's original introductions, photographs, and new artwork by Joe Quesada, Chris Weston, Jesus Saiz, and Colleen Doran. This career-spanning compilation is a must-have for Ellison fans, and readers discovering this zany, polyphonic writer for the first time." -- endpapers

Platform Decay

"Everyone's favorite lethal SecUnit is back in the next installment of Martha Wells' bestselling and award-winning Murderbot Diaries series. Having someone else support your bad decision feels kind of good. After volunteering to run a rescue mission, Murderbot realizes that it will have to spend significant time with a bunch of humans it doesn't know. Including human children. Ugh. This may well call for... eye contact! (Emotion check: Oh, for f-)." -- Provided by publisher

Supremacy

"Does the U.S. Constitution force us to live under the rule of nine robed lawyers? Many Americans assume that it does. It is commonly said that the Supreme Court has always had the power to decide what the Constitution means and to strike down any act of Congress that violates the justices' dictates. Even as the Court has used this power to upend democracy--erasing federal laws that once prevented presidential autocracy and protected the right to vote--we are told there is nothing everyday Americans can do, as if our ability to govern ourselves requires the Court to answer our most fundamental questions for us. But what if that isn't accurate? What if the Court was not given the power it now wields, but rather seized it? That is the revelation of Nikolas Bowie and Daphna Renan's masterful new account of the Supreme Court. In a sweeping narrative of over 200 years of American history, they demonstrate that 'judicial supremacy' was not written into the Constitution and has always been challenged as fundamentally at odds with it. Far from being an eternal principle, the power the Court claims to override Congress's interpretation of the Constitution took hold in reaction to abolition and Reconstruction--not to protect democracy, but to weaken it. Supremacy charts how the Court has repeatedly sabotaged the efforts of Congress to broaden democracy by enabling presidents, corporations, and the wealthy to ignore enacted law. It also challenges how even liberals understand the Court's most celebrated rulings--including Brown v. Board of Education and Roe v. Wade--showing how the left has unwittingly subscribed to the very ideology that now threatens it. At every step, Bowie and Renan recover a lost constitutional tradition, one forged by abolitionists, labor leaders, suffragists, and civil rights pioneers. These individuals presented another way forward, in which power is returned to where the Constitution put it--Congress--and everyday Americans have more of a say in the law that shapes our lives." -- Front jacket flap

The Need

"The Need is a rare genetic disorder. Those who have it must consume human flesh, or die. For some The Need is power. For others it is a curse. Talia's been on the run with her two teenagers since the kids were babies, changing names and identities every time someone gets close to discovering her family's tragic secret. Sam is her son, tormented by The Need, unable to stop giving in to his darkest desires, much to his mother's chagrin. While Rosie, his twin sister, who's escaped her mom and brother's genetic curse, is desperate for a life of normalcy- like a Tik Tok account, Homecoming or a kiss with her mysterious new friend Naomi. But her brother keeps eating people and frankly, it's ruining her life. Vera, a former supermodel and member of New York City's elite Armstrong family, lives a life of luxury, haute couture and eating people. Yes, unlike Talia, the Armstrongs secretly pride themselves on their genetic abnormality. But beneath Vera's opulent lifestyle is a woman who's ruthlessly haunted by a mistake from her past. It's corrupted her standing with the Armstrongs, ruined her relationship with her kids and is slowly unraveling her sanity. Vera will do whatever it takes to correct it. On the surface, these two families have nothing in common. But Talia is harboring a secret from the twins-one that will bring them crashing into the Armstrongs. And when the truth comes out, no one will ever be the same"-- Provided by publisher

American Sophistication

The fascinating story of sophistication in the United States, from the founding to the present Is there such a thing as "American sophistication"--or is it a contradiction in terms? Those questions have been up for grabs since America's founding. The idea of sophistication has always left Americans uneasy. Devoted to a self-image of sincerity and plain-dealing, Americans are suspicious of sophistication's playfulness and ease, which look like symptoms of European elitism, snobbery, and decadence. In this entertaining and enlightening account of American sophistication from the eighteenth century to today, Ross Posnock tells the story of how Americans' anxiety about style and elegance led them to develop their own casual and cool style of sophistication. From the start, American sophistication has been distinctive because it is mixed, improvised, and shape-shifting: guilty and smooth, game and nervous, vulgar and poised.

The Maltese Version

"A charged, delightfully offbeat novel of four women forging their way across time, place, and language in search of desire, power, and connection."-- Provided by publisher

The Everest Mystery

"The unsolved mysteries of George Mallory, Sandy Irvine, and their legendary 1924 Everest expedition. There is no mystery more compelling in the history of mountaineering than the disappearance of George Mallory and Sandy Irvine close to the summit of Mount Everest on June 8, 1924. Over 100 years after they were last seen 'going strong for the top,' the question of exactly what happened to them on that fateful day has not been answered. George Mallory's frozen remains were discovered in 1999. But in September 2024, a climber found an old boot lying out in the open on the Central Rongbuk Glacier on Mount Everest, several miles from where Mallory lay. The boot contained a foot, and a sock bearing a nametape spelled out in red: A.C. IRVINE. Did Mallory and Irvine reach the summit-becoming the first to do so-or did they perish while ascending? What happened to the camera that Irvine may have carried, which would have documented their climb? Written by Julie Summers, Sandy Irvine's great-niece, and Jochen Hemmleb, the world's leading authority on the Mallory and Irvine Everest expedition, The Everest Mystery explores the life of Sandy Irvine, his relationship with George Mallory, and the many theories about what happened to them so close to the summit of Mount Everest. Above all, it restores Sandy Irvine to his place in the great mystery of Everest 1924." -- Provided by publisher

You Won't
Get Free of It

"A collection of reported stories that explore the relationship between mothers and daughters by the award-winning author of Strangers to Ourselves." -- Provided by publisher

We Want to Believe

For most of the twentieth century, reports of unidentified flying objects were treated as cultural error: cranks, hoaxes, late-night radio. Then, abruptly, the posture changed. The Pentagon released videos it could not explain. Navy pilots testified under oath about encounters that defied known technology. Intelligence agencies acknowledged that something unfamiliar appears to move through the skies. In We Want to Believe, Adam Kirsch, one of our most searching literary critics, traces the intellectual history behind this reversal to see UAPs not as fantasies or threats, but as a mystery closer to home. Moving from Cold War skeptics such as physicists Edward Condon and Carl Sagan--who helped define the boundaries of legitimate inquiry--to figures like Air Force officer Edward Ruppelt and astronomer J. Allen Hynek, who encountered anomalies from within official institutions, Kirsch follows how UAPs migrated from dismissed error to unresolved problem. Tracing how figures such as Pentagon official Luis Elizondo and astrophysicist Avi Loeb have reopened the question under radically different conditions, Kirsch draws on declassified documents, military encounters, and a wide literature of belief and skepticism to examine why some questions endure and what it means for modern societies when certainty fails and curiosity persists.

Under the Falls

"A spellbinding page-turner about a crime in a small town that exposes long-held secrets and betrayals among a group of lifelong friends."-- Provided by publisher

Time's
Second Arrow

"From a distinguished geoscientist and author and a rising-star planetary scientist, a stunningly ambitious proposal for a new natural law of evolution and increasing order in the cosmos." -- Provided by publisher

A Tender Age

"An exploration of American masculinity and family dynamics as seen through the confused eyes of a prepubescent child of immigrants. Korean American Jeon-Gi is torn between competing ideas of himself. At home, his working-class parents dote on him. Outside, he is part of a roving pack of kids with dominion over a derelict baseball field, weedy parking lot, and rusty jungle gym. Getting into and out of trouble is all-consuming. But the summer he turns eleven, he becomes embroiled in a staggering series of events reverberating far beyond himself and his family."-- Provided by publisher

The Story of Your Life

"Over the past two decades, platforms like Instagram, Facebook, and TikTok have revolutionized how we document and share our lives. We once archived our experiences in photo albums, and now we capture our most significant moments in reels and photo dumps. Whether we prefer to admit it or not, social media is where our history lives now. In The Story of Your Life, journalist and New York magazine columnist Kathryn Jezer-Morton examines how these algorithm-driven platforms not only change the way we share information but also shape the content itself. What stories do we choose to tell, and how do these choices reflect and shape our evolving identities? Through rigorous research and intimate interviews with everyday people, Jezer-Morton explores how the platforms on which we have told our life stories for the past twenty years have determined what those stories have come to look and sound like. Today our attention spans are short, and our stories reflect that, with spectacle and exaggeration playing ever-larger roles in our accounts of everyday life. By examining how we share, talk, and post about our milestones, vacations, homes, relationships, hardships, politics, and more, Jezer-Morton shows just how pervasive and influential our social media platforms have become in how we view ourselves and what we consider to be a life well lived."-- Provided by publisher

Someone Else's
Husband

"Gretchen Falk, a Park Avenue sophisticate born into great wealth and blessed with a storybook marriage, knows she lives a charmed life, and she's not about to risk losing any part of it. That's why she tried so hard to convince Richard, her devoted husband and father to their three children, not to join his old college friends on an expedition almost eight thousand miles away, to the legendary peak of Mount Kilimanjaro. Little did she know the beautiful artist climbing alongside him might prove the far bigger threat. Frankie Callahan's dream of artistic success is within reach, with her career-making exhibition at a celebrated New York gallery only weeks away. If all goes well, the show will leave her completely independent, free of the tainted money that ties her to a past--and a man--she's desperate to escape. To mark the end of this chapter, she is going to climb Kilimanjaro. But when she learns she's the sole female accompanying a group of longtime male friends, Frankie realizes that nothing about the trip will be as she expected. She certainly hasn't counted on meeting anyone like the very charismatic, very rich, very married Richard Falk. By the time the group descends--with one fewer than when they began--they have lost more than they ever could have imagined. Now, just two weeks after returning to New York, Frankie is dead, her East Village loft a blood-soaked crime scene. When Richard is charged in Frankie's death, it falls to Gretchen to piece together how the life she so carefully constructed could have imploded so completely. There are only two things she knows for sure: she's the only woman Richard has ever loved, and he would never hurt anyone. Someone Else's Husband is the sweeping and suspenseful story of two women on a collision course with love--and with each other--in which no one is right and everyone is very, very wrong."-- Provided by publisher

I Was Bonnie & Clyde

"A collection of poems by Laura Kasischke." -- Provided by publisher

Finding Renée Richards

A biography of Renée Richards, a pioneering transgender professional tennis player who gained international attention after successfully challenging her exclusion from the women's draw of the 1977 US Open. The book traces Richards's life from her childhood in Queens and career as an eye surgeon to her tennis career and role as a transgender pioneer, while examining her complex views on transgender participation in sports.

Famous Men

"Will Miles is trapped. Trapped in tiny Greening, Michigan, where a toxic high school rumor has turned her into a social exile. Trapped in the predictable routines of her mother, and under the unrelenting gaze of her mother's increasingly sinister boyfriend. But when Will stumbles across the early poems of Nathaniel Fellow, a famous writer forty years her senior who also grew up in Greening, she feels she's found a kindred spirit. A passing comment from her mother only adds to Will's fascination: Is Nathaniel the father she's never known? Will orchestrates a plan to track Nathaniel down, following in his footsteps to New York City, where she learns he's not the answer to her past, not the way she imagined. But their meeting sparks a complicated, consuming relationship that gives Will sidelong access to a world she's only ever imagined: of writers and intellectuals, a financial safety net, and, most intoxicatingly, a glimpse into her own potential. But who is Nathaniel Fellow, off the page? And what will shaping her life to suit his cost her? When a torrent of information about his past threatens not just her life with Nathaniel, but the story she tells herself about him, Will is faced with a choice that will change everything. A gripping novel about ambition, parents and children, and all the ways women still pay for men's mistakes, Famous Men traces one woman's journey to the truth of where she comes from, what she's capable of, and how she might start again." -- Publisher's website

Endless Endings

A scientific exploration of the varied forms, origins, and meanings of death. Using death as a connecting theme, Ricard Solé explores the differing meanings of death in varied forms, reflecting on questions that are pushing forward the frontiers of scientific understanding. What is the physical basis of inevitable decay? Can we manipulate cellular rules to avoid death? What does death mean if life occurs inside a computer? Can a conscious machine save itself from death? Is immortality possible? What does it mean for language, thought, or information to die? As Solé reveals, life's endings can be just as fascinating and varied as life itself.

The Black Shield

"An exploration of race and policing through the complex stories of Black police officers: the braided narratives of Cooper's family, three generations of cops in Cleveland, and of Black Shield, an organization for Black police officers in Cleveland."-- Provided by publisher

Biological War

"A lab accident, a bio-attack, a global pandemic, and the collapse of human society. In this essential new book, based on dozens of new interviews with experts with high-level political, governmental, medical, and military responsibility, Annie Jacobsen examines this very scenario. It would be only a matter of days from such a global infection before the infrastructure built to handle this gravest of situations would be in a battle for human existence. The fallout: mass death, total societal breakdown, widespread insurrection, anarchy, and a plague-ravaged wasteland that no longer resembles modern civilization. In other words: dystopia. Following the gripping narrative style that launched Nuclear War to the New York Times bestseller list, Jacobsen looks deeply at a situation that is in some ways the opposite of a nuclear bomb: There is no mushroom cloud, no shock wave or blast. Instead, the scenario that could end the world as we know it begins with something so small, and something so malicious, that when used for evil, only evil can result. This is what could happen; a ticking-clock roadmap to the hours, days, and weeks following the release of a biological agent, that serves as the most essential, forward-looking journalism in preparation for urgent societal upheaval."-- Provided by publisher

The Amateur

"When a young woman, a golf prodigy, kills a caddy with a stray ball at the country club, the investigation of this freak accident reveals a dark and shocking tale of secret affairs and predatory men, and suddenly a teenager is on trial. 1978: It is the first Thursday in August and temperatures are flirting with ninety when Mira Winston, eighteen years old, drives a golf ball from her tee toward the practice net near the clubhouse and caddy shack. The golf ball, weighing 1.6 ounces, tears through the net, traveling 150 miles per hour, and slams, with sickening force, into the temple of a high school junior named Kenny Foster, rupturing an artery and unleashing a torrent of blood. Kenny brings his hand to the side of his head, then topples onto his side. He's dead before the ambulance even arrives. In the wake of this terrible accident--and everyone, at first, agrees it was an accident--Mira looks for comfort in all the wrong places: In her lover, Theo Catton, a married man three decades her senior. In her mother, a well-kept woman with secrets of her own. In the dead caddy's little sisters, girls bewildered by grief. But when the investigators look more closely at the torn net, when a detective recalls Mira's history of recklessness, and when Kenny's father spies Mira with her married lover, the affluent and mannered community turns on this once-promising young woman. A gripping story that takes the reader from the sun-soaked greens of a tony Westchester country club to the fluorescent-lit stand of a county courtroom, The Amateur asks: What happens when one small moment--a swing, a ball, a piece of string--changes the course of an entire life?"-- Provided by publisher

We Want so Much to Be Ourselves

"Günter Zeitz, psychoanalyst-in-training and the son of a Catholic country doctor, and Josine Rosen, Sigmund Freud's patient and the daughter of a Jewish shipping magnate, first meet in 1924, in Freud's Viennese waiting room. As their intense affair develops, Freud arranges for Günter's appointment to the newly created Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. Shortly after the move, their daughter Hannah is born. But less than a decade later, all their hopes and ideals are profoundly challenged by political realities so horrific that they are, initially, beyond comprehension. A heartrending story of love in a time of hatred, an absorbing investigation into the Nazis' exploitation of psychoanalysis, and a cautionary tale about self-deception and the failures of a people to recognize the lies of their charismatic leader, We Want So Much to Be Ourselves examines the ways science can be corrupted and one's very identity transformed by historical circumstance." -- Page [4] of cover

A Vast Horizon

"Late summer 1937. Europe is inching toward war. In the South of France a group of friends picnic in a secluded clearing. The women have peeled down their dresses to their waists. Shoes have been cast aside. A couple kiss playfully while the others look on, laughing. The moment is captured in a now-iconic image by photographer Lee Miller. Some of the friends--the dancer Ady Fidelin, the poet Paul Éluard and his wife Nusch, the Surrealists Man Ray and Roland Penrose--are well-known, others less so. They are spending the summer at the Hôtel Vaste Horizon in Mougins with fellow artists Dora Maar, Eileen Agar, and Pablo Picasso. In this evocative setting, biographer Anna Thomasson traces the group's individual and intertwined lives through the photographs they took, the art they made, and the poems and letters they wrote. From the heady, fertile weeks of creativity, sex, and collaboration of that Mediterranean summer through the tumultuous years that followed, this is the story of rebellious lives and the redemptive power of art."-- Publisher's description

Time to Burn

"Mercurial tech entrepreneur Inigo Frank has perfected commercial time travel, though it is tightly regulated and so expensive that it's open only to the very wealthiest. His company, Tempus Tours, has so far been approved for just one route: a journey back to London in 1941, to the days of the Blitz, allowing the super-rich to experience the awesome sights and sounds of the aerial bombardment of the capital during World War II. It's a slick operation--routes across the wartime city are meticulously plotted, guides are extensively trained, and rules for the time tourists are strictly enforced. To immortalize his achievement, Frank enlists award-winning filmmaker Phoebe Hunt to create a fly-on-the-wall documentary. On her first day shadowing Inigo, she is set to witness the return of a billionaire property developer and his family from their trip to the past. But instead of their awe-filled return, she captures the group arriving bloodied and traumatized, with one of their number missing. Not only that, but Phoebe recognizes the missing woman, and knows not only that she's not who she claims to be but that she has every reason to harbor a grudge against her. And as events begin to unravel in the present day, it seems increasingly clear that she had sinister motives for returning to the past--and that people close to Phoebe are in danger. Phoebe must race to untangle the truth--before past and the future are rewritten."-- Provided by publisher