Recommendations based on "The Last World"

The Novels of Ray Bradbury by Ray Bradbury, Granada Publishing Limited, 8 Grafton Street, London England, 1984, First British Edition. This is a Highly Collectible, SIGNED, Hardcover Book and Dust jacket. The book is Sunflower Yellow Cloth over Boards with Navy Blue Lettering on the spine. The book is SIGNED on the Front Free End Page, EDIE! Ray Bradbury 1/18/93. The dust jacket has been placed in an archival, clear Mylar for further protection and preservation. Here for the first time in one volume are Ray Bradbury's three haunting novels Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes. Fahrenheit 451 is a famous and terrifying fable which has also been filmed by the French Director Francois Truffault. Dandelion Wine is a Beautiful Novel - full of summer, set in the real world but enriched by Bradbury's original imagination and his unique gift for fantasy. Something Wicked This Way Comes is a novel of pure and classic fantasy imbued with frightening air of evil. Together these novels reveal the range of imagination, the art, the phenomenon that is Ray Bradbury.

This American underground classic is a rollicking cosmic mystery featuring Albert Einstein and James Joyce as the ultimate space/time detectives. One fateful evening in a suitably dark, beer-soaked Swiss rathskeller, a wild and obscure Irishman named James Joyce would become the drinking partner of an unknown physics professor called Albert Einstein. And on that same momentous night, Sir John Babcock, a terror-stricken young Englishman, would rush through the tavern door bringing a mystery that only the two most brilliant minds of the century could solve . . . or perhaps bringing only a figment of his imagination born of the paranoia of our times. An outrageous, raunchy ride through the twists and turns of mind and space, Masks of the Illuminati runs amok with all our fondest conspiracy theories to show us the truth behind the laughter . . . and the laughter in the truth. Praise for Masks of the Illuminati “I was astonished and delighted . . . Robert Anton Wilson managed to reverse every mental polarity in me, as if I had been pulled through infinity.”—Philip K. Dick “[Wilson is] erudite, witty, and genuinely scary.”—Publishers Weekly   “A dazzling barker hawking tickets to the most thrilling tilt-a-whirls and daring loop-o-planes on the midway to a higher consciousness.”—Tom Robbins “Wilson is one of the most profound, important, scientific philosophers of this century—scholarly, witty, hip, and hopeful.”—Timothy Leary

"A thoughtful, intricate, ambivalent novel with the reach of greatness in it." —John Updike"It is impossible to do justice here to the subtleties, comedy, and wisdom of this very beautiful novel. Milan Kundera is an artist, clearly one of the best to be found anywhere, who says that the good (and evil) that issues from men's souls matters much more than the deeds of a State. And he says it with passion, with good humor, and with love." —Salman RushdieAll too often, this brilliant novel of thwarted love and revenge miscarried has been read for its political implications. Now, more than a quarter century after The Joke was first published and several years after the collapse of the Soviet-imposed Czechoslovak regime, it becomes easier to put such implications into perspective in favor of valuing the book (and all Milan Kundera 's work) as what it truly is: great, stirring literature that sheds new light on the eternal themes of human existence.This edition provides English-language readers an important further means toward revaluation of The Joke. For reasons he describes in his Author's Note, Milan Kundera devoted much time to creating a completely revised translation that reflects his original as closely as any translation possibly can: reflects it in its fidelity not only to the words and syntax but also to the characteristic dictions and tonalities of the novel's narrators. The result is nothing less than the restoration of a classic.

“Ursula Le Guin is more than just a writer of adult fantasy and science fiction . . . she is a philosopher; an explorer in the landscapes of the mind.” – Cincinnati Enquirer The recipient of numerous literary prizes, including the National Book Award, the Kafka Award, and the Pushcart Prize, Ursula K. Le Guin is renowned for her spare, elegant prose, rich characterization, and diverse worlds. "The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas" is a short story originally published in the collection The Wind's Twelve Quarters.

A second volume of collected short fiction—from the bestselling author and winner of the 2015 Rea Award for the Short StoryFew authors write with such sheer love of story and language as T.C. Boyle, and that is nowhere more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and always entertaining short stories. In 1998, T.C. Boyle Stories brought together the author’s first four collections to critical acclaim. Now, T.C. Boyle Stories II gathers the work from his three most recent collections along with fourteen new tales previously unpublished in book form as well as a preface in which Boyle looks back on his career as a writer of stories and the art of making them.By turns mythic and realistic, farcical and tragic, ironic and moving, Boyle’s stories have mapped a wide range of human emotions. The fifty-eight stories in this new volume, written over the last eighteen years, reflect his maturing themes. Along with the satires and tall tales that established his reputation, readers will find stories speaking to contemporary social issues, from air rage to abortion doctors, and character-driven tales of quiet power and passion. Others capture timeless themes, from first love and its consequences to confrontations with mortality, or explore the conflict between civilization and wildness. The new stories find Boyle engagingly testing his characters’ emotional and physical endurance, whether it’s a group of giants being bred as weapons of war in a fictional Latin American country, a Russian woman who ignores dire warnings in returning to her radiation-contaminated home, a hermetic writer who gets more than a break in his routine when he travels to receive a minor award, or a man in a California mountain town who goes a little too far in his concern for a widow.Mordant wit, emotional power, exquisite prose: it is all here in abundance. T.C. Boyle Stories II is a grand career statement from a writer whose imagination knows no bounds.

SUM is a dazzling exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered–each presented as a vignette that offers us a stunning lens through which to see ourselves here and now.In one afterlife you may find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, your creators are a species of dim-witted creatures who built us to figure out what they could not. In a different version of the afterlife you work as a background character in other people’s dreams. Or you may find that God is a married couple struggling with discontent, or that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember, or that the hereafter includes the thousands of previous gods who no longer attract followers. In some afterlives you are split into your different ages; in some you are forced to live with annoying versions of yourself that represent what you could have been; in others you are re-created from your credit card records and Internet history. David Eagleman proposes many versions of our purpose here; we are mobile robots for cosmic mapmakers, we are reunions for a scattered confederacy of atoms, we are experimental subjects for gods trying to understand what makes couples stick together.These wonderfully imagined tale–at once funny, wistful, and unsettling–are rooted in science and romance and awe at our mysterious existence: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that exposes radiant new facets of our humanity.

Sum is a stunning exploration of funny and unexpected afterlives that have never been considered—each presented as a vignette that offers a lens through which to see ourselves here and now. In one afterlife, you find that God is the size of a microbe and is unaware of your existence. In another, you work as a background character in other people's dreams. Or you may find that the afterlife contains only those people whom you remember. The stories in Sum are rooted in romance, science, and awe: a mixture of death, hope, computers, immortality, love, biology, and desire that cuts through human nature at new and exciting angles.

The critically acclaimed novel that is now a major motion picture starring John Boyega and Olivia Cooke, coming to theaters August 6, streaming August 13!A Naked Singularity tells the story of Casi, a child of Colombian immigrants who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender--one who, tellingly has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of justice and even his sense of self begin to crack--and how his world then slowly devolves. It’s a huge, ambitious novel clearly in the vein of DeLillo, Foster Wallace, Pynchon, and even Melville, and it's told in a distinct, frequently hilarious voice, with a striking human empathy at its center. Its panoramic reach takes readers through crime and courts, immigrant families and urban blight, media savagery and media satire, scatology and boxing, and even a breathless heist worthy of any crime novel. If InfiniteJest stuck a pin in the map of mid-90s culture and drew our trajectory from there, A Naked Singularity does the same for the feeling of surfeit, brokenness, and exhaustion that permeates our civic and cultural life today. In the opening sentence of William Gaddis’s A Frolic of His Own, a character sneers, "Justice? You get justice in the next world. In this world, you get the law." A Naked Singularity reveals the extent of that gap, and lands firmly on the side of those who are forever getting the law.

For the first time in English, all the fiction by the writer who has been called “the greatest Spanish-language writer of our century” collected in a single volume“An event, and cause for celebration.”—The New York TimesA Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition with flaps and deckle-edged paperFor some fifty years, in intriguing and ingenious fictions that reimagined the very form of the short story—from his 1935 debut with A Universal History of Iniquity through his immensely influential collections Ficciones and The Aleph, the enigmatic prose poems of The Maker, up to his final work in the 1980s, Shakespeare’s Memory—Jorge Luis Borges returned again and again to his celebrated themes: dreams, duels, labyrinths, mirrors, infinite libraries, the manipulations of chance, gauchos, knife fighters, tigers, and the elusive nature of identity itself. Playfully experimenting with ostensibly subliterary genres, he took the detective story and turned it into metaphysics; he took fantasy writing and made it, with its questioning and reinventing of everyday reality, central to the craft of fiction; he took the literary essay and put it to use reviewing wholly imaginary books.Bringing together for the first time in English all of Borges’s magical stories, and all of them newly rendered into English in brilliant translations by Andrew Hurley, Collected Fictions is the perfect one-volume compendium for all who have long loved Borges, and a superb introduction to the master’s work for all who have yet to discover this singular genius.For more than seventy-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 2,000 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Walker Percy's mordantly funny and wholly original contribution to the self-help book craze deals with the Western mind's tendency toward heavy abstraction. This favorite of Percy fans continues to charm and beguile readers of all tastes and backgrounds. Lost in the Cosmos invites us to think about how we communicate with our world.