Daedalus Books

The first encyclopedic illustrated guide to the world of Middle Earth and the Undying Lands, this book brings together every important aspect of Tolkien's vast cosmology. More than five hundred alphabetical entries cover five major subject areas: history, geography, sociology, natural history and biography. The maps, genealogies and time-charts, together with the illustrations of characters, places adn events, reveal to the reader the full dramatic sweep and splendor of Tolkien's world.

Introduction by Simon Franklin; Translation by Michael Glenny.

This is the first novel in Isaac Asimov's Foundation Trilogy, a three-part masterwork that was later expanded to a seven-part series. It won the Hugo Award for Best All-Time Novel Series — a special award created to recognize this central work of science fiction. The book describes a far future in which humanity numbers in the quadrillions, spread across millions of worlds, governed by the vast and presumably eternal Empire. But mathematician Hari Seldon, who has developed the study of psychohistory, or the dynamics of very large numbers of humans, has predicted the Empire's certain downfall. In order to forestall the chaos that would follow, he proposes a Foundation of all human knowledge at the edge of the galaxy.

In Anne Rice's new novel, the Vampire Lestat — outsider, canny monster, hero-wanderer — is at last offered the chance to be redeemed. He is brought into direct confrontation with both God and the Devil, and into the land of Death. We are in New York. The city is blanketed in snow. Through the whiteness Lestat is searching for Dora, the beautiful and charismatic daughter of a drug lord, the woman who arouses Lestat's tenderness as no mortal ever has. While torn between his vampire passions and his overwhelming love for Dora, Lestat is confronted by the most dangerous adversaries he has yet known. He is snatched from the world itself by the mysterious Memnoch, who claims to be the Devil. He is invited to be a witness at the Creation. He is taken like the ancient prophets into the heavenly realm and is ushered into Purgatory. He must decide if he can believe in the Devil or in God. And finally, he must decide which, if either, he will serve.

This boon to logophiles, culled from Buckley: The Right Word, presents the author's most erudite, outre, and interesting words — from prehensile and sciolist to rubric and histrionic — complete with definitions, examples, and usage notes. Introduction by Jesse Sheidlower; illustrations by Arnold Roth.

Murder is hardly the best way for Lord Peter and his bride, the famous mystery writer Harriet Vane, to start their honeymoon. It all begins when the former owner of their newly acquired estate is found quite nastily dead in the cellar. All too quickly, what Lord Peter had hoped would be a very private and romantic stay in the country has turned into a most baffling case, with a misspelled «notise» to the milkman at its center and a dead man who's been discovered in a most intriguing condition: with not a spot of blood on his smashed skull and not a penny less than six hundred pounds in his pocket.

These Previously uncollected stories and letters are essential to the understanding of Babel's life and works.

Brilliant stories that show the growth of a novelist's mind, and the raw material that fed the wild surrealism of Bulgakov's later fiction. With the ink still wet on his diploma, the twenty-five-year-old Dr. Mikhail Bulgakov was flung into the depths of rural Russia which, in 1916-17, was still largely unaffected by such novelties as the motor car, the telephone or electric light. How his alter-ego copes (or fails to cope) with the new and often appalling responsibilities of a lone doctor in a vast country practice — on the eve of Revolution — is described in Bulgakov's delightful blend of candid realism and imaginative exuberance.

An unconventional woman trapped in a conventional marriage, Martha Quest struggles to maintain her dignity and her sanity through the misunderstandings, frustrations, infidelities, and degrading violence of a failing marriage. Finally, she must make the heartbreaking choice of whether to sacrifice her child as she turns her back on marriage and security. A Proper Marriage is the second novel in Doris Lessing's classic Children of Violence series of novels, each a masterpiece on its own right, and, taken together, an incisive and all-encompassing vision of our world in the twentieth century.

Netsuke are small toggles or buckles carved from wood or ivory. The Japanese in the seventeenth century used them to fasten pouches to their kimono belt, since kimonos had no pockets. This lavishly illustrated book takes the reader on an exciting tour of one type of netsuke—those carved to look like the masks used by stage actors.

Following the National Book Award–winning All the Pretty Horses, this second part of Cormac McCarthy's Border Trilogy is not a sequel but a parallel story, set in the boot heel of New Mexico, hard on the frontier. «Sixteen-year-old Billy Parham is obsessed with trapping a renegade wolf that has crossed the border from Mexico to raid his father's cattle ranch. By the time he finally succeeds, Billy has formed such a close bond with his prey that he decides to return the wolf to its home, and the two head off into the mountains. Billy returns months later to find that his parents have been murdered by horse thieves. He abducts his kid brother from a foster home, and they ride into Mexico to retrieve their property, encountering gypsies, desperadoes, and itinerant philosophers along the way... McCarthy's luminous prose style, spare as the desert landscapes it describes, is almost Beckett-like in its blend of deadpan humor and existential despair. An exceptionally vivid and rewarding novel».

Meet Mr. Ash, quiet-spoken, tall, unfailingly kind — sole survivor of an ancient species, the Taltos — thriving among humankind as he has always done, now the head of a great corporate empire. As the novel opens, he is stunned to learn from an old and mysterious friend that another Taltos has been seen — in the very same Scottish glen where centuries ago, long before the coming of the Romans, Ash ruled his clan. At once he is propelled into the world of Rowan Mayfair, and into the mysteries of the Mayfair family — the New Orleans dynasty of witches forever besieged by ghosts, spirits, and the dizzying powers of his own species — a family intimately involved with the heritage of the Taltos, a family of unique, brilliant, and troubled souls struggling as they have for centuries to use both science and magic in their battle for greatness, even survival. At the heart of the novel is the Talamasca, a secular order of psychic scholars, the only organization in existence which may understand Ash, his Taltos past, and the dilemma of the Mayfair witches. The story of the Mayfair family continues, moving from London to Donnelaith, Scotland, to New Orleans, back and forth through time — from the origins of the Taltos and their mythic Lost Land to the moral crises of the present day.

This is Ernest Hemingway's lyrical journal of a month on safari in the great game country of East Africa, where he and his wife Pauline journeyed in December 1933. Hemingway's well-known interest in — and fascination with — big game hunting is magnificently captured in this evocative account of his trip. It is an examination of the lure of the hunt and an impassioned portrait of the glory of the African landscape and of the beauty of a wilderness that was, even then, being threatened by the incursions of man.

From the day her first Vampire Chronicle was published, critics and readers — readers by the hundreds of thousands — have been mesmerized by the writings of Anne Rice. And with the publication of The Witching Hour, she created for us yet another world and legend, and both the chorus of praise and the multitudes of her readers once more increased. Now, Anne Rice brings us again — even more magically — into the midst of the dynasty of witches she introduced in The Witching Hour. At the center: the brilliant an beautiful Rowan Mayfair, queen of the coven, and Lasher, the darkly compelling demon whom she finds irresistible and from whose evil spell and vision she must now flee. She takes with her their terrifying and exquisite child, one of «a brood of children born knowing, able to stand and talk on the first day». Rowan's attempt to escape Lasher and his pursuit of her and their child are at the heart of this extraordinary saga. It is a novel that moves around the globe, backward and forward through time, and between the human and demonic worlds. Its many voices — of women, of men, of demons and angels, present and past — haunt and enchant us. With a dreamlike power, the novel draws us through twilight paths, telling a chillingly hypnotic story of occult and spiritual aspirations and passion.

It's very easy to get a little disheartened when your planet has been blown up, the woman you love has vanished in a misunderstanding about the nature of space-time, the spaceship you are on crashes in flames on a remote and Bob-fearing planet and all you have to fall back on are a few simple sandwich-making skills. However, instead of being disheartened, Arthur Dent makes the terrible mistake of starting to enjoy life a bit and, immediately, all hell breaks loose. Hell takes a number of forms: there is the usual Ford Prefect form of hell, fresh hell in the form of an all-new version of The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy which behaves in an altogether more mysterious, sinister and airborn manner, and a totally unexpected hell that arrives in the form of a teenage girl who utterly startles Arthur Dent by being his daughter when he didn't even know he had one. Much as Arthur would love to stay in his rural sandwich-making idyll, he is forced to set off on his travels once again, this time on the back of a mysterious Perfectly Normal Beast. Can he save the Earth from total destruction throughout all dimensional probabilities? Can he save the Guide from a hostile alien takeover? Can he save the Grebulons from completely myopic junked-up idiocy? Can he save his daughter Random from herself? Of course not. He never even works out what is going on, exactly. Will you? Mostly Harmless: The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy Part Five: The book that gives a whole new meaning to the world trilogy.

Martha really does speak in this book and audio CD set, which features two readings — one with page-turn cues for reading along, and one without — by Kathy Najimy, who voices Martha's many, many comments about the world around her. It all begins when young Helen gives her lovable mutt Martha a bowl of alphabet soup, and the letters bypass the dog's stomach and go directly to her brain. Not only does Martha start talking, she can't shut up, and eventually drives her family crazy. The inaugural title in Susan Meddaugh's delightful series for readers up to 8, this New York Times Best Illustrated Book for 1992 is reminiscent of William Steig's quirky children's stories.

The most complete compendium of mythology ever published. 'Bulfinch's Mythology' includes the stories of: Apollo and Daphne, Pygmalion, Cupid and Psyche, Jason and the Golden Fleece, Hercules, Theseus and Daedalus, The Trojan War, Ulysses, and more...

Lesley O'Mara. ed. Introduction by Gerald Durrell. B&W Line Art. Outstanding authors Virginia Woolf, P.G. Wodehouse, G.K. Chesterton, Jack London, James Herriot, O. Henry and many others have contributed to this touching collection of stories that pay tribute to man's (and woman's) best friend.

Long considered a literary heir of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald (1915–83) infused new life into the hardboiled detective genre with psychologically complex mysteries involving his intuitive and empathetic private eye Lew Archer. This omnibus presents three of Macdonald's best Archer novels. The Ivory Grin (a.k.a. Marked for Murder) begins when a wealthy woman hires Archer to track down a maid she suspects of stealing her jewelry. The Zebra-Striped Hearse finds Archer investigating a rich man's prospective son-in-law, and in The Underground Man Archer tracks a missing child and uncovers a secret history of wayward parents and wounded offspring.

Interweaving past and present, Sweden and Zambia, «The Eye of the Leopard» draws on bestselling author Mankell's deep understanding of the two worlds he has inhabited for more than 20 years.

The many readers who are enthralled with the enduring legend of Camelot will be drawn to this fascinating book, which may become the definitive work in the effort to prove the historical authenticity of King Arthur.

Exquisitely produced — bound in sandalwood linen and presented in a matching linen case with a button-tie closure and stamped Chinese yin mark — this album offers a vivid impression of pre-World War II China. Stanley Gamble, the grandson of the co-founder of Proctor & Gamble, took three extended journeys through China from 1917 to 1932. His surveys of life in Beijing and rural northern China included the remarkable photographs reproduced here, paired with Chinese poetry.

Waugh tells the story of the Marchmain family. Aristocratic, beautiful and charming, the Marchmains are indeed a symbol of England and her decline in this novel of the upper class of the 1920s and the abdication of responsibility in the 1930s.

In this book Lewis tells of his search for joy, a spiritual journey that led him from the Christianity of his early youth into atheism and then back to Christianity.