Random House, Inc.

History offers few eras richer in drama than the last years of imperial Russia. Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, Empress Alexandra, presided over a glittering world of huge palaces, lavish balls, and incomparable luxury. Then their cherished son Alexis was born. His hemophilia led to their tragic entanglement with the bizarre Siberian mystic Rasputin and eventually to the disintegration of their empire. Nicholas and Alexandra is the unforgettable intimate account of the entire imperial family, now in a trade paperback format for the first time. Told with scrupulous historical accuracy and stunning narrative power, Nicholas and Alexandra is a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

Bring your child's classroom with the wonderfully imaginative Step-Ahead series. Proven educational methods reinforce what is taught in preschool through the elementary grades. Simple instructions, delightful graphics, and fun-to-do activities, such as this book with peel-and-stick stickers, motivate your child to master skills and turn the page for more.

Alice Munro's territory is the farms and semi-rural towns of south-western Ontario. In these dazzling stories she deals with the self-discovery of adolescence, the joys and pains of love and the despair and guilt of those caught in a narrow existence. And in sensitively exploring the lives of ordinary men and women, she makes us aware of the universal nature of their fears, sorrows and aspirations.

Back for an amazing ninth printing, this is our bestselling book ever, a Catcher in the Rye for its generation and the basis for the Academy Award-nominated film. It tells the story of Enid and Rebecca, two above-it-all best friends confronted with the prospect of adulthood and the uncertain future of their friendship.

From the award-winning translators of Crime and Punishment, Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky. The Brothers Karamazov is a murder mystery, a courtroom drama, and an exploration of erotic rivalry in a series of triangular love affairs involving Karamazov and his three sons — the impulsive and sensual Dmitri; the coldly rational Ivan; and the healthy young novice Alyosha. Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the social and spiritual strivings in what was both a golden age and a tragic turning point in Russian culture.

A young boy and his wintertime friend share a magical night of friendship, fun, and flying in this award-winning, wordless story.

Begun in the autumn of 1957 and published posthumously in 1964, this short book looks back to what it meant to be young and poor and writing in Paris during the 1920s. A correspondent for the Toronto Star, Hemingway arrived in Paris in 1921 — Braque and Picasso were experimenting with cubist forms; James Joyce had just completed Ulysses; and Gertude Stein held court at 27 rue de Fleurus, and deemed young Ernest a member of rue génération perdue. It was during these years that the yet-unpublished young writer gathered the material for The Sun Also Rises, and the subsequent masterpieces that followed. Writing in a terse, stripped-down style, first as a reporter and then a novelist, Hemingway was an enormously influential author from the 1920s through the 50s, and won both the Pulitzer and Nobel Prizes. J.D. Salinger, Hunter S. Thompson, Charles Bukowski, and Jack Kerouac all acknowledged their indebtedness to him, as did non-authors like artist Edward Hopper, whose Nighthawks at the Diner was inspired in part by Hemingway's short stories.

Simple instructions and delightful graphics motivate children to master skills... and turn the page for more. Each Workbook Contains: — Easy-to-follow directions; — Skill building exercises with delightful illustrations; — An assortment of colorful stickers; — 32 easy-tear-out pages; — Skill identifier at the bottom of each page; — An answer key.

Simple instructions and delightful graphics motivate children to master skills... and turn the page for more. Each Workbook Contains: — Easy-to-follow directions; — Skill building exercises with delightful illustrations; — An assortment of colorful stickers; — 32 easy-tear-out pages; — Skill identifier at the bottom of each page; — An answer key.

Evelyn Waugh's short stories are the marvelous, concentrated riffs of his comic genius, revealing in miniaturized perfection all the elements that made him the greatest comic writer of our century. We find in them Waugh's almost superhuman technical skill as a writer and his quicksilver attentiveness to the minutiae of human absurdity, as well as his worldly knowledge, his tenderness, his perceptive compassion, and his sophisticated, disabused, but nevertheless forceful idealism. The thirty-nine stories collected here include such small masterpieces as «Mr. Loveday's Little Outing» and «Scott-King's Modern Europe»; an alternative ending to Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust; a «missing chapter» in the life of Charles Ryder, the hero of Brideshead Revisited; and two linked stories, remnants of an abandoned novel that Waugh considered his best writing. This edition contains the original illustrations to «Love Among the Ruins», as well as more than thirty graphics produced by the author as an Oxford undergraduate in the 1920s.

Inspired by the true story of a political murder that horrified Russians in 1869, Fyodor Dostoevsky conceived of Demons as a 'novel-pamphlet' in which he would say everything about the plague of materialist ideology that he saw infecting his native land. What emerged was a prophetic and ferociously funny masterpiece of ideology and murder in pre-revolutionary Russia.

Five classic short stories by Dostoevsky are collected in a single anthology for the first time, showcasing the author's strange and intoxicating literary genius.

»50 Great Short Stories» is a comprehensive selection from the world' s finest short fiction. The authors represented range from Hawthorne, Maupassant, and Poe, through Henry James, Conrad, Aldous Huxley, and James Joyce, to Hemingway, Katherine Anne Porter, Faulkner, E.B. White, Saroyan, and O' Connor. The variety in style and subject is enormous, but all these stories have one point in common — the enduring quality of the writing, which places them among the masterpieces of the world' s fiction.

Folksy and fresh, endearing and affecting, Fried Green Tomatoes at the Whistle Stop Cafe is the now-classic novel of two women in the 1980s: of gray-headed Mrs. Threadgoode telling her life story to Evelyn, who is in the sad slump of middle age. The tale she tells is also of two women — of the irrepressibly daredevilish tomboy Idgie and her friend Ruth — who back in the thirties ran a little place in Whistle Stop, Alabama, a Southern kind of Cafe Wobegon offering good barbecue and good coffee and all kinds of love and laughter, even an occasional murder. And as the past unfolds, the present — for Evelyn and for us — will never be quite the same again...

Calder Moor is a wild and deadly place: many have been trapped in the myriad limestone caves, lost in collapsed copper mines, injured on perilous gritstone ridges. But this time, when two bodies are discovered in the shadow of the ancient circle of stones known as Nine Sisters Henge, it is clearly not a case for Mountain Rescue. The corpses are those of a young man and woman. Each met death in a different fashion. Each died violently. To Detective Inspector Thomas Lynley, brought in to investigate by special request, this grisly crime promises to be one of the toughest assignments of his career. For the unfortunate Nicola Maiden was the daughter of a former officer in an elite undercover unit, a man Lynley once regarded as a mentor. Now, as Lynley struggles to find out if Nicola's killer was an enemy of her father's or one she earned herself, a disgraced Barbara Havers, determined to redeem herself in the eyes of her longtime partner, crisscrosses London seeking information on the second murder victim. Yet the more dark secrets Lynley and Havers uncover, the more they learn that neither the victims nor the suspects are who they appear to be. And once again they come up against the icy realization that human relationships are often murderous...and that the blood that binds can also kill.

Wolverine, Cyclops, Jean Grey, Storm, and Rogue, mutants born with remarkable powers, band together as the X-Men to protect a world that fears and hates them from the powerful mutant Magneto.

She's a catwalk model who has everything: a boyfriend, a career, a loyal best friend. But when a sudden motor 'accident' leaves her disfigured and incapable of speech, she goes from being the beautiful centre of attention to being an invisible monster, so hideous that no one will acknowledge she exists.

Edmund has escaped from his family into a lonely life. Returning for his mother's funeral he finds himself involved in the same awful problems, together with some new ones. He also rediscovers the eternal family servant, the ever-changing «Italian girl».

How we know that a cat is a cat is a nice philosophical poser, and has been since the time of Plato. Why we should all agree on calling the animal a cat is equally interesting, yet it throws up the problem that lies at the heart of all modern philosophy: how much do our perceptions of things depend on our cognitive ability, and how much on our linguistic resources? Where, and how, do these two questions meet? Having decided against a systematic treatment of his subject, Umberto Eco undertakes a series of idiosyncratic and typically brilliant explorations, starting from the perceived data of common sense, from which flow an abundance of 'stories' or fables, often with animals as protagonists, to expound a clear critique of Kant, Heidegger and Peirce. And, as a beast designed specifically to throw spanners in the works of cognitive theory, the duckbilled platypus naturally takes centre stage.

Sequel to «The Godfather», this describes the ending of Michael Corleone's exile in Sicily, his search for Salvatore Giuliano and his troubles, as he confronts brutal and unfamiliar treacheries in the deceitful society within which he moves.

Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the Creedish death cult, has commandeered a Boeing 747, emptied of passengers, in order to tell his story to the plane's black box before it crashes. Brought up by the repressive cult and, like all Creedish younger sons, hired out as a domestic servant, Tender finds himself suddenly famous when his fellow cult members all commit suicide. As media messiah, he ascends to the very top of the freak-show heap before finally and apocalyptically spiralling out of control.

His life was like his recurring nightmare: a train to nowhere. But an ordinary life has a way of taking an extraordinary turn. Add a girl whose ears are so exquisite that, when uncovered, they improve sex a thousand-fold, a runaway friend, a right-wing politico, an ovine-obsessed professor and a manic-depressive in a sheep outfit, implicate them in a hunt for a sheep, that may or may not be running the world, and eth upshot is another singular masterpiece from Japan's finest novelist.

Iris Murdoch's richly peopled novel revolves round a happily married couple, Kate and Octavian, and the friends of all ages attached to their household in Dorset. The novel deals with love in its two aspects, the self-gratifying and the impersonal — the nice and the good — as they are embodied in a fascinating array of paired characters. The Nice And The Good leads through stress and terror to a joyous and compassionate 'Midsummer Nights Dream' conclusion, in which the couples all sort themselves out neatly and omnia vincit amor.

Growing up in the suburbs in post-war Japan, it seemed to Hajime that everyone but him had brothers and sisters. His sole companion was Shimamoto, also an only child. Together they spent long afternoons listening to her father's record collection. But when his family moved away, the two lost touch. Now Hajime is in his thirties. After a decade of drifting he has found happiness with his loving wife and two daughters, and success running a jazz bar. Then Shimamoto reappears. She is beautiful, intense, enveloped in mystery. Hajime is catapulted into the past, putting at risk all he has in the present.