Kurt Vonnegut, Jr. wrote with a piercingly cynical eye — but one tempered with the dark survivor-humor and empathy of a man who had seen too much wartime carnage. Steeped in satire, black comedy and his freewheeling imagination, Vonnegut’s novels delve into society’s hollow places, politics, the… MORE

A two-man mission to Venus fails and is aborted; when it returns, the Captain is missing and the other astronaut, Harry M. Evans, is unable to explain what has happened. Or, conversely, he has too many explications; his journal of the expedition — compiled in the mental institution to which NASA… MORE

This fast-paced business autobiography takes the reader through one of the most rapidly moving and far-reaching publishing careers. Arthur Klebanoff offers a rare glimpse into the previously rarefied literary world and the behind the scenes role of an agent.

From the White House in the late… MORE

A remote scientific research expedition at the North Pole is invaded by a monstrous alien, reawakened after lying frozen for centuries after a crash-landing. The alien is intelligent, cunning and a shape-changer who can assume the form and personality of anything it destroys and soon it is among… MORE

"His best book," Esquire wrote of Kurt Vonnegut's 1959 novel The Sirens of Titan, adding, "he dares not only to ask the ultimate question about the meaning of life, but to answer it." This novel fits into that aspect of the Vonnegut canon that might be classified as science fiction, a quality that… MORE

Charles Underhill, a widower, would do anything to protect his young son Jim from the horrors of the playground ... a playground which he and the boy pass daily and whose tumult and activity brings back to him the anguish of his own childhood. The playground like childhood itself is a nightmare of… MORE

Richard and Janet Gayford happened to spend the night of September 26 in London, not returning to their home in the village of Midwich until the following day. Only they have difficulty getting back into Midwich, and -- in ways that are difficult to isolate -- the village does not seem to be the… MORE

Best known as the basis for Hitchcock's classic early film, The Lady Vanishes, Ethel White's The Wheel Spins is a gripping and accomplished work in its own right. The plot is deceptively simple, and the premise -- a woman meets a mysterious stranger during a long railway journey -- is classic. It's… MORE

Science fiction fans will find familiar the premise of Philip K. Dick's 1954 short story "The Father-Thing." In it, a young boy, Charlie, discovers that his father is not actually his father. The man in his house who comes home from work, kisses his mother, sits down to dinner, makes comments about… MORE

The second volume in Daniel Boorstin's award-winning trilogy, The Americans: The National Experience, continues the ongoing story of the formation of the American character from the Revolution through the Civil War. Winner of the Francis Parkman Prize, The National Experience is not a history of… MORE

Charles Webb's The Graduate, published in 1963, was a success for the young American writer, a sly and provocative first novel that is often forgotten in the shadow of Mike Nichols' sensational 1967 film and, more recently, an attention-grabbing stage adaptation in London with Kathleen Turner, then… MORE