When Kris Kelvin arrives at the planet Solaris to study the ocean that covers its surface he is forced to confront a painful, hitherto unconscious memory embodied in the physical likeness of a long-dead lover. Others suffer from the same affliction and speculation rises among scientists that the Solaris ocean may be a massive brain that creates incarnate memories, but its purpose in doing so remains a mystery . . .Solaris raises a question that has been at the heart of human experience and literature for centuries: can we truly understand the universe around us without first understanding what lies within?

This epic work of the imagination has captured the hearts of millions of readers worldwide since it was first published more than a decade ago. Its special story within a story is an irresistible invitation for readers to become part of the book itself. And now this modern classic and bibliophile's dream is available in hardcover again.The story begins with a lonely boy named Bastian and the strange book that draws him into the beautiful but doomed world of Fantastica. Only a human can save this enchanted place by giving its ruler, the Childlike Empress, a new name. But the journey to her tower leads through lands of dragons, giants, monsters, and magic and once Bastian begins his quest, he may never return. As he is drawn deeper into Fantastica, he must find the courage to face unspeakable foes and the mysteries of his own heart. Readers, too, can travel to the wondrous, unforgettable world of Fantastica if they will just turn the page...--front flap

Librarian's note: See alternate cover edition of ISBN13 9780380395866 here.Set in England's Downs, a once idyllic rural landscape, this stirring tale of adventure, courage and survival follows a band of very special creatures on their flight from the intrusion of man and the certain destruction of their home. Led by a stouthearted pair of friends, they journey forth from their native Sandleford Warren through the harrowing trials posed by predators and adversaries, to a mysterious promised land and a more perfect society.

When Dorothy and her little dog Toto are caught in a tornado, they and their Kansas farmhouse are suddenly transported to Oz, where Munchkins live, monkeys fly and Wicked Witches rule. Desperate to return home, and with the Wicked Witch of the West on their trail, Dorothy and Toto - together with new friends the Tin Woodsman, Scarecrow and cowardly Lion - embark on a fantastic quest along the Yellow Brick Road in search of the Emerald City. There they hope to meet the legendary, all-powerful Wizard of Oz, who alone may hold the power to grant their every wish.Just as captivating as it was a hundred years ago, this is a story that all ages will love.

In his blistering new novel, Cormac McCarthy returns to the Texas-Mexico border, the setting of his famed Border Trilogy. The time is our own, when rustlers have given way to drug-runners and small towns have become free-fire zones. One day, Llewellyn Moss finds a pickup truck surrounded by a bodyguard of dead men. A load of heroin and two million dollars in cash are still in the back. When Moss takes the money, he sets off a chain reaction of catastrophic violence that not even the law–in the person of aging, disillusioned Sheriff Bell–can contain.As Moss tries to evade his pursuers–in particular a mysterious mastermind who flips coins for human lives–McCarthy simultaneously strips down the American crime novel and broadens its concerns to encompass themes as ancient as the Bible and as bloodily contemporary as this morning’s headlines. No Country for Old Men is a triumph.

In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, women, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D. H. Lawrence, "Ham on Rye" offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.

Nausea is the story of Antoine Roquentin, a French writer who is horrified at his own existence. In impressionistic, diary form he ruthlessly catalogues his every feeling and sensation about the world and people around him. His thoughts culminate in a pervasive, overpowering feeling of nausea which "spread at the bottom of the viscous puddle, at the bottom of our time, the time of purple suspenders and broken chair seats; it is made of wide, soft instants, spreading at the edge, like an oil stain." Roquentin's efforts to try and come to terms with his life, his philosophical and psychological struggles, give Sartre the opportunity to dramatize the tenets of his Existentialist creed.The introduction for this edition of Nausea by Hayden Carruth gives background on Sartre's life and major works, a summary of the principal themes of Existentialist philosophy, and a critical analysis of the novel itself.

(Originally published on my blog: http://mybiochemicalsky.wordpress.com...)What a marvelous book Lena Krohn’s tiny Tainaron is! I admit that I chose it for my train read precisely because of its size. It’s merely 130 pages long, many of them filled with illustrations and the blank spaces that follow the end of chapters, in this case letters. Tainaron consists of thirty letters sent by a woman to her unnamed once-lover, over the huge mass of Oceanus, from the eponymous insect-inhabited city where she has emigrated for an unknown reason. It is not a novel, nor is it really a novella. There is no overarching plot; in fact, most of the novelistic mechanics that is part of our conditioning cannot be found in it. The psychological core of that very Western literary form, rooted in the socio-economic interaction between character and society, is simply not much of a concern for Lena Krohn. We never get to learn why the anonymous author of the letters came to Tainaron, how she makes her living, whether she has a job at all.Instead, Tainaron is a confession of sorts, albeit an oblique one. It is also a series of metaphysical musings on the nature of life, death, identity. It is about change, in its many forms that lurk in every facet of being. Each letter tells us of something different: of gardens with gigantic flowers that can easily swallow you whole, of strange processions that fill streets like rivers, of mass self-immolations, of queens who do nothing but give birth, and of a prince ignored by his own people. But despite all that, there is coherency to Tainaron, even though it is of a different kind. Krohn’s alien insectopolis is so gutturally strange and eventually unknowable, for the narrator and for the reader, that the mind cannot but seek similarities with our human world. She is well-aware of this cognitive reflex (Krohn, but her narrator as well, I think) and walks with confidence the tight-rope between metaphorical fiction and SF. What makes this work is her vivid and evocative style, captured wonderfully in the translation from Finnish. Tainaron might be just 130 pages long, but every sentence in it demands your full attention, that you actively imagine yourself there and bring into sharp relief the smorgasbord of images that sleep beneath the words. Thus, the book feels much bigger, as if it is a building with thirty different rooms, and each and every one of them can be explored anew many times, never surrendering an ultimate meaning.This is a book that will convince you to reread it, possibly many times. You read a paragraph and are struck by the sheer beauty of its words and phrases. Then you momentarily lose yourself in the cloying, creeping reality of that utterly strange world, only to find yourself being pulled back by the realization blooming in the back of your mind, while the same grasps for strands of meaning, that on some level that reality resembles our own so much it really hurts to even think the thought. After each letter you collect those shards, tally and catalogue them, separate and mingle them in jars made of yet newer analogies, quickly put together and disassembled to test multiple hypotheses. Eventually you give up and just let go, but you can now discern (at least you think you can) some tendencies, dependencies, cyclicities. The map is not the territory and a terrain in the process of constant recreation cannot ever be mapped, nor is there any point in trying to do so. Such is life, such is Tainaron that is always being demolished and rebuilt; even the measures of its buildings cannot be put down in the documents of history, as in every generation a new Surveyor is born in the city, whose body – the cartographer’s very instrument! – will capture a different story, a different map, meaningless to any reader of the future.The same goes for identities – their metamorphoses fill the book and every imaginable crack in time, they whisper of infinite cycles and unimaginable leaps in meaning. The narrator asks one of the oldest citizens of Tainaron – a man carried around in a bag, because he is too weak to walk on his own – what has been the most difficult thing in his life, and he answers–– “The fact that everything recurs and must always return and that the same questions are asked again and again.” The narrator herself struggles, throughout her letters, to come to terms with change, she clings to her own understanding of the necessary nature of predictable causality:“Really,” said Longhorn (her guide and mentor in Tainaron, who is literally a longhorn beetle), without showing any kind of sympathy, in fact teasingly. “So you want everyone to be someone. You want what someone is at the beginning to be what he is at the end.”“But surely! There has to be some kind of continuity!” I shouted. “Development, naturally, but at the same time––loyalty!” In another letter she wonders at the literal metamorphosis that the citizens of Tainaron go through, how it is possible for one to undergo complete transformation and abandon their previous self:Here you can bump into a stranger, and he will come up to you like an old acquaintance and begin to remember some past amusing coincidence that you apparently experienced together. When you ask, “When?”, he laughs and answers: “When I was someone else.” And although she speaks little of her life on the other side of Oceanus and of her once-lover, who never answers her mail, much is revealed about her fears and hopes, mirrored in the text and Tainaron itself. In one of the shortest and most startling letters she describes the inner dwellings of Tainaronians, which some of them carry around themselves, like armor on the outside and a comfortable hollow on the inside:Some of them carry their innermost apartment, a one-roomed flat which fits their dimensions like a glove, with them everywhere. But this has the drawback that one cannot always make sense of what they say, for it echoes and reverberates from the walls of their private apartments. It is also vexing to me that I cannot always tell where the dwelling ends and its inhabitant begins.Poor things, who never come among people without this innermost shield. It reflects the terrible vulnerability of their live. Their little home may be made of the most diverse ingredients: grains of sand, bark, straw, clay, leaves… But it protects them better than others protected by armour, from every direction, and it is a direct continuation of themselves, much more so than clothes are to you or me. But if it is taken away from them, they die––perhaps simply of shame, perhaps because their skins are too soft for the outside air, or because they do not have any skin at all. Did somebody take her armor away from her, one might ask. Did she flee the human world to escape, or did she die, or crack in the head? Did her lover do it to her? Or maybe she did it to him?And then there are those who cannot bear such a situation, those who wish to see everything face to face and to reveal, open, show the whole world the nakedness of things…. Now and then the temptation becomes overwhelming to them, and they split open the house of some poor unfortunate. I awake to shrieking, sigh and turn over––and soon fall asleep again. Those are sad and chilling paragraphs. Perhaps because they are so painfully truthful, despite the frailty of their metaphor. At the end, when winter comes to Tainaron and Oceanus freezes over, and everybody goes to stasis, she herself makes a pupa to sleep in, to transmogrify; frightened, but excited as well to see the world through new eyes when she wakes up.Tainaron is no allegory. It does not provide easy answers, or ask easy questions. And you will want to reread it, knowing that you will never exhaust it. It is not meant to be read like a novel, and it sports very distinctly the detached and yet piercing quality of Scandinavian writing, in the spirit of other famous fabulists like Lindgren and Jansson. It is a book you can get lost in, in its magical strangeness, but it will never deny you the surface – that will always be there, visible, and you will always want to return to it, not being able to bear the poignancy of the letters for too long. But at the same time you will long for that bittersweet quality and for the truth that has to lie buried somewhere in them, never excavated in full. I will refrain from rating the book on a numerical scale, as in this case it seems a meaningless exercise. And anyway, I expect to reread it many times in the future, so I am not eager to fix a label to it.

The novel is set during World War II, from 1942 to 1944. It mainly follows the life of Captain John Yossarian, a U.S. Army Air Forces B-25 bombardier. Most of the events in the book occur while the fictional 256th Squadron is based on the island of Pianosa, in the Mediterranean Sea, west of Italy. The novel looks into the experiences of Yossarian and the other airmen in the camp, who attempt to maintain their sanity while fulfilling their service requirements so that they may return home.

A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.(front flap)

From the author of the underground sensation Fight Club comes this wickedly incisive second novel, a mesmerizing, unnerving, and hilarious vision of cult and post-cult life.Tender Branson—last surviving member of the so-called Creedish Death Cult—is dictating his life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. Before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed, steroid- and collagen-packed media messiah, author of a best-selling autobiography, Saved from Salvation, and the even better selling Book of Very Common Prayer (The Prayer to Delay Orgasm, The Prayer to Prevent Hair Loss, The Prayer to Silence Car Alarms). He'll reveal the truth of his tortured romance with the elusive and prescient Fertility Hollis, share his insight that "the only difference between suicide and martyrdom is press coverage," and deny responsibility for the Tender Branson Sensitive Materials Sanitary Landfill, a 20,000-acre repository for the nation's outdated pornography. Among other matters both bizarre and trenchant.Not since Kurt Vonnegut's Mother Night and Jerzy Kosinski's Being There has there been as dark and telling a satire on the wages of fame and the bedrock lunacy of the modern world. Unpredictable, compelling, and unforgettable, Survivor is Chuck Palahniuk at his deadpan peak; and it cements his place as one of the most original writers in fiction today.

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