From the Booker Prize-winning author of The Satanic Verses comes nine stories that reveal the oceanic distances and the unexpected intimacies between East and West. Daring, extravagant, comical and humane, this book renews Rushdie's stature as a storyteller who can enthrall and instruct us with the same sentence.

*"A rich and intriguing story whcih the authors disentangle with great skill."--Sunday Telegraph Beevor's Ardennes 1944: The Battle of the Bulge* is now available from Viking Books  In this brilliant synthesis of social, political, and cultural history, Antony Beevor and Artemis Cooper present a vivid and compelling portrayal of the City of Lights after its liberation. Paris became the diplomatic battleground in the opening stages of the Cold War. Against this volatile political backdrop, every aspect of life is portrayed: scores were settled in a rough and uneven justice, black marketers grew rich on the misery of the population, and a growing number of intellectual luminaries and artists including Hemingway, Beckett, Camus, Sartre, de Beauvoir, Cocteau, and Picassocontributed new ideas and a renewed vitality to this extraordinary moment in time.

Her marriage over, her life unraveling, writer Leila Landsman turns to work and finds herself drawn to the sensational story of Becky Burgess, a young woman accused of killing her husband with the help of her teenage lover. Becky thought she'd escaped the grim poverty of her childhood when she married up, but her husband was soon planning to trade her in for a newer model. And that's just what happened to Mary Burke, whose middle-class life ended with her divorce. Now Leila's housecleaner, Mary has a secret: she is homeless. They are three very different women who share the same longings: to be seen for who they are, to be valued and loved, but most of all, to have a physical and emotional home that can't be taken away....

Vampires in Stoneybrook? Kristy and her friends are so excited that a vampire movie is being shot in Stoneybrook. But when someone threatens the child actor who's in their charge, the Baby-sitters Club has to sink their teeth into another great mystery.

While the Johanssens are away, Stacey's in charge of walking their dog, Carrot, and watching their house. At first, it's fun.

As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In A Drinking Life, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong New Yorker.

It's a Ho! Ho! Ho-rrible trick! Christmas is coming, and Nancy's third grade class is having a Secret Santa exchange. That means cards, candy, and a special gift for everyone. Everyone except Nancy Drew! Is it a mistake? Is somebody just being silly or mean? Or is someone hiding something and afraid to tell the truth? One thing's for sure. Nancy's presents are gone, and all she has to unwrap is one big mystery!

Second Nature tells the story of a suburban woman, Robin Moore, who discovers her own free spirit through a stranger she brings home to her perfectly ordered neighborhood. As Robin impulsively draws this beautiful, uncivilized man into her world-meanwhile coping with divorce and a troubled teenage son-she begins to question her wisdom and doubt her own heart, and ultimately she changes her ideas about love and humanity.

OH, WHAT A TANGLED WEB... Everything should have been quiet and pleasant for Ben Holiday, the former Chicago lawyer who became sovereign of the Magic Kingdom of Landover. But it wasn't. Horris Kew, conjurer, confidence-man, and trickster, had returned to Landover from Ben's own world. Alas, Horris had not returned of his own volition--he had been sent by the Gorse, a sorcerer of great evil, whom Horris had unwittingly freed from the magic Tangle Box, where it had long ago been imprisoned by the fairy folk. Now it had returned to enslave those who had once dared condemn it. But first, it would rid Landover of all who could stand in its way... Soon Ben found himself imprisoned within the gloom of the Tangle Box, lost in its mists and its labyrinthine ways. The only one who could free Ben from the Tangle Box was the lady Willow. But she had disappeared, was gone from Landover on a mysterious mission of her own.... From the Paperback edition.

After a car accident kills Robert, Andy's best friend and teammate on the Hazelwood High Tigers, Andy doesn't know if he can go on. He's consumed with guilt for driving the night of the accident after a long evening of drinking and partying. With perceptiveness and compassion, Sharon M. Draper portrays an African-American teenager who feels driven to consider suicide in the wake of a devastating tragedy.

A beautiful young reporter and a small group of jokers and aces have unearthed evidence of a secret conspiracy called the Card Sharks, whose goal is no less than the wholesale destruction of those afflicted with the Wild Cards virus. Hannah and her heroes must flush out the Card Sharks before they can employ their ultimate weapon.

**A high school yearbook editor stumbles on a body—and his school’s evil secret **According to his IQ test, David Kallas is a genius, even if his teachers think he’s a slacker. His sole extracurricular activity is the yearbook, and he only became editor as an excuse to get close to Ariana Maas. On his way to the printer’s to check on the book, he takes a shortcut to spy on Ariana and her boyfriend—the impossibly perfect Stephen Taylor—and ends up finding something even nastier than two students making out: a butchered corpse floating in the creek. The body leads David to a disturbing secret about his school’s past. When members of the senior class start dying, David is determined to solve the mystery and save the school—even if he has to destroy himself to do it. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Peter Lerangis including rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author’s personal collection. 

Barry di Hoa had the good life on the Moon: steady work and the love of a good woman. But a rival slipped him a mickey, and he next awoke aboard Gerald Tscharka's ship as it neared the colony planet, Pava, eighteen light-years away. Pava was the frontier, complete with earthquakes, primitive conditions and hard physical work. The local "doctor" wouldn't treat Barry's little manic-depressive problem without medicine from the Moon. And the Millernarist colonists, who thought suicide was cool fun, didn't thrill him. Then he made friends with the leps. The large, caterpillar-like, odd-speaking gentle beasts were helping the humans to fashion a life on their planet. In their strange way, they knew things about Pava that might make the difference in the colony's survival. He started to believe he could really enjoy life in this fragile paradise. Except Tscharka was up to soemthing bad, something that would change eveyrthing. Barry knew only he could stop the mad captian, and the captain knew it, too. What neither knew was whether Barry could be manic enough to do it.

They busted out of McAlester State Penitentiary--three escaped convicts going to ground in a world unprepared for anything like them.... Lamar Pye is prince of the Dirty White Boys.  With a lion in his soul, he roars--for he is the meanest, deadliest animal on the loose.... Odell is Lamar's cousin, a hulking manchild with unfeeling eyes.  He lives for daddy Lamar.  Surely he will die for him.... Richard's survival hangs on a sketch: a crude drawing of a lion and a half-naked woman.  For this Lamar has let Richard live... Armed to the teeth, Lamar and his boys have cut a path of terror across the Southwest, and pushed one good cop into a crisis of honor and conscience.  Trooper Bud Pewtie should have died once at Lamar's hands.  Now they're about to meet again.  And this time, only one of them will walk away.... From the Paperback edition.

Professor Edward Kitchener, a double Nobel laureate researching quantum cosmology for the powerful Event Horizon conglomerate has been savagely murdered. But was he the victim of industrial espionage, personal revenge, or a crime of passion by one of his handpicked team of live-wire students? Event Horizon needs to know and fast, so Greg Mandel, PSI-boosted veteran of the infamous Mindstar Battalion, must embark on an urgent investigation that ultimately leads him to an astounding confrontation with a past, which, according to the dead man's theories, might never have happened.