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(0)Yuri Rasovsky
The insidious Fleet Street barber slit his first throat in an 1846 "penny dreadful," one of those gaudy serialized novels that gleefully offered thrills and gore to sensation-hungry Victorians. TitledThe String of Pearls, it told of Sweeney Todd, whose shop stood next to St. Dunstan's Church, just a few blocks from the Royal Courts of Justice. On this site, he robbed and murdered hundreds of customers. To dispose of their remains, he carried them
...Ronald Radosh’s earliest memory is of being trundled off to a May Day demonstration by his Communist parents. Radosh grew up in the parallel universe of American Communism. When he entered the University of Wisconsin in the late 1950s, he became a founding father of the New Left and was on the center stage during the sixties.
But if Commies is an intimate social history of the American Left over the past half-century, it is also a compelling
...Welcome to Shakespeare's London, a world where the stage captures the hearts of every citizen, and where darkness hides dangerous and vengeful creatures. It is in this darkness that Shakespeare finds himself the victim of treachery most foul.
When Shakespeare is contacted by his dark mistress, the former love of his life, he is excited to see her again after the long separation. But to his horror, he finds that the years have not been kind;
...From a foxhole on Guadalcanal, shared with former champ Barney Ross, to the glitzy underworld of Hollywood in the ’40s, Nate Heller fights his memories and “the outfit.” Something happened at the Canal, something Heller’s blocking out. What he can’t block, though, is the wound he received -- the million-dollar wound, the one that got him home. Back in the States, and back in Chicago, he becomes involved once again with Frank Nitti during
...14) Beowulf
Mavis Gallant is a contemporary legend, a frequent contributor to the New Yorker for close to fifty years, and the undisputed master of the short story. Her peerless prose captures the range of human experience while evoking time and place with unequaled skill. This superb collection of fifteen of Gallant's stories, edited and with an introduction by bestselling author Michael Ondaatje, gathers the best of her many stories set all over Europe,
...In 1975, a People’s Militia homicide investigator is on a plane for Istanbul when it is hijacked by Armenian terrorists. Before the Turkish authorities can fulfill the hijackers’ demands, the plane explodes in midair.
Two investigators, a secret policeman and a homicide detective, are assigned to the case. Both believe that their superiors are keeping them in the dark, but they can’t figure out why…until they begin to realize that everything
...17) The tempest
Master Sun said: "Ultimate excellence lies not in winning every battle but in defeating the enemy without ever fighting."
For more than two thousand years, The Art of War has stood as a cornerstone of Chinese culture, a lucid text that reveals as much about psychology, politics, and economics as it does about battlefield strategy. For those seeking a deeper understanding of this seminal work, scholar John Minford brings the words of Sun-tzu
...In 1743, a Russian ship was blown off course and trapped in ice off the coast of Svalbard (Spitzbergen), a barren Arctic island. Four sailors went ashore with only two days' supplies, and only twenty pounds of flour for food. Upon return they found the ship had vanished, apparently crushed and sunk by the ice. Blessed with courage and ingenuity, the men survived more than six years of unimaginable hardship—including polar bear attacks—until
...One of the finest and most influential horror writers of the twentieth century, Richard Matheson has left his stamp on the collective imagination. Here are more than twenty of Matheson's most memorable tales of fear and paranoia, personally selected by the author himself. Many of these stories have already entered into popular culture, including the title story, which became a landmark episode of The Twilight Zone, and "Duel," the nail-biting tale
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