This is the story of Mike Ridley and the experiences he encounters in less than one year's period of time, from the fall of 1979 to the summer of 1980---some strange, some surreal, some more terrifying than any soul could ever imagine, including the culmination of his ten-year-long descent into the clutches of madness.

In the scorching summer of 1976—the hottest since records began—Christopher Norton, his wife Laura and their young daughter Faye settle into their new home in north London. The faded glory of the Victorian house is the perfect place for Norton, a composer of film soundtracks, to build a recording studio of his own. But soon in the long, oppressively hot nights, Laura begins to hear something through the crackle of the baby monitor. First, a knocking sound. Then come the voices.For Norton, the voices mark an exciting opportunity. Putting his work to one side, he begins the project of a lifetime—a grand symphony incorporating the voices±—and becomes increasingly obsessed with one voice in particular. Someone who is determined to make themselves heard . . .

2024 Winner, Kjetil Hatlebrekke Memorial Book Prize, King's College Centre for the Study of Intelligence This book focuses on the generation of the sixties and seventies in Kharkiv, Soviet Ukraine, a milieu of writers who lived through the Thaw and the processes of de-Stalinization and re-Stalinization. Special attention is paid to KGB operations against what came to be known as the dissident milieu, and the interaction of Ukrainians, Jews, and Russians in the movement, their persona friendships, formal and informal interactions, and the ways they dealt with repression and arrests. This study demonstrates that the KGB unintentionally facilitated the transnational and intercultural links among the Kharkiv multi-ethnic community of writers and their mutual enrichment. Post-Khrushchev Kharkiv is analyzed as a political space and a place of state violence aimed at combating Ukrainian nationalism and Zionism, two major targets in the 1960s–1970s. Despite their various cultural and social backgrounds, the Kharkiv literati might be identified as a distinct bohemian group possessing shared aesthetic and political values that emerged as the result of de-Stalinization under Khrushchev. Archival documents, diaries, and memoirs suggest that the 1960s–1970s was a period of intense KGB operations, “active measures” designed to disrupt a community of intellectuals and to fragment friendships, bonds, and support among Ukrainians, Russians, and Jews along ethnic lines domestically and abroad.

From his army of the undead, Xar, Lord of the Nexus, learns of the existence of the mysterious Seventh Gate. It is said that this gate grants whoever enters it the power to create worlds—or destroy them. Only Haplo knows its location—but he doesn't know he knows it. Now an ex-lover has been sent to betray Haplo and bring back his corpse. Meanwhile, the assassin Hugh the Hand is also after Haplo, wielding the Accursed Blade. With his old companion Alfred, Haplo must seek sanctuary in the Labyrinth—a deadly prison maze whose inhabitants are condemned to death. Millennia ago a battle raged between the Sartan and the Patryn, and the Sartan sundered the world into four realms—air, fire, stone, and water—and then vanished. But now the two races have rediscovered each other through the magic of the Death Gate—and war is about to erupt anew.

The last hundred years of scientific and philosophical thought have created dramatic upheavals in how we view our universe, our spiritual beliefs and ourselves. Commonly accepted theories of evolution and relativity and the precepts of existentialism, have shaken the foundations of traditional religious practices. Many people now wonder if enduring spiritual and moral truths even exist.

Winner of the Shirley Jackson Award. London, 1603. Ben Jonson, playwright, poet, satirist . . . detective? Someone is murdering choir boys and Jonson, in the way that only Greer Gilman could write him — "Fie, poetastery." — is compelled to investigate.

In The Gatekeeper: Narrative Voice in Plato’s Dialogues Margalit Finkelberg offers the first narratological analysis of all of Plato’s transmitted dialogues. The book explores the dialogues as works of literary fiction, giving special emphasis to such topics as narrative levels, focalization, narrative frame, and metalepsis. The main conclusion of the book is that in Plato the plurality of the speakers’ opinions is not accompanied by a plurality of points of view. Only one perspective is available, that of the narrator. Contrary to the widespread view, Plato’s dialogues cannot be considered multivocal, or “dialogic” in Bakhtin’s sense. By skillful use of narrative voice, Plato unobtrusively regulates the readers’ reception and response. The narrator is the dialogue’s gatekeeper, a filter whose main function is to control how the dialogue is received by the reader by sustaining a certain perspective of it.