Russell, Penny and Will have not seen each other for twenty years. Why, then, do they spend a month driving around the coast of Britain in a van refusing to listen to music? Why do they find little blue bottles washing up on the shore containing pages from a future Bible? And why is Penny carrying such a huge spade? Funny, surprising and good-hearted, The Brandy of the Damned is a dream-like short novel that leaves the reader strangely grounded and which reveals different things each time it is read. It is the literary equivalent of stepping off the path and heading out into the woods, knowing that if you can't see what's ahead you are never bored. The Brandy of the Damned is a genuinely original story told by a unique voice. It exists in a genre of one.

Harry White examines the influence of music in the development of the Irish literary imagination from 1800 to the present day. He identifies music as a preoccupation which originated in the poetry of Thomas Moore early in the nineteenth century. He argues that this preoccupation decisively influenced Moore's attempt to translate the 'meaning' of Irish music into verse, and that it also informed Moore's considerable impact on the development of European musical romanticism, as in the music of Berlioz and Schumann. White then examines how this preoccupation was later recovered by W.B. Yeats, whose poetry is imbued with music as a rival presence to language. In its readings of Yeats, Synge, Shaw and Joyce, the book argues that this striking musical awareness had a profound influence on the Irish literary imagination, to the extent that poetry, fiction and drama could function as correlatives of musical genres. Although Yeats insisted on the synonymous condition of speech and song in his poetry, Synge, Shaw and Joyce explicitly identified opera in particular as a generic prototype for their own work. Synge's formal musical training and early inclinations as a composer, Shaw's perception of himself as the natural successor to Wagner, and Joyce's no less striking absorption of a host of musical techniques in his fiction are advanced in this study as formative (rather than incidental) elements in the development of modern Irish writing. Music and the Irish Literary Imagination also considers Beckett's emancipation from the oppressive condition of words in general (and Joyce in particular) through the agency of music, and argues that the strong presence of Mendelssohn, Chopin and Janácek in the works of Brian Friel is correspondingly essential to Friel's dramatisation of Irish experience in the aftermath of Beckett. The book closes with a reading of Seamus Heaney, in which the poet's own preoccupation with the currency of established literary forms is enlisted to illuminate Heaney's abiding sense of poetry as music.

With vampires and werewolves running amuck, Bruno Casta struggles to distance himself from the horrors of his life while fighting for humanity on the road to discovering the Chronicles of the Damned.

“With The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice has created universes within universes, traveling back in time as far as ancient, pre-pyramidic Egypt and journeying from the frozen mountain peaks of Nepal to the crowded, sweating streets of southern Florida.”—Los Angeles Times In a feat of virtuoso storytelling, Anne Rice unleashes Akasha, the queen of the damned, who has risen from a six-thousand-year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. Akasha has a marvelously devious plan to “save” mankind and destroy the vampire Lestat—in this extraordinarily sensual novel of the complex, erotic, electrifying world of the undead. Praise for The Queen of the Damned “Mesmerizing . . . a wonderful web of dark-side mythology.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Imaginative . . . intelligently written . . . This is popular fiction of the highest order.”—USA Today “A tour de force.”—The Boston Globe

General Dwight Eisenhower commands a diverse army that must destroy Hitler’s European fortress. On the coast of France, German commander Erwin Rommel prepares for the coming invasion, as the Führer thwarts the strategies Rommel knows will succeed. Meanwhile, Sergeant Jesse Adams, a veteran of the 82nd Airborne, parachutes with his men behind German lines. And as the invasion force surges toward the beaches of Normandy, Private Tom Thorne of the 29th Infantry Division faces the horrifying prospects of fighting his way ashore on Omaha Beach, a stretch of coast more heavily defended than the Allied commanders anticipate. From G.I. to general, this story carries us through the war’s most crucial juncture, the invasion that altered the flow of the war, and, ultimately, changed history.

International Bestseller: The essential guidebook to the history of magic and occultism—“the most interesting, informative, and thought-provoking book on [the occult]” (The Sunday Telegraph) Colin Wilson’s great classic work is a comprehensive history of mystery and magic. His genius lies in producing a skillful synthesis of the available material; clarifying without simplifying, seeing the occult in the light of reason and reason in the light of the mystical and paranormal. It is a journey of enlightenment—a wide-ranging survey of the whole subject and an insightful exploration of Man’s latent powers. Republished two years after the author’s death, and with a new foreword by bibliographer Colin Stanley, Wilson brings his own refreshingly optimistic and stimulating interpretation to the worlds of the paranormal, the occult, and the supernatural.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Ramses the Great returns in this “darkly magical” (USA Today) novel from bestselling author Anne Rice “The reader is held captive and, ultimately, seduced.”—San Francisco Chronicle Ramses the Great lives! But having drunk the elixer of live, he is now Ramses the Damned, doomed forever to wander the earth, desperate to quell hungers that can never be satisfied—for food, for wine, for women. Reawakened in opulent Edwardian London, he becomes Dr. Ramsey, expert in Egyptology. He also becomes the close companion of voluptuous, adventurous Julie Stratford, heiress to a vast shipping fortune and the center of a group of jaded aristocrats with appetites of their own to appease. But the pleasures Ramses enjoys with Julie cannot soothe him. Searing memories of his last reawakening, at the behest of Cleopatra, his beloved Queen of Egypt, burn in his immortal soul. And though he is immortal, he is still all too human. His intense longings for his great love, undiminished over the centuries, will force him to commit an act that will place everyone around him in the gravest danger. . . .