AND SO IT BEGINS… In the United States, the Department of Defense and the NSA computer networks have been hacked. A nuclear-armed CIA drone has lost all flight control. North Korea . . . Iran . . . Russia . . . and soon the gates of Hell will open. DEFCON 1—FULL SCALE NUCLEAR WAR Humanity’s most terrifying nightmare has become reality. Bombs are detonated, missiles are launched, counterstrikes are ordered, and within minutes, untold thousands of megatons have left countless millions dead or dying. Devastation of biblical proportions has fallen over the land . . . and the USA has been hit the hardest. NOW THE SURVIVORS ARE ON THEIR OWN… The death toll is incalculable. Following the devastation, there is no law, no power, no communication. But there are survivors. And now the real battle begins, on the ground, hand to hand, person to person. Can those who remain survive long enough to rebuild a world . . . or will it just take a little longer for them to die? “Leaves you breathless.”—Marc Cameron, bestselling author of National Security and Day Zero “Like a nuclear reactor, this story heats up fast!”—Anderson Harp, author of Retribution and Born of War (on Powerless)

A Master Chief story and original full-length novel set in the Halo universe—based on the New York Times bestselling video game series! 2526. It has been more than a year since humanity first encountered the hostile military alliance of alien races known as the Covenant, and several weeks after the United Nations Space Command’s devastating counterattack of Operation: SILENT STORM was deemed an overwhelming success. The UNSC has put its faith in the hands of the Spartans, led by the legendary Master Chief, John-117: enhanced super-soldiers raised and trained from childhood via a clandestine black ops project to be living weapons. But the Covenant—enraged and fearful of their enemy’s unexpected strategies and prowess—is not taking its recent defeat lightly, and is now fully determined to eradicate humanity from existence, brutally overrunning the ill-fated planets of the Outer Colonies faster than retreats can be ordered. If the UNSC has any chance of stemming the tide of the war, the Master Chief and Blue Team must drop onto an empty, hellish world in order to capture a disabled Covenant frigate filled with valuable technology. It has all the makings of a trap, but the bait is far too tempting to ignore—and this tantalizing prize is being offered by a disgraced and vengeful Covenant fleetmaster, whose sole opportunity for redemption lies in extinguishing humanity’s only hope of survival…

Sixteen-year-old Callie Knowles fights her compulsion to write constantly, even on herself, as she struggles to cope with foster care, her mother's life in a mental institution, and her belief that she killed her father, a minister, who has been missing for a year.

In the spring of 1932, I had finished a two-year run in Threes A Crowd, a musical revue in which I appeared with Clifton Webb and Libby Holman. The following September I was to go into a new show. I had no contract; merely the producers promise. When I returned to New York to start rehearsals, I discovered that there was to be no show. It had been a hot summer. Many people hadn’t been able to keep things. One of the things the producer hadn’t been able to keep was his promise. With the advance of refrigeration, I hope that along with the frozen foods someday we will have frozen conversation. A person will be able to keep a frozen promise indefinitely. This will be a boon to show business where more chorus girls are kept than promises. With no immediate plans for the theater, I began to wonder about radio. Many of the big-name comedians were appearing on regular programs. In the theater the actor had uncertainty, broken promises, constant travel and a gypsy existence. In radio, if you were successful, there was an assured season of work. The show could not close if there was nobody in the balcony. There was no travel and the actor could enjoy a permanent home. There may have been other advantages but I didn’t need to know them. The pioneer comedians on radio were Amos and Andy, Ray Knight and his Cuckoo Hour, the Gold Dust Twins, Stoopnagle and Budd and the Tasty Yeast Jesters. With the exception of Amos and Andy, who had been playing smalltime vaudeville theaters under the name of Sam and Henry, the others were trained and developed in radio. All of these artists performed their comedy routines in studios without audiences. Their entertainment was planned for the listener at home. In the early 1930’s when the Broadway comedians descended on radio, things went from hush to raucous. The theater buffoon had no conception of the medium and no time to study its requirements. The Broadway slogan was “Its dough—lets go!” Eddie Cantor, Jack Pearl, Ed Wynn, Joe Penner and others were radio sensations. They brought their audiences into the studios, used their theater techniques and their old vaudeville jokes, and laughter, rehearsed or spontaneous, started exploding between the commercials. The cause of this merriment was not always clear. The bewildered set owner in Galesburg, Illinois, suddenly realized that he no longer had to be able to understand radio comedy. As he sat in his Galesburg living room he knew that he had proxy audiences sitting in radio studios in New York, Chicago and Hollywood watching the comedians, laughing and shrieking “Vass you dere, Charlie” and “Wanna buy a duck” for him.

This acclaimed twenty-first–century Russian novel is “a Dantean descent” into the abandoned Soviet gulags, written “with a clear poetic sensibility” (The Wall Street Journal). In Sergei Lebedev’s debut novel, an unnamed young man travels to the vast wastelands of the Far North to uncover the truth about a mysterious neighbor who once saved his life, and whom he knows only as Grandfather II. What he finds among the forgotten mines and decrepit barracks of former gulags is a world relegated to oblivion, where it is easier to ignore both the victims and the executioners than to come to terms with a terrible past. This disturbing tale evokes the great and ruined beauty of a land where man and machine work in tandem with nature to destroy millions of lives during the Soviet century. Emerging from today’s Russia, where the ills of the past are being forcefully erased from public memory, this masterful novel is an epic literary act of bearing witness, attempting to rescue history from the brink of oblivion. A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Novel of the Year “Not since Alexander Solzhenitsyn has Russia had a writer as obsessed as Sergei Lebedev with that country’s history or the traces it has left on the collective consciousness . . . The best of Russia’s younger generation of writers.” ―The New York Review of Books

When a hacked military drone sets off global nuclear war, the few left alive face a brutal fight for survival in this post-apocalyptic thriller. When the Department of Defense is hacked, a nuclear-armed CIA drone goes rogue. With North Korea, Iran, and Russia all primed to respond, humanity's worst nightmare becomes a reality.Bombs are detonated, missiles are launched, counterstrikes are ordered, and within minutes, countless millions are dead or dying. Devastation of biblical proportions has fallen over the land . . . and the United States is hit the hardest. For those that remain, there is no law, no power, no communication. And now a new kind of battle begins—on the ground, hand to hand, person to person. Can the remnants of humanity survive long enough to rebuild a world . . . or will it just take a little longer for them to die?

Tack and Richardson show you how to start with a batch of plain cupcakes, and turn them into fun creations such as robots, farm- or zoo-animals, and even a cookie village! --Adapted from back cover.

After an accidental nuclear war, Vivian Gray joins a comically inept goup of fellow twentysomething survivors. She and her new friends embark on a cross-country road trip seeking sanctuary from the menagerie of deadly atomic mutants unleased by the contaminated atmosphere.

When Minnesota is invaded by warriors from the ancient world, sixteen-year-old Macy and her family head down the Mississippi by boat to escape from the encroaching madness.

When a disaster plunges civilization back into the Dark Ages, one man will do whatever it takes to reunite with his family in this apocalyptic thriller. It strikes without warning. A massive geomagnetic solar storm that destroys every power grid in the northern hemisphere. In Boulder, Colorado, weather technicians watch in horror as civilization collapses around them. Planes are falling out of the skies. Cars are dead. Pandemonium and terror grip the planet. As nuclear reactors across North America face inevitable meltdowns, the US President remains powerless in a heavily guarded White House. From London to Boston to Anchorage, there is no food, no water, no hope. It's every man for himself. . .and it will only get worse. Army veteran Zeke Marshall is the one man prepared to handle a nightmare like this. But when he tries to reunite with his family in Dallas—across a lawless terrain as deadly as any battlefield—he discovers there are worse things in life than war. And what he'll have to do to survive is unthinkable . . .