Love and duty come in many guises ... When everything falls apart around Raphael, he starts over anew. As an immortal mage responsible for our world’s magic, this has happened more times than he cares to count. He no longer finds it exciting. In a modern London where magic hides around every corner, he awaits the end of the Great Game, a magical contest he is playing with the enchantress Circe. The Game’s prize is the world’s magic, and its price almost certainly Armageddon. Win or lose, Raphael is willing to sacrifice his power, his soul, and his life to prevent the end of the world. His heart doesn’t even enter his calculations. Three days before the crux of the Game his long-lost brother comes to find him—and along with unwelcoming memories brings a gift far more dangerous than any enemy: hope. Till Human Voices Wake Us is a retelling of the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, a story where love, like duty, like Raphael himself, has many unexpected faces. Keywords: contemporary fantasy, mythological retellings, literary fantasy, mythopoeic fantasy, Orpheus and Eurydice, Greek myths

In such groundbreaking novels as Crache and Idolon, Mark Budz established his reputation as one of science fiction’s most exciting and innovative writers. Now he surprises us again with an ambitious new thriller set in three realities at once, where three different lives hang in the balance. . . . What if your world were rapidly running out of tomorrows? And what if the only way to save the future was to relive the past? But which past holds the key to survival? That’s the life-and-death question faced by three desperate people separated by the past, present, and future but who share a single terrifying reality. A tortured soul, brain-damaged in a motorcycle accident, issues a pirate broadcast out of a van in near-future California. In Depression-era San Francisco an architect with an inoperable brain tumor seeks a mystical cure. A post-human space traveler caught in a cosmic accident searches for a way to reconstruct himself and the future. In Mark Budz’s spellbinding narrative, their lives–and deaths–are drawn together by a force even more powerful than destiny.

Sometimes the difference between reality and insanity is only a matter of absurdity. There is nothing Milo Bishop fears more than the thought that he is going insane. Having grown up hearing his Uncle Jay's stories about the strange mermaids, Milo never had a reason to believe they were actually true. But when a near-death experience gives Milo a vision of a mermaid calling to him for help, Milo is forced to test his uncle's claims. And when he winds up in Rasulka, the mermaid community deep under the southern California seas, the question of his uncle's sanity is the least of Milo's concerns. For in the heart of Rasulka, a growing whirlpool in the ocean-sky and the terrarium's changing climate -- along with a discarded prophecy that says the end will come when humans appear -- all suggest time is of the essence. Along with his uncle, his best friend, Moss, and Eluia, a young mermaid, Milo has only hours to sort through his doubts and insecurities, discover the truth, and overcome unimaginable terrors if he is going to find his way home -- before Rasulka, and everyone in it, is lost forever. Fans of Dune, Empire of Lies, Fahrenheit 451, and Till We Have Faces will enjoy this science fantasy thriller with a dark psychological twist from author C. S. Johnson.

Black Mirror meets A Good Girl’s Guide to Murder when a teenage girl’s relentless investigation into her best friend’s death plunges her deep into a dangerous underground society where every secret has a price. Seventeen-year-old Cia lived in a house of secrets until she was five, when her father literally burned it all down. The price of his clandestine operation? Cia’s entire family, and her leg. So, when her best friend Alice says she has a secret too, Cia wants nothing to do with it—even if it could shed light on her family’s dark past. But Alice doesn’t let go so easily, especially when her search for answers might help find Noah, the boy who broke her heart before going missing two months ago. But then the police find Alice’s body floating in the quarry. Now Cia would give anything to know Alice’s secrets. Because Alice would never have jumped, no matter what the cops think. Desperate to figure out what happened to her friend, Cia picks up the threads of Alice’s investigation, plunging deep into a shadow world of augmented reality. As she untangles one web of lies after another, Cia finds herself pursued by an enemy that will pay any price to keep their secrets buried. But the girl who already lost everything isn’t about to back down now. Her only chance to avenge Alice lies in exposing an underground society preying on those they think no one will miss—but danger lies closer to home than she imagined.

"Isabelle Berendon dove into blue water to save her son. She was too late. Again and again in her dreams she dives in, hoping this time it will be different. He will breathe and live. But again and again he dies. In the empty days following his death, abandoned by her husband, drowning in her grief, she falls in love with the one person who keeps reaching out to save her -- her sister-in-law."--Page 4 of cover.

When Denis Donoghue left Warrenpoint and went to Dublin in September 1946, he entered University College as a student of Latin and English. A few months later he also started as a student of lieder at the Royal Irish Academy of Music. These studies have informed his reading of English, Irish, and American literature. Now in this volume, one of our most distinguished readers of modern literature offers his most personal book of literary criticism. Donoghue's Words Alone is an intellectual memoir, a lucid and illuminating account of his engagement with the works of T. S. Eliot--from initial undergraduate encounters with "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" to later submission to Eliot's entire writings. "The pleasure of Eliot's words persists," Donoghue says, "only because in good faith it can't be denied." Submission to Eliot, in Donoghue's case, involves the ear as much as it does the mind. He is a reader who listens attentively and a writer whose own music in these pages commands attention. Whether he is writing about Eliot's poetry or confronting the (often contentious) prose, Donoghue eloquently demonstrates what it means to read and to hear a master of language.

Let Us Go Then, You and I is a new edition of T. S. Eliot's selected poems, published to celebrate his nomination as the 'Nation's Favourite Poet' in a BBC poll for National Poetry Day 2009.

This was the summer he discovered what he wanted--at a gruesome museum of criminology far off the beaten track of more timid tourists. Visions of torture inspired his fantasies like a muse. It would prove so terribly fulfilling. The bodies of four men have been discovered in the town of Bradfield. Enlisted to investigate is criminal psychologist Tony Hill. Even for a seasoned professional, the series of mutilation sex murders is unlike anything he's encountered before. But profiling the psychopath is not beyond him. Hill's own past has made him the perfect man to comprehend the killer's motives. It's also made him the perfect victim. A game has begun for the hunter and the hunted. But as Hill confronts his own hidden demons, he must also come face-to-face with an evil so profound he may not have the courage--or the power--to stop it... The Mermaids Singing is a chilling and taut psychological mystery from Val McDermid.

Prufrock and Other Observations (1917) is a collection of poems by T.S. Eliot. Published following the successful appearance of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A Magazine of Verse, Prufrock and Other Observations established Eliot’s reputation as a leading English poet and pioneering literary Modernist. Opening with “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” the collection begins with an invocation of Dante, whom Eliot saw as an important innovator of a polyphonic, referential poetry capable of interrogating and dramatizing the construction and representation of the self. The poem is written from the perspective of a repressed, despairing middle-aged man who meditates on his relationships with women and the regrets he has accumulated with age. In “Preludes,” a poem of urban malaise, Eliot “thinks of all the hands / That are raising dingy shades / In a thousand furnished rooms,” and reaches for an understanding of the world as “some infinitely gentle / Infinitely suffering thing.” Other poems include “Morning at the Window,” another brief vision of city life, “The Boston Evening Transcript,” a satirical reverie on time and community, and “Cousin Nancy,” a humorous lyric celebrating Miss Nancy Ellicott, who unabashedly “smoked, / And danced all the modern dances. Both personal and universal, global in scope and intensely insular, Eliot’s poetry changed the course of literary history, inspiring countless poets and establishing his reputation as one of the foremost artists of his generation. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of T.S. Eliot’s Prufrock and Other Observations is a classic of English literature reimagined for modern readers.

“A unique and intriguing point of entry into the dialogues and a variety of concerns from metaphysics and epistemology to ethics, politics, and aesthetics.” —Eric Sanday, University of Kentucky Plato’s Animals examines the crucial role played by animal images, metaphors, allusions, and analogies in Plato’s dialogues. These fourteen lively essays demonstrate that the gadflies, snakes, stingrays, swans, dogs, horses, and other animals that populate Plato’s work are not just rhetorical embellishments. Animals are central to Plato’s understanding of the hierarchy between animals, humans, and gods and are crucial to his ideas about education, sexuality, politics, aesthetics, the afterlife, the nature of the soul, and philosophy itself. The volume includes a comprehensive annotated index to Plato’s bestiary in both Greek and English. “Plato’s Animals is a strong volume of beautifully written paeans to postmodern themes found in premodern thought.” —Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews “Shows readers of Plato that he remains significant to issues currently pursued in Continental thought and especially in relation to Derrida and Heidegger.” —Robert Metcalf, University of Colorado, Denver “Will provide fertile ground for future work in this area.” —Jill Gordon, author of Plato’s Erotic World