Lister gazed out of the porthole and catalogues the series of disasters that had led him to this point in space and time: the bad decisions, the poor career choices, the unreliable friendships that had led him here - on a prison ship bound for the most inhospitable penal colony in the outer cosmos...and all he'd ever wanted was to be a soft metal g...more

Written to celebrate the 80 CE opening of the Roman Colosseum, Martial's first book of poems, "On the Spectacles," tells of the shows in the new arena. The great Latin epigrammist's twelve subsequent books capture the spirit of Roman life in vivid detail. Fortune hunters and busybodies, orators and lawyers, schoolmasters and acrobats, doctors and p...more

Harry Flashman, the antihero of TOM BROWN'S SCHOOL DAYS, relates his adventures in America during the Gold Rush. Ever the cad, Harry engineers an escape for himself after he and his party are captured by Apaches, emerging to "help" the US government settle their issues with the Sioux, help which leads directly to the Battle of Little Bighorn. A mas...more

First published in 1816, Jane Austen's EMMA is about an unconventional heroine--and one whom Austen thought no one but herself would like. Emma Woodhouse is bright, beautiful, and rich; she is also snobbish and judgmental, and she can be cruel, with a tendency to interfere in other people's lives. The novel chronicles Emma's attempts to make a matc...more

During the mid-'80s Howard Marks had forty-three aliases and eighty-nine phone lines, and he owned twenty-five companies trading throughout the world. Bars, recording studios, offshore banks -- all were money-laundering vehicles serving the core business: dope dealing. At the height of his career he was smuggling consignments of up to thirty tons o...more

His Dark Materials, the wildly popular, bestselling young adult fantasy trilogy by Philip Pullman is available in a paperback boxed set. Following the adventures of the spirited Lyra Belacqua as she seeks out dangerous mysteries that threaten to destroy her world and others, the three novels include THE GOLDEN COMPASS, THE SUBTLE KNIFE, and THE AMB...more