In "Babel-17," Rydra Wong, a poet and code expert, must break an enemy government's code, but discovers that the code is really a supersophisticated language, while in "Empire Star," a simple-minded teenager is entrusted to carry a vital message to a... View details
Here fumes rust the sky, the General thought. Industrial gases flushed the evening with oranges, salmons, purples with too much red. West, ascending and descending transports, shuttling cargoes to ste...
Acclaimed winner of the William Whitehead Memorial Award for a lifetime's contribution to gay and lesbian literature, Samuel R. Delany wrote Hogg three decades ago. Since then it has been one of America's most famous 'unpublishable' novels. The subje... View details
Her scream bit off. She backed into the wall, her mouth open and her henna hair coming forward. “Come on, mister …!” She was trying to smile, to reason; it came out pleading. “Come on, now. You don’t ...
'Here words are not the polite contortions of twentieth-century printer's ink. They are alive. They elbow their way on to the page, and glow and blaze and fade and disappear.' Samuel Beckett... View details
Every evening at lighting up o’clock sharp and until further notice in Feenichts Playhouse. (Bar and conveniences always open, Diddlem Club douncestears.) Entrancings: gads, a scrab; the quality, one ...
The story of a truly galactic civilization with over 6,000 inhabited worlds.
Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politi... View details
His big-pored forehead wrinkled, his heavy lips opened (the flesh around his green, green eyes stayed exactly the same), the ideogram of incomprehension among whose radicals you could read ignorance’s...
Naked Lunch is one of the most important novels of the twentieth century. Exerting its influence on the work of authors like Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, and William Gibson, on the relationship of art and obscenity, and on the shape of music, film,... View details
I can feel the heat closing in, feel them out there making their moves, setting up their devil doll stool pigeons, crooning over my spoon and dropper I throw away at Washington Square Station, vault a...
Given that the suns of Draco stretch almost sixteen light years from end to end, it stands to reason that the cost of transportation is the most important factor of the 32nd century. And since Illyrion is the element most needed for space travel, Lor... View details
“We were moving out, boy, with the three hundred suns of the Pleiades glittering like a puddle of jeweled milk on our left, and all blackness wrapped around our right. The ship was me; I was the ship....
The Einstein Intersection won the Nebula Award for best science fiction novel of 1967. The surface story tells of the problems a member of an alien race, Lo Lobey, has assimilating the mythology of earth, where his kind have settled among the leftove... View details
There is a hollow, holey cylinder running from hilt to point in my machete. When I blow across the mouthpiece in the handle, I make music with my blade. When all the holes are covered, the sound is sa...
Italo Calvino's beloved, intricately crafted novel about an Emperor's travels??-??a brilliant journey across far-off places and distant memory.
"Cities, like dreams, are made of desires and fears, even if the thread of their discourse is secret, thei... View details
Kublai Khan does not necessarily believe everything Marco Polo says when he describes the cities visited on his expeditions, but the emperor of the Tartars does continue listening to the young Venetia...
Vurt is a feather-a drug, a dimension, a dream state, a virtual reality. It comes in many colors: legal Blues for lullaby dreams. Blacks, filled with tenderness and pain, just beyond the law. Pink Pornovurts, doorways to bliss. Silver feathers for te... View details
Close by was a genuine dog, flesh and blood mix; the kind you don’t see much any more. A real collector’s item. It was tethered to the post of a street sign. The sign read NO GO. Slumped under the sig...
Discover Thomas Pynchon's brilliant writing in this postmodern literature classic.
'The greatest, wildest author of his generation' Guardian
We could tell you the year is 1944, that the main character is called Tyrone Slothrop and that he has a prob... View details
It is too late. The Evacuation still proceeds, but it's all theatre. There are no lights inside the cars. No light anywhere. Above him lift girders old as an iron queen, and glass somewhere far above ...