Almost anyone who has read or written Science Fiction or fantasy has been inspired by the work of Michael Moorcock. His literary flair and grand sense of adventure have been evident since his controversial first novel Behold the Man, through the stories and novels featuring his most famous character, Elric of Melniboné, to his fantasy masterpiece, Gloriana, winner of both the Campbell Memorial and World Fantasy, awards for best novel. Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, and Michael Chabon all cite Moorcock as a major influence; as editor of New Worlds magazine, he helped launch the careers of many of his contemporaries, including Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, and J. G. Ballard. Tor Books now proudly presents Moorcock's first independent novel in nine years, a tale both fantastical and autobiographical, a celebration of London and what it meant to be young there in the years after World War II. The Whispering Swarm is the first in a trilogy that will follow a young man named Michael as he simultaneously discovers himself and a secret realm hidden deep in the heart of London. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

With his first full novel in almost ten years (not counting his Doctor Who book), Michael Moorcock - the most influential figure in modern fantasy and science fiction - returns to the city of his birth. London has always been a central character in Moorcock's work, from the high-literary fiction of MOTHER LONDON to the roof gardens of Jerry Cornelius. Now return to London just after the war, a city desperately trying to get back on its feet. And one young boy, Michael Moorcock, who is about to discover a world of magic and wonder. Between his first tentative approaches to adulthood - a job on Fleet Street, the first stirrings of his interest in writing - and a chance encounter with a mysterious Carmelite Friar, we see a version of Moorcock's life that is simultaneously a biography and a story. Mixing elements of his real life with his adventures in a parallel London peopled with highwaywomen, musketeers and magicians, this is Moorcock at his dazzling, mercurial best.

Set in a marvelous multiverse, this fantasy adventure-plus-memoir grapples with questions of identity, creativity, heroism, and the very structure of storytelling. Postwar London, Swinging Sixties London--a time and place of creativity and social change. Young Michael Moorcock embarks upon adulthood as both editor and writer of science fiction and fantasy, helping shape the genre into its modern form through his work and his friendships with other writers. His marriage is new and fresh; his children are young and raising them, an adventure. But no adventure lasts forever, and Moorcock begins to chafe under the grind of work and family. What seems a chance encounter with a monk--one of the White Friars--leads to a secret at the heart of London. Massive yet phantasmal doors lead to the Alsacia, a hidden world inhabited by great heroes of both history and fiction. Captivated, Moorcock rides as a highwayman and finds himself drinking in the company of all four Musketeers, though he misses his children and his increasingly-estranged wife. The Alsacia's dangerous politics come to a head just as Moorcock's wife divorces him, each catastrophe feeding on the other as two realities pull on the emotionally struggling writer. Part memoir, part adventure novel, The Whispering Swarm--the first book in The Sanctuary of the White Friars series--is both an evocation of a now-vanished London and the beginning of a new journey through the multiverse, created by a master of science fiction and fantasy.

Already celebrated far beyond his native Iceland, the novels of Sjón arrive on waves of praise from writers, critics, and readers worldwide. Sjón has won countless international awards and earned ringing comparisons to Borges, Calvino, and Iceland's other literary superstar, the Nobel Prize winner Halldór Laxness. The Whispering Muse is his masterpiece so far. The year is 1949 and Valdimar Haraldsson, an eccentric Icelander with elevated ideas about the influence of fish consumption on Nordic civilization, has had the extraordinary good fortune to be invited to join a Danish merchant ship on its way to the Black Sea. Among the crew is the mythical hero Caeneus, disguised as the second mate. Every evening after dinner he entrances his fellow travelers with the tale of how he sailed with the fabled vessel the Argo on its quest to retrieve the Golden Fleece. What unfolds is a slender but masterful, brilliant, and always entertaining novel that ranges deftly from the comic to the mythic as it weaves together tales of antiquity with the modern world in a voice so singular as to seem possessed.

From literary cult hero Dennis Cooper comes his most haunting work to date. “An American master…. Cooper is the most important transgressive literary artist since Burroughs.” --Salon In secret passageways, hidden rooms, and the troubled mind of our narrator, a mystery perpetually takes shape—and the most compelling clue to its final nature is “the marbled swarm” itself, a complex amalgam of language passed down from father to son. Cooper ensnares the reader in a world of appearances, where the trappings of high art, old money, and haute cuisine obscure an unspeakable system of coercion and surrender. And as the narrator stalks an elusive truth, traveling from the French countryside to Paris and back again, the reader will be seduced by a voice only Dennis Cooper could create.

Naturalist Gerald Durrell recalls his expedition to South America to find exotic animals in this follow-up to A Zoo in My Luggage. After bringing multiple species of African animals back to the Channel Island of Jersey to populate their new zoo, British naturalist Gerald Durrell and his wife followed their passion for wildlife preservation on a journey to South America. With a team of helpers, they spent eight months on safari searching for exotic specimens. Through windswept Patagonian shores and tropical forests in the Argentine, from ocelots to penguins, fur seals to parrots to pumas, the author who inspired the public television drama The Durrells in Corfu captures the landscape and its inhabitants with his signature charm and humor. Filled with adventure, exploration, and the spirit of conservation, The Whispering Land is a memoir that animal lovers of all ages will enjoy. This ebook features an illustrated biography of Gerald Durrell including rare photos from the author’s estate.

Byzantium Endures, the first volume of Michael Moorcock’s legendary Pyat Quartet, appeared in 1981. The Laughter of Carthage (1984) and Jerusalem Commands (1992) followed. Now the quartet is complete. Pyat keeps his appointment with the age’s worst nightmare. Born in Ukraine on the first day of the century, a Jewish antisemite, Pyat careered through three decades like a runaway train. Bisexual, cocaine-loving engineer/inventor/spy, he enthusiastically embraces Fascism. Hero-worshipping Mussolini, he enters the dictator’s circle, enjoys a close friendship with Mussolini’s wife and is sent by the Duce on a secret mission to Munich, becoming intimate with Ernst Röhm, the homosexual stormtrooper leader. His crucial role in the Nazi Party’s struggle for power has him performing perverted sex acts with “Alf,” as the Führer’s friends call him. Pyat’s extraordinary luck leaves him after he witnesses Hitler’s massacre of Röhm and the SA. At last he is swallowed up in Dachau concentration camp. Thirty years later, having survived the Spanish Civil War, he is living in Portobello Road and telling his tale to a writer called Moorcock. This authoritative edition presents this work for the first time in the United States, along with a new introduction by Alan Wall.