Adult

One hundred and fifty years after Abraham Lincoln’s death, the full story of his extraordinary relationship with Jews is told here for the first time. LINCOLN AND THE JEWS provides readers both with a captivating narrative of his interactions with Jews, and with the opportunity to immerse themselves in rare manuscripts and images --- many from the Shapell Lincoln Collection --- that show Lincoln in a way he has never been seen before.

This new anthology of 16 original stories by some of science fiction’s best writers --- edited by #1 New York Times bestselling author George R. R. Martin and award-winning editor Gardner Dozois --- turns back the clock to a more innocent time, before the hard-won knowledge of science vanquished the infinite possibilities of the imagination. Travel back in time to a planet that never was but should have been: a young, rain-drenched world of fabulous monsters and seductive mysteries.

Growing up, Cassie Carter and her sisters, Karen and Nichole, were incredibly close --- until one fateful event drove them apart. After high school, Cassie ran away from home to marry the wrong man, throwing away a college scholarship. Now 31, Cassie is living in Seattle with her daughter and hoping to leave her past behind. Despite the strides she has made, she hasn’t been able to make peace with her sisters. Then one day, Cassie receives a letter from Karen, offering what Cassie thinks may be a chance to reconcile.

Raised by a single father, a controversial sociologist, the narrator of THE SELLOUT spent his childhood as the subject in racially charged psychological studies. He is led to believe that his father’s pioneering work will result in a memoir that will solve his family’s financial woes. But when his father is killed in a police shoot-out, he realizes there never was a memoir. The narrator also sets out to right another wrong: Dickens literally has been removed from the map to save California from further embarrassment.

Poxl West is the epitome of manhood and something of an idol to his teenage nephew, Eli Goldstein, who reveres him as a brave, singular, Jewish war hero. Poxl fills Eli’s head with electric accounts of his derring-do, adventures and romances, as he collects the best episodes from his storied life into a memoir. But as he delves deeper into Poxl’s history, Eli begins to see that the life of the fearless superman he’s adored has been much darker than he let on.

Weary of his deskbound status in the Royal Navy, intelligence officer Ian Fleming spends his spare time spinning stories in his head that are much more exciting than his own life…until the critical Tehran Conference, when Winston Churchill, Franklin Roosevelt and Josef Stalin meet to finalize the D-Day invasion. With the Big Three in one place, Fleming is tipped off that Hitler’s top assassin has infiltrated the conference. Seizing his chance to play a part in a real-life action story, Fleming goes undercover to stop the Nazi killer.

Making use of previously classified materials from the Russian State Archive of Social and Political History, and the Archive of the Foreign Policy of the Russian Federation, as well as the Franklin D. Roosevelt Library and 300 hot war messages between Roosevelt and Stalin, Susan Butler tells the story of how the leader of the capitalist world and the leader of the Communist world became more than allies of convenience during World War II.

Anna Benz lives with her husband, Bruno, and their three young children in a suburb of Zürich. Though she leads a comfortable, well-appointed life, Anna is falling apart inside. Adrift and increasingly unable to connect with the emotionally unavailable Bruno or even with her own thoughts and feelings, Anna tries to rouse herself with new experiences: German language classes, Jungian analysis, and a series of sexual affairs she enters with an ease that surprises even her.

A year after getting divorced, Helen Carpenter lets her annoying brother talk her into signing up for a wilderness survival course. When she discovers that her brother’s even-more-annoying best friend is also coming on the trip, she can’t imagine how it will be anything other than a disaster. Thus begins the strangest adventure of Helen's life: three weeks in the remotest wilderness of a mountain range in Wyoming, where she will survive mosquito infestations, a surprise summer blizzard, and a group of sorority girls.

At the end of the First World War, Bernard Jacquelain returns from the trenches a changed man. Broken by the unspeakable horrors he has witnessed, he becomes addicted to the lure of wealth and success. He wallows in the corruption and excess of post-war Paris, but when his lover abandons him, Bernard turns to a childhood friend for comfort. For 10 years, he lives the good bourgeois life, but when the drums of war begin to sound again, everything around which he has rebuilt himself starts to crumble.