Adam Roberts

"The Black Prince is a brutal historical tale of chivalry, religious belief, obsession, siege and bloody warfare. From disorientating depictions of medieval battles to court intrigues and betrayals, the campaigns of Edward III, the Black Prince, are brought to vivid life. This rambunctious novel, based on a completed screenplay and the notes for an unfinished novel by Anthony Burgess and approved by the Burgess estate, showcases Adam Roberts in complete control of the novel as a way of making us look at history with fresh eyes, all while staying true to the linguistic pyrotechnics and narrative verve of Burgess's best work."--Dust jacket flap

The text that follows is taken from the back cover: After Russia's brutal invasion of Czechoslovakia it became clear that many civilian activities (including radio and press) had been successfully, if spontaneously, deployed to resist the invader. We now have to ask ourselves whether a nation can defend itself effectively against armed attack by non-violent means. Can civil disobedience, strikes, boycotts, underground newspapers, and the whole armoury of passive resistance be expanded and co-ordinated into a strategy of national defence, with patriotic government running in parallel with enemy or puppet authority? Many experts believe they can.

Andy, the new kid at school, has a tattoo on his arm that resembles Lizzie, the school's most popular girl, and he also has one really big secret.

Golden Age SF meets Golden Age Crime from the author of Swiftly, New Model Army, and Yellow Blue Tibia?an innovative literary voice working at the height of his powers Jack Glass is the murderer?we know this from the start. Yet as this extraordinary novel tells the story of three murders committed by Glass, the reader will be surprised to find out that it was Glass who was the killer and how he did it. And by the end of the book our sympathies for the killer are fully engaged. Riffing on the tropes of crime fiction (the country house murder, the locked room mystery) and imbued with the feel of golden age SF, this is another bravura performance from Roberts. Whatever games he plays with the genre, whatever questions he asks of the reader, Roberts never loses sight of the need to entertain. This novel has some wonderfully gruesome moments, is built around three gripping HowDunnits, and comes with liberal doses of sly humor. Roberts invites us to have fun and tricks us into thinking about both crime and SF via a beautifully structured novel set in a society whose depiction challenges notions of crime, punishment, power, and freedom.

Riddles have lost none of their power over us: we are as fascinated by mysteries, from sudoko to whodunnits, from jokes to philosophical conundrums. The Hobbit is a book threaded through with riddles; most obviously in its central Riddles in the Dark chapter, but everywhere else too. What is a burrahobbit? How many versions of the Hobbit are there? What is the buried secret in the nine riddles Bilbo and Gollum swap between one another? What are Ents? Dragons? Wizards? What is the magic of the magic ring? All these questions, and more, are answered in this book, the first critical engagement with Tolkien's great novel to take the riddle seriously as a key structuring principle of the novel. Riddles are more than a diverting pastime; they are expressive and beguiling rebuses that touch on larger mysteries, powerful questions and paradoxes also embodied in the Catholicism that informed so much of Tolkien's imaginative life. Ringing widely across Tolkien's creative life, this book explores the importance of riddles to the Anglo Saxon and Norse cultures that inspired him, and discusses scores of riddles offering more than one answer for each. This is a critical study of the playful aspect of a great writer that takes his playfulness seriously; it explores and embodies ingenuity; and comes to some original and startling new conclusions.

A man is about to kill a cow. He discusses life and death and his right to kill with the compliant animal. He begins to suspect he may be about to commit murder. But kills anyway. It began when the animal rights movement injected domestic animals with artificial intelligences in bid to have the status of animals realigned by the international court of human rights. But what is an animal that can talk? Where does its intelligence end at its machine intelligence begin? And where might its soul reside?

Widely regarded as one of America's most important cultural theorists, Fredric Jameson has been at the forefront of the field of literary and cultural studies since the early 1970s. Author of The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act and Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, Jameson is without doubt one of the leading intellectuals of our time. Fredric Jameson: Live Theory offers an invaluable and highly accessible introduction to the work of this important thinker. Ian Buchanan explores and illuminates how Jameson forms his concepts and how they operate, providing a fascinating account of Jameson's important and ongiong contributions to Critical Theory. The book provides a clear sense of his overall project and the marvellous productivity of his thinking. Motivated by a desire to inaugurate social change by illuminating the obstacles standing in its way, the aim of Jameson's work is to dishabituate us from the comfortable feeling that modern life is enhanced by the global grip of capitalism. The book concludes with a new interview with Jameson himself, in which he discusses the key themes and issues in his work and future directions for the Jamesonian project. Thematically organised, clear and accessible, Fredric Jameson: Live Theory is a key resource for anyone studying this pioneering thinker.