Title: Ex-Kop Author: Warren Hammond File Type: Mobi Subject:Science-Fiction Description:From Publishers WeeklyStarred Review. This hard-bitten follow-up to Hammonds 2007 science fiction noir debut KOP, set in the 28th century on the technologically backward world of Lagarto, offers further evidence of his considerable talents. A former member of the Koba Office of Police, Juno Mozambe has been forced into retirement by corrupt detective Diego Banks, who murdered Kobas previous police chief. Now a sleazy, broke PI, nothing but a drunken old has-been, Mozambe reluctantly lets his ex-partner Maggie Orzo hire him to exonerate Adela Juarez, a young woman about to be executed for murdering her parents. Orzo suspects her current partner and rival, Ian Davies, of framing Juarez. Mozambe struggles through a mire of corruption and violence to get the answers and protect his own loved ones. Koba is a tough town full of desperate people, and Hammond makes full use of this richly imagined society. (Oct.) br Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. FromAfter getting fired, aging detective Juno of the economically depressed colony planet Lagarto has been making a scant living photographing scandals for the papers. His wife is hospitalized after what Juno only wishes were an accident, and all his money goes to her medical bills. So when his ex-partner, Maggie, offers to hire him to investigate a murder case she believes her new partner, Ian, is falsifying, he agrees, despite already knowing what bad news Ian is. While Maggie works the case of a sadistic serial killer, Juno tracks down the truth, discovering that his case and Maggie’s are linked parts of a sickening undercover operation, and that Ian is even more dangerous then he thought. Ex-Kop is even better than Kop (2007), involving as it does all the best elements of an sf crime thriller engrossing, high-stakes case a fascinating setting and a downtrodden, dogged hero whose worthiness outshines his flaws. Readers can only hope Hammond gives us more stories of Juno and his jungle world. --Krista Hutley

Title: Jude the Obscure Author: Thomas Hardy File Type: Mobi Subject:classics Description:Jude the Obscure, by strongThomas Hardystrong, is part of the Barnes & Noble Classics series, which offers quality editions at affordable prices to the student and the general reader, including new scholarship, thoughtful design, and pages of carefully crafted extras. Here are some of the remarkable features of Barnes & Noble Classics ull All editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications some include illustrations of historical interest. Barnes & Noble Classics pulls together a constellation of influences—biographical, historical, and literary—to enrich each readers understanding of these enduring works. lulVirginia Woolf called him “the greatest tragic writer among English novelists,” but strongThomas Hardystrong was so distressed by the shocked outrage that greeted Jude the Obscure in 1895 that he decided to quit writing novels.  For in telling the story of Jude Fawley, whose many attempts to rise above his class are crushed by society or the forces of nature, Hardy had attacked Victorian society’s most cherished institutions—marriage, social class, religion, and higher education.  A poor villager, Jude Fawley longs to study at the elite University of Christminster, but his ambitions are thwarted by class prejudice—and an earthy country girl who tricks him into marriage by pretending to be pregnant.   Entrapped in a loveless marriage, he becomes a stonemason and falls in love with his cousin—the intellectual, free-spirited Sue Bridehead, who is also unhappy in marriage.  Sue leaves her husband to live with Jude and eventually bears his children out of wedlock.  Their poverty and the weight of society’s disapproval begin to take their toll on the couple, forcing them into a shattering downward spiral that ends in one of the most shocking scenes in all of literature.A stunning masterpiece, Jude the Obscure is Hardy’s bleakest and most personal novel.strongAmy M. Kingstrong is an Assistant Professor of Literature at the California Institute of Technology, and the author of Bloom The Botanical Vernacular in the English Novel, forthcoming from Oxford University Press. She is also the author of articles on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British literature and culture, and has taught widely in the English novel at Haverford College and Caltech. King received her doctorate in 1998 from Harvard University in English and American Literature and Language. Excerpt. Reprinted by permission. strongFrom Amy M. King’s Introduction to Jude the ObscurestrongHardy’s stature as a novelist when Jude the Obscure was published guaranteed him a certain degree of critical attention, but the attention he was to receive was so negative as to alter the course of his career. Jude the Obscure was Hardy’s final novel. In one of the strangest turns in literary history, Hardy at the age of fifty-five turned to poetry, which he continued to write until his death in 1928 at the age of eighty-eight. In letters to close friends he pretends a somewhat jaunty indifference to the negative response to Jude, but in an essay entitled “The Profitable Reading of Fiction,” which appeared in the journal Forum in 1888, Hardy’s defensiveness about readers suggests the effect the reception of his novel would have upon him A novel which does moral injury to a dozen imbeciles, and has bracing results upon a thousand intellects of normal vigor, can justify its existence. . . . It is unfortunately quite possible to read the most elevating works of imagination in our own or any language, and, by fixing the regard on the wrong sides of the subject, to gather not a grain of wisdom from them, nay, sometimes positive harm. What author has not had his experience of such readers?—the mentally and morally warped ones of both sexes, who will, where practicable, so twist plain and obvious meanings as to see in an honest picture of human nature an attack on religion, morals, or institutions. If Hardy had become wary of a certain kind of reader, his bitterness toward what he calls “the mentally and morally warped ones” did not prevent him from continuing to believe that such “imbeciles” numbered in the dozens, not the thousands. He continued to tinker with the novel in subsequent editions. In the 1903 edition he tempered the scene in which Arabella throws the pig genitals at Jude, while in the 1912 edition he introduces some two hundred small but nevertheless effectively important changes. These changes, which the edition you read here reflects, are generally considered to have been softening gestures to the depiction of Sue. For instance, as the bibliographical critic Robert Slack has shown, in the 1903 edition Jude threatens to return to Arabella unless Sue consents to live with him (and, it is inferred, become his sexual partner), and Sue agrees to it because he has “conquered” her in the 1912 edition, Sue’s acquiescence is the result of love. The key words “I do love you” are included seventeen years after the first publication of the novel. The revisions that Hardy makes go beyond an author’s usual attention to errors in early editions. Jude clearly stayed with Hardy in the years following his switch to poetry, though whether we should understand that switch in light of a renunciation inspired by the extremity of the negative reaction to Jude or as an excuse for returning to the genre (poetry) with which he began his writing career is less certain it was, if nothing else, a decisive one.