A morbidly fascinating mixture of bungled executions, strange last requests, and classic final one-liners from medieval times to the present day. Sometimes it's hard to be an executioner, trying to keep someone from popping up to make a quip when they should have spectacularly sunk without a trace. Or to be told that the condemned to the guillotine won't have a last drink for fear of "completely losing his head." The business of death can be absurd,...

Featured in this volume are "Billy Budd", Melville's posthumously published novella, the story of the rivalry between a handsome sailor and his demonic captain; the tale of the apathetic "Bartleby, the Scrivener; " the riveting "Benito Cereno", the story of a slave ship mutiny written at the time of the Amistad case and "The Town-Ho's Story", a chapter from Melville's masterpiece, "Moby Dick". Introduction by Joyce Carol Oates.

"In this reimagining of The Arabian Nights, Shahrzad plans to avenge the death of her dearest friend by volunteering to marry the murderous boy-king of Khorasan but discovers not all is as it seems within the palace." --

If Melville had never written Moby Dick, his place in world literature would be assured by his short tales. "Billy Budd, Sailor," his last work, is the masterpiece before his death in 1891 in which he delivers the final summation in his "quarrel with God." It is a brilliant study of the tragic clash between social authority and individual freedom, human justice and abstract good.

“[Charles] Todd’s mysteries are among the most intelligent and affecting being written these days.”—The Washington Post Book World 
In 1912 Ian Rutledge helped gather the evidence that sent Ben Shaw to the gallows. Now, seven years later, Ben Shaw’s widow brings Rutledge evidence she’s convinced proves her husband’s innocence. Ben Shaw’s past is a tangle of unsettling secrets that...

Amanda Eyre Wards debut novel is an intimate portrait of three women whose lives collide during a brutal Texas summer. In Gatestown, Texas, twenty-nine-year-old Karen Lowens awaits her execution with a host of convicted serial killers on death row. In Manhattan, Dr. Franny Wren, also twenty-nine, tends to a young cancer patient, and resists the urge to run from her fiancé and her carefully crafted life. In Austin, Texas, brassy Celia Mills, a once-vibrant...

In the near future, citizens can enjoy watching the executions of society's most infamous convicted felons, streaming live on The Postman app from the prison island Alcatraz 2.0. Dee Guerrera wakes up in a haze, lying on the ground of a dimly lit warehouse, about to be the next victim of the app, found guilty of murdering her stepsister. But Dee refuses to roll over and die for a heinous crime she didn't commit. Her newly formed posse, the Death Row...

The stoic bushido world of Samurai Executioner is one full of flying, disembodied heads and odd happenings, and this volume is no exception. There are always stories of crimes and their ensuing punishments, and plenty of squirting blood, but this volume promises a story that will fascinate and inspire a few grins. A mysterious woman with a turtlelike demon tattooed on her back and the ability to swim like no other is stealing weapons from men around...

It's the final volume of Samurai Executioner, and like the previous nine volumes, the last is a combination of life's varying tides of good fortune and ill circumstance.  The woman who once stole the weapons of samurai cops is becoming a cop herself. It's a story of gender struggles in a time long past. All the while, criminals keep losing their heads to Asa the decapitator. But one criminal might leave something behind that could hurt our favorite...

Long poem, written in the form of dramatic monologues, dealing with the marriage of Count Guido Franceschini and Pompilia Comparini, during the 17th century in Tuscany.