Stefan Rudnicki

In seafaring literature, no fictional sailor's story can match this true, real-life adventure. Before the Wind is the memoir of early nineteenth-century sea captain Charles Tyng- from his childhood and love affair with the sea to his rise through the ranks to captain and ship owner in the tea and sugar trade. Before the Wind takes listeners on a trip around the world- from visits to Lord Byron in Italy and King Kamehameha in Hawaii to Napoleon's prison...

Che is a precocious young boy raised in isolated privilege by his New York grandmother. Yearning for his famous outlaw parents--radical 1960s activists who are now among the FBI's most wanted--he's denied access to television and the news. But he takes hope from his teenage neighbor, who predicts, 'They will come for you, man. They'll break you out of here'.

When the alien ship screamed through the solar system, it disrupted communications between the far-flung human mining ships and supply stations and between them and Earth. So Earth and Luna were unaware that they had been invaded until the ship pulled into Earth orbit, and began landing terra-forming crews in China. Politics and pride slowed the response on Earth, and on Luna, corporate power struggles seemed more urgent than distant deaths. In this...

A novel of naval life in Napoleonic France. After forty years of piracy on Eastern seas, Citizen Peyrol returns to his native France, a country now ravaged and scarred by revolution and war. Looking for peace in which to end his days, he withdraws to a safe harbor in a remote farmhouse on Escampobar Peninsula, which looks out to the distant Mediterranean, where the lovely Arlette lives with her aunt and the revolutionary Scevola. But the arrival of...

From "one of the greatest writers of this century," a fantasy masterpiece about the aftermath of a marriage between a mortal prince and an elfin princess. -Arthur C. Clarke Before the fellowships and wardrobes and dire wolves . . . . . . there was the village of Erl and the Kingdom of Elfland. Considered formative to the development of the fairy tale and high fantasy subgenres, The King of Elfland's Daughter follows Alveric, who...

Penrod sat morosely upon the back fence and gazed with envy at Duke, his wistful dog. A bitter soul dominated the various curved and angular surfaces known by a careless world as the face of Penrod Schofield. Except in solitude, that face was almost always cryptic and emotionless; for Penrod had come into his twelfth year wearing an expression carefully trained to be inscrutable. Since the world was sure to misunderstand everything, mere defensive...

When a lonely young giant discovers a friend in a little girl named Anya, he believes he can trust the other villagers too.

First published in 1924, "Old New York" is a collection of four short stories set in the New York of the 1840s, 50s, 60s, and 70s by American author Edith Wharton. These stories are often considered a companion to Wharton's celebrated novel "The Age of Innocence", as many of the same characters and settings appear. "Old New York" is Wharton at her best as she explores the social issues that were often at the center of her works: infidelity, the class...

"Humankind headed out to the stars not for conquest, nor exploration, nor even for curiosity. Humans went to the stars in a desperate crusade to save intelligent life wherever they found it. A wave of death is spreading through the Milky Way galaxy, an expanding sphere of lethal gamma radiation that erupted from the galaxy's core twenty-eight thousand years ago and now is approaching Earth's vicinity at the speed of light. Every world it touched was...

"Mykonos holds tight to its past even as it transforms from an obscure, impoverished Aegean island into a tourist mecca and summertime playground for the world's rich, a process making the Mykonian people some of the wealthiest in Greece. Yes, the old guard is still a force to be reckoned with despite the new money. One of them, a legendary nightclub owner, has been found savagely bludgeoned in his home. All evidence points to obvious thugs. Yet the...