These stories from the middle period of Chekhov's career show him exploring complex, ambiguous and often extreme emotions. Influenced by his own experiences as a doctor, 'Ward No. 6', set in a mental hospital, is a savage indictment of the medical profession. 'The Black Monk', portraying an academic who has strange hallucinations, explores ideas of genius and insanity; in 'Murder', religious fervour leads to violence; while in 'The Student', Chekhov's favourite story, a young man recounts a tale from the gospels and undergoes a spiritual epiphany. In all the stories collected here, Chekhov's characters face madness, alienation and frustration before they experience brief, ephemeral moments of insight, often earned at great cost, where they confront the reality of their existence.

The #1 Kids' Video Game! Lightning Rod Faces the Cyclops Queen is the third book in an ongoing Mask of Power series of original novels set in the Skylanders universe. These all-new stories feature favorite characters from all the Skylanders games.

A dead woman. A literary treasure. A dangerous quest.Thomas Knight, the protagonist from On the Fifth Day, returns and is faced with a centuries-old mystery surrounding a long-lost—and now priceless—Shakespearean play. To find it, Thomas will have to enter a story which drags loss and death after it like one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, a story bound to time and all it devours.

The days of summer are numbered. As Eiji Miyake's twentieth birthday nears, he arrives in Tokyo with a mission - to find the father he has never met.number9dream follows Eiji on a search that leads through the seething city's underworld, its lost property offices and video arcades; through his own imaginings, dreams and memories; via his alcoholic mother's letters, the manuscript of an attic fabulist, and the journal of a wartime torpedo pilot; to encounters with a syndicate of organ harvesters, John Lennon, and the god of thunder; and finally back to the rainy southern island of Yakushima, where everything that matters to Eiji began and ended.David Mitchell's second novel belongs in a Far Eastern, multi-textual, urban-pastoral, road-movie-of-the-mind, cyber-metaphysical, detective/family chronicle, coming-of-age-love-story genre of one.