The best stories of the year, as selected by the one of the world's most honoured science fiction authors and his long-time collaborator. Here in one affordable volume is the best short science fiction of the year as selected from magazines, anthologies and journals. It is the first in a prestigious new series from ibooks. Robert Silverberg, a multiple winner of the Hugo and Nebula awards as a writer, has complied a distinguished record as an anthologist over the past 35 years. Among the famous books he has edited are THE SCIENCE FICTION HALL OF FAME, THE NEW DIMENSIONS, UNIVERSE and THE ALPHA SERIES. His long list of science fiction and fantasy novels include such titles as DYING INSIDE and THE ALIENS YEARS.

Healing Tea is the thirteenth novel in the bestselling Tea Series. With over 250,000 copies sold, the series serves up fast, fun reads full of action, romance, and laughs. A fresh take on the serial novel, not every mystery is solved at the end of the day—or at the end of the book. Each installment keeps you coming back for more!Cara's world has been shattered by the death of her mother and the loss of her unborn child. She cries herself empty...until at last her mom's voice comes through: "'Tis the hardest thing you will ever do, love, but you must put one foot in front of the other. Remember how to smile. Then remember how to laugh." So when Adeline offers to plan a secret getaway, Cara and A.J. accept. And in the city that never sleeps, wedding chapels wait on every corner... Is it finally time for Cara to build her own little family and home? Awash with happy tears, Healing Tea is a balm for the soul and a beautiful reminder of how grief can transform into joy.

Brother detectives Frank and Joe follow a crooked trail of artistic deception in the fifteenth book in the thrilling Hardy Boys Adventures series.The Hardy Boys are visiting Paris! Joe is excited to check out all the street art he's heard about. And Frank can't wait to go to all the museums he's researched. On their very first day in the city, the brothers are woken up early in the morning by fireworks. But these are no ordinary fireworks. They are a part of elaborate cover for the heist of a priceless artifact. What's worse, the theft seems to have been orchestrated by Joe's favorite street artist, an unidentified outlaw and activist that goes only by the name Le Stylo. Everyone seems sure that it's him, but the Hardys are suspicious. From everything they know about Le Stylo, the crime is out of character. Sure, he makes a habit of provoking the authorities, but he's an activist; not a thief. Could the artist known for his mystique have been framed? Frank and Joe are...

It's been eighteen months since Baroness Charlotte von Steinbeck stepped into a carriage with the most famous castrato singer in Europe, leaving her family and her reputation behind for the sake of true love. What she and Carlo found waiting for them at the end of their first journey, though, was nothing like what they had hoped. Now they're hoping to begin a new life together in cosmopolitan London...but will they really be able to continue their forbidden duet, or will society's disapproval doom them forever?**IMPORTANT NOTE: This story does NOT stand alone. It follows on from the novel Masks and Shadows, which should definitely be read first.**

Martin Powers wanted an ironing board for Christmas. Instead, he got . . . Matthew Kieler, a non-returnable gift, but a gift that kept on giving. Look Away Silence is a romance set in the time of AIDS, when ignorance could spell trouble and often did. It encompasses the author’s experiences in volunteer community service and personal friendships during a tragic period in American history.

A CLASSIC FROM THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF UNDER MAGNOLIAFrances Mayes, whose enchanting #1 New York Times bestseller Under the Tuscan Sun made the world fall in love with Tuscany, invites us back for a delightful new season of friendship, festivity, and food, there and throughout Italy.Now with an excerpt from Frances Mayes's latest southern memoir, Under Magnolia

Shelley: The Pursuit is the book with which Richard Holmes—the finest literary biographer of our day—made his name. Dispensing with the long-established Victorian picture of Shelley as a blandly ethereal character, Holmes projects a startling image of "a darker and more earthly, crueler and more capable figure." Expelled from college, disowned by his aristocratic father, driven from England, Shelley led a life marked from its beginning to its early end by a violent rejection of society; he embraced rebellion and disgrace without thought of the cost to himself or to others. Here we have the real Shelley—radical agitator, atheist, apostle of free love, but above all a brilliant and uncompromising poetic innovator, whose life and work have proved an essential inspiration to poets as varied as W.B. Yeats and Allen Ginsberg.

What do Americans love almost as much as sex? Talking about it. In their letters to Penthouse magazine, the nation's hottest forum for contemporary sexual issues, they reveal everything that goes on behind closed bedroom doors-as well as in the back and front seats of cars, locked corporate offices, and airplane rest rooms, not to mention on kitchen tables and in other erogenous ports of call.Here, as told in their own uninhibited words, is the state of the union between men and women today, in all its inventive, eccentric, energetic variety. The sex is unbelievable. And every word is true.

Ellie Holbrook has endured a lot in her short life, but after so many years of heart break, she’s set to get her happily ever after and Devlin Westport, her boyfriend of three years, is just the man to give it to her. Fate, however quickly intervenes when the man who shattered her heart so completely ten years ago comes back into her life. But the worst of it comes when Nicholas finally discovers the two little secrets Ellie kept from him all these years. All hell breaks loose soon after that and it’s all Ellie can do to safeguard her heart against heart break once again.Ruthless business magnate Nicholas Grayson has sacrificed everything to amass his global empire. Seated at the very top, poised at the helm of his corporation nothing can possibly touch him. That is until he learns the truth about the twin children Ellie kept from him. But just when he shakes off the astonishment and works on integrating himself into their lives, an enemy from both Ellie and Nicholas’s past brutally rips his children away from them.A race against time will yield devastating events and Nicholas and Ellie must rely on each other to save their children