The Adventures of Roderick Random is a picaresque novel written by Tobias Smollett written before 1748. The book follows the misadventures of the eponymous main character, Roderick Random, as he navigates through life in 18th-century Britain. Roderick is a young man of humble origins who dreams of making his fortune and rising in society. However, he is constantly beset by misfortune and finds himself at the mercy of cruel fate and the nefarious actions of those around him. Throughout the novel, Roderick experiences a series of wild and often comical adventures, including being press-ganged into the Navy, working as a quack doctor, and falling in love with a woman who turns out to be a thief. The Adventures of Roderick Random is considered one of the earliest and most influential examples of the picaresque novel genre, which portrays the adventures of a rogue or antiheroic protagonist. It remains a beloved classic of English literature and a testament to Smollett's skill as a writer.

Here is the continuing and uproarious saga of Roderick, a robot and "learning machine" growing up in an America in the near future. The mild-mannered robot is confronted with an ever-widening cast of madcap characters who typify the artificial values endemic in modern America.

In this bestselling book that inspired the hit movie by the same name, starring Frank Sinatra, an apparent suicide forces a PI to reconsider his most famous case Joe Leland returned from World War II with a chest full of medals, but his greatest honor came after he traded his pilot’s wings for a detective’s shield. Catching the Leikman killer made Joe a local hero, but the shine quickly wore off, and it wasn’t long before he left the police force to start his own private agency. Years after his greatest triumph, Joe has a modest income and a quiet life—both of which may soon fall apart. When Colin MacIver dies at the local racetrack, the coroner rules that he took his own life, but his widow knows better. Because MacIver’s life insurance policy doesn’t cover suicide, his wife is left broke, desperate, and afraid for her safety. She hires Leland to find out who could have killed her gentle, unassuming husband—a simple question that will turn this humble city inside out.

The God of the Left Hemisphere explores the remarkable connections between the activities and functions of the human brain that writer William Blake termed 'Urizen' and the powerful complex of rationalising and ordering processes which modern neuroscience identifies as 'left hemisphere' brain activity. The book argues that Blake's profound understanding of the human brain is finding surprising corroboration in recent neuroscientific discoveries, such as those of the influential Harvard neuro-anatomist Jill Bolte Taylor, and it explores Blake's provocative supposition that the emergence of these rationalising, law-making, and 'limiting' activities within the human brain has been recorded in the earliest Creation texts, such as the Hebrew Bible, Plato's Timaeus, and the Norse sagas. Blake's prescient insight into the nature and origins of this dominant force within the brain allows him to radically reinterpret the psychological basis of the entity usually referred to in these texts as 'God'. The book draws in particular on the work of Bolte Taylor, whose study in this area is having a profound impact on how we understand mental activity and processes.

A mysterious stranger commissions a single, valuable shoe from a humble cobbler, changing the cobbler's life and the life of his young apprentice forever.