The Panagarh Institute of Engineering & Management welcomes the new batch of First-Year Engineering students. Among them is Aratrika Roy, a young and enthusiastic engineering student who has joined the residential hostel with others. She enjoys her newly found independence until a student goes missing on campus and a professor dies. Things quickly turn dark when she witnesses a questionable person entering the girl's hostel late at night and seeing the same person being followed by a suspicious shadow. After midnight the same shadow is seen again inside the girl's hostel trying to steal something, prompting the police to investigate. As an avid reader of detective novels, Aratrika tries to solve the mysteries plaguing her college and discovers something she never should have. She learns the hard way that appearances can be deceptive. Do the disappearances of two more students in the Engineering College affect the hostel and college life of hundreds of students? Can she hunt down a perilous killer alone within the campus? Is she able to find the truth, or will she perish trying?

“A stunningly inventive fantasy about cosmic travel” from the Kafka Prize–winning author of Solaris (The New York Times). The Hermes explorer ship represents the epitome of Earth’s excellence: a peaceful mission sent forth to make first contact with an alien civilization, and to use the expansive space technology developed by humanity to seek new worlds, friendships, and alliances. But what its crew discovers on the planet Quinta is nothing like they had hoped. Locked in a seemingly endless cold war among themselves, the Quintans are uncommunicative and violent, refusing any discourse—except for the firing of deadly weapons. The crew of the Hermes is determined to accomplish what they had set out to do. But the cost of learning the secrets hidden on the silent surface of Quinta may be grave. Stark, startling, and insightful, Fiasco has been praised by Publishers Weekly as “one of Lem’s best novels.” It is classic, thought-provoking hard science fiction, as prescient today as when it was first written.

Four friends. Three cookies. One problem. Hippo, Croc, and the Squirrels are determined to have equal cookies for all! But how? There are only three cookies . . . and four of them! They need to act fast before nervous Hippo breaks all the cookies into crumbs!

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • One of the Washington Post Book World's 10 Best Books of the Year • Time's 10 Best Books of the Year • USA Today's Nonfiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book "Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The best account yet of the entire war." —Vanity Fair The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account—explosive, shocking, and authoritative—of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.

Read Along or Enhanced eBook: Sarah Jane Hartwell and her class are back. After the stress of her last attempt at taking her class on a field trip (seen in First Year Letters), Mrs. Hartwell has a plan for an upcoming trip to the zoo—a plan that includes a lot of rules. Her students prove that they can line up straight, walk quietly, and take plenty of notes, but everyone soon realizes that this field trip isn’t as much fun as they’d hoped. Mrs. Hartwell rethinks her plan and saves the day.

"You’ve got to give it all you can that first year.... You’ve got just one year when they treat you right, and before they start worrying about themselves.... So, you’ve got one year."--Lyndon B. Johnson, January 1965 In an increasingly polarized political environment, the first year of the new president’s term will be especially challenging. With a fresh mandate, however, the first year also offers opportunities that may never come again. The First Year Project is a fascinating initiative by the Miller Center of the University of Virginia that brings together top scholars on the American presidency and experienced officials to explore the first twelve months of past administrations, and draw practical lessons from that history, as we prepare to inaugurate a new president in January 2017. This project is the basis for a new series of digital shorts published as Miller Center Studies on the Presidency. Addressing the theme of national security, this debut volume examines the first-year experiences of five previous administrations, including those of John F. Kennedy, Ronald Reagan, George H. W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and George W. Bush. Presented as specially priced collections published exclusively in an ebook format, these timely examinations recognize the experiences of past presidents as an invaluable resource that can edify and instruct the incoming president. Contributors: Hal Brands, Duke University * Jeffery Engel, Southern Methodist University * Michèle Flournoy, Center for a New American Security * Melvyn P. Leffler, University of Virginia * Marc Selverstone, University of Virginia * Jeremi Suri, University of Texas at Austin * Philip Zelikow, University of Virginia Miller Center Studies on the Presidency