Lewis Shiner is a two-time finalist for the Nebula (Frontera, Deserted Cities of the Heart), a finalist for the Philip K. Dick (Frontera), and won the World Fantasy award for Glimpses.

ßehemoth ... is the most gripping and the most thought-out [book that Watts has yet written] ... Like Greg Egan's "Reasons to be Cheerful", Watts is arguing for an entirely different way of understanding and presenting character, one that reconfigures both how personality is constructed and how actions are to be understood. This seems to me a unique and particularly science-fictional contribution ... For all Watts's dark humor, and for all the incidental thrills of his future, ßehemoth caps a series which is one of the two or three most challenging works I've read in the last decade.

- Graham Sleight, The NY Review of Science Fiction

By the time Dickens set out for America in 1842, he was already a well known author and celebrity. His illuminating book American Notes is his depiction of the New World, a place with both admirable (well run hospitals, prisons, law courts) and despicable (slavery, unsavoury manners) qualities. When first published, his accounts and opinions incited hostile reactions on both sides of the Atlantic.

A defence of one's life presents an autobiographical account of his religious development as a defence against an attack by novelist Charles Kingsley. Newman had begun as an Anglican theologian and later converted to Catholicism, this conversion was very disturbing for many people and marked a turning point in the history of the Church of England and the Catholic Church in England.