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.

In Tough Guy Lewis introduces a collection of four tough-guy detective mystery short stories from the 1980s.

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

The centrepiece of this collection of four stories is Nanna, the ninth of the 20-volume Les Rougon-Macquart series, which was to follow a family over many generations. Nanna had been earlier introduced as the daughter of an abusive drunk, forced to live on the streets and begin a life of prostitution. Here she discovers a unique talent for destroying men... When first published, the public was outraged by Nanna as they were by many of Zola's works.

Written in 1651 during the chaos of the English Civil War. Hobbes formulates the case for a powerful sovereign - or 'Leviathan' - to enforce peace and the law. The work was publicly burnt for sedition and blasphemy when it was first published. Hobbes' view that man's essential nature is competitive and selfish is as challenging today as it was when originally published, the work remains relevant to the modern world and stands as one of the most fascinating works of modern philosophy.

Mary Barton is a millworker's daughter who comes into contact with the son of a wealthy family. She must decide between her devoted lover and the possibilities of joining a middle class family. The book explores the British lower classes' frustration, the false sense of class mobility of the 1800s, at a time when the working class were not able to vote. Much of this novel is autobiographical, incorporating incidents from Gaskell's own life.

An idealistic young man, the title character of Nicholas Nickleby is left to find work and to support and protect his mother and sister after his father's death leaves them penniless. After his cold-hearted Uncle Ralph turns down his pleas for help, Nicholas Nickleby is left to find his own way, opening him up to all manner of queer folk, rogues and scoundrels. Dickens shows himself not only to be a literary genius but a comic one as well.