Valancourt Books: 178 books

The William Morris Institute of Automation Research is working hard to simplify our lives by programming computers to carry out life’s routine tasks. Whether it’s resolving ethical dilemmas, writing pornographic novels, saying prayers, or watching sports, these automation experts are developing...

Michael Frayn’s third novel is set in the crossword and nature notes department of an obscure national newspaper during the declining years of Fleet Street, where John Dyson dreams wistfully of fame and the gentlemanly life – until one day his great chance of glory at last arrives. Regarded...

Uncumber lives in the distant future, in a world sharply divided between ‘Insiders’ and ‘Outsiders’. The Insiders lead a privileged existence: never having to leave their homes, they enjoy a vastly prolonged lifespan, a regular supply of food and mind-altering drugs, and holographic entertainment...

Terry, the charismatic director of a British campaign for open government, has a direct approach to official secrets and women alike. The only person who can resist his brash frankness is Hilary, a serious and dedicated young civil servant in the Home Office, who happens to know the truth about a...

"So remarkable in truth is this novel that I cannot understand why it is not universally known and admired." - Hugh Walpole "I Am Jonathan Scrivener remains a tantalizing, highly diverting philosophical novel of rare elegance and wit." - Michael Dirda James Wrexham...

Having escaped being burnt at the stake, the reluctant sorcerer Fursey is back in this sequel, trying to make a quiet life for himself as a grocer in the realm of King Ethelwulf. But when his old enemies seize his wife, Fursey resolves to embrace evil and return to Ireland to reclaim her. Along the...

Hailed by critic E. F. Bleiler as a "landmark book in the history of fantasy," Mervyn Wall's classic The Unfortunate Fursey (1946) is set in 11th century Ireland, where the forces of evil have launched an assault on the monastery of Clonmacnoise. Their task is made easier by the fact that...

Tayler Kent flees London in a blinding snowstorm, hoping to escape the ghosts that haunt his home. Instead, he finds things may have gone from bad to worse when he crashes his car, breaks his ankle, and is forced to take refuge at a medieval monastery now inhabited by the eccentric Charles Hogarth,...

'In this extraordinary work Sinclair combines a sort of spiritual inquest or seance into the Whitechapel Ripper murders and the dark side of the late Victorian imagination with another plot-thread, done in hectic picaresque, of a posse of seedy book dealers hot on the trail of obscure rarities of...

After Pilgermann, a German Jew in the year 1096, ravishes the tax collector's wife, an angry Christian mob retaliates by brutally castrating him. Bleeding and left for dead, Pilgermann experiences a vision of Jesus Christ and resolves to set out on a journey to the Holy Land. Along the way, he will...

Charles Ripley has a good job as an engineer, a pretty wife, and an expensive house in a fashionable San Diego suburb. But it isn't until Ruskin Marsh moves in next door that Ripley realizes how passionless his life really is. Marsh, a connoisseur of the arts, high-powered lawyer, model husband and...

"The most original piece of imaginative fiction since Wells wrote The War of the Worlds." - Birmingham Mail "Against the novels written for wholesale consumption, the fantasies of Frank Baker are an unfailing delight." - New York Times "The story . . . is...

In the aptly titled Offbeat, Richard Matheson, a modern master of strange fiction, offers thirteen excursions into the unsettling and bizarre. In these stories you will encounter a major league pitcher with a horrific secret for his astonishing success; an ordinary man who wakes to find himself in...

In the worlds of Steve Rasnic Tem a father takes his son “fishing” in the deepest part of downtown, flayed rabbits visit a suburban back yard, a man is haunted by a surrealistic nightmare of crutches, a father is unable to rescue his son from a nightmare of trees, a bereaved man transforms memories...