Grendel

Sample

Kevin S. Kiernan

When this book first appeared in 1981, most scholars agreed that Beowulf was an early eighth-century poem and few of them had shown any interest in the early eleventh-century manuscript that preserved it. Today they disagree widely, dating the poem anywhere between the eighth and the eleventh century. The single surviving manuscript in The British Library has become a new focus of interest as historians, linguists, literary critics, theorists, palaeographers, and codicologists all debate issues relating to the unique physical context in which the poem survives. With its extensive and seminal discussion of these issues, Beowulf and the Beowulf Manuscript remains at the centre of these debates.

Sample

Andre Norton

Sarita, apprentice to the Embroidier Dame Argalas, escapes from Earl Florian's enemies with the Earl's infant son and seeks refuge in the mountainous lair of the legendary beast, the Loden.

Sample

Emily Rodda

The walled city of Weld is under attack from ferocious flying creatures that raid in the night, bringing death and destruction. The Warden calls for Volunteers to find and destroy the Enemy who is sending the invaders. The heroes of Weld answer the call one by one, never to return. Rye is officially too young to go, but his brothers are among the lost, and he must find them.

Sample

Kelly Link & Gavin J. Grant

**STORIES BY M. T. Anderson, Paolo Bacigalupi, Nathan Ballingrud, Holly Black, Sarah Rees Brennan, Cassandra Clare, Nalo Hopkinson, Dylan Horrocks, Nik Houser, Kathleen Jennings, Alice Sola Kim, Joshua Lewis, Kelly Link, Patrick Ness, and G. Carl Purcell** **P**redatory kraken that sing with--and for--their kin; band members and betrayed friends who happen to be demonic; harpies as likely to attract as repel. Welcome to a world where humans live side by side with monsters, from vampires both nostalgic and bumbling to an eight-legged alien who makes tea. Here you'll find mercurial forms that burrow into warm fat, spectral boy toys, a Maori force of nature, a landform that claims lives, and an architect of hell on earth. Through these and monsters that defy categorization, some of today's top authors for young adults explore ambition and sacrifice, loneliness and rage, love requited and revenged, and the boundless potential for connection, even across extreme borders. As in their acclaimed and award-winning anthology *Steampunk!*, Kelly Link and Gavin J. Grant have brought together fifteen of the premier voices in speculative fiction to explore the intersection of fear and love--where the monsters within meet, and sometimes blue into, the monsters without--in a haunting, at times hilarious, darkly imaginative volume. This description comes from the publisher.