Government Fiction

Here is the world's most famous master plan for seizing and holding power. Astonishing in its candor, The Prince is a disturbingly realistic and prophetic work on what it takes to be a prince, a king, a president.

Today's political pundits express shock and disappointment when candidates resort to negative campaigning. But history reveals that smear campaigns are as American as apple pie. Anything for a Vote is a look at 200-plus years of dirty tricks and bad behavior in presidential elections, from George Washington to Barack Obama and John McCain. Let the name-calling begin!

Over two millennia after its compilation, the Politics still offers much to consider with regards to political science. Aristotle's succinct and thoughtful analysis is based on his study of over 150 city constitutions and covers the gamut of political issues in order to establish which types of constitution are best, ideally as well as for particular circumstances, and how they may be maintained.

London. December 1981. The IRA is on the attack, a cold war is being waged, another war is just over the horizon, and Stephen Donaldson spends his days listening. When he first joined the Institute, he expected to encounter glamorous, high-risk espionage. Instead he gets the tape-recorded conversations of ancient Communists and ineffectual revolutionaries - until the day he is assigned a new case: the ultra-secret PHOENIX, a suspected internal leak.

Rights of Man presents an impassioned defense of the Enlightenment principles of freedom and equality that Thomas Paine believed would soon sweep the world. He boldly claimed, "From a small spark, kindled in America, a flame has arisen, not to be extinguished. Without consuming...it winds its progress from nation to nation."

In a near-future America fractured by corporate rule and brutal crackdowns, one man’s war ignites a revolution. As Homeland Security scrambles to hold the line, resistance erupts in the streets—and no city burns hotter than the capital.

The year is 2032. The NRA has been outlawed; the U.S. military has been gutted; Conservative Christians, dubbed ANARKS, have been labeled a global conspiracy and have been largely driven underground. The Caliphate is now a superpower, residing in Israel. The White House is occupied by a repressive Progressive regime, obsessed with the upcoming presidential election.

Victoria James is at home awaiting a call from Downing Street, desperate for the telephone to ring but mindful of the impact a promotion could have on her husband and daughter. When she receives the summons, high office does indeed await her, and life will never be the same again. As a young, attractive female Minister, Victoria will be living in the public eye, challenged in her views at every turn. But nothing prepares her for what ultimately throws her off-balance: a love affair with a married man.

Yates is a Futurist. Which is to say he makes a very good living flying around the world dispensing premonitory wisdom, a.k.a. prepackaged bull, to world governments, corporations, and global leadership conferences. He is an optimist by trade and a cynic by choice. He's the kind of man who can give a lecture on successive days to a leading pesticide manufacturer and the Organic Farmers of America, and receive standing ovations at both.

Despite the title, Dickens's portrayal of early industrial society is less relentlessly grim than that in novels by contemporaries such as Elizabeth Gaskell or Charles Kingsley. Hard Times weaves the tale of Thomas Gradgrind, a hard-headed politician who raises his children Louisa and Tom without love and to have no empathy, their lives completely devoid of beauty, culture, or imagination. Only after a series of crises does their father realise that the manner in which he raised his children has ruined their lives.

As a young man, Narendra Modi had got into the habit of writing a letter to the Mother Goddess, whom he addressed as jagat janani, every night before going to bed. The topics were varied: there were seething sorrows, fleeting joys, lingering memories. In Modi's writings there was the enthusiasm of a youngster and the passion to usher in change. But every few months, Modi would tear up the pages and consign them to a bonfire. The pages of one diary, dating back to 1986, survived, however.

Presidential candidate Victoria Wodhull advocates the heretical concept of Free Love. "Free Love" was a phrase coined long before the 1960s. Listen to how we can save ourselves from the imposed bondage of marital relationships.

A nuclear terror plot is thwarted just outside Washington, D.C. And it's an election year. Mandisa "Mandi" Nkosi is a young reporter who, while on a trip to Johannesburg to connect with her roots, is contacted by an anonymous source with evidence that material seized from a nuclear terror plot will point squarely at one of humanity's most important companies as the supplier.

A master strategist and tireless activist, Bayard Rustin is best remembered as the organizer of the 1963 March on Washington, one of the largest nonviolent protests ever held in the United States. He brought Gandhi's protest techniques to the American civil rights movement and played a deeply influential role in the life of Martin Luther King, Jr., helping to mold him into an international symbol of nonviolence.

A masterpiece of American individualism, Henry David Thoreau’s Civil Disobedience is considered by many to be one of the most important pieces of political and philosophical writings ever produced by an American. Thoreau wrote the essay because of his opposition to slavery and the Mexican-American War. When the government engages in actions that are unjust, he believed that citizens should completely withdraw their support of the government and stop paying taxes, even if it results in imprisonment or violence.

Setembre de 1962. Una jove mestra de vocació dubtosa i escassa capacitat de comunicació oral arriba a la seva primera plaça en una escola del Pirineu ribagorçà. Ella volia un poble, una feina i una casa des d'on veure caure la neu. Darrere deixa una infantesa marcada per l'enigmàtica activitat del pare i per l'original educació rebuda d'una mare dividida entre l'impuls irresistible d'apartar la filla de les consignes del Règim i la por d'aïllar-la excessivament de la normalitat imperant.

We talk about achieving 'LGBTQ+ equality', but around the world, LGBTQ+ people are still suffering discrimination and extreme violence. How do we solve this urgent problem, allowing queer people everywhere the opportunity to thrive? In We Can Do Better Than This, 35 voices explore this question. Through deeply moving stories and provocative new arguments on safety and visibility, dating and gender, care and community, they map new global frontiers in the fight for LGBTQ+ rights.

On July 4, 1826, as Americans lit firecrackers to celebrate the country’s 50th birthday, both John Adams and Thomas Jefferson were on their deathbeds. The young nation had outlived the men who made it, but could it survive intensifying divisions over the very meaning of the land of the free? American Radicals is a dynamic, timely history of 19th-century activists - free-lovers and socialists, abolitionists and vigilantes - and the social revolution they sparked in the turbulent Civil War era.

Politics is the second half of a single treatise by Aristotle (384 B.C.E - 322 B.C.E.), Ethics being the first. Both deal with one and the same subject: what Aristotle calls the philosophy of human affairs. He also refers to it as political science and social science. Aristotle collected and studied the constitutions of over 150 city states before writing his Politics.

Inhabiting four lives - a railroad baron's valet who unwittingly ignites an explosion in Chinese labor, Hollywood's first Chinese movie star, a hate-crime victim whose death mobilizes Asian Americans, and a biracial writer visiting China for an adoption - this novel captures and capsizes over a century of our history, showing that even as family bonds are denied and broken, a community can survive - as much through love as blood.