"The story of Harrison William Shepherd, a man caught between two worlds -- Mexico and the United States in the 1930s, '40s, and '50s -- and whose search for identity takes readers to the heart of the twentieth century's most tumultuous events"--Provided by publisher.

Lacuna, defined in the Oxford Dictionary as a Hiatus, blank, missing portion, empty part, seemed to be the picture of the world to J, whom on the death of his exhausted mother, becomes the sole career of his aged father who is in an advanced state of Alzheimer's, in a confused, agitated South London where mobile phones and iPods, both addictive and sedative, are background Muzak to more serious displays of road rage, street rage and drug activity....

The 13th novelette of The Refuse Chronicles.This short story follows the Tamara-thread, continuing from The Watchers and The Never.

Twenty-five years ago, the hand of fate marked four newborns and sent them to the four corners of the Great Kingdoms. They were schooled and trained as rulers of their lands in preparation for the Golden Eclipse ceremony: a festival to celebrate a thousand years of peace and prosperity since the Great War. Crow, ruler of Northlands, a skilled swordsman and expert tactician, is as reclusive and stoic as the mountains that surround him. Tancho has spent...

Peace in our time.The Toralii guns are silent. Humanity's home of Velsharn is secure. There are no more battles. No more wars. The machinations of a dying man have traded a single life for a species; Captain Melissa Liao's world is four iron walls and pain, but her suffering buys life for mankind. Her legacy is one of struggle, selflessness, and sacrifice.Held in the grasp of the Toralii Alliance, she takes little comfort in this. Is this the swansong...

The words of a construct, an artificial mind, ring truer than ever. Humanity has angered a powerful foe and cannot weather the growing storm. The Toralii are coming.But instead of warships, the Toralii Alliance send an ambassador to the Sol system. The message it brings is a startling, marked departure from all other contact with the species... and one that heralds a shift in the balance of power in the Milky Way, the most significant in hundreds...

Lacunae, Daniel Nadler's debut collection, is an exercise in poetics of vital import. In it, Nadler imagines himself into those moments of unintelligibility-that blank space in between things-where constraint and expansion coincide. These poems, translations of work that does not otherwise exist, are intended to fill the invented or actual lacunae in manuscripts of classical Indian poetry. When faced with such ellipses, like where a few decisive hieroglyphs...