Political Fiction

From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt. With a forward by Hilton Als, these 12 pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure.

De Brevitate Vitae (frequently referred to as On the Shortness of Life in English) is a moral essay written by Seneca the Younger, a Roman Stoic philosopher, to his father-in-law Paulinus. The philosopher brings up many Stoic principles on the nature of time, namely that men waste much of it in meaningless pursuits. According to the essay, nature gives man enough time to do what is really important and the individual must allot it properly.

In the war-ravaged borderlands of Ukraine, a Russian mercenary unit has gone rogue. Its members, conscripted from the worst prisons and mental asylums across Russia, are the most criminally violent, psychologically dangerous combatants to ever set foot upon the modern battlefield. With all attention focused on the frontlines, they have pushed deeper into the interior to wage a campaign of unspeakable barbarity. As they move from village to village, committing horrific war crimes, they meet little resistance as all able-bodied men are off fighting the war.

It is 2059, and the world has crashed. Forty years ago, a solar catastrophe began to slow the planet's rotation to a stop. Now, one half of the globe is permanently sunlit, the other half trapped in an endless night. Ellen Hopper is a scientist living on a frostbitten rig in the cold Atlantic. She wants nothing more to do with her country after its slide into casual violence and brutal authoritarianism. Yet when two government officials arrive demanding she return to London to see her dying college mentor, she accepts—and begins to unravel a secret.

On the eve of the Cuban Missile Crisis in Paris, 1962, Devereaux and Nordstrom uncover Soviet plans to ship nuclear arms. But when nobody acts after sharing his findings, Devereaux becomes the target of an assassination attempt and soon realizes the plot extends far beyond Cuba - and himself. A thrilling and well-paced novel filled with Cold War intrigue, Topaz features two agents on a journey around the world to save NATO and themselves.

The Unincorporated Man is a provocative social/political/economic novel that takes place in the future, after civilization has fallen into complete economic collapse. This reborn civilization is one in which every individual is incorporated at birth and spends many years trying to attain control over his or her own life by getting a majority of his or her own shares. Life extension has made life very long indeed.

Captain Dominika Egorova of the Russian Intelligence Service (SVR) has returned from the West to Moscow and the Center, the headquarters of her service. She finds things worse than when she left. She despises the men she must serve, the oligarchs and crooks and thugs of Putin's Russia. What no one knows is that Dominika is working for the CIA as Washington's most sensitive penetration of SVR and the Kremlin.

Mitch Rapp has worked for a number of presidents over his career, but Anthony Cook is unlike any he’s encountered before. Cunning and autocratic, he feels no loyalty to America’s institutions and is distrustful of the influence Rapp and CIA director Irene Kennedy have in Washington.

Riske is a freelance industrial spy who, despite his job title, lives a mostly quiet life above his auto garage in central London. He has avoided big, messy jobs - until now. A gangster by the name of Tino Coluzzi - once a compatriot of Riske - has orchestrated the greatest street heist in the history of Paris: a visiting Saudi prince had his pockets lightened of millions in cash, and something else. Hidden within a stolen briefcase is a secret letter that could upend the balance of power in the Western world. The Russians have already killed in an attempt to get it back.

The year is 1995, and an energetic senator wants to disarm, perhaps even eliminate, the CIA. To accumulate the evidence necessary to persuade the Senate, he needs the cooperation of Blackford Oakes, now retired. He wants from Oakes an account of his covert activity 10 years earlier, when Oakes served as chief of covert activities for the CIA. But, what will the frustrated senator do to compel cooperation from Blackford Oakes?

Tony Colletti, a good suburban cop and father of a child with autism, finds himself drawn into the controversy over the apparent but rarely acknowledged connection between childhood vaccines and autism. His quest to uncover the truth forces him to risk all he holds dear while confronting corrupt government officials, the powerful pharmaceutical industry, and disturbing elements of his own past. Even while holding down his job and dealing with family crises, Colletti spearheads the drive to contend with industrial espionage, Russian gangsters, and sexual predators.

Julian the Apostate, nephew of Constantine the Great, was one of the brightest yet briefest lights in the history of the Roman Empire. A military genius on the level of Julius Caesar and Alexander the Great, a graceful and persuasive essayist, and a philosopher devoted to worshipping the gods of Hellenism, he became embroiled in a fierce intellectual war with Christianity that provoked his murder at the age of thirty-two, only four years into his brilliantly humane and compassionate reign.

The massive international bestseller—an epic historical novel that chronicles the birth and rise of fascism in Italy, witnessed through the eyes of its founder, the terrifyingly charismatic figure who would become one of the most notorious dictators of the twentieth century, Benito Mussolini.

A famously disappointing minor royal and the emperor's least favorite grandchild, Prince Kiem is summoned before the emperor and commanded to renew the empire's bonds with its newest vassal planet. The prince must marry Count Jainan, the recent widower of another royal prince of the empire. But Jainan suspects his late husband’s death was no accident. And Prince Kiem discovers Jainan is a suspect himself.

On the banks of the Missouri River, the town of Yellow Earth and the Three Nations reservation prepare for an invasion - the ground beneath their feet is loaded with readily frackable shale oil and the minions of corporate energy are rushing to extract it. Tribal Chairman Harleigh Kildeer welcomes Big Oil with open arms, while county sheriff Will Crowder has to deal with the overnight influx of roughnecks, truckers, drug dealers, and sex workers.

White is Bret Easton Ellis's first work of nonfiction. Already the bad boy of American literature, from Less Than Zero to American Psycho, Ellis has also earned the wrath of right-thinking people everywhere with his provocations on social media, and here he escalates. Eschewing convention, he embraces views that will make many in literary and media communities cringe, as he takes aim at anti-Trump fixation, coastal elites, corporate censorship, Hollywood, identity politics, Generation Wuss, "woke" cultural watchdogs, and more.

The world’s largest bounty has just been placed upon America’s top spy. His only hope for survival is to outwit, outrun, and outlast his enemies long enough to get to the truth. But for Scot Harvath to accomplish his most dangerous mission ever - one that has already claimed the lives of the people closest to him, including his new wife - he’s going to need help - a lot of it. Not knowing whom he can trust, Harvath finds an unlikely ally in Norwegian intelligence operative Sølvi Kolstad.

This near-future political satire about the election of a new president argues that socialism and populism will eventually give rise to chaos and disaster.

Authored by Ingersoll Lockwood - around whom conspiracy theories concerning the sci-fi/fantasy character Baron Trump now abound - 1900, Or: The Last President is notable for both its clairvoyance and its reflection on the social movements and political climate of its time.

In Dune: The Heir of Caladan, the climactic novel in the Caladan trilogy by New York Times bestselling authors Brian Herbert and Kevin J. Anderson, we step into the shoes of Paul Atreides. A boy not yet a man in years, he is about to enter a world he could never have imagined. The story that began with Duke Leto Atreides's rise to power, then continued with the consequences of Lady Jessica’s betrayal, will now conclude with Paul becoming the leader that he needs to be on the way to his pivotal role as Muad’Dib.

Marx's complex theories about society, economics, and politics - collectively understood as Marxism - hold that human societies develop through class struggle. In capitalism, this manifests itself in the conflict between the ruling and working classes. Employing a critical approach known as historical materialism, Marx predicted that, like previous socio-economic systems, capitalism produced internal tensions which would lead to its self-destruction and replacement by a new system: socialism.