SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

The Southern Reach Trilogy begins with Annihilation, the Nebula Award-winning novel that reads as if Verne or Wellsian adventurers exploring a mysterious island had warped through into a Kafkaesque nightmare world (Kim Stanley Robinson).

Area X has been cut off from the rest of the world for years. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. Expeditions into Area X have ended in disaster or death.

In Annihilation, the first volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, we join the latest expedition. The group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and the narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain, record all observations of their surroundings and of one another, and, above all, avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers--they discover lifeforms that surpass understanding. But it's the secrets they carried across the border with them that change everything.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

ONE OF THE MOST ANTICIPATED BOOKS OF 2024:
The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York magazine, Time, Kirkus, Literary Hub, Goodreads

The surprise fourth volume in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series--and the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

When the Southern Reach trilogy was first published a decade ago, it was an instant sensation, celebrated in a front-page New York Times story before publication, hailed by Stephen King and many others. Each volume climbed the bestseller list; awards were won; the books made the rare transition from paperback original to hardcover; the movie adaptation became a cult classic. All told, the trilogy has sold more than a million copies and has secured its place in the pantheon of twenty-first-century literature.

And yet for all this, for Jeff VanderMeer there was never full closure to the story of Area X. There were a few mysteries that had gone unsolved, some key points of view never aired. There were stories left to tell. There remained questions about who had been complicit in creating the conditions for Area X to take hold; the story of the first mission into the Forgotten Coast--before Area X was called Area X--had never been fully told; and what if someone had foreseen the world after Acceptance? How crazy would they seem?

Structured in three parts, each recounting a new expedition, Absolution is a brilliant, beautiful, and ever-terrifying plunge into unique and fertile literary territory. There are some long-awaited answers here, to be sure, but also more questions, and profound new surprises. It is the final word on one of the most provocative and popular speculative fiction series of our time.

SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

In Authority, the New York Times bestselling second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, Area X's most disturbing questions are answered . . . but the answers are far from reassuring.

After thirty years, the only human engagement with Area X--a seemingly malevolent landscape surrounded by an invisible border and mysteriously wiped clean of all signs of civilization--has been a series of expeditions overseen by a government agency so secret it has almost been forgotten: the Southern Reach. Following the tumultuous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the agency is in complete disarray.

John Rodriguez (aka Control) is the Southern Reach's newly appointed head. Working with a distrustful but desperate team, a series of frustrating interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, Control begins to penetrate the secrets of Area X. But with each discovery he must confront disturbing truths about himself and the agency he's pledged to serve.

In Authority, the second volume of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, Area X's most disturbing questions are answered . . .but the answers are far from reassuring.

Everything you need to create characters and play the new adventures in this introduction to the world's greatest roleplaying game. Designed for 2-6 players.

The Dungeons & Dragons Essentials Kit is the perfect introduction to the legendary role-playing game.--Forbes

Truly excellent.--Paste

• Take your first step into the world of Dungeons & Dragons, or get a more expansive D&D experience after playing the Starter Set.

• Play with groups as small as two players (one Dungeon Master & one adventurer) for the first time in D&D fifth edition with the introduction of sidekicks.

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Components: (1) rulebook, (1) Dragon of Icespire Peak introductory adventure, (6) blank character sheets, (11 ) dice, (1) 33 × 8.5 Dungeon Master's screen, (81) cards for magic items, sidekicks and more, (1) 21 x 15 double-sided poster map for use with the adventure.

SPECIAL TENTH ANNIVERSARY EDITION

The New York Times bestselling third installment of Jeff VanderMeer's wildly popular Southern Reach Trilogy.

It is winter in Area X, the mysterious wilderness that has defied explanation for thirty years, rebuffing expedition after expedition, refusing to reveal its secrets. As Area X expands, the agency tasked with investigating and overseeing it--the Southern Reach--has collapsed in on itself in confusion. Now one last, desperate team crosses the border, determined to reach a remote island that may hold the answers they've been seeking. If they fail, the outer world is in peril.

Meanwhile, Acceptance tunnels ever deeper into the circumstances surrounding the creation of Area X--what initiated this unnatural upheaval? Among the many who have tried, who has gotten close to understanding Area X--and who may have been corrupted by it? In this last installment of Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy, the mysteries of Area X may be solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound--or terrifying.

A single-volume hardcover edition that brings together the first three volumes of the Southern Reach Series.

Annihilation is the first volume in Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach series, Authority is the second, and Acceptance is the third.

In Annihilation, Area X-a remote and lush terrain-has been cut off from the rest of the continent for decades. Nature has reclaimed the last vestiges of human civilization. The first expedition returned with reports of a pristine, Edenic landscape; all the members of the second expedition committed suicide; the third expedition died in a hail of gunfire as its members turned on one another; the members of the eleventh expedition returned as shadows of their former selves, and within months of their return, all had died of aggressive cancer.

This is the twelfth expedition.

Their group is made up of four women: an anthropologist; a surveyor; a psychologist, the de facto leader; and our narrator, a biologist. Their mission is to map the terrain and collect specimens; to record all their observations, scientific and otherwise, of their surroundings and of one another; and, above all, to avoid being contaminated by Area X itself.

They arrive expecting the unexpected, and Area X delivers-they discover a massive topographic anomaly and life forms that surpass understanding-but it's the surprises that came across the border with them, and the secrets the expedition members are keeping from one another, that change everything.

After the disastrous twelfth expedition chronicled in Annihilation, the Southern Reach-the secret agency that monitors these expeditions-is in disarray. In Authority, John Rodriguez, aka Control, is the team's newly appointed head. From a series of interrogations, a cache of hidden notes, and hours of profoundly troubling video footage, the secrets of Area X begin to reveal themselves-and what they expose pushes Control to confront disturbing truths about both himself and the agency he's promised to serve. And the consequences will spread much further than that.

It is winter in Area X in Acceptance. A new team embarks across the border on a mission to find a member of a previous expedition who may have been left behind. As they press deeper into the unknown-navigating new terrain and new challenges-the threat to the outside world becomes more daunting. The mysteries of Area X may have been solved, but their consequences and implications are no less profound-or terrifying.

Named one of the best books of 2017 by The Los Angeles Times, The Boston Globe, PopSugar, Financial Times, Chicago Review of Books, Huffington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, Thrillist, Book Riot, National Post (Canada), Kirkus and Publishers Weekly

From the author of the Southern Reach Trilogy comes Jeff VanderMeer's Borne, a story about two humans and two creatures.

Am I a person? Borne asked me.
Yes, you are a person, I told him. But like a person, you can be a weapon, too.

In Borne, a young woman named Rachel survives as a scavenger in a ruined city half destroyed by drought and conflict. The city is dangerous, littered with discarded experiments from the Company--a biotech firm now derelict--and punished by the unpredictable predations of a giant bear. Rachel ekes out an existence in the shelter of a run-down sanctuary she shares with her partner, Wick, who deals his own homegrown psychoactive biotech.

One day, Rachel finds Borne during a scavenging mission and takes him home. Borne as salvage is little more than a green lump--plant or animal?--but exudes a strange charisma. Borne reminds Rachel of the marine life from the island nation of her birth, now lost to rising seas. There is an attachment she resents: in this world any weakness can kill you. Yet, against her instincts--and definitely against Wick's wishes--Rachel keeps Borne. She cannot help herself. Borne, learning to speak, learning about the world, is fun to be with, and in a world so broken that innocence is a precious thing. For Borne makes Rachel see beauty in the desolation around her. She begins to feel a protectiveness she can ill afford.

He was born, but I had borne him.

But as Borne grows, he begins to threaten the balance of power in the city and to put the security of her sanctuary with Wick at risk. For the Company, it seems, may not be truly dead, and new enemies are creeping in. What Borne will lay bare to Rachel as he changes is how precarious her existence has been, and how dependent on subterfuge and secrets. In the aftermath, nothing may ever be the same.

From Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Borne and Annihilation, comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic City of Saints and Madmen. In this reinvention of the literature of the fantastic, you hold in your hands an invitation to a place unlike any you've ever visited--an invitation delivered by one of our most audacious and astonishing literary magicians.

City of elegance and squalor. Of religious fervor and wanton lusts. And everywhere, on the walls of courtyards and churches, an incandescent fungus of mysterious and ominous origin. In Ambergris, a would-be suitor discovers that a sunlit street can become a killing ground in the blink of an eye. An artist receives an invitation to a beheading--and finds himself enchanted. And a patient in a mental institution is convinced that he's made up a city called Ambergris, imagined its every last detail, and that he's really from a place called Chicago . . .

By turns sensuous and terrifying, filled with exotica and eroticism, this interwoven collection of stories, histories, and eyewitness reports invokes a universe within a puzzle box where you can lose--and find--yourself again.

A 2020 LOCUS AWARD FINALIST

Jeff VanderMeer's Dead Astronauts presents a City with no name of its own where, in the shadow of the all-powerful Company, lives human and otherwise converge in terrifying and miraculous ways. At stake: the fate of the future, the fate of Earth--all the Earths.

A messianic blue fox who slips through warrens of time and space on a mysterious mission. A homeless woman haunted by a demon who finds the key to all things in a strange journal. A giant leviathan of a fish, centuries old, who hides a secret, remembering a past that may not be its own. Three ragtag rebels waging an endless war for the fate of the world against an all-powerful corporation. A raving madman who wanders the desert lost in the past, haunted by his own creation: an invisible monster whose name he has forgotten and whose purpose remains hidden.

If worldbuilding gives you an S-class migraine, never fear. There's one book that every speculative fiction writer should read to learn about proper worldbuilding: Wonderbook. ―Bustle

Aspiring writers of 'imaginative fiction'--whether science fiction, fantasy or other kinds--are in for a treat. ―Space.com

Jeff VanderMeer's modern masterpiece of instruction exploits the visual nature of genre culture and employs bold, full-color drawings, maps, renderings, and visualizations to stimulate creative thinking.

A true objet d'art, this overstuffed, full-color illustrated book features glorious Lovecraftian artwork of all sorts of outrageous monsters, as well as a host of advice winding their ways around the edges of the pages like marginalia in an illuminated monk's script. Yes, it's practical advice, useful to writers, but it also deserves a place on your coffee table for visitors to flip through and for you to look at again and again.

This revised and expanded edition features an additional 50 pages of diagrams, illustrations, and writing exercises creating the ultimate volume of inspiring advice that is also a stunning and inspiring object.

On top of all that, the book features sidebars and essays from some of the biggest names working in the field today, including:

• George R. R. Martin
• Lev Grossman
• Neil Gaiman
• Michael Moorcock
• Kim Stanley Robinson
• Charles Yu
• Karen Joy Fowler
• And more!

The Strange Bird--from New York Times bestselling novelist Jeff VanderMeer--expands and weaves deeply into the world of his thorough marvel* of a novel, Borne.

The Strange Bird is a new kind of creature, built in a laboratory--she is part bird, part human, part many other things. But now the lab in which she was created is under siege and the scientists have turned on their animal creations. Flying through tunnels, dodging bullets, and changing her colors and patterning to avoid capture, the Strange Bird manages to escape.

But she cannot just soar in peace above the earth. The sky itself is full of wildlife that rejects her as one of their own, and also full of technology--satellites and drones and other detritus of the human civilization below that has all but destroyed itself. And the farther she flies, the deeper she finds herself in the orbit of the Company, a collapsed biotech firm that has populated the world with experiments both failed and successful that have outlived the corporation itself: a pack of networked foxes, a giant predatory bear. But of the many creatures she encounters with whom she bears some kind of kinship, it is the humans--all of them now simply scrambling to survive--who are the most insidious, who still see her as simply something to possess, to capture, to trade, to exploit. Never to understand, never to welcome home.

With The Strange Bird, Jeff VanderMeer has done more than add another layer, a new chapter, to his celebrated novel Borne. He has created a whole new perspective on the world inhabited by Rachel and Wick, the Magician, Mord, and Borne--a view from above, of course, but also a view from deep inside the mind of a new kind of creature who will fight and suffer and live for the tenuous future of this world.

Praise for Borne

*Jeff VanderMeer's Southern Reach Trilogy was an ever-creeping map of the apocalypse; with Borne he continues his investigation into the malevolent grace of the world, and it's a thorough marvel. --Colson Whitehead

VanderMeer is that rare novelist who turns to nonhumans not to make them approximate us as much as possible but to make such approximation impossible. All of this is magnified a hundredfold in Borne . . . Here is the story about biotech that VanderMeer wants to tell, a vision of the nonhuman not as one fixed thing, one fixed destiny, but as either peaceful or catastrophic, by our side or out on a rampage as our behavior dictates--for these are our children, born of us and now to be borne in whatever shape or mess we have created. This coming-of-age story signals that eco-fiction has come of age as well: wilder, more reckless and more breathtaking than previously thought, a wager and a promise that what emerges from the twenty-first century will be as good as any from the twentieth, or the nineteenth. --Wai Chee Dimock, The New York Times Book Review

From Lovecraft to Borges to Gaiman, a century of intrepid literary experimentation has created a corpus of dark and strange stories that transcend all known genre boundaries. Together these stories form The Weird, and its practitioners include some of the greatest names in twentieth and twenty-first century literature.

Exotic and esoteric, The Weird plunges you into dark domains and brings you face to face with surreal monstrosities. You won't find any elves or wizards here...but you will find the biggest, boldest, and downright most peculiar stories from the last hundred years bound together in the biggest Weird collection ever assembled.
The Weird features 110 stories by an all-star cast, from literary legends to international bestsellers to Booker Prize winners: including William Gibson, George R. R. Martin, Stephen King, Angela Carter, Kelly Link, Franz Kafka, China Mi ville, Clive Barker, Haruki Murakami, M. R. James, Neil Gaiman, Mervyn Peake, and Michael Chabon.

The Weird is the winner of the 2012 World Fantasy Award for Best Anthology

What if life was never-ending? What if you could change your body to adapt to an alien ecology? What if the Pope was a robot? Spanning galaxies and millennia, this must-have anthology showcases classic contributions from H.G. Wells, Arthur C. Clarke, Octavia Butler, and Kurt Vonnegut alongside a century of the eccentrics, rebels, and visionaries who have inspired generations of readers. Within its pages, find beloved worlds of space opera, hard SF, cyberpunk, the new wave, and more. Learn the secret history of science fiction, from literary icons who wrote SF to authors from over 25 countries, some never before translated into English. In THE BIG BOOK OF SCIENCE FICTION, literary power couple Ann and Jeff VanderMeer transport readers from Mars to Mechanopolis, planet Earth to parts unknown. Read the genre that predicted electric cars, travel to the moon, and the modern smart phone. We've got the worlds if you've got the time.

Including:
- Legendary tales from Isaac Asimov and Ursula LeGuin!
- An unearthed sci-fi story from W.E.B. DuBois!
- The first publication of the work of cybernetic visionary David R. Bunch in 20 years!
- A rare and brilliant novella by Chinese international sensation Liu Cixin!

Plus:
- Aliens!
- Space battles!
- Robots!
- Technology gone wrong!
- Technology gone right!

From the author of Annihilation, a brilliant speculative thriller of dark conspiracy, endangered species, and the possible end of all things.

Jane Smith--not her real name--receives an envelope that contains a note from a woman she doesn't know and a key to an anonymous storage unit. The key leads her to a pair of taxidermied animals, a hummingbird and a salamander, which turn out to be two of the most endangered creatures on earth.

Jane has set in motion a series of events that quickly spin beyond her control. She is being followed, her home surveilled, her family in peril. The author of the mysterious note--Jane's only real lead--is already dead. She was, Jane learns, a reputed ecoterrorist. What did she want with Jane?

Profiteering wildlife smugglers; an amoral energy company; an extremist's apocalyptic vision. The threats come from all around, and time is running out--for Jane and possibly for the world.

Hummingbird Salamander is Jeff VanderMeer at his dazzling, cinematic best, wrapping profound questions into a tightly plotted tale of the fight to survive.

From the author of Borne and Annihilation comes the one-volume hardcover reissue of his cult classic Ambergris Trilogy.

More than twenty years ago, Jeff VanderMeer first introduced the world to the fictional city of Ambergris, a beautiful and sinister sprawling metropolis populated by artists and thieves, composers and murderers, geniuses and madmen. Ambergris bristles with intellectual fervor and religious rivalries; it thrives on cultural upheaval, and its politics are never short on intrigue, conspiracy, and even terror. There are stories within stories, mystery, mayhem, and a dark history that threatens to consume the city itself as the gray caps, the mysterious and deadly mushroom people who once ruled Ambergris and have since been driven underground, now threaten to rise again.

Ultimately, the fate of Ambergris comes to lie in the hands of John Finch, a beleaguered detective with a murder on to solve and too many loyalties for one man to bear. The city is bursting at its seams, seemingly held together only by the tense, fraying tendrils of his investigation.

The Ambergris trilogy is made up of three novels, each of which has become a cult classic in its own right: City of Saints and Madmen, Shriek: An Afterword, and Finch. It is a marvelous, unparalleled feat of imagination. And yet the books themselves, as celebrated and influential as they have become, have a publishing history as arcane and elaborate as Ambergris itself. Over the years they have slipped in and out of print and have never before been available as a complete trilogy. Until now.

For fans both new and old of the work of Jeff VanderMeer, Ambergris is essential reading. Welcome to Ambergris. We can't promise you'll leave untransformed.

From Jeff VanderMeer, the author of Borne and Annihilation, comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic Finch.

In a deserted tenement in an occupied city, two dead bodies lie on a dusty floor as if they have fallen out of the air. One corpse is cut in half, the other is utterly unmarked. One is human, the other isn't. The city of Ambergris is half ruined, rotten, its population controlled by narcotics, internment camps, and acts of terror. But its new masters want this case closed, urgently. Detective John Finch has just one week to solve it or be sent to the camps. With no ID for the victims, no clues, no leads, and precious little hope, Finch's fate hangs in the balance.

But there is more to this case than meets the eye. Enough to put Finch in the crosshairs of every spy, rebel, informer, and traitor in town. Under the shadow of the eldrich tower the occupiers are raising above the city, Finch is about to come face-to-face with a series of mysteries that will change him and Ambergris forever. Why does one of the victims most resemble a man thought to have been dead for a hundred years? What is the murders' connection to an attempted genocide nearly six hundred years ago? And just what is the secret purpose of the occupiers' tower?

From the New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer's first novel, Veniss Underground, takes readers on a journey to a labyrinthine city of tunnels, and the dangers lurking behind each turn. This paperback edition features the bonus novella Balzac's War.

In a dark and decadent far future, the city of Veniss persists beside a dead ocean. Earth has become a desert wasteland ravaged by climate change. Veniss endures on the strength of its innovative tech of almost Boschian intensity, but at what cost? Where does the line between made creature and person lie?

Against this backdrop, Veniss Underground spins the tale of Nicholas, an aspiring, struggling Artist; his twin sister, Nicola; and Shadrach, Nicola's former lover. A fateful trip by Nicholas to the maverick biotech Quin will have far-reaching consequences for all three--and for the fate of Veniss itself, as insurrection stirs and the oppressed begin to revolt.

Veniss Underground is Jeff VanderMeer's first novel, a spectacular surreal foray into a world as influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky as by Ursula K. Le Guin. Readers of VanderMeer's later work will be enchanted and horrified by the marvels within, including the author's signature fascination with the nonhuman and the environment. By turns beautiful and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession against a backdrop of betrayal and biological mutation.

This reissue includes a new introduction by the National Book Award-winning author Charles Yu and a bonus story from Jeff VanderMeer.

From the author of Borne and Annihilation comes the paperback reissue of his cult classic Shriek: An Afterword.

An epic yet personal look at several decades of life, love, and death in the imaginary city of Ambergris--previously chronicled in Jeff VanderMeer's acclaimed City of Saints and Madmen--Shriek: An Afterword relates the scandalous, heartbreaking, and horrifying secret history of two squabbling siblings and their confidantes, protectors, and enemies.

Narrated with flamboyant intensity and under increasingly urgent conditions by the ex-society figure Janice Shriek, this afterword presents a vivid gallery of characters and events, emphasizing the adventures of Janice's brother Duncan, a historian obsessed with a doomed love affair and a secret that may kill or transform him; a war between rival publishing houses that will change Ambergris forever; and the gray caps, a marginalized people armed with advanced fungal technologies, who have been waiting underground for their chance to mold the future of the city.

After reading this introduction to the Family Shriek--part academic treatise, part tell-all biography--you'll never look at history in quite the same way.

A Peculiar Peril is a head-spinning epic about three friends on a quest to protect the world from a threat as unknowable as it is terrifying, from the Nebula Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer.

Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather's overstuffed mansion--a veritable cabinet of curiosities--once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables).

Swept into encounters with allies more unpredictable than enemies, Jonathan pieces together his destiny as a member of a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora. But as the ground shifts and allegiances change with every step, he and his friends sink ever deeper into a deadly pursuit of the profound evil that is also chasing after them.

By turns beautiful, horrifying, delicate, and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession in a landscape that defies the boundaries of the imagination.

This special edition includes the short stories The Sea, Mendeho, and Moonlight; Detectives and Cadavers; and A Heart for Lucretia and the novella Balzac's War, offering a complete tour of the fantastic world of Veniss.

Praise for Veniss Underground

A wonder-filled journey that echoes Dante's Divine Comedy, the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice, and the landscapes of Hieronymus Bosch.--Publishers Weekly

Audacious . . . full of beautiful sentences, black humor and terrible wonders.--San Francisco Chronicle

The novel's] milieu recalls Philip K. Dick, its passages of prose poetry Edgar Allan Poe, its wry fatalism Jim Thompson. Wow --Booklist

In the hands of a brilliant writer like Jeff VanderMeer, writing fantasy can be a means of serious artistic expression . . . also playful, poignant, and utterly, wildly imaginative.--Peter Straub, author of lost boy lost girl