Alan Lee

Bilbo Baggins, a respectable, well-to-do hobbit, lives comfortably in his hobbit-hole until the day the wandering wizard Gandalf chooses him to take part in an adventure from which he may never return. He becomes a thief for a band of dwarves and soon finds himself in the midst of a war with the evil goblins and wargs, and is forced to make a decision between the call of duty and the pull of the simple life.

The standard hardcover edition of the second volume of The Lord of the Rings includes a large format fold-out map. Frodo and his Companions of the Ring have been beset by danger during their quest to prevent the Ruling Ring from falling into the hands of the Dark Lord by destroying it in the Cracks of Doom. They have lost the wizard, Gandalf, in a battle in the Mines of Moria. And Boromir, seduced by the power of the Ring, tried to seize it by force....

For over fifty years, J.R.R. Tolkien's peerless fantasy has accumulated worldwide acclaim as the greatest adventure tale ever written. No other writer has created a world as distinct as Middle-earth, complete with its own geography, history, languages, and legends. And no one has created characters as endearing as Tolkien's large-hearted, hairy-footed hobbits. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings continues to seize the imaginations of readers of all ages,...

Sinatra, a notorious federal marshal, is drafted into a domestic black ops group. Their mission-arrest the untouchable. An international terrorist slips through the East Coast and takes up residence inside an impregnable mountain chateau-within American borders but beyond legal reach. Her name is El Gato and she's a top priority for both the DEA and FBI. The situation is dicey and politically explosive, perfect for Sinatra and his team. Sometimes...

"In the Tale of The Fall of Gondolin are two of the greatest powers in the world. There is Morgoth of the uttermost evil, unseen in this story but ruling over a vast military power from his fortress of Angband. Deeply opposed to Morgoth is Ulmo, second in might only to Manwë, chief of the Valar: he is called the Lord of Waters, of all seas, lakes, and rivers under the sky. But he works in secret in Middle-earth to support the Noldor, the kindred...

Tucked away in Siberia, there are furry, four-legged creatures with wagging tails and floppy ears that are as docile and friendly as any lapdog. But, despite appearances, these are not dogs-they are foxes. They are the result of the most astonishing experiment in breeding ever undertaken-imagine speeding up thousands of years of evolution into a few decades. In 1959, biologists Dmitri Belyaev and Lyudmila Trut set out to do just that, by starting...

Never before published in a single volume, Tolkien's four novellas (Farmer Giles of Ham, Leaf by Niggle, Smith of Wootton Major, and Roverandom) and one book of poems (The Adventures of Tom Bombadil) are gathered together for the first time, in a fully illustrated volume. This new, definitive collection of works -- which had appeared separately, in various formats, between 1949 and 1998 -- comes with a brand-new foreword and endmatter, and with a...

Lee Alan Dugatkin is Professor of Biological Sciences at the University of Louisville. He is the author of many books, including the popular Cheating Monkeys and Citizen Bees: The Nature of Cooperation in Animals and Humans and Model Systems in Behavioral Ecology (Princeton). In a world supposedly governed by ruthless survival of the fittest, why do we see acts of goodness in both animals and humans? This problem plagued Charles Darwin in the 1850s...

One of the three 'Great Tales' of the Elder Days, J.R.R. Tolkien's The Children of Húrin takes place in Middle-earth thousands of years before the events of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.

The Children of Húrin is the first complete book by Tolkien since the 1977 publication of The Silmarillion. Six thousand years before the One Ring is destroyed, Middle-earth lies under the shadow of the Dark Lord Morgoth.

...

A man, his business partner, and his wife are enlisted to transport an unknown object from a Russian military base, only to discover that the object is a giant, genetically-altered python.