You'll find a name for your new baby in this book!

 15,000+ Baby Names was designed to let you scan through a list of the most contemporary girls' and boys' names in print to find the right name for your new baby. This book includes the following features:

 

 Guidelines for naming your baby

 

 A list of 200 most popular names

 

 Names used by parents of a variety or racial, ethnic, and religious backgrounds, including African American, British, Chinese, French, German, Greek, Hispanic, Irish, Italian, Japanese, Jewish, Muslim, Polish, Russian, and more

 

 Origins, meanings, and famous namesakes

 

 A helpful cross-referencing system to lead you to related or similar names

 

 Worksheets to help you choose a name

It's fair to say that Will Eisner invented modern comic art. A Contract with God has been called the first graphic novel, and its divergence from traditional comics themes and forms highlights Eisner's foresight and brilliance. Dealing with stories and memories from his childhood in a Bronx tenement, he explores the brutality, fragility, and tenderness possible among people living in close quarters close to the poverty line. The four stories here are tough but funny, deep but finely detailed, much like the traditional Jewish stories he drew upon to flavor his own work. Ending reflectively (and perhaps autobiographically), A Contract with God shows us a young man peering out into his city as he decides whether and how to face adulthood. You won't see that in the funny papers. —Rob Lightner

It's been said that Vladimir Nabokov's best novels are the ones he wrote after starting a failed novel. Anne Rice wrote The Body Thief, the fourth thrilling episode of her Vampire Chronicles, right after she spent a long time poring over that most romantic of horror novels, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, to research a novel Rice abandoned about an artificial man. Perhaps as a result of Shelley's influence, The Body Thief is far more psychologically penetrating than its predecessors, with a laser-like focus on a single tormented soul. Oh, we meet some wild new characters, and Rice's toothsome vampire-hero Lestat zooms around the globe—as is his magical habit—from Miami to the Gobi desert, but he's in such despair that he trades his immortal body to a con man named Raglan James, who offers him in return two days of strictly mortal bliss.

 Lestat has always had a faulty impulse-control valve, and it gets him in truly intriguing trouble this time. On the plus side, he gets to experience romance with a nun and orange juice——"thick like blood, but full of sweetness." But Lestat is horrified by an uncommon cold, and his toilet training proves traumatic. He's also got to catch Raglan James, who has no intention of giving up his dishonestly acquired new superpowered body. Lestat enlists the help of David Talbot, a mortal in the Talamasca, a secret society of immortal watchers described in Queen of the Damned.

 The swapping of bodies and supernatural stories is choice, and there's even a moral: never give a bloodsucker an even break. —Tim Appelo

This beautiful collection of meditations on the astrological signs and the paths of the Tree of Life was originally titled 'The Treasure House of Images.' At one time it was primarily perceived as an inspirational text. This edition treats it as a unique instruction on magical technique. With additional material by David Cherubim, Christopher S. Hyatt, Lon Milo DuQuette and Nancy Wasserman it has become a powerful tool for self-transformation.

One of the most widely respected members of the magic community, Lon Milo DuQuette is known for his ability to address the rather intimidating aspects of magick with a casual candor; he makes the subject accessible to the initiate while still holding the interest of the experienced reader. Angels, Demons & Gods of the New Millennium is a collection of loosely connected essays surveying the state of magick in the face of the new millennium. It showcases DuQuette's knack for combining wit with profundity, producing chapters such as "Qabalah-Zen of the West" and "Demons Are Our Friends," while addressing contemporary topics such as initiations and the procession of the equinoxes.

As his 1980's masterwork Watchmenproved so magnificently, Alan Moore's greatest talent is taking a classic format and re-imagining it with a fresh perspective. After years of heated animosity with the comics industry while chucking out the odd masterpiece (From Hell), Moore returned to the mainstream with a vengeance with "America's Best Comics", writing no less than five titles a month at the turn of the Millennium. Headlining ABC is Tom Strong, Moore's supremely enjoyable take on the "Thrilling Tales" pulp comics of the 1930s and 40s. A square-jawed hero of the classic mould, Tom Strong is the peak of mental and physical perfection, raised on the mysterious island of Attabar Teru after his parents became shipwrecked there in 1899. A century later, he's the saviour of Millennium City, still fighting fit thanks to the age-defying powers of the "Goloka Root" and aided by his wife, daughter, his steam-powered butler Pneuman and an intelligent (English) ape called King Solomon. In these first seven issues Moore provides a wonderfully rendered homage, with Tom constantly leaping into danger with a sense of selfless heroism that would make Superman envious. Whether it be alien threats, ancient curses, the fiendish plans of Tom's nemesis Paul Saveen or struggles facing the lethal landscape of Prehistoric Earth, Moore weaves short, sharp and undeniably thrilling stories that are free of the tired grim'n'gritty cynicism so common in comics. With such high-calibre storytelling, and Chris Spruce's engaging art, you cannot fail to enjoy such an honest, engaging re-telling of throwaway adventures as seen through Moore's ever-incisive and beautifully observant gaze. —Danny Graydon

The critically acclaimed anthology series The Year's Best Science Fiction publishes its astounding 19th volume in 2002. Weighing in at well over 600 pages, this comprehensive volume contains 26 of the best SF stories of 2001 and a knowledgeable, thorough introduction/summation by the editor, 12-time Hugo Award winner Gardner Dozois. The contributors range from veteran greats like Nancy Kress and Michael Swanwick to cult gods like Howard Waldrop and Michael Blumlein to impressive newcomers like Andy Duncan and Charles Stross.

 A brief review cannot discuss all the stories, but can only suggest the range of subgenres within. These include the hard SF of Alastair Reynolds's extrasolar murder mystery "Glacial"; the soft SF of Maureen F. McHugh's wise "Interview: On Any Given Day"; the testosterone-drenched adventure SF of Paul Di Filippo's "Neutrino Drag"; the doomed lesbian love in a future so distant it seems like fantasy in Ian R. MacLeod's "Isabel of the Fall"; alternate history about Philip K. Dick and Richard Nixon in Paul McAuley's "The Two Dicks"; the triple-timeline Trojan fantasy of Howard Waldrop and Leigh Kennedy's excellent collaboration, "One-Horse Town"; the scathing satire of Carolyn Ives Gilman's "The Real Thing"; and the high-density postcyberpunk of "Lobsters," in which new author Charles Stross blends bleeding-edge infotech and venture-capital bizbuzz to create the standout SF story of 2001. —Cynthia Ward

At long last, a ray of light is cast upon that most notorious of occult dynasties: the Cthulhu Cult. Written in 1946 but unpublished and largely unknown until now, Fred Pelton's ground breaking work of occult scholarship sifts through the ashes of history and discovers much of interest to the Cthulhu scholar. Fascinating in its descriptions, meticulous in its details, and shocking in its revelations, Fred Peltons's "A Guide to the Cthulhu Cult" is the book that a generation of Cthulhu scholars has been awaiting- and that a network of Cthulhu cultists has dreaded. At long last, the story can be told!

John Shirley takes us on a journey from the mildly bizarre to the downright weird and then some in this, his latest collection of short fiction. The book incorporates some of Shirley's classic stories along with some revised and hard to find material and is highlighted by nine never before published works. A must have for the Shirley reader or collector. Includes art work by Alan M. Clark. "The 37 stories in this mind-shaking collection are grouped into four sections of ascending weirdness, from Really Weird to Really, Really, Really, Really Weird. Considering that the first entry, I Want to Get Married, Says the Worlds Smallest Man, concerns a 28"-tall midget who weds a full-size, crack-smoking whore, to brutal effect, readers may rest assured that an unforgettable trip awaits them from cover to cover. But weirdness per se doesnt seem to be Shirleys aim, except insofar as outr subject matter (as in Skeeter Junkie, wherein the mind of a heroin addict enters the body of a mosquito) or prose style (e.g., the sentences of the potent and moving Ten Things to be Grateful For, as long and sinuous as anacondas) can wrench readers from their habitual frame of reference to experience the world afresh. The author of last years Black Butterflies demonstrates throughout a fecund imagination, wicked sense of humor and thematic seriousnessregarding the malleability of reality, the hellishness of drug abuse, the fragility of human constructthat render these tales as profound as they are sensational. Selected from 26 years of output, ranging from SF to dark fantasy to crime, drawn from books, magazines and a Web site (and with 10 entries never before published), the collection isnt all aces. But the majority of stories are, making this another virtuoso offering from a writer whose daring and originality continue to astonish." - Publishers Weekly Contents: * The Author Wants to Tell You... (Introduction) * REALLY WEIRD STORIES o "I Want to Get Married!" Says World's Smallest Man o Will the Chill o Tapes 12, 14, 15, 22 and 23 o Don't Be Afraid o Lot Five, Building Seven, Door Twenty-Three o Kindred Spirits o The Word "Random", Deliberately Repeated o Voices o The Last Ride * REALLY, REALLY, WEIRD STORIES o ...And the Angel with Television Eyes o The Sweet Caress of Mother Nature o In the Cornelius Arms o Quill Tripstickler Out the Window [*Quill Tripstickler] o I Live in Elizabeth o Morons at the Speed of Light o Silent Crickets o Screens o Brittany? Oh: She's in Translucent Blue o Ticket to Heaven * REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, WEIRD STORIES o Ash o Triggering o When Enter Came o Skeeter Junkie o What Joy! What Fulfillment! o 199619971998 o Preach o Preach: Part Two: The Apocalypse of the Reverend John Shirley o Modern Transmutations of the Alchemist * REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, REALLY, WEIRD STORIES o Just Like Suzie o Cold Feet o The Peculiar Happiness of Professor Cort o Tahiti in Terms of Squares o Equilibrium o What Cindy Saw o The Almost Empty Rooms o Ten Things to Be Grateful For o The Sea Was Wet As Wet Could Be