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Fly Away Home

Successful Boston cookbook author Daria Walker, whose greatest pleasures are her home and family -- and who loves her husband deeply -- is devastated to learn he wants a divorce. Now she must put her life back together. But as she strives to understand the life she is losing, Daria must face the shocking truth behind the smooth facade of her prominent attorney-husband, Ross -- and recreate her own values, her own sense of family, and herself.
Views: 749

The Black Company

Librarian note: an alternate cover for this edition can be found here. Some feel the Lady, newly risen from centuries in thrall, stands between humankind and evil. Some feel she is evil itself. The hard-bitten men of the Black Company take their pay and do what they must, burying their doubts with their dead. Until the prophesy: The White Rose has been reborn, somewhere, to embody good once more. There must be a way for the Black Company to find her... So begins one of the greatest fantasy epics of our age—Glen Cook's Chronicles of the Black Company.
Views: 747

The Big U

The New York Times Book Review called Neal Stephenson's most recent novel "electrifying" and "hilarious".  but if you want to know Stephenson was doing twenty years before he wrote the epic Cryptonomicon, it's back-to-school time. Back to The Big U, that is, a hilarious send-up of American college life starring after years our of print, The Big U is required reading for anyone interested in the early work of this singular writer.
Views: 745

Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed

A series of essays including: Stealing Tomorrow, Down the Rabbit-Hole to TV-Land, Rolling Dat Ole Debbil Electronic Stone, Defeating the Green Slime, Fear Not your Enemies, From Albany, With Hate, Centerpunching, Voe Doe Dee Oh Doe, Cheap Thrills on the Road to H*ll, and more.
Views: 741

A Very Private Eye: The Diaries, Letters and Notebooks of Barbara Pym

Intimate and unexpected portrait of the popular Engish novelist, Barbara Pym, in her own words, gathered from journals and a selection of her letters to close personal friends.
Views: 735

Touch the Horizon

1 New York Times bestselling author Iris Johansen combines romance and adventure in this exotic tale of finding the love of your life—in the last place you’d ever look. ** **She was stranded in a deadly sandstorm when he rode to her rescue like a desert prince on his black stallion. On a lark Billie Callahan had come to the Middle East to play a minor film role in a desert epic. Suddenly she found herself starring in a real-life romantic adventure. Cowboy, hero, friend of sheikhs and princes, David Bradford spoke like a poet in the drawl of his native Texas. What was this mysterious, eccentric, and irresistibly seductive man doing in Sedikhan, and what did he want with an ordinary woman like Billie? Her curiosity piqued, Billie followed David to the lavish pleasure fortress he called home, with its armed guards and adoring staff. He warned her that the pleasure he offered her would last forever. What he didn’t know was that Billie only believed in now.
Views: 735

Julie

Will the dam hold? Julie Wallace has always wanted to write. Trying to escape the Great Depression, Julie’s father buys The Alderton Sentinel, a small-town newspaper in flood-prone Alderton, Pennsylvania, and moves his family there. As flash floods ominously increase, Julie’s investigative reporting uncovers secrets that could endanger the entire community. Julie, the newspaper, and her family are thrown into a perilous standoff with the owners of the steel mills as they investigate the conditions of the steelworkers. Battle lines are drawn between the steel mill owners and their immigrant laborers. As The Sentinel and Julie take on a more aggressive role in reforming these conditions in their community, seething tensions come to a head. When a devastating tragedy follows a shocking revelation, Julie’s courage and strength are tested. Will truth and justice win, or will Julie lose everything she holds dear?
Views: 707

To the Land of the Living

In the universe of the Afterworld, time and places flow fluidly according to a demon's whim. And there, Gilgamesh of Urik is joined by the eternally ravishing Helen of Troy and the godlike artificer Picasso in a journey more harrowing and more fabulous than any undertaken in his first life.
Views: 704

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand

Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand is a science fiction masterpiece, an essay on the inexplicability of sexual attractiveness, and an examination of interstellar politics among far-flung worlds. First published in 1984, the novel's central issues--technology, globalization, gender, sexuality, and multiculturalism--have only become more pressing with the passage of time. The novel's topic is information itself: What are the repercussions, once it has been made public, that two individuals have been found to be each other's perfect erotic object out to "point nine-nine-nine and several nines percent more"? What will it do to the individuals involved, to the city they inhabit, to their geosector, to their entire world society, especially when one is an illiterate worker, the sole survivor of a world destroyed by "cultural fugue," and the other is--you!
Views: 702

Stars and Bars: A Novel

Sharply observed and brilliantly plotted, Stars and Bars is an uproarious portrait of culture clash deep in the heart of the American South, by one of contemporary literature’s most imaginative novelists. A recent transfer to Manhattan has inspired art assessor Henderson Dores to shed his British reserve and aspire to the impulsive and breezy nature of Americans. But when Loomis Gage, an eccentric millionaire, invites him to appraise his small collection of Impressionist paintings, Dores's plans quite literally go south. Stranded at a remote mansion in the Georgia countryside, Dores is received by the bizarre Gage family with Anglophobic slurs, nausea-inducing food, ludicrous death threats, and a menacing face off with competing art dealers. By the time he manages to sneak back to New York City–sporting only a cardboard box–Henderson Dores realizes he is fast on the way to becoming a naturalized citizen. From the Trade Paperback edition.
Views: 697

Books of Blood: Volumes 1-6

"Everybody is a book of blood; wherever we're opened, we're red." For those who only know Clive Barker through his long multigenre novels, this one-volume edition of the Books of Blood is a welcome chance to acquire the 16 remarkable horror short stories with which he kicked off his career. For those who already know these tales, the poignant introduction is a window on the creator's mind. Reflecting back after 14 years, Barker writes: I look at these pieces and I don't think the man who wrote them is alive in me anymore.... We are all our own graveyards I believe; we squat amongst the tombs of the people we were. If we're healthy, every day is a celebration, a Day of the Dead, in which we give thanks for the lives that we lived; and if we are neurotic we brood and mourn and wish that the past was still present. Reading these stories over, I feel a little of both. Some of the simple energies that made these words flow through my pen--that made the phrases felicitous and the ideas sing--have gone. I lost their maker a long time ago. These enthusiastic tales are not ashamed of visceral horror, of blood splashing freely across the page: "The Midnight Meat Train," a grisly subway tale that surprises you with one twist after another; "The Yattering and Jack," about a hilarious demon who possesses a Christmas turkey; "In the Hills, the Cities," an unusual example of an original horror premise; "Dread," a harrowing non-supernatural tale about being forced to realize your worst nightmare; "Jacqueline Ess: Her Will and Testament," about a woman who kills men with her mind. Some of the tales are more successful than others, but all are distinguished by strikingly beautiful images of evil and destruction. No horror library is complete without them. --Fiona Webster
Views: 696

In Custody

Touching and wonderfully funny, In Custody is woven around the yearnings and calamities of a small-town scholar in the north of India. An impoverished college lecturer, Deven, sees a way to escape from the meanness of his daily life when he is asked to interview India's greatest Urdu poet, Nur -- a project that can only end in disaster.
Views: 695

The Stanislavski System

This clearly written guide to the Stanislavski method has long been a favorite among students and teachers of acting. Now, in light of books and articles recently published in the Soviet Union, Sonia Moore has made revisions that include a new section on the subtext of a role. She provides detailed explanations of all the methods that actors in training have found indispensable for more than twenty years. Designed to create better actors, this guide will put individuals in touch with themselves and increase personal sensitivity as well.
Views: 692

Seven Conquests

Epub (my conversion)The old blue man sighed, and a smile tugged at his mouth. You didn’t work many centuries in the Service without becoming an idealist and a cynic. So many planets, spinning through night and cold, so many souls huddled on them…a half million full-status worlds, members of interstellar civilization by virtue of knowing that such a civilization existed… and how many millions more who did not know. The duty of true civilization was to guide its brothers in darkness— secretly, gently keeping from them the devastating knowledge that a million-year-old society already existed, until they had matured enough to take that bitter pill and join the League of the older planets.
Views: 687

Voyager in Night

Rafe Murray, his sister Jillian, and Jillian's husband Paul Gaines, like many other out-of-luck spacers, had come to newly-built Endeavor Station to find their future. Their tiny ship, Lindy, had been salvaged from the junk heap, and fitted to mine ore from the mineral-rich rings which circled Endeavor. But their future proved to be far stranger than any of them imagined, when a "collision" with a huge alien vessel provided them with the oddest first contact experience possible! --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.
Views: 680