In this enchanting debut, a young girl faces the secrets buried in the mud-rich, rain-soaked landscape of her mother's childhood.When fourteen-year-old Allie's mother, Mae, mysteriously disappears in the dark waters of the harbor, Allie is taken by Julia—an aunt she barely knows—to stay at the dilapidated dairy farm where her mother grew up.As the days pass and the heat of the wet season swells, Allie confidently waits for her mother's call, certain that Mae will reappear as she always has in the past. In the meantime, Allie watches her aunt, who is determined to replant the trees of the forest and undo the damage her family has inflicted upon the land. And Allie lurks around the cabin belonging to her mother's first love, a man who still lives deep within the valley.When the truth about Mae's childhood and Allie's mythical father, the Balloon Man, begins to surface, Allie must sort through the lies her mother has told her and come to grips with the many... Views: 66
A collection of three books treasured by users of the great library at Hogwarts School for Witchcraft and Wizardry: Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, Newt Scamander's masterful work on magical creatures; Quidditch Through the Ages, a comprehensive history of the game and its rules; and The Tales of Beedle the Bard, with an introduction and illustrations by J.K. Rowling and extensive commentary by Albus Dumbledore. A treasure trove of magical facts and fairy tales, the Hogwarts Library Collection is an essential companion to the Harry Potter series. This collection includes the updated edition of Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them, with a new foreword from J.K. Rowling (writing as Newt Scamander) and six new beasts! Views: 66
Can a down-on-her-luck princess really have it all?A whisper away from thirty, gorgeous Tess Hamilton has been the tennis world's top titleholder and celebrity since she won her first championship at fifteen. Now the headline-making party girl is getting her first taste of mortality -- thanks to new teenage phenom Gabrielle Fontaine. But it's Gaby's cool, calm, and all-too-collected brother and manager, Max, who really has Tess seeing double. He's the first man she can't seem to seduce -- or intimidate. It appears Tess is truly off her game, until a real-life, modern-day fairy godmother steps in.... Aurora Favreaux, a founder of Glass Slipper, Inc., and an old family friend, has a plan to get Tess back on her stilettos, and it includes an unlikely meeting between Tess, Max, and Gaby at Glass Slipper's new London headquarters -- just in time for Wimbledon. It seems that Tess is going to hit the courts in a whole new way, to prove to the world -- and herself -- that a woman with the heart of a champion can ace life and love -- even after the big 3-0.... Views: 66
From successful model to has-been at age twenty-four, Kayanne Aldarmann had returned home to figure out what to do with the rest of her life—and discovered the seductive bachelor next door might just have the answer. But she soon realized he was too good to be true. Because Dave Evans had an agenda of his own—and destroying Kayanne was the only way he would get what he wanted. Views: 66
The Sangre de Cristo Exotic Game Club is every man's dream. For the right price you can hunt beautiful women then enjoy your prize in almost any way you can imagine. Bondage, erotic torment and wild sex are only a part of the vacation of a lifetime. The question is, do the women being hunted have just as much fun, and is there a better time in store for the woman with the trophy rack? Views: 66
First in the Kurt Wallander series. It was a senselessly violent crime: on a cold night in a remote Swedish farmhouse an elderly farmer is bludgeoned to death, and his wife is left to die with a noose around her neck. And as if this didn’t present enough problems for the Ystad police Inspector Kurt Wallander, the dying woman’s last word is foreign, leaving the police the one tangible clue they have–and in the process, the match that could inflame Sweden’s already smoldering anti-immigrant sentiments. Unlike the situation with his ex-wife, his estranged daughter, or the beautiful but married young prosecuter who has peaked his interest, in this case, Wallander finds a problem he can handle. He quickly becomes obsessed with solving the crime before the already tense situation explodes, but soon comes to realize that it will require all his reserves of energy and dedication to solve. Views: 66
It was a miracle that he found her—freezing cold and alone in the treacherous snow-covered terrain of the English mountains. And with nowhere else to go, Miranda Harding finds herself agreeing to spend a magical Christmas Day with her rescuer. Gorgeous consultant Jake Blackwell doesn't want to let this beautiful woman out of his sight, yet the next morning she's gone. Only to reappear that same day as the new midwife in his OB-GYN department. That's not the only surprise—it's now startlingly obvious that his mysterious Miranda is also six months pregnant... Views: 66
Only a Scandinavian dystopia would unravel in a setting “furnished in a modern style and tastefully decorated in muted colors” such as “eggshell white.” And only a Scandinavian dystopia, perhaps, would see mandatory paternal leave as a slippery slope to compulsory childcare and then to compulsory parenthood and the criminalization of traditional gender roles. This is a dystopia for a shrinking country. In The Unit, all childless women over fifty and childless men over sixty are classified as “dispensable” and removed to facilities where they take part in scientific experiments and eventually donate all of their organs to “needed” individuals. The Unit uncannily echoes its organ-donation-dystopia predecessor, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005); both imagine societies of extreme utilitarianism that plunder their margins for body parts, and both raise the prospect of art for art’s sake, and love for love’s, as weapons against such thinking. The Unit’s heroine, Dorrit, has chosen not to have children and thus “spill over like rising bread dough”; at the book’s opening, Dorrit’s independence has just earned her incarceration in the Unit, a death camp puzzlingly replete with art galleries and gourmet restaurants where her individualism seems to lapse into passivity. Through flashbacks, we learn of all Dorrit has lost-her career as a novelist, her beloved dog, the small house she owned herself, the opportunities to save herself by becoming “useful” to society. These snippets of memory are interspersed with descriptions of the eponymous unit and its dying inhabitants, descriptions so matter-of-fact they lull. The novel grips toward the end when Dorrit finds love-and with it a potential escape-and makes a startling choice. Dorrit’s play-by-play narration can be clunky in translation, but the spare, cumulative prose effectively reveals a character whose story can barely ward off the disintegration of the self it relates. Holmqvist cleverly makes that very self unreliable; The Unit is the latest in a trend of anti-heroic dystopias such as Never Let Me Go and P.D. James’s The Children of Men. In these novels of bad futures, the trustworthy memories of protagonists such as Nineteen Eighty-Four’s Winston Smith (“Airstrip One… had been called England or Britain, though London, [Winston] felt fairly certain, had always been called London”) are replaced by the self-delusions of narrators who mislead the reader and themselves lose control of the stories they are telling. In these novels, rebellion must be expressed obliquely. Like Kathy, the complacent carer of Never Let Me Go, who survives her childhood friends, nursing them as they donate all their organs, Dorrit displaces her anger onto a clearer-eyed friend who calls the Unit what it is, a “luxury slaughterhouse.” While Holmqvist builds a powerfully imaginative scenario around the concept of killing off the childless, her message on gender roles is clumsy and unconvincing. In Dorrit’s world, flirting and other “typically male” behavior has been criminalized, and retrograde domestic fantasies have to be played out in secret, making the missionary position an act of transgression. We have come a long way from the rage of Margaret Atwood’s 1985 A Handmaid’s Tale, with its neo-Biblical America in which all women are forced either to bear children or to raise them. In today’s climate of threatened reproductive rights, a critique of compulsory motherhood would be welcome, but The Unit displays the same innate conservatism that is the pitfall of Never Let Me Go-a disturbing willingness to locate tragedy not in the horror of forced organ donation and premature death, but in Kathy and Dorrit’s lost opportunities to become mothers. Copyright 2010 Fran Bigman Views: 66
In a place where realms combine and portals open passages to the unknown, a prophecy speaks of fertility being restored to his people through the taking of King Kabril's mate.
The prophecy neglects to mention she lacks something vital to his kind--wings. Kabril, King of the Buteos Regalis has no interest in taking a human mate. His kind believes humans are dirty, vile creatures who rely on machines to lift them into the air. The last place he wants to go in search of his mate is Earth, but he's left no choice.
Never did he expect to find love on a planet with one moon, people who lack wings and a stubborn vixen who makes his heart soar. When he does, he fears the truth about who and what he truly is will steal it away. Little does he know his enemies fully intend on doing the taking.
WARNING: This book contains hot, explicit sex and violence explained with contemporary, graphic language. Views: 66
ReviewAdvance Praise for The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight “It’s always complicated to write about writing (and about writers), but Marc Weingarten does it effortlessly. Every character in The Gang That Wouldn’t Write Straight is compelling and necessary. If this book doesn’t make you want to be a journalist, nothing will.” —Chuck Klosterman, author of Killing Yourself to Live “Well-researched, beautifully wrought—this is an addictively readable history of the revolution in American journalism.” —T. C. Boyle, author of Drop City “Weingarten is a strong, fresh voice in contemporary cultural criticism.” —Alvin Toffler, author of Future Shock From the Hardcover edition.Product Description. . . In Cold Blood, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, The Armies of the Night . . . Starting in 1965 and spanning a ten-year period, a group of writers including Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, and Michael Herr emerged and joined a few of their pioneering elders, including Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, to remake American letters. The perfect chroniclers of an age of frenzied cultural change, they were blessed with the insight that traditional tools of reporting would prove inadequate to tell the story of a nation manically hopscotching from hope to doom and back again—from war to rock, assassination to drugs, hippies to Yippies, Kennedy to the dark lord Nixon. Traditional just-the-facts reporting simply couldn’t provide a neat and symmetrical order to this chaos. Marc Weingarten has interviewed many of the major players to provide a startling behind-the-scenes account of the rise and fall of the most revolutionary literary outpouring of the postwar era, set against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent—and significant—years in contemporary American life. These are the stories behind those stories, from Tom Wolfe’s white-suited adventures in the counterculture to Hunter S. Thompson’s drug-addled invention of gonzo to Michael Herr’s redefinition of war reporting in the hell of Vietnam. Weingarten also tells the deeper backstory, recounting the rich and surprising history of the editors and the magazines who made the movement possible, notably the three greatest editors of the era—Harold Hayes at Esquire, Clay Felker at New York, and Jann Wenner at Rolling Stone. And finally Weingarten takes us through the demise of the New Journalists, a tragedy of hubris, miscalculation, and corporate menacing. This is the story of perhaps the last great good time in American journalism, a time when writers didn’t just cover stories but immersed themselves in them, and when journalism didn’t just report America but reshaped it. “Within a seven-year period, a group of writers emerged, seemingly out of nowhere—Tom Wolfe, Jimmy Breslin, Gay Talese, Hunter S. Thompson, Joan Didion, John Sack, Michael Herr—to impose some order on all of this American mayhem, each in his or her own distinctive manner (a few old hands, like Truman Capote and Norman Mailer, chipped in, as well). They came to tell us stories about ourselves in ways that we couldn’t, stories about the way life was being lived in the sixties and seventies and what it all meant to us. The stakes were high; deep fissures were rending the social fabric, the world was out of order. So they became our master explainers, our town criers, even our moral conscience—the New Journalists.” —from the Introduction From the Hardcover edition. Views: 66
