Readers of John Green, Sarah Dessen, and Laurie Halse Anderson will be touched by the emotional depth and realistic characters of Jennifer Castle's YA novel You Look Different in Real Life. Justine charmed the nation in a documentary film featuring five kindergartners. Five years later, her edgy sense of humor made her the star of a second movie that caught up with the lives of the same five kids. Now Justine is sixteen, and another sequel is in the works. Justine isn't ready to have viewers examining her life again. She feels like a disappointment, not at all like the girl everyone fell in love with in the first two movies. But, ready or not, she and the other four teens will soon be in front of the cameras again. Smart, fresh, and frequently funny, You Look Different in Real Life is a piercing novel about life in an age where the lines between what's personal and what's public aren't always clear. Views: 11
When a comatose woman suddenly wakes up and starts painting scenes she’s never witnessed, with a skill she’s never had, medical science has no explanation. As more bizarre phenomena manifest, even her doctors start to wonder if the woman may be possessed. Frustrated and frightened, the patient’s sister reluctantly turns to Greywalker Harper Blaine to discover who—or what—is occupying her sister’s body. As Harper digs into the case of apparent possession, she discovers other patients struck with the same mystifying afflictions and a disturbing connection to one of the most gruesome stories in Washington’s history… Views: 11
Evie's shattered ribs have been a secret for the last four years. Now she has found the strength to tell her adoptive parents, and the physical traces of her past are fixed - the only remaining signs a scar on her side and a fragment of bone taken home from the hospital, which her uncle Ben helps her to carve into a dragon as a sign of her strength.Soon this ivory talisman begins to come to life at night, offering wisdom and encouragement in roaming dreams of smoke and moonlight that come to feel ever more real.As Evie grows stronger there remains one problem her new parents can't fix for her: a revenge that must be taken. And it seems that the Dragon is the one to take it.This subtly unsettling novel is told from the viewpoint of a fourteen-year-old girl damaged by a past she can't talk about, in a hypnotic narrative that, while giving increasing insight, also becomes increasingly unreliable.A blend of psychological thriller and fairytale,The Bone Dragon explores the fragile boundaries between real life and fantasy, and the darkest corners of the human mind.Review'In a beautifully crafted narrative that constantly confounds expectation - her friends are kind, her foster parents are saintly - the final act is anything but comforting. Sometimes anger and vengeance aren't just understandable but essential tools for survivial' -- Suzi Feay Financial Times 20130520 Casale has shown that she is a talented writer who can pack such an emotional punch in her prose.The Bone Dragonleft me wanting more, I couldn't believe when it ended, I wanted the novel to continue so I could learn so much more about Evie. It's an emotional ride that's mixed with mystic and magic.' Read Write and Read Some More Blog 20130520 This book is the debut of an exciting and mature young writer who shows real skill in writing about the little details of life, bringing a realness to her characters and making the situations she writes about so very believable ... Intriguing, compulsive and wholly absorbing, Evie's tale is beautifully told and is ultimately warm and uplifting. Written by a young writer who has struggled with dyslexia it is also extremely inspiring, and a rewarding read for both young and older adults. We Love This Book 20130520 About the AuthorA British-American citizen of Italian heritage, Alexia is an editor, teacher and writing consultant. After studying psychology then educational technology at Cambridge, she moved to New York to work on a Tony-award-winning Broadway show before completing a PhD and teaching qualification. In between, she worked as a West End script-critic, box-office manager for a music festival and executive editor of a human rights journal. Alexia has always wanted a Dragon; luckily, she has her very own rib in a pot... Views: 11
A broken heart can never be a blank canvas… You meet someone, fall in love, and live happily ever after…right? That’s what Jim MacDuff thought, but after years of being blissfully happy, everything he holds dear comes crashing spectacularly down thanks to his interfering mother-in-law. Felicity “Flick” Johnston-Hart is passionate about painting what she sees through the glass. Just like the subjects of her paintings, she’s viewed her life as an observer instead of really living. Although she adores her first love, Jim, more than life, her mother’s expectations eventually chip away at her, making her believe that painting and Jim are simply not enough. After settling back into life as a single man in the stunning Scottish Highlands, Jim is graced with an unexpected and unwanted visitor bringing painful news that he would rather not hear. A letter from beyond the grave leads him to do something he never imagined and takes him on a journey to try to help Flick rekindle her passion for painting…and maybe win her love again in the process. Can Jim and Flick make things right before it’s too late, or will events leave them heartbroken and alone forever?** Views: 11
*THE DAZZLING NEW MASTERWORK FROM THE PROPHET OF SILICON VALLEY*Jaron Lanier is the bestselling author of You Are Not a Gadget, the father of virtual reality, and one of the most influential thinkers of our time. For decades, Lanier has drawn on his expertise and experience as a computer scientist, musician, and digital media pioneer to predict the revolutionary ways in which technology is transforming our culture.Who Owns the Future? is a visionary reckoning with the effects network technologies have had on our economy. Lanier asserts that the rise of digital networks led our economy into recession and decimated the middle class. Now, as technology flattens more and more industries—from media to medicine to manufacturing—we are facing even greater challenges to employment and personal wealth.But there is an alternative to allowing technology to own our future. In this ambitious and deeply humane book, Lanier charts the path toward a new information economy that will stabilize the middle class and allow it to grow. It is time for ordinary people to be rewarded for what they do and share on the web. Insightful, original, and provocative, Who Owns the Future? is necessary reading for everyone who lives a part of their lives online.Amazon.com ReviewAn Amazon Best Book of the Month, May 2013: Jaron Lanier's last book, You Are Not a Gadget, was an influential criticism of Web 2.0's crowd-sourced backbone. In Who Owns the Future?, Lanier is interested in how network technologies affect our culture, economy, and collective soul. Lanier is talking about pretty heady stuff--the monopolistic power of big tech companies (dubbed "Siren Servers"), the flattening of the middle class, the obscuring of humanity--but he has a gift for explaining sophisticated concepts with clarity. In fact, what separates Lanier from a lot of techno-futurists is his emphasis on the maintaining humanism and accessibility in technology. In the most ambitious part of the book, Lanier expresses what he believes to be the ideal version of the networked future--one that is built on two-way connections instead of one-way relationships, allowing content, media, and other innovations to be more easily attributed (including a system of micro-payments that lead back to its creator). Is the two-way networked vision of the internet proposed in Who Owns the Future quixotic? Even Lanier seems unsure, but his goal here is to establish a foundation for which we should strive. At one point, Lanier jokingly asks sci-fi author William Gibson to write something that doesn't depict technology as so menacing. Gibson replies, "Jaron, I tried. But it's coming out dark." Lanier is able to conjure a future that's much brighter, and hopefully in his imagination, we are moving closer to that. --Kevin NguyenQ&A with Jaron LanierQ. Years ago, in the early days of networking, you and your friends asserted that information should be free. What made you change your tune?A. In the big picture, a great new technology that makes the world more efficient should result in waves of new opportunity. That’s what happened with, say, electricity, telephones, cars, plumbing, fertilizers, vaccinations, and many other examples. Why on earth have the early years of the network revolution been associated with recessions, austerity, jobless recoveries, and loss of social mobility? Something has clearly gone wrong.The old ideas about information being free in the information age ended up screwing over everybody except the owners of the very biggest computers. The biggest computers turned into spying and behavior modification operations, which concentrated wealth and power.Sharing information freely, without traditional rewards like royalties or paychecks, was supposed to create opportunities for brave, creative individuals. Instead, I have watched each successive generation of young journalists, artists, musicians, photographers, and writers face harsher and harsher odds. The perverse effect of opening up information has been that the status of a young person’s parents matters more and more, since it’s so hard to make one’s way.Q. Throughout history, technological revolutions have caused unemployment but also brought about new types of jobs to replace the old ones. What’s different today?A. Cars can now drive themselves, and cloud services can translate passages between languages well enough to be of practical use. But the role of people in these technologies turned out to be a surprise.Back in the 1950s, the fantasy in the computer science world was that smart scientists would achieve machine intelligence and profound levels of automation, but that never worked. Instead, vast amounts of “big data” gathered from real people is rehashed to create automation. There are many, many real people behind the curtain.This should be great news for the future of employment! Multitudes of people are needed in order for robots to speak, drive cars, or perform operations. The only problem is that as the information age is dawning, the ideology of bright young people and newfangled plutocrats alike holds that information should be free.Q. Who does own the future? What’s up for grabs that will affect our future livelihoods?A. The answer is indeed up for grabs. If we keep on doing things as we are, the answer is clear: The future will be narrowly owned by the people who run the biggest, best connected computers, which will usually be found in giant, remote cloud computing farms.The answer I am promoting instead is that the future should be owned broadly by everyone who contributes data to the cloud, as robots and other machines animated by cloud software start to drive our vehicles, care for us when we’re sick, mine our natural resources, create the physical objects we use, and so on, as the 21st century progresses.Right now, most people are only gaining informal benefits from advances in technology, like free internet services, while those who own the biggest computers are concentrating formal benefits to an unsustainable degree.Q. What is a “Siren Server” and how does it function?A. I needed a broad name for the gargantuan cloud computer services that are concentrating wealth and influence in our era. They go by so many names! There are national intelligence agencies, the famous Silicon Valley companies with nursery school names, the stealthy high finance schemes, and others.All these schemes are quite similar. The biggest computers can predictably calculate wealth and clout on a broad, statistical level. For instance, an insurance company might use massive amounts of data to only insure people who are unlikely to get sick. The problem is that the risk and loss that can be avoided by having the biggest computer still exist. Everyone else must pay for the risk and loss that the Siren Server can avoid.The interesting thing about the original Homeric Sirens was that they didn’t actually attack sailors. The fatal peril was that sailors volunteered to grant the sirens control of the interaction. That’s what we’re all doing with the biggest computing schemes.Q. As a solution to the economic problems caused by digital networks, you assert that each one of us should be paid for what we do and share online. How would that work?A. We’ve all contributed to the fortunes of big Silicon Valley schemes, big finance schemes, and all manner of other schemes which are driven by computation over a network. But our contributions were deliberately forgotten. This is partly due to the ideology of copying without a trace that my friends and I mistakenly thought would lead to a fairer world, back in the day.The error we made was simple: Not all computers are created equal.What is clear is that networks could remember where the value actually came from, which is from a very broad range of people. I sketch a way that universal micropayments might solve the problem, though I am not attempting to present a utopian solution. Instead I hope to deprogram people from the “open” ideal to think about networks more broadly. I am certain that once the conversation escapes the bounds of what has become an orthodoxy, better ideas will come about.Q. Who Owns the Future seems like two books in one. Does it seem that way to you?A. If all I wanted was sympathy and popularity, I am sure that a critique by itself—without a proposal for a solution—would have been more effective.It’s true that the fixes put forward in Who Owns the Future are ambitious, but they are presented within an explicitly modest wrapping. I am hoping to make the world safer for diverse ideas about the future. Our times are terribly conformist. For instance, one is either “red” or “blue,” or is accepted by the “open culture” crowd or not. I seek to bust open such orthodoxies by showing that other ideas are possible. So I present an intentionally rough sketch of an alternate future that doesn’t match up with any of the present orthodoxies.A reality-based, compassionate world is one in which criticism is okay. I dish it out, but I also lay my tender neck out before you.Q. You’re a musician in addition to being a computer scientist. What insight has that given you?A. In the 1990s I was signed to a big label, but as a minor artist. I had to compete in an esoteric niche market, as an experimental classical/jazz high prestige sort of artist. That world was highly competitive and professional, and inspired an intense level of effort from me.I assumed that losing the moneyed side of the recording business would not make all that much of a difference, but I was wrong. I no longer bother to release music. The reason is that it now feels like a vanity market. Self-promotion has become the primary activity of many of my musician friends. Yuk.When the music is heard, it’s often in the context of automatically generated streams from some cloud service, so the listener doesn’t even know it’s you. Successful music tends to be quite conformist to some pre-existing category, because that way it fits better into the automatic streaming schemes. I miss competing in the intense NYC music scene. Who keeps you honest when the world is drowning in insincere flattery?So here I am writing books. Hello book critics!Review“Daringly original . . . Lanier’s sharp, accessible style and opinions make Who Owns the Future? terrifically inviting.” (Janet Maslin, The New York Times)“Lanier’s career as a computer scientist is entwined in the central economic story of our time, the rapid advance of computation and networking. . . . [Who Owns the Future?] not only makes a convincing diagnosis of a widespread problem, but also answers a need for moonshot thinking.” (The New Republic)"Lanier has a mind as boundless as the internet . . . [He is] the David Foster Wallace of tech." (London Evening Standard)“Lanier has a poet’s sensibility and his book reads like a hallucinogenic reverie, full of entertaining haiku-like observations and digressions.” (Financial Times)"Everyone complains about the Internet, but no one does anything about it . . . except for Jaron Lanier." (Neal Stephenson, bestselling author of Reamde and Cryptonomicon)"Who Owns the Future? explains what’s wrong with our digital economy, and tells us how to fix it. Listen up!” (George Dyson, bestselling author of Turing's Cathedral)"Who Owns the Future? is a deeply original and sometimes startling read. Lanier does not simply question the dominant narrative of our times, but picks it up by the neck and shakes it. A refreshing and important book that will make you see the world differently." (Tim Wu, author of The Master Switch)“This book is rare. It looks at technology with an insider’s knowledge, wisdom, and deep caring about human beings. It’s badly needed.” (W. Brian Arthur, economist and author of The Nature of Technology)"One of the triumphs of Lanier's intelligent and subtle book is its inspiring portrait of the kind of people that a democratic information economy would produce. His vision implies that if we are allowed to lead absorbing, properly remunerated lives, we will likewise outgrow our addiction to consumerism and technology." (The Guardian) Views: 11
The bigger the dreams, the bigger the drama. . .With major industry success and a year of college under her belt, Sunday Tolliver is ready to take her singer-songwriter talents to the next level. But new opportunities also mean totally unexpected drama. Her flirtationship with hot video star DeShawn is turning into much more—but the unfinished business between her and ex-boyfriend Sam won't go away. An explosive campus hazing scandal puts her friends up against a powerful sorority—and Sunday's skills on the line. And reluctantly helping her jealous cousin Dreya save her record deal is a major diva face-off that could end both their careers. Now Sunday will have to take mad risks and trust everything she's learned to stay true to her fab life—and herself."This series is poised to 'blow up'." —Kirkus"Plenty of reality show-type drama." —RT Book Reviews on Doing My Own Thing Views: 11
From the author of Shetland and VeraThe honeymoon was over . . . and Jim and his English bride, Sarah, had come home to Kinness to settle down. But first there was to be one huge celebration for the newlyweds, with the whole island present. And before the party was over, there would be a shockingly unexpected death. Somehow, in the dark of the night, Jim’s young sister, Mary, slipped off Ellie’s Head to the rocks below. A terrible end to a boisterously cheerful evening. But did Mary fall, or was she pushed? George Palmer-Jones, retired birdwatcher and amateur detective, suspected the latter, but proving it would be difficult: no one wanted to upset the balance of the island’s ancient relationships. Yet those with something to hide inevitably try to hide it, and George, helped by Sarah, began to piece together a tragic story he wished he had never heard. Kinness was a paradise lost.About the AuthorAnn Cleeves is the author behind ITV's VERA and BBC One's SHETLAND. She has written over twenty-five novels, and is the creator of detectives Vera Stanhope and Jimmy Perez -- characters loved both on screen and in print. Her books have now sold over 1 million copies worldwide. Ann worked as a probation officer, bird observatory cook and auxiliary coastguard before she started writing. She is a member of 'Murder Squad', working with other British northern writers to promote crime fiction. In 2006 Ann was awarded the Duncan Lawrie Dagger (CWA Gold Dagger) for Best Crime Novel, for Raven Black, the first book in her Shetland series. In 2012 she was inducted into the CWA Crime Thriller Awards Hall of Fame. Ann lives in North Tyneside. www.anncleeves.com Views: 11
Instant Father One minute, Caleb Mast is an oil-rig roughneck who answers to no one but himself. The next, he's the father of a special-needs child he never knew existed. What kind of home can a man like him - without faith or community - provide for an eight-year-old girl? For little Joy's sake, Caleb returns to the Amish community he left behind years ago. His daughter bonds with Amish schoolteacher Leah Belier, and Caleb feels hopeful for once. But Leah blames Caleb for dashing long-ago dreams and can't bear to trust him. With Christmas weeks away, one special girl just may bring two hearts - and an entire community - together. Brides of Amish Country: Finding true love in the land of the Plain People. Views: 11
Gay Fiction/Romance. 104913 words long. First published in 2012, 2012 Views: 11
All you need is time...
(A Jessika Fevrier chronoromance)
Time is of the essence. Time is life's most precious commodity. Time is this, time is that. Time is everywhere, a part of every single thing we do, and yet time is uncontrollable, unreachable, unattainable...
Or is it?
Misa lives in a world where people trade their lives away in exchange for prosperity, as a show of love and affection, or in order to grasp at a chance for a better future. Time is important, a means to an end, but what if the results are part of the problem?
What happens if you don't have any more time?
Love is of the essence. Love is precious. Love is this, love is that. Love is everywhere, a part of every single thing we do, and yet love is uncontrollable, unreachable, unattainable...
What happens if you don't have time for love?
(This scintillating chronoromance of love and ambition is ~5,200 words in length)
Views: 11
