A sparkling, highly entertaining romantic comedy about beloved country girl group the Darling Songbirds, from the bestselling author of Eliza's Gift. Love is a country song waiting to happen . . . Adele, Molly and Lana are the Darling Songbirds, the country-singing sisters who gained fame in their teens for their smart lyrics and sweet harmonies. But when their father died suddenly on the eve of their big tour, the group acrimoniously broke up. Now, eleven years on, Adele arrives back in Darling Bay, the sleepy gold-rush town founded by her great-grandfather. For Uncle Hugh has bequeathed to the sisters his hotel and bar the Golden Spike. Except this is not the welcoming saloon Adele remembers from her childhood. The building is a ruin, the business is broke and customers are scarce. Add into the mix Nate Houston - the handsome, guitar-playing barman who had always believed he would be the next owner - and Adele has one potent cocktail on her hands. She... Views: 20
An NYRB Classics Original The hero of The Invisibility Cloak lives in contemporary Beijing—where everyone is doing their best to hustle up the ladder of success while shouldering an ever-growing burden of consumer goods—and he's a loser. Well into his forties, he's divorced (and still doting on his ex), childless, and living with his sister (her husband wants him out) in an apartment at the edge of town with a crack in the wall the wind from the north blows through while he gets by, just, by making customized old-fashioned amplifiers for the occasional rich audio-obsessive. He has contempt for his clients and contempt for himself. The only things he really likes are Beethoven and vintage speakers. Then an old friend tips him off about a special job—a little risky but just don't ask too many questions—and can it really be that this hopeless loser wins?This provocative and seriously funny exercise in the social fantastic by the brilliantly... Views: 20
Carter discovers a creepy maze at the fair and travels farther and farther back in time. How will he ever get back to the present? The fair is dull, dull, dull, and nothing interesting will ever happen to Carter again … until Carter discovers the curious maze. Nothing has ever happened here in the history of the world, he thinks. But the maze has some strange secrets, and the spot Carter stands upon has seen some very exciting events over the centuries.Once Carter enters the maze, odd people begin to appear. First he meets Mr. Green, the mysterious, creepy maze-keeper, then a leaf-covered girl, a lost little boy in old-fashioned clothes, a wounded British soldier, and finally an eighteenth-century native boy who seems very authentic, indeed.When Carter eventually escapes the curious maze, the fair is all wrong. There are too many horses, ladies in bonnets, and what’s a freak show doing there? Carter begins his travels through time,... Views: 20
From Tim Wu, author of the award-winning The Master Switch and who coined the phrase "net neutrality"—a revelatory look at the rise of "attention harvesting," and its transformative effect on our society and our selves. Attention merchant: an industrial-scale harvester of human attention. A firm whose business model is the mass capture of attention for resale to advertisers.In nearly every moment of our waking lives, we face a barrage of advertising enticements, branding efforts, sponsored social media, commercials and other efforts to harvest our attention. Over the last century, few times or spaces have remained uncultivated by the "attention merchants," contributing to the distracted, unfocused tenor of our times. Tim Wu argues that this is not simply the byproduct of recent inventions but the end result of more than a century's growth and expansion in the industries that feed on human attention. From the pre-Madison Avenue birth of... Views: 20
From the bloody banks of the Rio Grande to the edge of the American frontier comes this truly epic Western from the author of the acclaimed Here by the Bloods. A Twelve Man Massacre Along the Rio Grande, a dozen bodies fester in the sun. Harlan Two-Trees discovers the massacre, but wants nothing to do with it. Mistrusted by the whites who run Caliche Bend and estranged from the Navajo, Harlan heads west to California—to freedom. He will find the Rio Grande's bloody baptism does not wash off so easily. Death Rides Alongside From his berth aboard the gleaming Santa Fe railway, Harlan brims with the promise of a new life in California. But when a daring robbery maroons him in the desert, he is back in the world he knows—where death is king, and justice comes from the smoking barrel of a gun. Pursued by a murderous, insane, lone lawman who dogs his every move, Harlan has a new goal—to stagger out of the desert alive . . . Views: 20
