The word gifted has never been applied to a kid like Donovan Curtis. It's usually more like Don't try this at home. So when the troublemaker pulls a major prank at his middle school, he thinks he's finally gone too far. But thanks to a mix-up by one of the administrators, instead of getting in trouble, Donovan is sent to the Academy of Scholastic Distinction (ASD), a special program for gifted and talented students.
It wasn't exactly what Donovan had intended, but there couldn't be a more perfect hideout for someone like him. That is, if he can manage to fool people whose IQs are above genius level. And that becomes harder and harder as the students and teachers of ASD grow to realize that Donovan may not be good at math or science (or just about anything). But after an ongoing experiment with a live human (sister), an unforgettably dramatic middle-school dance, and the most astonishing come-from-behind robot victory ever, Donovan shows that his gifts might be exactly what the ASD students never knew they needed. Views: 763
BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Elizabeth Berg's Once Upon a Time, There Was You.
In this superb novel by the beloved author of Talk Before Sleep, The Pull of the Moon, and Until the Real Thing Comes Along, a woman re-creates her life after divorce by opening up her house and her heart.
Samantha's husband has left her, and after a spree of overcharging at Tiffany's, she settles down to reconstruct a life for herself and her eleven-year-old son. Her eccentric mother tries to help by fixing her up with dates, but a more pressing problem is money. To meet her mortgage payments, Sam decides to take in boarders. The first is an older woman who offers sage advice and sorely needed comfort; the second, a maladjusted student, is not quite so helpful. A new friend, King, an untraditional man, suggests that Samantha get out, get going, get work. But her real work is this: In order to emerge from grief and the past, she has to learn how to make her own happiness. In order to really see people, she has to look within her heart. And in order to know who she is, she has to remember—and reclaim—the person she used to be, long before she became someone else in an effort to save her marriage.
Open House is a love story about what can blossom between a man and a woman, and within a woman herself. Views: 763
Serena Frome, the beautiful mathematician daughter of an Anglican bishop, has a brief affair with an older man during her final year at Cambridge, and finds herself being groomed for the Intelligence Service. The year is 1972: Britain, confronting economic disaster, is being torn apart by industrial unrest and Irish terrorism and faces its fifth state of emergency. The Cold War has entered a moribund phase but the fight goes on and MI5 hesitates at little
to influence hearts and minds.
Serena, a compulsive reader of novels, is sent by her new employers on a secret mission that brings her into the literary world of Tom Haley, a promising young writer. First, she loves his stories, then she begins to love the man. Can she maintain the fiction of her undercover life? And who is deceiving whom? To answer these
questions, Serena must abandon the first rule of espionage—trust no one.
Ian McEwan masterfully entwines espionage and desire in an unforgettable story of intrigue, betrayal and love. Views: 763
Colby's post-high school plans have long been that he and his best friend Bev would tour with her band, then spend a year in Europe. When Bev she announces that she will start college just after the tour, Colby struggles to understand why she changed her mind and what losing her means for his future. Views: 763
The early fiction of one of the nation’s most celebrated writers, Truman Capote, as he takes his first bold steps into the canon of American literature
Recently rediscovered in the archives of the New York Public Library, these short stories provide an unparalleled look at Truman Capote writing in his teens and early twenties, before he penned such classics as Other Voices, Other Rooms, Breakfast at Tiffany’s, and In Cold Blood. This collection of more than a dozen pieces showcases the young Capote developing the unique voice and sensibility that would make him one of the twentieth century’s most original writers.
Spare yet heartfelt, these stories summon our compassion and feeling at every turn. Capote was always drawn to outsiders—women, children, African Americans, the poor—because he felt like one himself from a very early age. Here we see Capote’s powers of empathy developing as he depicts his characters struggling at the margins of their known worlds. A boy experiences the violence of adulthood when he pursues an escaped convict into the woods. Petty jealousies lead to a life-altering event for a popular girl at Miss Burke’s Academy for Young Ladies. In a time of extraordinary loss, a woman fights to save the life of a child who has her lover’s eyes.
In these stories we see early signs of Capote’s genius for creating unforgettable characters built of complexity and yearning. Young women experience the joys and pains of new love. Urbane sophisticates are worn down by cynicism. Children and adults alike seek understanding in a treacherous world. There are tales of crime and violence; of racism and injustice; of poverty and despair. And there are tales of generosity and tenderness; compassion and connection; wit and wonder. Above all there is the developing voice of a writer born in the Deep South who will use and eventually break from that tradition to become a literary figure like no other.
With a foreword by the celebrated New Yorker critic Hilton Als, this volume of early stories is essential for understanding how a boy from Monroeville, Alabama, became a legend in American literature.
Praise for The Early Stories of Truman Capote
*“Succeeds at conveying the writer’s youthful rawness . . . These stories capture a moment when Capote was hungry to capture the rural South, the big city, and the subtle emotions that so many around him were determined to keep unspoken.”—USA Today*
“A window on the young writer’s emerging voice and creativity . . . Capote’s ability to conjure a time, place and mood with just a few sentences is remarkable.”—Associated Press
“[Capote’s early] stories are special. Not just because they give a glimpse of an author finding his voice; or for the traces of his masterpieces. But also because they stand in their own right as lovely vignettes of the lives of the lonely, broken and troubled. . . . If you consider they were written when he was a child—aged between eleven and nineteen—then they become breathtaking in their precocity, craftsmanship, simplicity and the tenderness he became renowned for.”—The Independent (U.K.)
“These ten-plus stories were written when Capote was a teenager and young man and will shed light on his subsequent work while remaining sharply observed pleasures in their own right.”*—Library Journal
“[A] gathering of the great American prose stylist’s earliest pieces, published for the first time . . . Students of both Capote and the short story will find this instructive and entertaining.”—*Kirkus Reviews*
From the Hardcover edition. Views: 762
A trip to grandmother's house that rapidly becomes a descent into an underworld community of vampires and a frantic rush to save Heaven and Earth. Lumi Laura is a Romanian author who now lives in Edinburgh, Scotland. You can learn everything about her on her blog: LumiLaura.com.Teenager Alexandra Eidyn never suspected that her annual trip to Grandmother's house to spend the summer would this time destroy her plans to attend Oxford University in the fall and instead propel her into the World of Vampires and eventually to the gates of Heaven and Hell. On the way, she'd fall in love — something she'd come to think wasn't even possible for her — with two people, become a fugitive from justice, and be a casualty of the Church to which she'd turned for help. She withdraws into a vampire society she never knew existed but that has been waiting for her the last ninety years, and learns that the Divine World has prophesied of her coming for millennia. All this following her grandmother's revelation of a family connection to royalty that has been kept secret for generations. Views: 762
A provocative literary thriller that playfully pays tribute to classic tales of mystery and adventure
Lucas Corso is a book detective, a middle-aged mercenary hired to hunt down rare editions for wealthy and unscrupulous clients. When a well-known bibliophile is found dead, leaving behind part of the original manuscript of Alexandre Dumas's The Three Musketeers, Corso is brought in to authenticate the fragment. He is soon drawn into a swirling plot involving devil worship, occult practices, and swashbuckling derring-do among a cast of characters bearing a suspicious resemblance to those of Dumas's masterpiece. Aided by a mysterious beauty named for a Conan Doyle heroine, Corso travels from Madrid to Toledo to Paris on the killer's trail in this twisty intellectual romp through the book world. Views: 762
In 1897, Alfred Hamilton was the country's number one respected hangman. All that changed the morning he came to hang Conrad Edgar Stubbs.In 1897, Alfred Hamilton was the country's number one respected executioner. When the man he was due to hang asked him to deliver his final letter to his sister, little did the hangman know of the fate that awaited him. Views: 762
From the bestselling author of Midwives and The Flight Attendant, a comic and life affirming novel of the clash between progress and tradition, science and magic: “*one of the most elegantly philosophical, urgent—yet somehow timeless—novels of these perilous times” (Howard Norman, National Book Award finalist for The Bird Artist*).
Vermont is drying up. The normally lush, green countryside is in the grip of the worst drought in years: stunted cornstalks rasp in the hot July breeze, parched vegetable gardens wither and die, the Chittenden River shrinks to a trickle, and the drilling trucks are booked solid as one by one the wells give out. Patience Avery, known nationwide as a gifted "water witch", is having a busy summer, too. Using the tools of the dowser's trade —divining sticks, metal rods, bobbers, and pendulums—she can locate, among other things, aquifers deep within the earth. In the midst of this crisis, Scottie Winston lobbies for permits to expand Powder Peak, a local ski area that's his law firm's principal client. As part of the expansion, the resort seeks to draw water for snowmaking from the beleaguered Chittenden, despite opposition from environmentalists who fear that the already weakened river will be damaged beyond repair. Views: 762
"Thomas Keneally recounts history with the uncanny skill of a great novelist whose only interest is to lay bare the human heart in all its hope and pain. As he was able to do in Schindler's List, he shows us in The Great Shame a people despised and rejected to the point of death, who in the face of all their sorrows manage to keep their souls. This story of oppression, famine, and emigration--a principal chapter in the story of man's inhumanity to man--becomes in Keneally's hands an act of resurrection; Irishmen and Irishwomen of a century and a half ago live once more within the pages of this book."
--Thomas Cahill, author of How the Irish Saved Civilization
In the nineteenth century, Ireland lost half of its population to famine, emigration to the United States and Canada, and the forced transportation of convicts to Australia. The forebears of Thomas Keneally, author of Schindler's List, were victims of that tragedy, and in The Great Shame Keneally has written an astonishing, monumental work that tells the full story of the Irish diaspora with the narrative grip and flair of a great novel. Based on unique research among little-known sources, this masterly book surveys eighty years of Irish history through the eyes of political prisoners--including Keneally's ancestors--who left Ireland in chains and eventually found glory, in one form or another, in Australia and America.
We meet William Smith O'Brien, leader of an uprising at the height of the Irish Famine, who rose from solitary confinement in Australia to become the Mandela of his age; Thomas Francis Meagher, whose escape from Australian captivity led to a glittering American career as an orator, a Union general, and governor of Montana; John Mitchel, who became a Confederate newspaper reporter, gave two of his sons to the Southern cause, was imprisoned with Jefferson Davis--and returned to Ireland to become mayor of Tipperary; and John Boyle O'Reilly, who fled a life sentence in Australia to become one of nineteenth-century America's leading literary lights.
Through the lives of many such men and women--famous and obscure, some heroes and some fools (most a little of both), all of them stubborn, acutely sensitive, and devastatingly charming--we become immersed in the Irish experience and its astonishing history. From Ireland to Canada and the United States to the bush towns of Australia, we are plunged into stories of tragedy, survival, and triumph. All are vividly portrayed in Keneally's spellbinding prose, as he reveals the enormous influence the exiled Irish have had on the English-speaking world.
"A terrible and personal saga, history delivered with a scholar's density of detail but with the individualizing power of a multi-talented novelist."
--William Kennedy Views: 762
De oceaanstormer Mauretania wordt belaagd door gangsters die proberen twee Europese wetenschapers te kidnappen. Isaac Bell weet de ontvoering te voorkomen, maar heeft de tweede aanval niet voorzien. In de strijdt wordt een van de wetenschappers gedood.
Welke kennis hebben de wetenschappers dat zij zo belangrijk zijn voor deze criminelen? Het is aan Isaac Bell om de misdadigers te ontmaskeren en hun plannen te dwarsbomen. Als hij nog op tijd is. Views: 762
One pregnant woman.
One deranged man.
Eleven hours of hell.
Abducted from a shopping mall in Dallas, Didi Wood, in her ninth month of pregnancy, is taken on the most dangerous, horrifying ride of her life, as a madman drives her across Texas. While her husband and the FBI try furiously to track them down, they can only hope to find Didi -- and her unborn child -- alive. Views: 762
This “mesmerizing” novel about a crime at an elite music school “*calls to mind a David Lynch film” (TheNew York Times).
Shy piano teacher Maggie Blackburn has selflessly devoted her life and career to her students at the Forest Park Conservatory of Music in an affluent Connecticut suburb. Then a rape shakes the school’s refined grounds. The violated young student, Brendan Bauer, is a timid ex-seminarian. The perpetrator, Rolfe Christensen, is the newly appointed and celebrated composer-in-residence who has dazzled the faculty in ways Maggie could never have dreamed of. But when the conservatory’s conspiracy to conceal the crime results in Christensen’s murder, Bauer is suspected—and Maggie vows to find the real killer.
What Maggie soon discovers is that Christensen’s reputation—as genius, manipulator, and sexual predator—had preceded him, giving many people a reason to want him dead. But when the murder of another colleague casts additional doubt on Bauer’s innocence, Maggie’s labyrinthine hunt for a killer turns into more than an investigation. Now it’s a liberating obsession with secrets—hers included—as dark and twisted as the crimes themselves.
One of today’s most prolific and acclaimed literary talents, Joyce Carol Oates is a National Book Award winner, a four-time Pulitzer Prize finalist, and a #1 New York Times*–bestselling author. As Elmore Leonard said, with her psychological suspense novels written under the name Rosamond Smith, “[she] could become the world’s Number One mystery writer easily.”
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An unforgettable addition to his widely acclaimed body of work, The Late Child is Larry McMurtry's tender, funny, and poignant sequel to The Desert Rose. McMurtry delivers another rich cast of characters -- and a heartfelt, bittersweet story that unfolds on the open road, in one woman's search for strength, understanding, and hope.
Harmony is the optimistic, resilient Las Vegas ex-showgirl who returns home one day to the news that her beloved daughter has died, in New York, of AIDS. She manages to stay afloat, buoyed by her precocious five-year-old son, Eddie, and her two outspoken sisters as they set forth on a journey across the country, seeking answers about her daughter's death. From Nevada to New York to Oklahoma, the eccentrics Harmony and her entourage meet nudge them closer to an inner peace with life, and a way to find hope in the future. Alive with inventive storytelling and honest emotion, The Late Child is a warm, enriching experience that celebrates the unique relationship between mother and child. Views: 761
After working a graveyard shift at Vitura Pharmaceuticals, Tomas' father disappears without a trace. Eager for answers, Tomas confronts Supervisor Bertrand, division head of the secretive corporation. Tomas gets answers all right; and it's those answers that put him on a course with destiny, international intrigue and...ZOMBIES. Where's his father? What are Vitura's plans?Are Zombies real?After working a graveyard shift at Vitura Pharmaceuticals, Tomas' father disappears without a trace. Eager for answers, Tomas confronts Supervisor Bertrand, division head of the secretive corporation. Tomas gets answers all right; and it's those answers that put him on a course with destiny, international intrigue and...ZOMBIES.What happened to his father?What are Vitura's plans?Are Zombies real?(Novella Length: 20,000 words/80 pages + 15 page bonus of Zombie Fever 2 : Outbreak)Find out these answers and more in this first installment of The Zombie Fever Series. Then hang on for hair-raising international zombie adventure:Zombie Fever 2: Outbreak (Available Now)It's a dream come true when Abigail and her best friend are cast in a new reality show. But it's a dream that turns into a nightmare, when Sebastian, the show's producer, decides to use the most recent zombie outbreak as the backdrop for the production. Mayhem and horror ensue as the show's cast is sent further and further into the quarantine zone. Meanwhile, Vitura is behind the outbreak and Tomas is doing his best to put a stop to their diabolical plans. But is he to late to save Abigail from the viral menace?Who will become infected with zombie fever? Who gets eaten by the zombie horde? And most importantly, who wins the million-dollar prize?Zombie Fever 3: Evolution (Available Now)The virus has spread to Singapore and is out of control, creating zombies that are faster, smarter and hungrier than ever!After helping Abigail and her teammates escape the quarantine zone, Tomas realizes that sending them into Singapore has inadvertently caused the worst zombie outbreak to date. To make matters worse, Tomas discovers that Abigail and her best friend are the only two people in the world inoculated with the cure. Tomas makes it his mission to rescue her, regardless of the millions of flesh-eating psychopaths rioting in the streets.However, Vitura is on to him. Supervisor Bertrand sends Jayden, a ruthless mercenary, to track down Tomas and Abigail and capture them...dead or alive. Praise for Zombie Fever 1: Origins5 out of 5 stars-"A chilling beginning for a zombie series." -Derrik Spence, Horror & Fear Review "I could swear someone was creeping outside my window after I read this!" 5 stars. -UbiquitousEarlOther 5 out of 5 star reviews:"5 awesome Stars! I'd already read Zombie Fever 2: Outbreak and wish I got a hold of this prequel first. It really prepares you for the zombie exploitation to come." -Jules Views: 761
