It's Mabon and Llewellyn's friends—Marigold and Rain—are running a harvest festival on their farm. Llewellyn and Raven open a vendor's booth to join in the fun. But Raven soon discovers the farm has deadly past. When she encounters the spirit of a teenaged girl who was thought to have been a runaway, she quickly discovers the girl was killed. As she attempts to prove the girl was the victim of a deadly ritual gone awry, a series of terrifying paranormal events begins to occur. Raven soon realizes that the spirit of the killer is still lurking on the land, and a race is on. Raven must prove that the girl was murdered before the killer's ghost strikes again, because he's willing to sacrifice anyone and anything who threatens to reveal the secrets of his past. Series Reading Order:1. The Silver Stag2. Oak & Thorns3. Iron Bones4. A Shadow of Crows5. The Hallowed Hunt6. The Silver Mist7. Witching Hour8.... Views: 410
Accelerating Returns is about science, progress, and the war for public opinion in the coming century. Rogue extremists known as Blockers perform acts of terror to create spectacles of worst-case-scenario science to spur the masses to action. A young, inspiring CEO takes her biotech firm from zero to empire, only to be undermined by Blockers seeking to show the dark side of technology.Rule #7 of Blocker’s Manifesto: A Blocker does not operate underground. He participates in a group. He is mainstream. All things anathema to him, he must embrace and make central to his life.Inspired by Ray Kurzweil’s Law of Accelerating Returns, Bill Joy’s Why the Future Doesn’t Need Us, and Hugo de Garis’ The Coming Artilect War. The Law of Accelerating Returns states that technology in the coming century will be so “rapid and profound it represents a rupture in the fabric of human history.” On one side will stand those who welcome radical advancement in technology, versus those on the other side who attempt to subvert and destroy it. Accelerating Returns is a novel about science, progress, and the war for public opinion. Rogue extremists known as Blockers perform acts of terror to create spectacles of worst-case-scenario science to spur the masses to action. A young, inspiring CEO takes her biotech firm from zero to empire, only to be undermined by a ruthless executive with his own anti-science agenda. A disgruntled researcher sees his work usurped by a charismatic scientist and is recruited by the neo-Luddites. Blockers are not street thugs throwing rocks. They are scientists and executives in research labs and board rooms whose single purpose is to deter the inevitable integration of man and machine. Views: 410
'Perhaps that moment had been exceptional, but still, I felt alive. That pressure on my chest means being alive.' Forty-nine, with a kind face, no serious ailments (apart from varicose veins on his ankles), a good salary and three moody children, widowed accountant Martín Santomé is about to retire. He assumes he'll take up gardening, or the guitar, or whatever retired people generally do. What he least expects is to fall passionately in love with his shy young employee Laura Avellaneda. As they embark upon an affair, happy and irresponsible, Martín begins to feel the weight of his quiet existence lift - until, out of nowhere, their joy is cut short. The intimate, heartbreaking diary of an ordinary man who is reborn when he falls in love one final time, this beloved Latin American novel has been translated into twenty languages and sold millions of copies worldwide, and is now published in Penguin Classics for the first time. Views: 410
A postapocalyptic thriller from #1 bestselling author Glenn Beck.
“I was just a baby when we were relocated and I don’t remember much. Everybody has that black hole at the beginning of their life. That time you can’t remember. Your first step. Your first taste of table food. My real memories begin in our assigned living area in Compound 14.”
Just a generation ago, this place was called America. Now, after the worldwide implementation of a UN-led program called Agenda 21, it’s simply known as “the Republic.” There is no president. No Congress. No Supreme Court. No freedom.
There are only the Authorities.
Citizens have two primary goals in the new Republic: to create clean energy and to create new human life. Those who cannot do either are of no use to society. This bleak and barren existence is all that eighteen-year-old Emmeline has ever known. She dutifully walks her energy board daily and accepts all male pairings assigned to her by the Authorities. Like most citizens, she keeps her head down and her eyes closed.
Until the day they come for her mother.
“You save what you think you’re going to lose.”
Woken up to the harsh reality of her life and her family’s future inside the Republic, Emmeline begins to search for the truth. Why are all citizens confined to ubiquitous concrete living spaces? Why are Compounds guarded by Gatekeepers who track all movements? Why are food, water and energy rationed so strictly? And, most important, why are babies taken from their mothers at birth? As Emmeline begins to understand the true objectives of Agenda 21 she realizes that she is up against far more than she ever thought. With the Authorities closing in, and nowhere to run, Emmeline embarks on an audacious plan to save her family and expose the Republic—but is she already too late? Views: 409
“A novelist who writes in a universal language.” —The New York TimesFrom the #1 best-selling author of The Alchemist comes an inspiring story about a young man seeking wisdom from an elder, and the practical lessons imparted along the way. In The Archer we meet Tetsuya, a man once famous for his prodigious gift with a bow and arrow but who has since retired from public life, and the boy who comes searching for him. The boy has many questions, and in answering them Tetsuya illustrates the way of the bow and the tenets of a meaningful life. Paulo Coelho's story suggests that living without a connection between action and soul cannot fulfill, that a life constricted by fear of rejection or failure is not a life worth living. Instead one must take risks, build courage, and embrace the unexpected journey fate has to offer. With the wisdom, generosity, simplicity, and grace that have made him an... Views: 407
A compelling Boyer Lecture from Australian literary sensation Geraldine Brooks. For theBoyer Lecture 2011, best-selling author and journalist Geraldine Brooks tackles the topic of the Idea of Home. Drawing on her personal experience from being an adolescent pen pal to being a foreign correspondent in some of the world's most dangerous countries to being a writer of several award winning books including the Pulitzer Prize winner, March, Brooks reflects on what it means to be both a global citizen and a novelist at home in an increasingly fractured world. the individual lectures are: Our Only Home, A Home on Bland Street, A Writer at Home and At Home in the World Views: 406
From the beginning of the first essay: RUSSIAN NATIONAL CHARACTER AS SHOWN IN RUSSIAN FICTION The Japanese war pricked one of the biggest bubbles in history, and left Russia in a profoundly humiliating situation. Her navy was practically destroyed, her armies soundly beaten, her offensive power temporarily reduced to zero, her treasury exhausted, her pride laid in the dust. If the greatness of a nation consisted in the number and size of its battleships, in the capacity of its fighting men, or in its financial prosperity, Russia would be an object of pity. But in America it is wholesome to remember that the real greatness of a nation consists in none of these things, but rather in its intellectual splendour, in the number and importance of the ideas it gives to the world, in its contributions to literature and art, and to all things that count in humanity\'s intellectual advance. When we Americans swell with pride over our industrial prosperity, we might profitably reflect for a moment on the comparative value of America\'s and Russia\'s contributions to literature and music. At the start, we notice a rather curious fact, which sharply differentiates Russian literature from the literature of England, France, Spain, Italy, and even from that of Germany. Russia is old; her literature is new. Russian history goes back to the ninth century; Russian literature, so far as it interests the world, begins in the nineteenth. Russian literature and American literature are twins. But there is this strong contrast, caused partly by the difference in the age of the two nations. In the early years of the nineteenth century, American literature sounds like a child learning to talk, and then aping its elders; Russian literature is the voice of a giant, waking from a long sleep, and becoming articulate. It is as though the world had watched this giant\'s deep slumber for a long time, wondering what he would say when he awakened. And what he has said has been well worth the thousand years of waiting. To an educated native Slav, or to a professor of the Russian language, twenty or thirty Russian authors would no doubt seem important; but the general foreign reading public is quite properly mainly interested in only five standard writers, although contemporary novelists like Gorki, Artsybashev, Andreev, and others are at this moment deservedly attracting wide attention. The great five, whose place in the world\'s literature seems absolutely secure, are Pushkin, Gogol, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, and Tolstoy. The man who killed Pushkin in a duel survived till 1895, and Tolstoy died in 1910. These figures show in how short a time Russian literature has had its origin, development, and full fruition.… Views: 406
“One of our most exquisite storytellers” (Esquire) gives us his first collection in over a decade: ten potent new stories that, along with twenty-one classics, display his mastery over a quarter century.
Tobias Wolff’s first two books, In the Garden of the North American Martyrs and Back in the World, were a powerful demonstration of how the short story can “provoke our amazed appreciation,” as The New York Times Book Review wrote then. In the years since, he’s written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School.
Now he returns with fresh revelations—about biding one’s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one’s mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy who’s picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.” Views: 405
On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley’s most outlandish characters–from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by “getting in touch” with his “subconscious,” to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive History of Crome. Denis’s stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he endures regarding his plan to write a novel about love and art. Aldous Huxley’s first novel, Crome Yellow, was published in 1921, and, as a comedy of manners and ideas, its relatively realistic setting and format may come as a surprise to fans of his later works such as Point Counter Point and Brave New World. Some who know only Brave New World may not know that as a 16-year-old planning to enter medicine, Aldous Huxley was stricken by a serious eye disease which left him temporarily blind, and which derailed what certainly would have been a prominent career as a physician or scientist. Crome Yellow has often been called “witty,” as well as “talky,” and it certainly owes as much to Vanity Fair as it may, surprisingly to some, owe to Tristram Shandy, although one might think that characters such as Mr. Barbecue-Smith and his remarkable writing theories could have some literary antecedents in Lawrence Sterne. Lambasting the post-Victorian standards of morality, Crome Yellow is a witty masterpiece that, in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s words, “is too irnonic to be called satire and too scornful to be called irony.”Aldous Huxley was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family. He spent the later part of his life in the United States, living in Los Angeles from 1937 until his death in 1963. Best known for his novels and wide-ranging output of essays, he also published short stories, poetry, travel writing, and film stories and scripts. Huxley was a humanist and pacifist, but was also latterly interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. He was also well known for advocating and taking psychedelics. By the end of his life Huxley was considered, in some academic circles, a leader of modern thought and an intellectual of the highest rank. Views: 405
Harry Blake had everything going his way. He retired from a successful business career. He wrote two novels and won the most prestigious literary award in the country, not to mention a prize of $125,000 in gold coins. Hollywood had decided to make a mini-series based on his books. He had a beautiful wife and a big, loving family. They lived in a lovely home on a lake in rural South Carolina. It seemed like a perfect life. But one night changed everything. Harry's life turned upside down. Can he start over at this point in his life? Can he expect a new life after 70? This is a story about one man who refused to surrender. Views: 405
A young rider gets to know a new pony, adjusts to a new sibling, and learns a lot about secrets in this charming follow-up to Pulitzer Prize winner Jane Smiley's Riding Lessons.Ellen can't stop thinking about the racehorse Ned—and the secret she shares with him. There seem to be a lot of secrets in Ellen's life these days. Secrets between friends. Secrets within families. Secrets that are all her own. And secrets her parents are keeping from her that could change everything about her life.One thing that's not a secret is how much Ellen wants to jump—to feel herself on a horse as it soars through the air, smooth and fast. The horse she's riding these days is Hot Potato—a pony she can trust, a pony she can practice jumping with. But he can't possibly be as interesting as Ned, can he? And will her parents' secret take her away from the stable forever? Views: 404
The Castle Keeper vignettes provide a glimpse into the time between Shadows in the Stone and Scattered Stones. You’ll have already met many of the characters, but some you will meet in Scattered Stones.These vignettes are not complete stories, only 300 words of a moment. Volume 01 contains the first twelve in a series of vignettes to be written.Almost five years has passed since Isla of Maura was kidnapped and Bronwyn Darrow left Maskil in search of her. In many ways, not much has happened; the inhabitants of the Land of Ath-o’Lea have continued their daily routine. But if you look deeper into the individual lives you’ll see much has changed in little ways.The Castle Keeper vignettes provide a glimpse into the time between Shadows in the Stone and Scattered Stones. You’ll have already met many of the characters, but some you will meet in Scattered Stones.These vignettes are not complete stories, only 300 words of a moment. Volume 01 contains the first twelve in a series of vignettes to be written. Views: 404
When Ellie and six of her friends return home from a camping trip deep in the bush, they find things hideously wrong — their families gone, houses empty and abandoned, pets and stock dead. Gradually they begin to comprehend that their country has been invaded and everyone in the town has been taken prisoner. As the horrible reality of the situation becomes evident they have to make a life-and-death decision: to run back into the bush and hide, to give themselves up to be with their families, or to stay and try to fight. This reveting, tautly-drawn novel seems at times to be only a step away from today's headlines. Views: 403
Moonshadow Bay...where magic lurks in the moonlight, and danger hides in the shadows. As January faces the Aseer to find out what her magical strengths are, she also delves into her family history, where she discovers dark secrets about her great-grandmother Colleen and a long lost child. But when she and Ari take on a private case, they find themselves in over their heads. They must ask Conjure Ink for help in solving a riddle where a mother insists that her child isn't really her child. January's investigation leads everyone down the rabbit hole of magical intrigue and into the world of the Woodlings, where January finds her worldview of what actually is real changing, even as it puts her life in danger. Reading Order of Series:1. Starlight Web2. Midnight Web3. Conjure Web4. Harvest Web (forthcoming) Views: 403
