Read Fast, Cry Hard... Vignettes (with a Vengeance)


Book Description

From the author of "For the Feint of Art: 1997 to 2014" comes a small collection of previously unreleased short stories. Misleadingly named, each story poignantly explores themes of love/friendship, loss, and acceptance in a brief anthology meant to bring one or more tears to the reader's eyes.




Blindsight


Book Description

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.




City of Night


Book Description

Bold and inventive in style, City of Night is the groundbreaking 1960s novel about male prostitution. Rechy is unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling 'youngman' and his search for self-knowledge among the other denizens of his neon-lit world. As the narrator moves from Texas to Times Square and then on to the French Quarter of New Orleans, Rechy delivers a portrait of the edges of America that has lost none of its power. On his travels, the nameless narrator meets a collection of unforgettable characters, from vice cops to guilt-ridden married men eaten up by desire, to Lance O'Hara, once Hollywood's biggest star. Rechy describes this world with candour and understanding in a prose that is highly personal and vividly descriptive.




Paralian


Book Description

Paralian has won best debut book at the 2016 Rainbow Awards. It has also been named as “Recommended Read” by several book review platforms including Bookmuse, Bookbag, Reader’s Favorite, etc.




Sophie's World


Book Description

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.




His Father's Son


Book Description

Lord Richard--once known as Lancelot and now a vampire--is called on to rescue a woman whom he had loved and lost as he struggles to save fragile human lives in the face of the Dark Fates that seek to steal his very soul.




The Things They Carried


Book Description

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.




The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding


Book Description

A haunting, magical novel about joy, grief, courage and transformation from the international bestselling author of The Lost Flowers of Alice Hart. ‘On the afternoon that Esther Wilding drove homeward along the coast, a year after her sister had walked into the sea and disappeared, the light was painfully golden.’ The last time Esther Wilding’s beloved older sister Aura was seen, she was walking along the shore towards the sea. In the wake of Aura’s disappearance, Esther’s family struggles to live with their loss. To seek the truth about her sister’s death, Esther reluctantly travels from Lutruwita/Tasmania, to Copenhagen, and then to the Faroe Islands, following the trail of the stories Aura left behind: seven fairy tales about selkies, swans and women, alongside cryptic verses Aura wrote and had secretly tattooed on her body. The Seven Skins of Esther Wilding is a sweeping, deeply beautiful and profoundly moving novel about the far reaches of sisterly love, the power of wearing your heart on your skin and the ways life can transform when we find the courage to feel the fullness of both grief and joy.




Dirtdobber Blues


Book Description

Immensely talented and devastatingly self-destructive, singer/songwriter Charles "Butch" Hornsby lived hard and fast. One of the most versatile artists ever to emerge from South Louisiana, Hornsby touched and frustrated his friends in equal measure. Dirtdobber Blues, a fictionalized account of Hornsby's life written by his close friend Cyril Vetter, provides the gritty but engrossing story of this man, his demons, and his art. Much like Hornsby's life, Dirtdobber Blues consists of short, fast-paced segments. These vignettes juxtapose musical accomplishments and personal misadventures to paint the portrait of a truly complex individual. His all-too-familiar vices -- sex, alcohol, and rock and roll -- and his capricious temperament affected his ability to find success in the music business. Vetter celebrates all that is Hornsby including his off-beat humor, frustrating narcissism, and profound creativity. In addition to Vetter's lively and captivating account of Butch's life, the book includes Hornsby's sheet music and a CD with fourteen of his songs. Photos of Butch and images of his found-object artwork by photographer Philip Gould are also included. Through the music, images, and text, Hornsby moves from the strawberry fields of Amite, Louisiana, to the bars of Baton Rouge and into the unforgiving arena of the recording industry. Along the way, Vetter provides glimpses into the musician's inspiration -- a tumultuous young love, a stint in Hollywood, his family's return to Louisiana -- and pieces together the arc of Hornsby's life, littered with poor decisions, crowned by artistic success, and concluding with the redemptive power of love.




First Jobs


Book Description

In First Jobs, reporter Merritt Watts collects real stories of early forays into the workforce from a range of eras and industries, and a diversity of backgrounds. For some, a first job is a warm welcome to the working world. For others, it's a rude awakening, but as these stories show, it's an influential, entertaining experience that should not be underestimated. A future mayor shining shoes, an atheist shilling Bibles, a housewife heading to work during World War II, a now-famous designer getting fired-we all got our start somewhere. A first job may not have the romance of the first kiss or the excitement of a first car, but more than anything else, it offers a taste of true independence and a preview of what the world has in store for us. This book transforms what we might think of as a single, unassuming line at the bottom of a résumé into a collection of absorbing tales and hard-earned wisdom to which we can all, for better or worse, relate.