Daughter of Smoke & Bone


Book Description

The first book in the New York Times bestselling epic fantasy trilogy by award-winning author Laini Taylor Around the world, black handprints are appearing on doorways, scorched there by winged strangers who have crept through a slit in the sky. In a dark and dusty shop, a devil's supply of human teeth grown dangerously low. And in the tangled lanes of Prague, a young art student is about to be caught up in a brutal otherworldly war. Meet Karou. She fills her sketchbooks with monsters that may or may not be real; she's prone to disappearing on mysterious "errands"; she speaks many languages--not all of them human; and her bright blue hair actually grows out of her head that color. Who is she? That is the question that haunts her, and she's about to find out. When one of the strangers--beautiful, haunted Akiva--fixes his fire-colored eyes on her in an alley in Marrakesh, the result is blood and starlight, secrets unveiled, and a star-crossed love whose roots drink deep of a violent past. But will Karou live to regret learning the truth about herself?




Holy Envy


Book Description

The renowned Christian preacher and New York Times bestselling author of An Altar in the World recounts her moving discoveries of finding the sacred in unexpected places while teaching world religions to undergraduates in Baptist-saturated rural Georgia, revealing how God delights in confounding our expectations. Christians are taught that God is everywhere--a tenet that is central to Barbara Brown Taylor's life and faith. In Holy Envy, she continues her spiritual journey, contemplating the myriad ways she encountered God while exploring other faiths with her students in the classroom, and on field trips to diverse places of worship. Both she and her students ponder how the knowledge and insights they have gained raise important questions about belief, and explore how different practices relate to their own faith. Inspired by this intellectual and spiritual quest, Barbara turns once again to the Bible for guidance, to see what secrets lay buried there. Throughout Holy Envy, Barbara weaves together stories from her classroom with reflections on how her own spiritual journey has been challenged and renewed by connecting with people of other traditions--and by meeting God in them. At the heart of her odyssey is her trust that it is God who pushes her beyond her comfortable boundaries and calls us to "disown" our privatised versions of the divine--a change that ultimately deepens her relationship with both the world and with God, and ours.




You're Making Me Hate You


Book Description

New York Times bestselling leadsinger of Slipknot and Stone Sour's hilarious trawl through the endless backwaters of human stupidity Corey Taylor has had it. Had it with the vagaries of human behavior and life in this postmodern digital blanked-out waiting room that passes for a world. Reality TV, awful music, terrible drivers, megamalls, airports, family reunions, bad fashion choices, other people's monstrous children, and badly-behaved "adult" human beings are warping life in the twenty-first century into an often-unbearable endurance test of one's patience, fortitude, and faith. You're Making Me Hate You is a blisteringly funny diatribe that skewers the worst aspects of human behavior with a knowing eye for every excruciating detail, told in the vivid way that only Corey Taylor can. Like his previous bestselling forays, You're Making Me Hate You is an unflinching glimpse into the mind of Corey Taylor, who spares no one from his seething gaze. Make no mistake: this is not the Corey Taylor you run into at meet-and-greets or in line at the coffee shop. This is not the kind and cuddly guy who kisses babies and takes pictures with your mom while leaving a voicemail for that distant cousin in college. This is not the loveable scamp who can poke just as much fun at himself as he does at the various rubes around him, though to be fair he does save one chapter for a brutal and lacerating self-analysis. This is Corey Motherfucking Taylor. This is the Great Big Mouth. This is that bastard you wonder about when you listen to Slipknot and Stone Sour. Funny, profane, blasphemous, and above all right on target, You're Making Me Hate You is pure Corey Taylor unleashed, exposing the underbelly of human depravity in all its ragged glory.




Leaving Church


Book Description

Tells how a renowned preacher left her ministry to rediscover the authentic heart of her faith. A moving reflection on keeping faith amidst the relentless demands of modern life.




Taylor Swift


Book Description

Get inside the head of one of the most influential musicians of our time with this collection of her most inspiring and revealing quotes. The quotations in this book have been carefully curated from Taylor Swift’s numerous public statements—interviews, op-eds, social media posts, and more. It’s a comprehensive picture of her meteoric rise to the top, her ever-savvy business sense, and her increasingly forthright perspective on the music world and beyond. Swift’s catchy, chart-topping songs have propelled her to become one of the bestselling musicians of all time. But in the more than fifteen years she’s been making music, she has also amassed enough power to buck the norms of an industry notorious for controlling the images of its often very young female artists. She’s stood up for herself and for other artists, championing their rights to fair royalties, and inspired tens of thousands of fans to register to vote. Swift’s achievements have earned her spots on both Forbes’s Most Powerful Women and Time’s 100 Most Influential People lists. Now, for the first time, you can find her most inspirational, thought-provoking quotes in one place.




Real Life


Book Description

A FINALIST for the Booker Prize, the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize, the VCU/Cabell First Novelist Prize, the Lambda Literary Award, the NYPL Young Lions Award, and the Edmund White Debut Fiction Award “A blistering coming of age story” —O: The Oprah Magazine Named a Best Book of the Year by The New York Times, The Washington Post, New York Public Library, Vanity Fair, Elle, NPR, The Guardian, The Paris Review, Harper's Bazaar, Financial Times, Huffington Post, BBC, Shondaland, Barnes & Noble, Vulture, Thrillist, Vice, Self, Electric Literature, and Shelf Awareness A novel of startling intimacy, violence, and mercy among friends in a Midwestern university town, from an electric new voice. Almost everything about Wallace is at odds with the Midwestern university town where he is working uneasily toward a biochem degree. An introverted young man from Alabama, black and queer, he has left behind his family without escaping the long shadows of his childhood. For reasons of self-preservation, Wallace has enforced a wary distance even within his own circle of friends—some dating each other, some dating women, some feigning straightness. But over the course of a late-summer weekend, a series of confrontations with colleagues, and an unexpected encounter with an ostensibly straight, white classmate, conspire to fracture his defenses while exposing long-hidden currents of hostility and desire within their community. Real Life is a novel of profound and lacerating power, a story that asks if it’s ever really possible to overcome our private wounds, and at what cost.




No Exit


Book Description

“What a box of tricks! This full-throttle thriller, dark and driving, rivals Agatha Christie for sheer ingenuity and James Patterson for flat-out speed. Swift, sharp, and relentless.” — A. J. Finn, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Woman in the Window A brilliant, edgy thriller about four strangers, a blizzard, a kidnapped child, and a determined young woman desperate to unmask and outwit a vicious psychopath. A kidnapped little girl locked in a stranger’s van. No help for miles. What would you do? On her way to Utah to see her dying mother, college student Darby Thorne gets caught in a fierce blizzard in the mountains of Colorado. With the roads impassable, she’s forced to wait out the storm at a remote highway rest stop. Inside are some vending machines, a coffee maker, and four complete strangers. Desperate to find a signal to call home, Darby goes back out into the storm . . . and makes a horrifying discovery. In the back of the van parked next to her car, a little girl is locked in an animal crate. Who is the child? Why has she been taken? And how can Darby save her? There is no cell phone reception, no telephone, and no way out. One of her fellow travelers is a kidnapper. But which one? Trapped in an increasingly dangerous situation, with a child’s life and her own on the line, Darby must find a way to break the girl out of the van and escape. But who can she trust? With exquisitely controlled pacing, Taylor Adams diabolically ratchets up the tension with every page. Full of terrifying twists and hairpin turns, No Exit will have you on the edge of your seat and leave you breathless.




Captains and the Kings


Book Description

New York Times Bestseller: Sweeping from the 1850s through the early 1920s, this towering family saga examines the price of ambition and power. Joseph Francis Xavier Armagh is twelve years old when he gets his first glimpse of the promised land of America through a dirty porthole in steerage on an Irish immigrant ship. His long voyage, dogged by tragedy, ends not in the great city of New York but in the bigoted, small town of Winfield, Pennsylvania, where his younger brother, Sean, and his infant sister, Regina, are sent to an orphanage. Joseph toils at whatever work will pay a living wage and plans for the day he can take his siblings away from St. Agnes’s Orphanage and make a home for them all. Joseph’s journey will catapult him to the highest echelons of power and grant him entry into the most elite political circles. Even as misfortune continues to follow the Armagh family like an ancient curse, Joseph takes his revenge against the uncaring world that once took everything from him. He orchestrates his eldest son Rory’s political ascent from the offspring of an Irish immigrant to US senator. And Joseph will settle for nothing less than the pinnacle of glory: seeing his boy crowned the first Catholic president of the United States. Spanning seventy years, Captains and the Kings, which was adapted into an eight-part television miniseries, is Taylor Caldwell’s masterpiece about nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America, and the grit, ambition, fortitude, and sheer hubris it takes for an immigrant to survive and thrive in a dynamic new land.




Dying: A Memoir


Book Description

"Bracing and beautiful . . . Every human should read it." —The New York Times A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice and 2017 Critics' Pick One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2017 At the age of sixty, Cory Taylor is dying of melanoma-related brain cancer. Her illness is no longer treatable: she now weighs less than her neighbor’s retriever. As her body weakens, she describes the experience—the vulnerability and strength, the courage and humility, the anger and acceptance—of knowing she will soon die. Written in the space of a few weeks, in a tremendous creative surge, this powerful and beautiful memoir is a clear-eyed account of what dying teaches: Taylor describes the tangle of her feelings, remembers the lives and deaths of her parents, and examines why she would like to be able to choose the circumstances of her death. Taylor’s last words offer a vocabulary for readers to speak about the most difficult thing any of us will face. And while Dying: A Memoir is a deeply affecting meditation on death, it is also a funny and wise tribute to life.




Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry (Puffin Modern Classics)


Book Description

Winner of the Newbery Medal, this remarkably moving novel has impressed the hearts and minds of millions of readers. Set in Mississippi at the height of the Depression, this is the story of one family's struggle to maintain their integrity, pride, and independence in the face of racism and social injustice. And it is also Cassie's story—Cassie Logan, an independent girl who discovers over the course of an important year why having land of their own is so crucial to the Logan family, even as she learns to draw strength from her own sense of dignity and self-respect. * "[A] vivid story.... Entirely through its own internal development, the novel shows the rich inner rewards of black pride, love, and independence."—Booklist, starred review