The White Van


Book Description

A compelling, original thriller from a fresh new voice in crime fiction.




The Girl in the White Van


Book Description

A teen is snatched outside her kung fu class and must figure out how to escape—and rescue another kidnapped victim—in The Girl in the White Van, a chilling YA mystery by New York Times bestselling author April Henry. When Savannah disappears soon after arguing with her mom’s boyfriend, everyone assumes she's run away. The truth is much worse. She’s been kidnapped by a man in a white van who locks her in an old trailer home, far from prying eyes. And worse yet, Savannah’s not alone: ten months earlier, Jenny met the same fate and nearly died trying to escape. Now as the two girls wonder if he will hold them captive forever or kill them, they must join forces to break out—even if it means they die trying. Christy Ottaviano Books




Wolf in White Van


Book Description

Beautifully written and unexpectedly moving, John Darnielle's audacious and gripping debut novel Wolf in White Van is a marvel of storytelling and genuine literary delicacy. Welcome to Trace Italian, a game of strategy and survival! You may now make your first move. Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright, open in the boundaries between the real and the imagined. His primary creation, Trace Italian, is an intricate text-role playing game that enables participants far and wide to explore a dystopian America, seeking refuge amidst the ruin. However, when two high school players, Lance and Carrie, extend the game into their reality, the consequences are horrifying, leaving Sean to account for it. Darnielle’s Wolf in White Van invites us to comprehend the depth and intricacy of Sean's life. Told in reverse, the story draws us back to the moment that fundamentally altered Sean’s life as he knows it.




Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance


Book Description

By the time of his death in 1964, Carl Van Vechten had been a far-sighted journalist, a best-selling novelist, a consummate host, an exhaustive archivist, a prescient photographer, and a Negrophile bar non. A white man with an abiding passion for blackness.




White Ninja


Book Description

A New York Times bestseller by the author of The Ninja: An American uses his martial arts expertise to track a serial killer preying on the women of Tokyo. A sadist haunts the back alleys and sex clubs of Tokyo, picking up women, horrifically mutilating them, and leaving behind a calling card written in blood: This could be your wife. He kills fearlessly, certain the police will never catch him. The only man who might stop this fiend is Nicholas Linnear, a martial arts expert whose childhood education in the dojos of Japan has made him one of the country’s leading practitioners of ninjutsu. But Linnear fears that his illness may have left him Shiro Ninja—stripped of his power and discipline. With the killer growing increasingly brazen, Linnear must summon all his strength and training before his own family becomes the next target. “Compelling [and] highly charged with action,” this is a chilling tale of menace, crime, and corruption featuring the half-British, half-Chinese hero of The Ninja and The Miko, by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of the Jason Bourne series (Publishers Weekly).




The Tastemaker


Book Description

A revealing biography of the influential and controversial cultural titan who embodied an era The Tastemaker explores the many lives of Carl Van Vechten, the most influential cultural impresario of the early twentieth century: a patron and dealmaker of the Harlem Renaissance, a photographer who captured the era's icons, and a novelist who created some of the Jazz Age's most salacious stories. A close confidant of Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Knopfs, Van Vechten frolicked in the 1920s Manhattan demimonde, finding himself in Harlem's jazz clubs, Hell's Kitchen's speakeasies, and Greenwich Village's underground gay scene. New York City was a hotbed of vice as well as creativity, and Van Vechten was at the center of it all.Edward White's biography—the first comprehensive biography of Carl Van Vechten in nearly half a century, and the first to fully explore Van Vechten's tangled relationship to race and sexuality—depicts a controversial figure who defined an age. Embodying many of the contradictions of modern America, Van Vechten was a devoted husband with a coterie of boys by his side, a supporter of difficult art who also loved lowbrow entertainment, and a promoter of the Harlem Renaissance whose bestselling novel—and especially its title—infuriated many of the same African-American artists he championed. Van Vechten's defense of what many Americans considered bad taste—modernist literature, African-American culture, and sexual self-expression—created a popular appetite for these quintessential elements of American art. The Tastemaker encompasses its subject's private fears and longings, as well as Manhattan's raucous, taboo-busting social scene of which he was such a central part. It is a remarkable portrait of a man whose brave journeys across boundaries of race, sexuality, and taste helped make America fully modern.




Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow


Book Description

A man who sleeps for twenty years in the Catskill Mountains wakes to a much-changed world.




Pappyland


Book Description

The New York Times bestseller! “A warm and loving reflection that, like good bourbon, will stand the test of time.” —Eric Asimov, The New York Times “Bourbon is for sharing, and so is Pappyland.”—The Wall Street Journal The story of how Julian Van Winkle III, the caretaker of the most coveted cult Kentucky Bourbon whiskey in the world, fought to protect his family's heritage and preserve the taste of his forebears, in a world where authenticity, like his product, is in very short supply. Following his father’s death decades ago, Julian Van Winkle stepped in to try to save the bourbon business his grandfather had founded on the mission statement: “We make fine bourbon—at a profit if we can, at a loss if we must, but always fine bourbon.” With the company in its wilderness years, Julian committed to safeguarding his namesake’s legacy or going down with the ship. Then he discovered that hundreds of barrels from the family distillery had survived their sale to a multinational conglomerate. The whiskey that Julian produced after recovering those barrels would immediately be hailed as the greatest in the world—and soon would be the hardest to find. Once they had been used up, a fresh challenge began: preserving the taste of Pappy in a new age. Wright Thompson was invited to ride along as Julian undertook the task. From the Van Winkle family, Wright learned not only about great bourbon but about complicated legacies and the rewards of honoring your people and your craft—lessons that he couldn’t help but apply to his own work and life. May we all be lucky enough to find some of ourselves, as Wright Thompson did, in Pappyland.




Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century


Book Description

The inspiration for Chloé Zhao's 2020 Golden Lion award-winning film starring Frances McDormand. "People who thought the 2008 financial collapse was over a long time ago need to meet the people Jessica Bruder got to know in this scorching, beautifully written, vivid, disturbing (and occasionally wryly funny) book." —Rebecca Solnit From the beet fields of North Dakota to the campgrounds of California to Amazon’s CamperForce program in Texas, employers have discovered a new, low-cost labor pool, made up largely of transient older adults. These invisible casualties of the Great Recession have taken to the road by the tens of thousands in RVs and modified vans, forming a growing community of nomads. Nomadland tells a revelatory tale of the dark underbelly of the American economy—one which foreshadows the precarious future that may await many more of us. At the same time, it celebrates the exceptional resilience and creativity of these Americans who have given up ordinary rootedness to survive, but have not given up hope.




Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa


Book Description

This book showcases new research by emerging and established scholars on white workers and the white poor in Southern Africa. Rethinking White Societies in Southern Africa challenges the geographical and chronological limitations of existing scholarship by presenting case studies from Angola, Mozambique, South Africa, Zambia and Zimbabwe that track the fortunes of nonhegemonic whites during the era of white minority rule. Arguing against prevalent understandings of white society as uniformly wealthy or culturally homogeneous during this period, it demonstrates that social class remained a salient element throughout the twentieth century, how Southern Africa’s white societies were often divided and riven with tension and how the resulting social, political and economic complexities animated white minority regimes in the region. Addressing themes such as the class-based disruption of racial norms and practices, state surveillance and interventions – and their failures – towards nonhegemonic whites, and the opportunities and limitations of physical and social mobility, the book mounts a forceful argument for the regional consideration of white societies in this historical context. Centrally, it extends the path-breaking insights emanating from scholarship on racialized class identities from North America to the African context to argue that race and class cannot be considered independently in Southern Africa. This book will be of interest to scholars and students of southern African studies, African history, and the history of race.