Download or read book Confessions of a Slot Machine Queen written by Sandra Adell and published by Eugeniabooks. This book was released on 2010 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A literature professor in the Department of Afro-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison describes her downward spiral into gambling addiction and despair.

Download or read book Blindsight written by Peter Watts and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2006-10-03 with total page 388 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.

Download or read book Un Lun Dun written by China Miéville and published by Del Rey. This book was released on 2007-02-13 with total page 448 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Endlessly inventive . . . [a] hybrid of Alice in Wonderland, The Wizard of Oz, and The Phantom Tollbooth.”—Salon What is Un Lun Dun? It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too–including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book. When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong. BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from China Mieville’s Embassytown. Praise for Un Lun Dun “Miéville fills his enthralling fantasy with enough plot twists and wordplay for an entire trilogy, and that is a good thing. A-.”—Entertainment Weekly “For style and inventiveness, turn to Un Lun Dun, by China Miéville, who throws off more imaginative sparks per chapter than most authors can manufacture in a whole book. Mieville sits at the table with Lewis Carroll, and Deeba cavorts with another young explorer of topsy-turvy worlds.”—The Washington Post Book World “Delicious, twisty, ferocious fun . . . so crammed with inventions, delights, and unexpected turns that you will want to start reading it over again as soon as you’ve reached the end.”—Kelly Link, author of Magic for Beginners “[A] wondrous thrill ride . . . Like the best fantasy authors, [Miéville] fully realizes his imaginary city.” —The A.V. Club “Mieville's compelling heroine and her fantastical journey through the labyrinth of a strange London forms that rare book that feels instantly like a classic and yet is thoroughly modern.”—Holly Black, bestselling author of The Spiderwick Chronicles

Download or read book Between You Me Confessions of a Comma Queen written by Mary Norris and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2015-04-06 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times Bestseller Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR, Wall Street Journal, Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, and Library Journal "Hilarious…This book charmed my socks off." —Patricia O’Conner, New York Times Book Review Mary Norris has spent more than three decades working in The New Yorker’s renowned copy department, helping to maintain its celebrated high standards. In Between You & Me, she brings her vast experience with grammar and usage, her good cheer and irreverence, and her finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.

Download or read book Out Of Control written by Kevin Kelly and published by Basic Books. This book was released on 2009-04-30 with total page 528 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Out of Control chronicles the dawn of a new era in which the machines and systems that drive our economy are so complex and autonomous as to be indistinguishable from living things.

Download or read book The Misadventures of Awkward Black Girl written by Issa Rae and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-07-12 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An introvert braves the cybersex, the pitfalls of eating out alone, the difficulties of weight gain, and other hurdles faced by shy people living in a world that urges us to be cool as "J" humorously recounts her life in all its awkward glory.

Download or read book Bad Religion written by Ross Douthat and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2013-04-16 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Traces the decline of Christianity in America since the 1950s, posing controversial arguments about the role of heresy in the nation's downfall while calling for a revival of traditional Christian practices.

Download or read book The Second Machine Age Work Progress and Prosperity in a Time of Brilliant Technologies written by Erik Brynjolfsson and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2014-01-20 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The big stories -- The skills of the new machines : technology races ahead -- Moore's law and the second half of the chessboard -- The digitization of just about everything -- Innovation : declining or recombining? -- Artificial and human intelligence in the second machine age -- Computing bounty -- Beyond GDP -- The spread -- The biggest winners : stars and superstars -- Implications of the bounty and the spread -- Learning to race with machines : recommendations for individuals -- Policy recommendations -- Long-term recommendations -- Technology and the future (which is very different from "technology is the future").

Download or read book Confessions Of A Karaoke Queen written by Ella Kingsley and published by Sphere. This book was released on 2011-12-08 with total page 237 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Maddie Mulhern is suddenly in charge. Her parents - former 80s pop duo Pineapple Mist - have left for the summer on a nostalgia tour, entrusting her to manage their struggling karaoke bar, Sing It Back. Panicking over the dodgy finances, Maddie takes a gamble: she signs up for a fly-on-the-wall reality TV series. With her faithful staff (divalicious drag queen Ruby, shy barman Simon and wannabe actress Jasmine) she'll transform the bar into a huge success. Simple. Right? Executive Producer Evan Bergman knows that scandal sells. It's no coincidence that he hires cool, attractive Nick Craven as director. Evan wants drama on screen - and he'll do anything to get it. As the series builds to a live finale, will Maddie see the truth in a Careless Whisper? Will Nick be able to keep his Poker Face? One thing's for sure: we all do things at karaoke that we regret . . .

Download or read book Talking to Strangers written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown. This book was released on 2019-09-10 with total page 316 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Outliers, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers and why they often go wrong—now with a new afterword by the author. A Best Book of the Year: The Financial Times, Bloomberg, Chicago Tribune, and Detroit Free Press How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach us something about the way we relate to one another that isn’t true? Talking to Strangers is a classically Gladwellian intellectual adventure, a challenging and controversial excursion through history, psychology, and scandals taken straight from the news. He revisits the deceptions of Bernie Madoff, the trial of Amanda Knox, the suicide of Sylvia Plath, the Jerry Sandusky pedophilia scandal at Penn State University, and the death of Sandra Bland—throwing our understanding of these and other stories into doubt. Something is very wrong, Gladwell argues, with the tools and strategies we use to make sense of people we don’t know. And because we don’t know how to talk to strangers, we are inviting conflict and misunderstanding in ways that have a profound effect on our lives and our world. In his first book since his #1 bestseller David and Goliath, Malcolm Gladwell has written a gripping guidebook for troubled times.

Download or read book The Thirty Names of Night written by Zeyn Joukhadar and published by Atria Books. This book was released on 2020-11-24 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the ALA Stonewall Book Award—Barbara Gittings Literature Award Named Best Book of the Year by Bustle Named Most Anticipated Book of the Year by The Millions, Electric Literature, and HuffPost ​The author of the “vivid and urgent…important and timely” (The New York Times Book Review) debut The Map of Salt and Stars returns with this remarkably moving and lyrical novel following three generations of Syrian Americans who are linked by a mysterious species of bird and the truths they carry close to their hearts. Five years after a suspicious fire killed his ornithologist mother, a closeted Syrian American trans boy sheds his birth name and searches for a new one. He has been unable to paint since his mother’s ghost has begun to visit him each evening. As his grandmother’s sole caretaker, he spends his days cooped up in their apartment, avoiding his neighborhood masjid, his estranged sister, and even his best friend (who also happens to be his longtime crush). The only time he feels truly free is when he slips out at night to paint murals on buildings in the once-thriving Manhattan neighborhood known as Little Syria. One night, he enters the abandoned community house and finds the tattered journal of a Syrian American artist named Laila Z, who dedicated her career to painting the birds of North America. She famously and mysteriously disappeared more than sixty years before, but her journal contains proof that both his mother and Laila Z encountered the same rare bird before their deaths. In fact, Laila Z’s past is intimately tied to his mother’s—and his grandmother’s—in ways he never could have expected. Even more surprising, Laila Z’s story reveals the histories of queer and transgender people within his own community that he never knew. Realizing that he isn’t and has never been alone, he has the courage to officially claim a new name: Nadir, an Arabic name meaning rare. As unprecedented numbers of birds are mysteriously drawn to the New York City skies, Nadir enlists the help of his family and friends to unravel what happened to Laila Z and the rare bird his mother died trying to save. Following his mother’s ghost, he uncovers the silences kept in the name of survival by his own community, his own family, and within himself, and discovers the family that was there all along. Featuring Zeyn Joukhadar’s signature “magical and heart-wrenching” (The Christian Science Monitor) storytelling, The Thirty Names of Night is a timely exploration of how we all search for and ultimately embrace who we are.

Download or read book Cherry Picker written by Mark Shechner and published by . This book was released on 2016-06 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Whoever said that winning is everything never played the slots. For millions of “cherry pickers,” winning is closer to an unintended consequence than a goal, but good luck finding anyone who will admit to it. Enter Mark Shechner. An English professor, literature scholar, and lifetime slot-machine enthusiast, Shechner routinely escapes the intellectual milieu by taking cross-country jaunts in fast cars and becoming one with the hordes crowding Las Vegas and casinos throughout the world. Far from hiding his fondness for playing the one-armed bandits, the author celebrates his lifelong passion in this book—simultaneously ignoring the derision of journalists, sociologists, and do-gooders and rejoicing in the almost mystical attraction of gambling’s most efficient and polarizing wagering device. Cherry Picker is an ode to suckers, pishers, senior citizens, and slot heads everywhere—chasers all of the blazing sevens, the double diamonds, the wild cherries. But it’s more than that. Short on math and long on perspective, Cherry Picker is a meditation on the automobile, traveling, classic gambling literature, Buddhism, hallucinogens, the natural versus the synthetic, and Vegas as “Oz.”--Back cover.

Download or read book Queen of Slots written by H. C. Petley and published by . This book was released on 1990-01-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book The Queen of the Damned written by Anne Rice and published by Ballantine Books. This book was released on 2010-11-17 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “With The Queen of the Damned, Anne Rice has created universes within universes, traveling back in time as far as ancient, pre-pyramidic Egypt and journeying from the frozen mountain peaks of Nepal to the crowded, sweating streets of southern Florida.”—Los Angeles Times In a feat of virtuoso storytelling, Anne Rice unleashes Akasha, the queen of the damned, who has risen from a six-thousand-year sleep to let loose the powers of the night. Akasha has a marvelously devious plan to “save” mankind and destroy the vampire Lestat—in this extraordinarily sensual novel of the complex, erotic, electrifying world of the undead. Praise for The Queen of the Damned “Mesmerizing . . . a wonderful web of dark-side mythology.”—San Francisco Chronicle “Imaginative . . . intelligently written . . . This is popular fiction of the highest order.”—USA Today “A tour de force.”—The Boston Globe

Download or read book Gates of Fire written by Steven Pressfield and published by Bantam. This book was released on 2007-01-30 with total page 402 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BESTSELLER • “Steven Pressfield brings the battle of Thermopylae to brilliant life.”—Pat Conroy At Thermopylae, a rocky mountain pass in northern Greece, the feared and admired Spartan soldiers stood three hundred strong. Theirs was a suicide mission, to hold the pass against the invading millions of the mighty Persian army. Day after bloody day they withstood the terrible onslaught, buying time for the Greeks to rally their forces. Born into a cult of spiritual courage, physical endurance, and unmatched battle skill, the Spartans would be remembered for the greatest military stand in history—one that would not end until the rocks were awash with blood, leaving only one gravely injured Spartan squire to tell the tale. . . .

Download or read book Free Fire Zone written by Theresa Rebeck and published by Smith & Kraus. This book was released on 2007 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Equally entertaining and doubly informative is Rebeck's tour-de-force Free Fire Zone... is edgy and fearless, in no small part because Rebeck so viscerally describes the experience of being a woman in a man's business-a place where one should "never look weak" and where one must take false statements as true. - American Theatre Journal, March 2008

Download or read book Confessions of a Goodfella written by Jean-Claude Kella and published by Editions Toucan. This book was released on 2014-12-10 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Jean-Claude Kella – aka « The devil » – was born in one of the poorest areas of Southern France, just a few months after the end of World War II. After dabbling in petty criminality for most of his teenage years, he became a millionaire thanks to the prominent part he came to play in the infamous French connection. But every rise has a downfall, and just a few years later he was arrested, tried and sent to the Atlanta State Penitentiary. His biography gives a fascinating account of the French underworld of the sixties with its traditions and codes of honour, and introduces all sorts of colourful characters – Italian prostitutes, Spanish thugs, ex-war criminals, Brooklyn mobsters, Hells Angels, Black Muslims and beautiful girls on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean ".