EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

EBookClubs

Read Books & Download eBooks Full Online

Book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier   Clay  with bonus content

Download or read book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay with bonus content written by Michael Chabon and published by Random House. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 706 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author “It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal—smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.”—The Washington Post Book World One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Decade • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age. Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award

Book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier   Clay  with bonus content

Download or read book The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier Clay with bonus content written by Michael Chabon and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2012-06-12 with total page 705 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The epic, beloved novel of two boy geniuses dreaming up superheroes in New York’s Golden Age of comics, now with special bonus material by the author “It's absolutely gosh-wow, super-colossal—smart, funny, and a continual pleasure to read.”—The Washington Post Book World One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century • One of Entertainment Weekly’s 10 Best Books of the Decade • Finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and Los Angeles Times Book Prize A “towering, swash-buckling thrill of a book” (Newsweek), hailed as Chabon’s “magnum opus” (The New York Review of Books), The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay is a triumph of originality, imagination, and storytelling, an exuberant, irresistible novel that begins in New York City in 1939. A young escape artist and budding magician named Joe Kavalier arrives on the doorstep of his cousin, Sammy Clay. While the long shadow of Hitler falls across Europe, America is happily in thrall to the Golden Age of comic books, and in a distant corner of Brooklyn, Sammy is looking for a way to cash in on the craze. He finds the ideal partner in the aloof, artistically gifted Joe, and together they embark on an adventure that takes them deep into the heart of Manhattan, and the heart of old-fashioned American ambition. From the shared fears, dreams, and desires of two teenage boys, they spin comic book tales of the heroic, fascist-fighting Escapist and the beautiful, mysterious Luna Moth, otherworldly mistress of the night. Climbing from the streets of Brooklyn to the top of the Empire State Building, Joe and Sammy carve out lives, and careers, as vivid as cyan and magenta ink. Spanning continents and eras, this superb book by one of America’s finest writers remains one of the defining novels of our modern American age. Winner of the Bay Area Book Reviewers Award and the New York Society Library Book Award

Book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh

Download or read book The Mysteries of Pittsburgh written by Michael Chabon and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s “astonishing” debut novel, about a son’s struggle to find his own identity and integrity (The New York Times). Michael Chabon, author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Moonglow, and The Yiddish Policeman’s Union, is one of the most acclaimed talents in contemporary fiction. The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, published when Chabon was just twenty-five, is the beautifully crafted debut that propelled him into the literary stratosphere. Art Bechstein may be too young to know what he wants to do with his life, but he knows what he doesn’t want: the life of his father, a man who laundered money for the mob. He spends the summer after graduation finding his own way, experimenting with a group of brilliant and seductive new friends: erudite Arthur Lecomte, who opens up new horizons for Art; mercurial Phlox, who confounds him at every turn; and Cleveland, a poetry-reciting biker who pulls him inevitably back into his father’s mobbed-up world. A New York Times bestseller, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh was called “astonishing” by Alice McDermott, and heralded the arrival of one of our era’s great voices. This ebook features a biography of the author.

Book A Model World

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael Chabon
  • Publisher : Open Road Media
  • Release : 2011-12-20
  • ISBN : 145323411X
  • Pages : 198 pages

Download or read book A Model World written by Michael Chabon and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A story collection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, “one of his generation’s most eloquent new voices” (The New York Times). With his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon announced his presence as a literary wunderkind of style and substance. A Model World and Other Stories only burnished his reputation as a distinctive prose stylist. In eleven elegant tales—some of them linked—by the New York Times–bestselling author of Telegraph Avenue and The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, Chabon’s singular characters hold tight to private dreams even as their closest relationships crumble. Five stories follow an anxious adolescent from the beach vacation where he learns of his parents’ divorce to the confused days of a woefully misguided crush. Others find ex-lovers tormenting each other at an oceanside café, a washed-up professional baseball player attending a teammate’s funeral, and a Pittsburgh disc jockey still pining for a woman who married him to get her American citizenship. “Chabon moves across powerful emotional ground with certainty and delicacy,” raves the Chicago Tribune. “There are heartbreaking moments in these stories, but they are rendered so precisely, through incidents that capture the subtlest of feelings, that the reader can only smile at Chabon’s skill.” This ebook features a biography of the author.

Book Michael Chabon Presents    The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist Volume 1

Download or read book Michael Chabon Presents The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist Volume 1 written by Michael Chabon and published by Dark Horse Comics. This book was released on 2016-09-06 with total page 164 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Master of Elusion, foe of tyranny, and champion of liberation — The Escapist! Operating from a secret headquarters under the boards of the majestic Empire Theater, the Escapist and his crack team of charismatic associates roam the globe, performing amazing feats of magic to aid all those who languish in oppression’s chains. The history of his creators, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, was recently chronicled in Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. The best of the Escapist’s adventures are now collected into one volume for all to enjoy! This thrilling volume of Michael Chabon Presents…The Amazing Adventures of The Escapist collects the first two issues of the comic book and features an original story penned by Michael Chabon, the comics debut of novelist Glen David Gold, a new story written and drawn by Howard Chaykin, the painted artwork of Bill Sienkiewicz, and a wraparound cover by Chris Ware!

Book The Final Solution

    Book Details:
  • Author : David Cesarani
  • Publisher : Routledge
  • Release : 2002-09-11
  • ISBN : 113474420X
  • Pages : 578 pages

Download or read book The Final Solution written by David Cesarani and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2002-09-11 with total page 578 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Final Solution clarifies the key questions surrounding the attempt by the Nazis to exterminate the Jews. Drawing on important new research, these authoritative essays focus on the preconditions and antecedents for the 'Final Solution' and examine the immediate origins of the genocidal decision. Contributors also examine the responses of peoples and governments in Germany, occupied Europe, the USA and among Jews worldwide. The controversial conversions of this study challenge many of our accepted ideas about the period.

Book Michael Chabon s The Escapist  Amazing Adventures

Download or read book Michael Chabon s The Escapist Amazing Adventures written by Michael Chabon and published by Dark Horse Comics. This book was released on 2018-02-13 with total page 408 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the fictional world of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, the Escapist--the epitome of Golden Age superhero--was conceived. This anthology is a collection of the hero's history and his exploits, created by an all-star cast of comic book luminaries. The Escapist and his associates are heroes to all who languish in oppression's chains. They roam the globe, performing amazing feats to foil diabolical evildoers. From preventing a prison break and attack on Empire City, to facing a demonic horde in Japan, to crushing a galactic takeover in the year 2966, and to surfacing a sunken submarine from 300 fathoms, the Escapist brings hope and liberation. As the history of his creators, Joe Kavalier and Sam Clay, was chronicled in The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, now a multitude of the Escapist's adventures are collected here, along with the patchwork publishing history of the character. This volume also contains the adventures of the Escapist's associate, Luna Moth. The stories and art within are by amazing talent like Brian K. Vaughan (Saga, Y--The Last Man), Kyle Baker (The Fifth Beatle), Eduardo Barreto (Batman), Howard Chaykin (American Flagg, Star Wars), Gene Colan (Daredevil, Howard the Duck), Matt Kindt (Pistolwhip), Kevin McCarthy (Circuit-Breaker), Bill Sienkiewicz (Elektra: Assassin), Jim Starlin (Captain Marvel) and, of course, Michael Chabon. Containing a total of twenty-six tales, along with two never-before-collected stories, this volume also contains six never-before-published stories, as well as a robust gallery of pinups celebrating the world of the Escapist from artists including Brian Bolland (Judge Dredd), Jöelle Jones (Lady Killer), Mike Mignola (Hellboy), Eric Wight (My Dead Girlfriend), Jae Lee (Before Watchmen), and more!

Book Moonglow

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael Chabon
  • Publisher : HarperCollins
  • Release : 2016-11-22
  • ISBN : 006222557X
  • Pages : 414 pages

Download or read book Moonglow written by Michael Chabon and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-11-22 with total page 414 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the Sophie Brody Medal • An NBCC Finalist for 2016 Award for Fiction • ALA Carnegie Medal Finalist for Excellence in Fiction • Wall Street Journal’s Best Novel of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book of the Year • A Washington Post Best Book of the Year • An NPR Best Book of the Year • A Slate Best Book of the Year • A Christian Science Monitor Top 15 Fiction Book of the Year • A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year • A San Francisco Chronicle Book of the Year • A Buzzfeed Best Book of the Year • A New York Post Best Book of the Year iBooks Novel of the Year • An Amazon Editors' Top 20 Book of the Year • #1 Indie Next Pick • #1 Amazon Spotlight Pick • A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice • A BookPage Top Fiction Pick of the Month • An Indie Next Bestseller "This book is beautiful.” — A.O. Scott, New York Times Book Review, cover review Following on the heels of his New York Times bestselling novel Telegraph Avenue, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon delivers another literary masterpiece: a novel of truth and lies, family legends, and existential adventure—and the forces that work to destroy us. In 1989, fresh from the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, Michael Chabon traveled to his mother’s home in Oakland, California, to visit his terminally ill grandfather. Tongue loosened by powerful painkillers, memory stirred by the imminence of death, Chabon’s grandfather shared recollections and told stories the younger man had never heard before, uncovering bits and pieces of a history long buried and forgotten. That dreamlike week of revelations forms the basis for the novel Moonglow, the latest feat of legerdemain from Pulitzer Prize-winning author Michael Chabon. Moonglow unfolds as the deathbed confession of a man the narrator refers to only as “my grandfather.” It is a tale of madness, of war and adventure, of sex and marriage and desire, of existential doubt and model rocketry, of the shining aspirations and demonic underpinnings of American technological accomplishment at midcentury, and, above all, of the destructive impact—and the creative power—of keeping secrets and telling lies. It is a portrait of the difficult but passionate love between the narrator’s grandfather and his grandmother, an enigmatic woman broken by her experience growing up in war-torn France. It is also a tour de force of speculative autobiography in which Chabon devises and reveals a secret history of his own imagination. From the Jewish slums of prewar South Philadelphia to the invasion of Germany, from a Florida retirement village to the penal utopia of New York’s Wallkill prison, from the heyday of the space program to the twilight of the “American Century,” the novel revisits an entire era through a single life and collapses a lifetime into a single week. A lie that tells the truth, a work of fictional nonfiction, an autobiography wrapped in a novel disguised as a memoir, Moonglow is Chabon at his most moving and inventive.

Book The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist

Download or read book The Amazing Adventures of the Escapist written by Michael Chabon and published by Paw Prints. This book was released on 2009-07-10 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Don't miss out on this thrilling first volume of The Escapist, featuring an original story by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Kavalier & Clay. . .Michael Chabon.

Book Eileen

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ottessa Moshfegh
  • Publisher : Penguin
  • Release : 2016-08-16
  • ISBN : 0143128752
  • Pages : 273 pages

Download or read book Eileen written by Ottessa Moshfegh and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2016-08-16 with total page 273 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Now a major motion picture streaming on Hulu, starring Anne Hathaway and Thomasin McKenzie Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize “Eileen is a remarkable piece of writing, always dark and surprising, sometimes ugly and occasionally hilarious. Its first-person narrator is one of the strangest, most messed-up, most pathetic—and yet, in her own inimitable way, endearing—misfits I’ve encountered in fiction. Trust me, you have never read anything remotely like Eileen.” —Washington Post So here we are. My name was Eileen Dunlop. Now you know me. I was twenty-four years old then, and had a job that paid fifty-seven dollars a week as a kind of secretary at a private juvenile correctional facility for teenage boys. I think of it now as what it really was for all intents and purposes—a prison for boys. I will call it Moorehead. Delvin Moorehead was a terrible landlord I had years later, and so to use his name for such a place feels appropriate. In a week, I would run away from home and never go back. This is the story of how I disappeared. The Christmas season offers little cheer for Eileen Dunlop, an unassuming yet disturbed young woman trapped between her role as her alcoholic father’s caretaker in a home whose squalor is the talk of the neighborhood and a day job as a secretary at the boys’ prison, filled with its own quotidian horrors. Consumed by resentment and self-loathing, Eileen tempers her dreary days with perverse fantasies and dreams of escaping to the big city. In the meantime, she fills her nights and weekends with shoplifting, stalking a buff prison guard named Randy, and cleaning up her increasingly deranged father’s messes. When the bright, beautiful, and cheery Rebecca Saint John arrives on the scene as the new counselor at Moorehead, Eileen is enchanted and proves unable to resist what appears at first to be a miraculously budding friendship. In a Hitchcockian twist, her affection for Rebecca ultimately pulls her into complicity in a crime that surpasses her wildest imaginings. Played out against the snowy landscape of coastal New England in the days leading up to Christmas, young Eileen’s story is told from the gimlet-eyed perspective of the now much older narrator. Creepy, mesmerizing, and sublimely funny, in the tradition of Shirley Jackson and early Vladimir Nabokov, this powerful debut novel enthralls and shocks, and introduces one of the most original new voices in contemporary literature. Ottessa Moshfegh is also the author of My Year of Rest and Relaxation, Homesick for Another World: Stories, and McGlue.

Book Wonder Boys

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael Chabon
  • Publisher : Open Road Media
  • Release : 2011-12-20
  • ISBN : 1453234101
  • Pages : 439 pages

Download or read book Wonder Boys written by Michael Chabon and published by Open Road Media. This book was released on 2011-12-20 with total page 439 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The “wise, wildly funny story” of a self-destructive writer’s lost weekend by a Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times–bestselling author (Chicago Tribune). A wildly successful first novel made Grady Tripp a young star, and seven years later he still hasn’t grown up. He’s now a writing professor in Pittsburgh, plummeting through middle age, stuck with an unfinishable manuscript, an estranged wife, a pregnant girlfriend, and a talented but deeply disturbed student named James Leer. During one lost weekend at a writing festival with Leer and debauched editor Terry Crabtree, Tripp must finally confront the wreckage made of his past decisions. Mordant but humane, Wonder Boys features characters as loveably flawed as any in American fiction. This ebook features a biography of the author.

Book Summerland

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael Chabon
  • Publisher : HarperCollins
  • Release : 2016-04-12
  • ISBN : 0062418092
  • Pages : 217 pages

Download or read book Summerland written by Michael Chabon and published by HarperCollins. This book was released on 2016-04-12 with total page 217 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the Pulitzer Prize winning Michael Chabon comes this bestselling novel for readers of all ages that blends fantasy and folklore with that most American coming-of-age ritual: baseball—now in a new edition, with an original introduction by the author. Ethan Feld is having a terrible summer: his father has moved them to Clam Island, Washington, where Ethan has quickly established himself as the least gifted baseball player the island has ever seen. Ethan’s luck begins to change, however, when a mysterious baseball scout named Ringfinger Brown and a seven-hundred-and-sixty-five-year-old werefox enter his life, dragging Ethan into another world called the Summerlands. But this beautiful, winter-less place is facing destruction at the hands of the villainous Coyote, and it has been prophesized that only Ethan can save it. In this cherished modern classic, the New York Times bestselling, Pulitzer Prize winning author brings his masterful storytelling, dexterous plotting, and singularly envisioned characters to a coming-of-age novel for readers of all ages.

Book Gentlemen of the Road

    Book Details:
  • Author : Michael Chabon
  • Publisher : Anchor Canada
  • Release : 2010-04-30
  • ISBN : 0307373630
  • Pages : 180 pages

Download or read book Gentlemen of the Road written by Michael Chabon and published by Anchor Canada. This book was released on 2010-04-30 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A rollicking saga set a thousand years ago along the ancient Silk Road, by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay. Gentlemen of the Road is set in the Kingdom of Arran, in the Caucasus Mountains, between the Black Sea and the Caspian Sea, A.D. 950. It tells the tale of two wandering adventurers and unlikely soul mates, variously plying their trades as swords for hire, horse thieves, and flimflam artists–until fortune entangles them in the myriad schemes and battles following a bloody coup in the medieval Jewish empire of the Khazars. Hired as escorts for a fugitive prince, they quickly find themselves half-willing generals in a mad rebellion, struggling to restore the prince’s family to the throne. As their increasingly outrageous exploits unfold, they encounter a wondrous elephant, wily Rhandanite tradesman, whores, thieves, soldiers, an emperor, and the truth about their young royal charge, whose slender frame conceals a startling secret and a warrior’s heart.

Book Manhood for Amateurs

Download or read book Manhood for Amateurs written by Michael Chabon and published by Harper Collins. This book was released on 2012-01-24 with total page 341 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Pulitzer Prize winning author -- “an immensely gifted writer and a magical prose stylist” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times) -- offers his first major work of nonfiction, an autobiographical narrative as inventive, beautiful, and powerful as critics and readers have come to expect. A shy manifesto, an impractical handbook, the true story of a fabulist, an entire life in parts and pieces: MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is the first sustained work of personal writing from Michael Chabon. In these insightful, provocative, slyly interlinked essays, one of our most brilliant and humane writers presents his autobiography and his vision of life in the way so many of us experience our own: as a series of reflections, regrets and re-examinations, each sparked by an encounter, in the present, that holds some legacy of the past. What does it mean to be a man today? Chabon invokes and interprets and struggles to reinvent for us, with characteristic warmth and lyric wit, the personal and family history that haunts him even as -- simply because -- it goes on being written every day. As a devoted son, as a passionate husband, and above all as the father of four young Americans, Chabon’s memories of childhood, of his parents’ marriage and divorce, of moments of painful adolescent comedy and giddy encounters with the popular art and literature of his own youth, are like a theme played -- on different instruments, with a fresh tempo and in a new key -- by the mad quartet of which he now finds himself co-conductor. At once dazzling, hilarious, and moving, MANHOOD FOR AMATEURS is destined to become a classic.

Book The Escapists

Download or read book The Escapists written by Brian K. Vaughan and published by Dark Horse Comics. This book was released on 2016-09-14 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Inspired by Michael Chabon’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, this is Vaughan’s love letter to his chosen medium, a story about what it takes to start out with nothing in Cleveland, Ohio, and end up with a comic so hot a major corporation wants to steal it from you! Brilliantly interweaving the lives of the creators with the world of their creation, artists Steve Rolston and Philip Bond bring the comic-booking trio Maxwell Roth, Case Weaver, and Denny Jones to life, while the inimitable Jason Shawn Alexander and Eduardo Barreto illustrate the thrilling trials and exciting extrications of the new -- and old -- Escapist!

Book The Teleportation Accident

    Book Details:
  • Author : Ned Beauman
  • Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
  • Release : 2013-02-26
  • ISBN : 1620400243
  • Pages : 398 pages

Download or read book The Teleportation Accident written by Ned Beauman and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-02-26 with total page 398 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Long-listed for the 2012 Man Booker Prize, The Teleportation Accident is a hilarious sci-fi noir about sex, Satan, and teleportation devices. When you haven't had sex in a long time, it feels like the worst thing that could ever happen. If you're living in Germany in the 1930s, it probably isn't. But that's no consolation to Egon Loeser, whose carnal misfortunes will push him from the experimental theaters of Berlin to the absinthe bars of Paris to the physics laboratories of Los Angeles, trying all the while to solve two mysteries: Was it really a deal with Satan that claimed the life of his hero, Renaissance set designer Adriano Lavicini, creator of the so-called Teleportation Device? And why is it that a handsome, clever, modest guy like him can't-just once in a while-get himself laid? Ned Bauman has crafted a stunningly inventive, exceptionally funny, dangerously unsteady and (largely) coherent novel about sex, violence, space, time, and how the best way to deal with history is to ignore it.

Book The Orphan Master s Son

    Book Details:
  • Author : Adam Johnson
  • Publisher : Random House Incorporated
  • Release : 2012
  • ISBN : 0812992792
  • Pages : 465 pages

Download or read book The Orphan Master s Son written by Adam Johnson and published by Random House Incorporated. This book was released on 2012 with total page 465 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The son of a singer mother whose career forcibly separated her from her family and an influential father who runs an orphan work camp, Pak Jun Do rises to prominence using instinctive talents and eventually becomes a professional kidnapper and romantic rival to Kim Jong Il. By the author of Parasites Like Us.