Download or read book The Last Illusion written by Porochista Khakpour and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2014-05-13 with total page 337 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A kaleidoscopic tale inspired by a legend from the medieval Persian epic "Book of Kings" follows the coming-of-age of a feral Middle Eastern youth in New York City on the eve of the September 11 attacks. By the award-winning author of Sons and Other Flammable Objects. 25,000 first printing.
Download or read book The Shadow written by Cullen Bunn and published by Dynamite. This book was released on 2016-05-25 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Shadow infiltrates the sanctum of The Society of United Magicians, an esoteric enclave of illusionists who are hellbent on escaping the ultimate trap: death itself! Learning the secret of the so-called "Last Illusion" from the spirit of escape artist Harry Houdini himself, The Shadow becomes the next target of their murderous scheme. To thwart their plans, he must evade twisted traps and solve spellbinding puzzles, while simultaneously evading the deadly skills of Sandman, the magician assassin. A good (or evil) magician never reveals his secrets... but the Shadow knows!
Download or read book The Last Illusion written by Clive Barker and published by . This book was released on 2016-11-25 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Once a novella bundled in 'Books of Blood' and 'Cabal,' Clive Barker's 'The Last Illusion' appears as a self-contained novel in this annotated edition.
Download or read book The Power of Illusion written by Christopher Anvil and published by Baen Publishing Enterprises. This book was released on 2010-10-01 with total page 615 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A new collection of stories by the master of humorous science fiction adventure, including: The full-length novel, The Day the Machines Stopped¾and what happens, not just to civilization, but to humanity and its chances of survival when all the machines stop working at once? A man is captured by aliens who are investigating the Earth as a possible target for colonization. The aliens have science and technology far in advance of humans¾but, unfortunately for them, they have never developed the human art of bluffing. For the first time in book form, Anvil's stories of Richard Verner, who is called in to solve apparently insoluble problems, such as explaining why experimental missiles keep failing for no apparent reason, or locating a kidnapped judge, or even solving an inexplicable murder that's interrupting his vacation. And much more, in a generous volume of sardonically humorous science fiction. At the publisher's request, this title is sold without DRM (Digital Rights Management).
Download or read book The Last Illusion written by Rhys Bowen and published by St. Martin's Press. This book was released on 2011-03 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Irish sleuth Molly Murphy is hired to protect none other than Harry Houdini after the on-stage death of a magician's assistant, in the latest in Bowen's award-winning series. Martin's Press.
Download or read book The Book of Illusions written by Paul Auster and published by Macmillan. This book was released on 2003 with total page 292 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A man's obsession with a silent-film star sends him on a journey into a shadow world of lies, illusions, and unexpected love Six months after losing his wife and two young sons in an airplane crash, Vermont professor David Zimmer spends his waking hours mired in a blur of alcoholic grief and self-pity. Then, watching television one night, he stumbles upon a clip from a lost silent film by comedian Hector Mann. Zimmer's interest is piqued, and he soon finds himself embarking on a journey around the world to research a book on this mysterious figure, who vanished from sight in 1929 and has been presumed dead for sixty years. When the book is published the following year, a letter turns up in Zimmer's mailbox bearing a return address from a small town in New Mexico-supposedly written by Hector's wife. "Hector has read your book and would like to meet you. Are you interested in paying us a visit?" Is the letter a hoax, or is Hector Mann still alive? Torn between doubt and belief, Zimmer hesitates, until one night a strange woman appears on his doorstep and makes the decision for him, changing his life forever. This stunning novel plunges the reader into a universe in which the comic and the tragic, the real and the imagined, the violent and the tender dissolve into one another. With The Book of Illusions, one of America's most powerful and original writers has written his richest, most emotionally charged work yet.
Download or read book Sons and Other Flammable Objects written by Porochista Khakpour and published by Grove/Atlantic, Inc.. This book was released on 2008-11-09 with total page 416 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Iranian-American author’s award-winning debut examines an immigrant’s coming of age with “punchy conversation, vivid detail [and] sharp humor” (The New York Times Book Review). Growing up in the United States, Xerxes Adam’s understanding of his Iranian heritage vacillates from typical teenage embarrassment to something so tragic it can barely be spoken. His father, Darius, is obsessed with his own exile, and fantasizes about a nonexistent daughter he can relate to better than his living son. His mother changes her name and tries to make friends. But neither of them helps Xerxes make sense of the terrifying, violent last moments in a homeland he barely remembers. As Xerxes grows up and moves to New York City, his major goal in life is to completely separate from his parents. But after the attacks of September 11th change New York forever, and Xerxes meets a beautiful half-Iranian girl on the roof of his building, he begins to realize that his heritage will never let him go. Winner of the California Book Award Silver Medal in First Fiction, Sons and Other Flammable Objects is a sweeping, lyrical tale of suffering, redemption, and the role of memory in making peace with our worlds. A New York Times Book Review Editor’s Choice
Download or read book The Abyss of Human Illusion written by Gilbert Sorrentino and published by Coffee House Press. This book was released on 2012-11-13 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “To the novel—everyone’s novel—Sorrentino brings honor, tradition, and relentless passion.”—Don DeLillo “Sorrentino [is] a writer like no other. He’s learned, companionable, ribald, brave, mathematical, at once virtuosic and somehow without ego. Sorrentino’s books break free of the routine that inevitably accompanies traditional narrative and through a passionate renunciation shine with an unforgiving, yet cleansing, light.”—Jeffrey Eugenides “For a compelling, hilarious, and ultimately compassionate rendering of life in mid-20th-century America, forget the conscientious subjectors and take Gilbert Sorrentino at his golden Word.”—Harry Mathews “One of [Brooklyn]’s most intriguing and authentic homegrown talents, Sorrentino’s Bay Ridge deserves to be appreciated alongside Malamud’s Crown Heights, Arthur Miller’s Coney Island, Henry Miller’s and Betty Smith’s Williamsburg, Hamill’s and Auster’s Park Slope, and Lethem’s Boerum Hill.”—Bookforum Titled after a line from Henry James, Gilbert Sorrentino’s final novel consists of fifty narrative set pieces full of savage humor and cathartic passion—an elegiac paean to the bleak world he so brilliantly captured in his long and storied career. Mirroring the inexplicable coincidences, encounters, and hallmarks of modern life, this novel revisits familiar characters—the aging artists, miserable couples, crackerjack salesmen, and drunken soldiers of previous books, placing them in familiar landscapes lost in time between the Depression era and some fraudulent bohemia of the present . A luminary of American literature, Gilbert Sorrentino was a boyhood friend of Hubert Selby, Jr., a confidant of William Carlos Williams, a two-time PEN/Faulkner Award finalist, and the recipient of a Lannan Literary Lifetime Achievement Award. He taught at Stanford for many years before returning to his native Brooklyn and published over thirty books before his death in 2006.
Download or read book The End of Illusions written by Andreas Reckwitz and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2021-06-28 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: We live in a time of great uncertainty about the future. Those heady days of the late twentieth century, when the end of the Cold War seemed to be ushering in a new and more optimistic age, now seem like a distant memory. During the last couple of decades, we’ve been battered by one crisis after another and the idea that humanity is on a progressive path to a better future seems like an illusion. It is only now that we can see clearly the real scope and structure of the profound shifts that Western societies have undergone over the last 30 years. Classical industrial society has been transformed into a late-modern society that is molded by polarization and paradoxes. The pervasive singularization of the social, the orientation toward the unique and exceptional, generates systematic asymmetries and disparities, and hence progress and unease go hand in hand. Reckwitz examines this dual structure of singularization and polarization as it plays itself out in the different sectors of our societies and, in so doing, he outlines the central structural features of the present: the new class society, the characteristics of a postindustrial economy, the conflict about culture and identity, the exhaustion of the self resulting from the imperative to seek authentic fulfillment, and the political crisis of liberalism. Building on his path-breaking work The Society of Singularities, this new book will be of great interest to students and scholars in sociology, politics, and the social sciences generally, and to anyone concerned with the great social and political issues of our time.
Download or read book The Knowledge Illusion written by Steven Sloman and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2017-03-14 with total page 306 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “The Knowledge Illusion is filled with insights on how we should deal with our individual ignorance and collective wisdom.” —Steven Pinker We all think we know more than we actually do. Humans have built hugely complex societies and technologies, but most of us don’t even know how a pen or a toilet works. How have we achieved so much despite understanding so little? Cognitive scientists Steven Sloman and Philip Fernbach argue that we survive and thrive despite our mental shortcomings because we live in a rich community of knowledge. The key to our intelligence lies in the people and things around us. We’re constantly drawing on information and expertise stored outside our heads: in our bodies, our environment, our possessions, and the community with which we interact—and usually we don’t even realize we’re doing it. The human mind is both brilliant and pathetic. We have mastered fire, created democratic institutions, stood on the moon, and sequenced our genome. And yet each of us is error prone, sometimes irrational, and often ignorant. The fundamentally communal nature of intelligence and knowledge explains why we often assume we know more than we really do, why political opinions and false beliefs are so hard to change, and why individual-oriented approaches to education and management frequently fail. But our collaborative minds also enable us to do amazing things. The Knowledge Illusion contends that true genius can be found in the ways we create intelligence using the community around us.
Download or read book The Illusion of Conscious Will written by Daniel M. Wegner and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2003-08-11 with total page 743 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A novel contribution to the age-old debate about free will versus determinism. Do we consciously cause our actions, or do they happen to us? Philosophers, psychologists, neuroscientists, theologians, and lawyers have long debated the existence of free will versus determinism. In this book Daniel Wegner offers a novel understanding of the issue. Like actions, he argues, the feeling of conscious will is created by the mind and brain. Yet if psychological and neural mechanisms are responsible for all human behavior, how could we have conscious will? The feeling of conscious will, Wegner shows, helps us to appreciate and remember our authorship of the things our minds and bodies do. Yes, we feel that we consciously will our actions, Wegner says, but at the same time, our actions happen to us. Although conscious will is an illusion, it serves as a guide to understanding ourselves and to developing a sense of responsibility and morality. Approaching conscious will as a topic of psychological study, Wegner examines the issue from a variety of angles. He looks at illusions of the will—those cases where people feel that they are willing an act that they are not doing or, conversely, are not willing an act that they in fact are doing. He explores conscious will in hypnosis, Ouija board spelling, automatic writing, and facilitated communication, as well as in such phenomena as spirit possession, dissociative identity disorder, and trance channeling. The result is a book that sidesteps endless debates to focus, more fruitfully, on the impact on our lives of the illusion of conscious will.
Download or read book Death Our Last Illusion written by Susan Shore and published by Common Ground Publishing. This book was released on 2011-01 with total page 432 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beginning with the latest science on the near-death experience, this resource explores the passage through physical death to the states of conscious being beyond. Traditional sources are compared with findings of science and medicine, and psychology from Jung and Piaget to Wilber.
Download or read book The Illusion of Money written by Kyle Cease and published by Hay House, Inc. This book was released on 2022-08-16 with total page 193 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: New York Times best-selling author and comedian-turned-motivational speaker, Kyle Cease, shows how your obsession with money is actually preventing you from living the life of your dreams. "I can't afford that." "Now's not the right time . . . I need to save up." "Quit my job? Are you nuts?!" Sound familiar? Money is one of the biggest excuses we make to not go after what we really want. Our fixation with money--the desire for more of it, and the fear of not having enough of it--is often really just a longing to feel safe. But this obsession with money is coming at a much bigger cost: our sanity, our creativity, our freedom, and our ability to step into our true power. This book is about eliminating the need to seek safety through the illusion of money, and learning to see ourselves for the perfection that we are--so that we can bring our gifts to the world in an authentic way, and allow ourselves to receive massive, true abundance as a result. Kyle Cease has heard excuses like the ones above countless times at his live events, and he has shown people how to completely break through them. In The Illusion of Money, he shares his own experiences as well as practical tools to help readers understand their ingrained beliefs and attachments to money, and how they can tap into our infinite assets and talents. "After 25 years as a successful comedian, actor, transformational speaker, author and junior-league amateur bowler, I've experienced many times how chasing money is not an effective way to create an abundant and fulfilling life. The most alive I've ever felt was after I left my comedy career at its peak to become a transformational speaker. I left tons of guaranteed money and so-called security for a complete unknown. It was terrifying--but what was on the other side of that terror was a completely different life that is not only more abundant financially, but has more freedom, more ease, more passion, more impact and more joy." -- Kyle Cease
Download or read book The Great Fox Illusion written by Justyn Edwards and published by . This book was released on 2022-04 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Secrets and illusions abound as a group of young magicians competes for the prize of a lifetime in this gripping adventure, the first in an enthralling new series from debut author Justyn Edwards. Magic is about dreaming what is impossible and making it possible. It's the innocent young mind in all of us that loves it. We want to be filled with wonder. We want to believe. I want the winner of this competition and the recipient of my legacy to dare to dream big. So, let the Great Fox Hunt begin. Thirteen-year-old Flick Lions has won a place on a new television show, in which young people compete to win the legacy of The Great Fox, one of the world's most famous magicians. But Flick isn't interested in uncovering the Great Fox's tired old magic tricks - she's after something much more important. The magician destroyed her family, and this is Flick's only chance to put things right. Inside the Fox's house is a secret that will change the world of magic for ever, and Flick will go to any lengths to find it.
Download or read book THE LAST ILLUSION written by Diana Hamilton and published by Harlequin / SB Creative. This book was released on 2019-07-01 with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When Charlotte reunites with her estranged husband for the first time in four years, the gorgeous devil of Andalucia, Sebastian, suddenly steals a kiss from her. But she’s only interested in getting him to agree to a divorce so she can be with someone new. She’s not the same nineteen-year-old girl who couldn’t resist his charms. She left him when she discovered his true cold-blooded nature, and she’s since grown into a strong woman who can take on a devil. And yet Sebastian’s kiss calls forth the sweet memories that still reside deep inside her. But as she fights a wave of sensations, there’s still something she doesn’t know…
Download or read book The Illusion of Living An AFK Book Bendy written by Adrienne Kress and published by Scholastic Inc.. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Enter the mind of Joey Drew in this exclusive memoir, sure to captivate fans of the hit horror video games Bendy and the Ink Machine and Bendy and the Dark Revival! Bendy fans will delight in poring over the memoir of his ingenious creator, Joey Drew. From humble beginnings to his meteoric rise as the force behind his eponymous studio, Mr. Drew offers a behind the scenes peek at his many animation innovations, such as Sillivision, his "Rules to Animate By," and of course his unique approach to franchising-among the first of its time. This re-release even includes never before seen information omitted from the original manuscript, cobbled together from the Joey Drew Studios archive as well as Mr. Drew's personal estate. Don't miss this exclusive peek inside the rise-and fall-of one of the most groundbreaking animators in history!
Download or read book The Eve Illusion written by Giovanna Fletcher and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2020-04-16 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: THE SECOND BOOK IN THE BESTSELLING EVE OF MAN TRILOGY AND NO. 1 SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER - EVE AND BRAM HAVE ESCAPED, BUT CAN THEY SURVIVE? Eve is the last girl on earth. For the last sixteen years, Eve has been a prisoner. Guarded by the Mothers. Trapped by her fate. Watched by the world. Until she took her chance, and escaped. Eve finally has the freedom she has wanted for so long, and with Bram she has the love. But both come at a price. In this dangerous new world beyond the Tower, the regime is only ever one step behind. And, together with the desperate rebel group fighting against them, Eve has found herself in more danger than she ever could have imagined. With everything stacked against them, can Eve and Bram survive? Praise for Eve of Man 'A Hunger Games-esque novel . . . a compelling read' The Mail on Sunday 'Set in a dystopian future that has seen no girls born for 50 years . . . This promises to be one of the big books of the year. You'd be a fool to miss it' Heat 'This chilling dystopia is at heart a love story, and the vivid characterisation has you rooting for the duo from page one' CHILDREN'S BOOK OF THE MONTH Mail on Sunday 'A thoughtful, and excellent read' The Sun
