Download or read book In the Watchful City written by S. Qiouyi Lu and published by Tordotcom. This book was released on 2021-08-31 with total page 192 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "This masterful work positions Lu among the vanguard of contemporary futurism and speculative fiction."—Publishers Weekly, starred review In the tradition of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities, debut author S. Qiouyi Lu has written a multifaceted story of borders, power, diaspora, and transformation with In the Watchful City. The city of Ora is watching. Anima is an extrasensory human tasked with surveilling and protecting Ora’s citizens via a complex living network called the Gleaming. Although ær world is restricted to what æ can see and experience through the Gleaming, Anima takes pride and comfort in keeping Ora safe from harm. When a mysterious outsider enters the city carrying a cabinet of curiosities from around with the world with a story attached to each item, Anima’s world expands beyond the borders of Ora to places—and possibilities—æ never before imagined to exist. But such knowledge leaves Anima with a question that throws into doubt ær entire purpose: What good is a city if it can’t protect its people? At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Download or read book Cities I ve Never Lived In written by Sara Majka and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2016-02-16 with total page 175 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In subtle, sensuous prose, the stories in Sara Majka's debut collection explore distance in all its forms: the emotional spaces that open up between family members, friends, and lovers; the gaps that emerge between who we were and who we are; the gulf between our private and public selves. At the center of the collection is a series of stories narrated by a young American woman in the wake of a divorce; wry and shy but never less than open to the world, she recalls the places and people she has been close to, the dreams she has pursued and those she has left unfulfilled. Interspersed with these intimate first-person stories are stand-alone pieces where the tight focus on the narrator's life gives way to closely observed accounts of the lives of others. A book about belonging, and how much of yourself to give up in the pursuit of that, Cities I've Never Lived In offers stories that reveal, with great sadness and great humor, the ways we are most of all citizens of the places where we cannot be. Cities I've Never Lived In is the second book in Graywolf's collaboration with the literary magazine A Public Space.

Download or read book The Wrong End of the Telescope written by Rabih Alameddine and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-09-18 with total page 305 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: WINNER OF THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION By National Book Award and the National Book Critics' Circle Award finalist for An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine, comes a transporting new novel about an Arab American trans woman's journey among Syrian refugees on Lesbos island. Mina Simpson, a Lebanese doctor, arrives at the infamous Moria refugee camp on Lesbos, Greece, after being urgently summoned for help by her friend who runs an NGO there. Alienated from her family except for her beloved brother, Mina has avoided being so close to her homeland for decades. But with a week off work and apart from her wife of thirty years, Mina hopes to accomplish something meaningful, among the abundance of Western volunteers who pose for selfies with beached dinghies and the camp's children. Soon, a boat crosses bringing Sumaiya, a fiercely resolute Syrian matriarch with terminal liver cancer. Determined to protect her children and husband at all costs, Sumaiya refuses to alert her family to her diagnosis. Bonded together by Sumaiya's secret, a deep connection sparks between the two women, and as Mina prepares a course of treatment with the limited resources on hand, she confronts the circumstances of the migrants' displacement, as well as her own constraints in helping them. Not since the inimitable Aaliya of An Unnecessary Woman has Rabih Alameddine conjured such a winsome heroine to lead us to one of the most wrenching conflicts of our time. Cunningly weaving in stories of other refugees into Mina's singular own, The Wrong End of the Telescope is a bedazzling tapestry of both tragic and amusing portraits of indomitable spirits facing a humanitarian crisis.

Download or read book City of Angels written by Christa Wolf and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-02-05 with total page 338 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The stunning final novel from East Germany's most acclaimed writer Three years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, the writer Christa Wolf was granted access to her newly declassified Stasi files. Known for her defiance and outspokenness, Wolf was not especially surprised to discover forty-two volumes of documents produced by the East German secret police. But what was surprising was a thin green folder whose contents told an unfamiliar—and disturbing—story: in the early 1960s, Wolf herself had been an informant for the Communist government. And yet, thirty years on, she had absolutely no recollection of it. Wolf's extraordinary autobiographical final novel is an account of what it was like to reckon with such a shocking discovery. Based on the year she spent in Los Angeles after these explosive revelations, City of Angels is at once a powerful examination of memory and a surprisingly funny and touching exploration of L.A., a city strikingly different from any Wolf had ever visited. Even as she reflects on the burdens of twentieth-century history, Wolf describes the pleasures of driving a Geo Metro down Wilshire Boulevard and watching episodes of Star Trek late at night. Rich with philosophical insights, personal revelations, and vivid descriptions of a diverse city and its citizens, City of Angels is a profoundly humane and disarmingly honest novel—and a powerful conclusion to a remarkable career in letters.

Download or read book Bath Haus written by P. J. Vernon and published by Anchor. This book was released on 2022-05-24 with total page 321 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Nominated for a 34th annual Lambda Literary Award • A scintillating thriller with an emotional punch: “The tension builds to unbearably claustrophobic levels. To say more would rob readers of the 'no, he didn’t' suspense that makes Bath Haus an unexpectedly twisted, heart-pounding cat-versus-mouse thriller" (Los Angeles Times). Oliver Park, a recovering addict from Indiana, finally has everything he ever wanted: sobriety and a loving, wealthy partner in Nathan, a prominent DC trauma surgeon. Despite their difference in age and disparate backgrounds, they've made a perfect life together. With everything to lose, Oliver shouldn't be visiting Haus, a gay bathhouse. But through the entrance he goes, and it's a line crossed. Inside, he follows a man into a private room, and it's the final line. Whatever happens next, Nathan can never know. But then, everything goes wrong, terribly wrong, and Oliver barely escapes with his life. He races home in full-blown terror as the hand-shaped bruise grows dark on his neck. The truth will destroy Nathan and everything they have together, so Oliver does the thing he used to do so well: he lies. What follows is a classic runaway-train narrative, full of the exquisite escalations, edge-of-your-seat thrills, and oh-my-god twists. P. J. Vernon's Bath Haus is perfect for readers curious for their next must-read novel.

Download or read book The Freeze Frame Revolution written by Peter Watts and published by Tachyon Publications. This book was released on 2018-06-19 with total page 124 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “This—THIS—is the cutting edge of science fiction.” —Richard K. Morgan, author of Altered Carbon How do you stage a mutiny when you're only awake one day in a million? How do you conspire when your tiny handful of potential allies changes with each job shift? How do you engage an enemy that never sleeps, that sees through your eyes and hears through your ears, and relentlessly, honestly, only wants what's best for you? Trapped aboard the starship Eriophora, Sunday Ahzmundin is about to discover the components of any successful revolution: conspiracy, code—and unavoidable casualties. Note from the publisher: The red letters in the print edition (highlighted letters in the e-book) indicate special bonus content.

Download or read book We See Everything written by William Sutcliffe and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2017-09-21 with total page 196 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NOMINATED FOR THE CILIP CARNEGIE MEDAL 2019 SHORTLISTED FOR THE RED TENTACLE AT THE KITSCHIES 2017 A gripping and powerfully relevant thriller set in a reimagined London where constant surveillance is the norm, We See Everything simmers with tension and emotion. From internationally bestselling author William Sutcliffe, this is perfect for fans of Patrick Ness and Malorie Blackman. Lex lives on The Strip – the overcrowded, closed-off, bombed-out shell of London. He's used to the watchful enemy drones that buzz in the air above him. Alan's talent as a gamer has landed him the job of his dreams. At a military base in a secret location, he is about to start work as a drone pilot. These two young men will never meet, but their lives are destined to collide. Because Alan has just been assigned a high-profile target. Alan knows him only as #K622. But Lex calls him Dad.

Download or read book Gordo written by Jaime Cortez and published by Grove Press. This book was released on 2021-08-10 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This debut story collection “masterfully navigates adverse conditions of migrant life while . . . managing to find joy and amusement, love and triumph” (San Francisco Chronicle). Gordo brings readers inside a migrant workers camp near Watsonville, California in the 1970s. At the heart of these interrelated stories is a young, probably gay, boy named Gordo, who must find a way to contend with the notions of manhood imposed on him by his father. As he comes of age, Gordo learns about sex, watches his father’s drunken fights, and discovers even his own documented Mexican-American parents are wary of illegal migrants. We also meet Fat Cookie, high schooler and resident artist who runs away from home one day with her mother’s boyfriend, Manny. And then there are Los Tigres, the twins who show up every season and whose drunken brawl ends with one of them rushed to the emergency room in an upholstered chair tied to the back of a pick-up truck. These scenes from Steinbeck Country are full of humor, family drama, and a sweet frankness about serious questions: Who belongs to America and how are they treated? How does one learn decency when grown adults must fear for their lives and livelihoods? Gordo “announces a vibrant new voice on the literary scene, at once wise and authentic and supremely gifted” (Booklist, starred review). Finalist for the 2022 Lambda Literary Award for Gay Fiction Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Download or read book XYZT written by Kristen Alvanson and published by MIT Press. This book was released on 2019-07-02 with total page 329 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Genre-defying fiction that accelerates "cross-cultural dialogue" into a kaleidoscopic rush of sensory estrangements, fairy tales, and alien encounters. "There's really no difference between us and them, so we're told…." Based on the author's experiences of living as an American in Iran, Kristen Alvanson's XYZT is a wildly imaginative dramatization of the idea of a "dialogue of civilizations" and its potentially outlandish ramifications. As part of an advanced technological test program, volunteers are shuttled back and forth between the US and Iran, hidden from the watchful eyes of immigration police and state bureaucracies. Each is given a single opportunity to be received by a local host and to have a brief authentic experience of what it means to live as “them” before being transported back home. But far from heralding the bliss of mutual recognition, the experiment unleashes a series of displacements so disorienting that the fabric of reality begins to fray. Ordinary people become entangled in extraordinary situations, and everyday life bleeds into mythological encounters, alternate universes and dark psychedelic journeys in alien lands where the real and the imaginary are indistinguishable. A treasury of tales told from multiple perspectives and in a multiplicity of styles, XYZT is an audacious cross-genre experiment, a firsthand memoir of what it means to see what "they" see, and a science-fictional, nonstandard engagement with anthropology in which cross-cultural encounters take on all the unpredictable features of a contemporary fairy tale.

Download or read book Pastworld written by Ian Beck and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2010-11-09 with total page 369 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What if Victorian London were an amusement park where the inhabitants were actors hired to entertain visitors from the twenty-first century? Now imagine if Jack the Ripper was a planned attraction gone horribly wrong. Life inside the park, Pastworld, is all Eve has ever known. But then she meets a tourist in terrible trouble. Their adventure through this dark and dangerous theme park is sure to grab teens.

Download or read book How to Find a Bird written by Jennifer Ward and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-08-04 with total page 48 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A joyful and informative guide to birdwatching for budding young birders from an award-winning author-illustrator duo. How do you find a bird? There are so many ways! Begin by watching. And listening. And staying quiet, so quiet you can hear your own heartbeat. Soon you’ll see that there are birds everywhere—up in the sky, down on the ground, sometimes even right in front of you just waiting to be discovered! Young bird lovers will adore this lushly illustrated introduction to how to spot and observe our feathered friends. It features more than fifty different species, from the giant whooping crane to the tiny ruby-throated hummingbird, and so many in between, and a detailed author’s note provides even more information about birding for curious readers. This celebration of the wondrous variety, colors, and sounds of the avian world is sure to have children grabbing their binoculars and heading outside to explore.

Download or read book Veniss Underground written by Jeff VanderMeer and published by Picador. This book was released on 2023-04-11 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer’s first novel, Veniss Underground, takes readers on a journey to a labyrinthine city of tunnels, and the dangers lurking behind each turn. This paperback edition features the bonus novella “Balzac’s War.” In a dark and decadent far future, the city of Veniss persists beside a dead ocean. Earth has become a desert wasteland ravaged by climate change. Veniss endures on the strength of its innovative tech of almost Boschian intensity, but at what cost? Where does the line between “made creature” and “person” lie? Against this backdrop, Veniss Underground spins the tale of Nicholas, an aspiring, struggling Artist; his twin sister, Nicola; and Shadrach, Nicola’s former lover. A fateful trip by Nicholas to the maverick biotech Quin will have far-reaching consequences for all three—and for the fate of Veniss itself, as insurrection stirs and the oppressed begin to revolt. Veniss Underground is Jeff VanderMeer’s first novel, a spectacular surreal foray into a world as influenced by Alejandro Jodorowsky as by Ursula K. Le Guin. Readers of VanderMeer’s later work will be enchanted and horrified by the marvels within, including the author’s signature fascination with the nonhuman and the environment. By turns beautiful and powerful, Veniss Underground explores the limits of love, memory, and obsession against a backdrop of betrayal and biological mutation. This reissue includes a new introduction by the National Book Award–winning author Charles Yu and a bonus story from Jeff VanderMeer.

Download or read book Illuminate written by Aimee Agresti and published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. This book was released on 2012 with total page 533 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A brainy, shy high school outcast interning at a Chicago hotel discovers that the hotel staff has an evil agenda planned for her classmates on prom night.

Download or read book White Noise written by Don DeLillo and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1999-06-01 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • An “eerie, brilliant, and touching” (The New York Times) modern classic about mass culture and the numbing effects of technology. “Tremendously funny . . . A stunning performance from one of our most intelligent novelists.”—The New Republic The inspiration for the award-winning major motion picture starring Adam Driver and Greta Gerwig Jack Gladney teaches Hitler Studies at a liberal arts college in Middle America where his colleagues include New York expatriates who want to immerse themselves in “American magic and dread.” Jack and his fourth wife, Babette, bound by their love, fear of death, and four ultramodern offspring, navigate the usual rocky passages of family life to the background babble of brand-name consumerism. Then a lethal black chemical cloud floats over their lives, an “airborne toxic event” unleashed by an industrial accident. The menacing cloud is a more urgent and visible version of the “white noise” engulfing the Gladney family—radio transmissions, sirens, microwaves, ultrasonic appliances, and TV murmurings—pulsing with life, yet suggesting something ominous.

Download or read book Speculative Los Angeles written by Denise Hamilton and published by Akashic Books. This book was released on 2021-02-02 with total page 194 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The debut title in a new city-based anthology series featuring all-new stories with speculative, sci-fi, and paranormal themes—each using distinct neighborhood settings as a launching pad. “A stimulating anthology of 14 futuristic L.A. fables . . . Some of the best of these tales seem illumined by the humanistic spirit of the late Ray Bradbury, poet laureate of Southern California fantasy literature.” —Wall Street Journal As an incubator of the future, Los Angeles has long mesmerized writers from Aldous Huxley to Octavia E. Butler. With its natural disasters, Hollywood artifice, staggering wealth and poverty, and urban sprawl, one can argue that Los Angeles is already so weird, surreal, irrational, and mythic that any fiction emerging from this place should be considered speculative. So, bestselling author Denise Hamilton commissioned fourteen stories (including one of her own) and did exactly that. In Speculative Los Angeles, some of the city’s most prophetic and diverse voices reimagine the metropolis in very different ways. In these pages, you’ll encounter twenty-first-century changelings, dirigibles plying the suburban skies, black holes and jacaranda men lurking in deep suburbia, beachfront property in Century City, walled-off canyons and coastlines reserved for the wealthy, psychic death cults, robot nursemaids, and an alternate LA where Spanish land grants never gave way to urbanization. As with our city-based Akashic Noir Series, each story in Speculative Los Angeles is set in a distinct neighborhood filled with local color, landmarks, and flavor. Since the best speculative fiction provides a wormhole into other worlds while also commenting on our own, that is exactly what you’ll find here. Featuring brand-new stories by: Charles Yu, Aimee Bender, Lisa Morton, Alex Espinoza, Ben H. Winters, Denise Hamilton, Lynell George, Stephen Blackmoore, Francesca Lia Block, Duane Swierczynski, Luis J. Rodriguez, A.G. Lombardo, Kathleen Kaufman, and S. Qiouyi Lu.

Download or read book Fairies in Our Yard written by and published by Imagine. This book was released on 2017-09-16 with total page 30 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Children's book

Download or read book The Warding of Witch World written by Andre Norton and published by Aspect. This book was released on 2001-02-15 with total page 930 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is a desperate time in Witch World. The Magestone, the key to the pandimensional gates, has been lost and now all the gates are open. In the classic series' grand finale, an infinite flood of evil is about to wash across the world as Simon Tregarth returns to lead the planet's heroes in the final war against the forces of darkness.