Richard Powers
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven year old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines
...8) Pygmy
Pygmy is one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US disguised as exchange students. Living with American families to blend in, they are planning an unspecified act of massive terrorism that will bring this big dumb country and its fat dumb inhabitants to their knees. Palahniuk...
A “meticulous history” of the classic suspense film based on exclusive interviews with the director, writers, cast, and crew (The New York Times Book Review).
First released in June 1960, Psycho altered the landscape of horror films forever. But just as compelling as the movie itself is the story behind it, which has been adapted as a movie starring Anthony Hopkins as Hitchcock, Helen Mirren as his wife Alma...Then things get weird: The dead man's daughter asks a favor. Every cell in Web's...
Oppen Porter thinks he's dying. (He's not.)
From his hospital bed, with tape recorder in hand, he unspools his tale for the benefit of his unborn son, the tale of his forty-day journey from innocence to experience, from self-described "slow absorber" to man of the world.
What...
12) Drive
Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn's late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the
...13) Driven
"The perfect piece of noir fiction." —New York Times Book Review
"Terse, brutal, poetic, perfectly wrought." —Publishers Weekly STARRED review
At the end of Drive, Driver has killed Bernie Rose, "the only one he ever mourned," ending his campaign against those who double-crossed him. Driven tells how that young man, done with killing, becomes the one who goes down "at 3 a.m. on a clear,
..."Is Google making us stupid?" When Nicholas Carr posed that question in an Atlantic Monthly cover story, he tapped into a well of anxiety about how the Internet is changing us. He also crystallized one of the most important debates of our time: as we enjoy the Internet's bounties, are we sacrificing our ability to read and think deeply?
Now, Carr expands his argument into the most compelling exploration yet published of the Internet's intellectual
...15) The Numerati
Every day, we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the twenty-first century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to dissect us and map out our next steps. Their goal? To manipulate our
...16) Survivor
Tender Branson, the last surviving member of the so-called Creedish Death Cult, is dictating his life story into the flight recorder of Flight 2039, cruising on autopilot at 39,000 feet somewhere over the Pacific Ocean. He is all alone in the airplane, which will crash shortly into the vast Australian outback. But before it does, he will unfold the tale of his journey from an obedient Creedish child and humble domestic servant to an ultra-buffed,
...17) The Cold Kiss
All Nate and Sara want is a new life in a new town, away from the crime and poverty of their past. So when they are approached at a roadside diner by a shady hitchhiker offering $500 for a ride to Omaha, they wonder if their luck might be changing. At first it seems like so much easy money—but within a few hours the man is dead.
Now, forced off the road by a blizzard and trapped in a run-down motel on the side of a deserted highway, Nate
...18) Moonheart
When Sara and Jamie discovered the artifacts, they sensed the pull of a dim, distant place, a world of misty forests, ancient magics, mythical beings, ageless bards, and restless evil.
Now, with their friends and enemies alike — Blue, the biker; Keiran, the folk musician; the Inspector from the RCMP; and the mysterious Tom Hengyr — Sara and Jamie are drawn into this enchanted land through the portals of a sprawling downtown edifice that straddles
...On January 21, 1998, the night before his thirty-eighth birthday, federal prosecutor Stanley Alpert was kidnapped by a car full of gun-toting thugs. Hoping to make a large withdrawal with his ATM card, they took him, blindfolded, to a Brooklyn apartment, and improvised. All night, his captors alternately held guns to his head, threatened his family, engaged him in discussions of "gangsta" philosophy, sought his legal advice, and even offered him
...A young woman dressed in Victorian finery is found strangled in Mingo House, a morbid brownstone and museum, a nineteenth-century time capsule in Boston's Back Bay. Dubbed the "Victorian Girl" by the media everywhere, she becomes the eye of a hurricane of publicity and speculation and of a darkness reaching back to the Mingo family's roots in England—and to the builders of the mansion, a Civil War arms dealer and his séance-holding wife.
Boston
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