Terrene: the Hidden Valley

Terrene: the Hidden Valley

Eric Liu

Nonfiction / Autobiography / Memoir

Hailed as a clever blend between science fiction and fantasy, Terrene explores the challenges of accelerating technology and global climate change through the stories of two remarkable women in two worlds that are not as distant as they seem.Within every person lies the power to change one world. Within Flora lies the hope for two.In the isolated rural valley of Terrene, where technology is grown, not manufactured, Flora Karachi paints her anguish with flowers and yearns to travel outside the mountain walls that guard her village. But in a society which values harmony and symmetry above all else, her dangerous curiosity and her indelicate scars, earned from a lifetime of inexplicable blackouts, make her an outcast with few prospects for adventure. Then the dreams come. Lucid and overpowering, they throw Flora into a fascinatingly advanced world where she lives the life of Jane Ingram, an American scientist fighting global climate change while trying to raise a child in a society where interpersonal interaction is becoming obsolete. Flora’s blackouts open a window into knowledge lost long ago and possibilities that are yet to come. To unravel these mysteries, she must travel to the enigmatic Institute, an ancient enclave hidden in the surrounding mountains, where scholars guard the secrets of Terrene.Living two lives, Flora will fight to become an Institute scholar in her own world while struggling to save the planet from humanity's neglect in Jane's. Yet all of Flora's courage combined with all of Jane's experience may not be enough to defeat the powerful forces protecting the secret which ties their two worlds together. To find salvation for both worlds, Jane and Flora must sacrifice their own dreams, conquer their fears, and discover hope for a new beginning.Hailed as a clever blend between science fiction and fantasy, Terrene explores the challenges of accelerating technology and global climate change through the stories of two remarkable women in two worlds that are not as distant as they seem.
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The Tongue Set Free

The Tongue Set Free

Elias Canetti

Fiction / Memoir / Nonfiction

Winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize, this first volume of the author's autobiography provides a searching portrait of his personal background and creative development. Elias Canetti was one of the major intellectual figures and polymaths of the twentieth century. A master of many genres, he is known especially for his novel, Auto-da-Fe, and his great work of social theory, Crowds and Power. But Canetti's genius is perhaps nowhere more evident than in the three volumes of his autobiography. This first volume, Tongue Set Free, provides a searching portrait of the author's personal background and creative development as it presents the events, personalities (especially Canetti's mother), and intellectual forces that shaped the growth of the artist as a young man.
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The Play of the Eyes

The Play of the Eyes

Elias Canetti

Fiction / Memoir / Nonfiction

"The third volume of his acclaimed autobiographical memoirs, The Play of the Eyes ambles along unpredictably, mingling character sketches, cafe conversations, dramatic readings of his plays, trips to Prague and Strasbourg, musings on the power of crowds and what makes the good man ... Canetti uses a dramatist's gifts here to achieve emotional depth; his mother's death, sketched simply against the backdrop of a crumbling Europe, takes on a tragic dignity." - Publishers Weekly
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The State of Wyoming: Episode 1 -- Laramie

The State of Wyoming: Episode 1 -- Laramie

Gillian Will

Animals / Horses / Autobiography / Memoir

A book for people who like TV. Thirteen 'episodes' of political situation comedy, starring Elliot Vance, handsome millennial slacker and great-nephew of the former Secretary of State. Each episode takes 20-30 minutes to read. This one is Episode 1.It’s Scandal meets Seinfeld. A political comedy set in Washington, D.C.It’s a book for people who like TV. A serial novel structured like a television show, with 13 individual episodes that each also contribute to the ongoing story.In 2011, the Obama Administration embarrassed itself by mistaking Colorado for Wyoming on the map of a speaking tour in western states. Voila, the Fifty States Program!--fifty new federal patronage jobs, one for each state, all housed in cubicles at the Eisenhower Executive Office Building adjacent to the White House.The millennials in these jobs call each other by the name of their states, and none of them are exactly what you’d call on the ball. Wyoming--that’s our man Elliot Vance-- could qualify for the slacker Olympics. He’s the grand-nephew of former Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, but prior to being given a States job by his wealthy father he got kicked out of an English lit Ph.D. program for insisting on doing his dissertation on 1950s pulp author F. Bob Goddard. Elliot dates a WASP-American princess who’s pushing for marriage, and his two best friends are Delaware and Nebraska. His nemesis is Tara Travis, the slinky blonde Republican aide to Wyoming congressman Bull Wheeler.In Episode 1 Elliot is blackmailed by Tara into flying to Laramie to do some actual work. It’s the first time he’s ever been to The State of Wyoming.
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Below Deck

Below Deck

Sophie Hardcastle

Young Adult / Memoir / Fiction

And then, just like that, a thought bubbles inside me. It's a beginning; a new beginning; my beginning. The beginning of the story I tell myself in order to survive.We choose to breathe, don't we?Twenty-one-year-old Olivia hears the world in colour, but her life is mottled grey. Estranged from her parents, and living with her grandfather who is drowning in sadness, Oli faces the reality of life beyond university alone.When she wakes on a boat with no recollection of how she got there, she accepts the help of two strangers who change the course of her future forever. With Mac and Maggie, Oli learns to navigate a life upon open ocean and the world flowers into colours she's never seen before.Four years later, Oli, fluent in the language of the sea, is the only woman among men on a yacht delivery from Noumea to Auckland. In the darkness below deck, she learns that at sea, no one can hear you scream.Moving to London, Oli's life at sea is buried. When...
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This Might Be Too Personal

This Might Be Too Personal

Alyssa Shelasky

Nonfiction / Autobiography / Memoir

A frisky, feminine, funny, and profoundly genuine essay collection on relationships, sex, motherhood, and finding yourself, by the editor of New York Magazine's Sex Diaries.Alyssa Shelasky has a lot to tell you.In this hilarious and intimate essay collection, Alyssa navigates life as a wild-hearted woman and her thrilling career as a sex, relationship, and celebrity writer in New York City. From double-booking an interview with Sarah Jessica Parker and an abortion appointment and unsuccessfully quitting sex and men entirely to have a baby via an anonymous sperm donor, to hooking up with a hot musician while eight months pregnant and then finding her life partner but vowing to never get married, Alyssa's essays paint a deeply genuine, romantic, and uproarious portrait of a woman who craves both love and lust, and refuses to settle or sacrifice her fierce inner-spirit, sometimes to her own regret and detriment. And she's not afraid to give you every...
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The Dragon Cycle

The Dragon Cycle

S.T. Harvey

Nonfiction / Memoir / Self Help

An event happens on January 22 that changes the course of history forever. Two towns are destroyed, and there is one survivor, Pollock Drake, a 15 year old. He is taken into custody as a suspected terrorist. Another attack occurs during the interrogation. Drake escapes and fights to survive against a country that is after him while trying to kill what destroyed his home.An event happens on January 22 that changes the course of history forever. Two towns are destroyed, and there is one survivor, Pollock Drake, a 15 year old. He is taken into custody as a suspected terrorist. Another attack occurs during the interrogation. Drake escapes and fights to survive against a country that is after him while trying to kill what destroyed his home. Told in the curious narrative style of epistolary form. It takes information from different newspapers around the country, journal articles, "confidential presidential transcripts," and many more to tell a story about one man and how he affects the country around him. One question remains, though, what is the Dragon Cycle? Is it about a real dragon? Is this dragon even real? Is this dragon a person who belongs to a group called Dragon? Answers will be answered as we go on.Everything that is in this book is important to the plot of the book. That includes the date which is oddly written as ???3 for the year.
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Sword of Honor

Sword of Honor

Evelyn Waugh

Fiction / Biography / Memoir

This trilogy spanning World War II, based in part on Evelyn Waugh's own experiences as an army officer, is the author's surpassing achievement as a novelist. Its central character is Guy Crouchback, head of an ancient but decayed Catholic family, who at first discovers new purpose in the challenge to defend Christian values against Nazi barbarism, but then gradually finds the complexities and cruelties of war overwhelming. Though often somber, Sword of Honor is also a brilliant comedy, peopled by the fantastic figures so familiar from Waugh's early satires. The deepest pleasures these novels afford come from observing a great satiric writer employ his gifts with extraordinary subtlety, delicacy, and human feeling, for purposes that are ultimately anything but satiric. Sword of Honor comprises the three acclaimed novels Men at Arms, Officers and Gentlemen, and Unconditional Surrender.
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Agony of Flies

Agony of Flies

Elias Canetti

Fiction / Memoir / Nonfiction

Agony of Flies: Notes and Notations presents brief aphorisms selected from the German Nobel laureate Elias Canetti's writings.These short writings collected in this bilingual edition offer remarkable insight into the life and thinking of "one of our great imaginers and solitary men of genius" (Iris Murdoch).
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The Way Things Were

The Way Things Were

Aatish Taseer

Memoir / History / Nonfiction

"A formidable mix of the personal and the political . . . The Way Things Were is a substantive contribution to new writing from the subcontinent." IndependentWhen Skanda's father Toby dies, estranged from Skanda's mother and from the India he once loved, it falls to Skanda to return his body to his birthplace. This is a journey that takes him halfway around the world and deep within three generations of his family, whose fractures, frailties and toxic legacies he has always sought to elude.Both an intimate portrait of a marriage and its aftershocks, and a panoramic vision of India's half-century - in which a rapacious new energy supplants an ineffectual elite - The Way Things Were is an epic novel about the pressures of history upon the present moment. It is also a meditation on the stories we tell and the stories we forget; their tenderness and violence in forging bonds and in breaking them apart. Set in modern Delhi and at flashpoints from...
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The End of the Affair

The End of the Affair

Graham Greene

Fiction / Thriller / Memoir

"A story has no beginning or end: arbitrarily one chooses a moment of experience from which to look ahead..." "This is a record of hate far more than of love," writes Maurice Bendrix in the opening passages of The End of the Affair, and it is a strange hate indeed that compels him to set down the retrospective account of his adulterous affair with Sarah Miles. Now, a year after Sarah's death, Bendrix seeks to exorcise the persistence of his passion by retracing its course from obsessive love to love-hate. At first, he believes he hates Sarah and her husband, Henry. Yet as he delves deeper into his emotional outlook, Bendrix's hatred shifts to the God he feels has broken his life, but whose existence at last comes to recognize.
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Blue Thirst

Blue Thirst

Lawrence Durrell

Literature & Fiction / Travel / Memoir

A pair of lectures from one of the twentieth century’s most mesmerizing speakers Lawrence Durrell was in his early twenties when, tired of the stiffness of London life, he took his family to live in Corfu. Interwar Greece, whose hard beds and mosquito swarms Durrell documented so tenderly in Prospero’s Cell, was no more. In the first of this pair of lectures, given during a 1970s visit to California, Durrell recalls those days, talking of family, poetry, and the joy of the islands as no other writer can. When war came to the Mediterranean, Durrell was swept into diplomatic service, an adventure he recounts in his second lecture. Though a diplomat of the modern world, he served under men whose experience stretched back to the days before the telephone, when solutions for crises had to be devised by the ambassador, and not phoned in from London. These two lectures on long-vanished worlds are an elegant demonstration of the evocative power of Durrell’s unmatched storytelling.
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