Life as U.S. counterintelligence agent Claire Haskell once knew it is in tatters—her mission betrayed, her lover dead, and her memories of the past suspect. Worse, the defeat of the mysterious insurgent group known as Autumn Rain was not as complete as many believed. It is quickly becoming clear that the group’s ultimate goal is not simply to destroy the tenuous global alliances of the 22nd century—but to rule all of humanity. And they’re starting with the violent destruction of the Net and the assassination of the U.S. president. Now it’s up to Claire, with her ability to jack her brain into the systems of the enemy, to win this impossible war.
Battling ferociously across the Earth-Moon system, and navigating a complex world filled with both steadfast loyalists and ruthless traitors, Claire must be ready for the Rain’s next move. But the true enemy may already be one step ahead of her.
Yokai are mysterious, troublemaking spirits and demons that have tormented Japan for centuries. Kotoko’s grandfather exorcised them for a living, but Kotoko never thought that her family lineage was an asset. Then she meets Kuro, a yokai doctor. Yokai have doctors? Now Kotoko is learning firsthand that healing the yokai is a lot more challenging than getting rid of them!
Includes in-depth translation notes and a preview of the next volume!
Sam's widowed mother has died from "the Disease," and Sam is claimed by his aunt Mercy, who lives in the small African village where Sam's mother was born and raised. The gap between Sam's life in the city, where he had his own room, attended private school, and used a computer, and his new life in the dirt-floored one-room hut, which he is to share with his aunt and cousins, is vast beyond imagining. Grief, loneliness, and the absence of everything familiar make for a rocky transition to a traditional culture where possessions count for little and everyone is expected to do his or her share.
About the Series: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the broadest spectrum of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, voluminous notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.
To the world at large, the Wilde family is an amazing team of golden skinned adventurers, born to daring escapades and globetrotting excitement! Doctor Spartacus Wilde, world class scientist and inventor, physical exemplar, ultimate warrior, and loving dad!
Brian and Wren Wilde, the world's most swashbuckling kids, able to survive the most perilous situations through quick wits and the intensive training and astonishing gadgets that are their birthright!
Now the Wildes must confront the deepest mysteries of Dark Matter and penetrate the tangled depths of uncharted jungles to face the likely end of the world in the clammy clutches of The Frogs of Doom...
At a time when fantasy readers have an embarrassment of riches in choosing new worlds to fall in love with, this first novel by a fresh, original voice is sure to stand out.
Darkness falls so quickly in Howland that the people there have no word for evening. One minute the sky is light, the next minute it is black. But darkness comes in other forms, too, and for thirteen-year-old Annie, the misery she endures in her Uncle's household makes the black of night seem almost soothing. When Annie escapes, her route takes her first to a dangerous mine where a precious stone is being stolen by an enemy of the king, and later to the king's own halls, where a figure from Annie's past makes a startling appearance. All the while, reported sightings of kinderstalk― mysterious, wolf-like creatures that prowl Howland's dark forests―grow more frequent. Eloquent, suspenseful, and imbued with fairy-tale motifs found in The Brothers Grimm, this is a riveting coming-of-age story of a girl who must learn to trust her instincts if she's to lead the people she is destined to rule.
Carol Lynch Willams' The Chosen One is a dazzling novel about a young teenager's rebellion from the polygamist cult that would have her become the seventh wife to her 60-year-old uncle
Thirteen-year-old Kyra has grown up in an isolated community without questioning the fact that her father has three wives and she has twenty brothers and sisters, with two more on the way. That is, without questioning them much---if you don't count her secret visits to the Mobile Library on Wheels to read forbidden books, or her meetings with Joshua, the boy she hopes to choose for herself instead of having a man chosen for her.
But when the Prophet decrees that she must marry her sixty-year-old uncle---who already has six wives---Kyra must make a desperate choice in the face of violence and her own fears of losing her family forever.
When Mudshark solves the mystery of who’s stealing the erasers, he discovers the culprit has the best of intentions. Now he has to think of a way to prevent the Psychic Parrot from revealing the eraser-thief’s identity. With a bit of misdirection and a lot of quick thinking, Mudshark restores order to the chaos . . . just for the moment.
Welcome to the world of young Mary Newbury, a world where simply being different can cost a person her life. Hidden until now in the pages of her diary, Mary’s startling story begins in 1659, the year herbeloved grandmother is hanged in the public square as a witch. Mary narrowly escapes a similar fate, only to face intolerance and new danger among the Puritans in the New World. How long can she hide her true identity? Will she ever find a place where her healing powers will not be feared?
Mimi Shapiro had a disturbing freshman year at NYU, thanks to a foolish affair with a professor who still haunts her caller ID. So when her artist father, Marc, offers the use of his remote Canadian cottage, she’s glad to hop in her Mini Cooper and drive up north. The house is fairy-tale quaint, and the key is hidden right where her dad said it would be, so she’s shocked to fi nd someone already living there — Jay, a young musician, who is equally startled to meet Mimi and immediately accuses her of leaving strange and threatening tokens inside: a dead bird, a snakeskin, a cricket sound track embedded in his latest composition. But Mimi has just arrived, so who is responsible? And more alarmingly, what does the intruder want? Part gripping thriller, part family drama, this fast-paced novel plays out in alternating viewpoints, in a pastoral setting that is evocative and eerie — a mysterious character in its own right.
THE WAR OF THE WORLDS MEETS DOUGLAS ADAMS as two kids and one old man prepare to save the world.
Things are getting better with the alien invasion. Sure it's still not too uncommon to come home and find your step-parents reduced to a pile of unsavory feet―but at least now with the disease killing the aliens off, you have a relatively decent chance of making it through a day without getting mostly eaten. William knows this first-hand, having lost both his step-parents, but when the aliens kidnap his long-time crush Sophie's scientist parents (and the government won't help) it's up to William, Sophie, and William's bizarre Uncle Maynard to save them…and perhaps the rest of the world while they are at it. A hysterically twisted adventure that will knock your feet off!
A brilliant, boundary-leaping debut novel tracing twelve-year-old genius map maker T.S. Spivet's attempts to understand the ways of the world
When twelve-year-old genius cartographer T.S. Spivet receives an unexpected phone call from the Smithsonian announcing he has won the prestigious Baird Award, life as normal—if you consider mapping family dinner table conversation normal—is interrupted and a wild cross-country adventure begins, taking T.S. from his family ranch just north of Divide, Montana, to the museum’s hallowed halls.
T.S. sets out alone, leaving before dawn with a plan to hop a freight train and hobo east. Once aboard, his adventures step into high gear and he meticulously maps, charts, and illustrates his exploits, documenting mythical wormholes in the Midwest, the urban phenomenon of "rims," and the pleasures of McDonald’s, among other things. We come to see the world through T.S.'s eyes and in his thorough investigation of the outside world he also reveals himself.
As he travels away from the ranch and his family we learn how the journey also brings him closer to home. A secret family history found within his luggage tells the story of T.S.'s ancestors and their long-ago passage west, offering profound insight into the family he left behind and his role within it. As T.S. reads he discovers the sometimes shadowy boundary between fact and fiction and realizes that, for all his analytical rigor, the world around him is a mystery.
All that he has learned is tested when he arrives at the capital to claim his prize and is welcomed into science’s inner circle. For all its shine, fame seems more highly valued than ideas in this new world and friends are hard to find.
T.S.'s trip begins at the Copper Top Ranch and the last known place he stands is Washington, D.C., but his journey's movement is far harder to track: How do you map the delicate lessons learned about family and self? How do you depict how it feels to first venture out on your own? Is there a definitive way to communicate the ebbs and tides of heartbreak, loss, loneliness, love? These are the questions that strike at the core of this very special debut.
The Selected Works of T.S. Spivet: The Lost Images
by Reif Larsen
I initially wrote a draft of The Selected Works without any accompanying illustrations. After reaching the end, I still had that tingly feeling that usually means something is missing, and so I thought about it for awhile and realized that in order to really understand T.S., we actually need to see his drawings laid out on the page. T.S. was most comfortable in the exploding diagram or the annotation or the bitchin’ bar graph; this marginal material was where he would often let down his guard and reveal something he wouldn’t otherwise in the main text.
As soon as you include that first image in the margin, however, you've positioned yourself on a slippery slope, as suddenly there's this temptation to illustrate every single detail in the novel. Particularly with a digressive character like T.S., I found that I had to be very selective about what I wanted to show. What is not shown is as important as what is shown. In addition, many of the images in this book are not direct illustrations like might you see in other books—as in, "let me tell you about x and now here is a picture of x." Instead of a direct one-to-one correspondence, there's a satellite-like relationship between the text and the image, a kind of graphical parallelism. T.S. will talk about his suspicion of the adult male and then include a chart of male-pattern baldness, and it is through these somewhat disparate leaps between text and image, between the main story and the marginalia, that we begin to soak in T.S.'s habits of mind.
Sometimes I would include an image and then realize that I could now erase a piece of text, as the image was performing the work of that text, and often performing it in subtler ways. On page 67, for instance, there's a diagram of the patterns of cross–talk at the dinner table. Before this image came along, I had a whole elaborate explanation of T.S.'s difficulties talking to his Father at the head of the table, but this became redundant with the diagram; the visual shows it much more elegantly.
And then there were cases where I put in an image only to figure out after awhile that it just wasn't working. In honor of T.S.'s tendency to categorize everything, I've chosen five of these "lost images," each representative of a different reason for ending up on the cutting-room floor.
Reason 1: NO ROOM!
Image: The Thrushing of Dr. Clair’s Hairbrush (as seen through the keyhole). This was an example of the illustration just not fitting in the margins. We thought a lot about the dimensions of the book—a size that felt novelistic but also allowed for enough width to give the margins breathing room. So a couple of images just got the axe. I like this one, though, and was sad to see it go. I now use it in one of my slideshow/readings.
Reason 2: CUT THE STRING, LOSE THE KITE
Image: Donkey/Dolphin/Dog In an old draft, T.S. fantasized about his impending fame as he rode the freight train out East:
"I took a couple of stereoscopic photos, promising myself that when I got to Washington I would look into the possibility of arranging an exhibit on the eye and stereoscopic vision using the panoramas of the West. The West seemed a good a place as any to point out that our world was in three dimensions. For a brief moment, I was intensely excited again about the possibility of exhibitions like this one; exhibitions on x-ray vision and time travel; the sturdiness of human bones; the intelligence of dogs and dolphins and donkeys."
I wanted to just gesture at one of these imaginary drawings, and I like how in this very seventh-grade bar graph there is no label on the y-axis, just a vague quantification of "intelligence." But the original line was cut... I didn't want T.S. musing about his fame just yet, and so went the vague bar graph. Cut the string, lose the kite.
Reason 3: NOT DOING THE WORK
Image: Newton Notwen, the Turtle In Chapter 7, T.S. turns to Newton's laws of conservation to help give him some theoretical sturdiness during his cross-country adventure. I originally had a sidebar here about Newton Notwen, T.S.’s unfortunate turtle:
"I still respected Newton immensely even if he did look a little like a child pornographer in his portraits. I had even named my first pet turtle after him: Newton Notwen, a perfect palindrome, because Newton Notwen had a tiny head that looked a lot like his tail if you squinted your eyes. Perhaps because of this reciprocal anatomy, NN died after only a week of living in the kiddie pool on our deck, although it could also have been because Layton shot him."
I made the tough decision to cut this because I thought it was too jokey jokey and wasn't doing enough for the scene.
Reason 4: TOO ILLUSTRATIVE
Image: The Valero Workstation This illustration originally opened chapter 8, but I felt like it was qualitatively different than many of the other drawings in that it was almost too illustrative. It was the kind of illustration you might find in a graphic novel, where images serve a very different purpose of representation. We get the hint of the family photo, but not much else with this, and so I swapped it with the Boredom Box, which is ultimately more engaging, I think.
Reason 5: DULLS THE ACTION
Image: The Dock Cleat When T.S. has his confrontation with the crazed preacher in Chicago, there’s a very tense moment of action. I originally had this diagram showing how Josiah trips over a dock cleat, but I realized the diagramming of the action actually lessened the stakes of the scene. Better to just give a couple of resonant images of the knife and the birds and then let the reader fill in the rest. The most powerful images are always those elusive mind maps that readers create in their own heads when fully immersed in a piece of literature; nothing on the page can hope to replicate their depth and intimacy.
And of course there were other reasons for cutting drawings: some were just lousy. I will spare you these lost images, however, as they belong in graphical pergatory. T.S. would not have approved, and let me tell you, I've learned a thing or two from Mr. Tecumseh Sparrow.