Jefferson Mays
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Ellis Hock never believed that he would return to Africa. He runs an old-fashioned menswear store in a small town in Massachusetts but still dreams of his Eden, the four years he spent in Malawi with the Peace Corps, cut short when he had to return to take over the family business. When his wife leaves him, and he is on his own, he realizes that there is one place for him to go: back to his village in Malawi, on the remote Lower River, where he can...
2) The Monk
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Left at a monastery as a baby, Ambrosio grew up to be a cruel and stern monk, renowned for his sermons and piety. When a nun named Agnes goes to Ambrosio for the sacrament of confession, she admits that she is pregnant after having a long love affair with a man named Raymond. Though admissions told in confession are meant to be kept in confidence, Ambrosio turns Agnes over to the authorities in her convent for punishment. Without a trace of guilt...
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The complete collection of “nimble and often hilarious” short stories exploring the cosmos by the acclaimed author of Invisible Cities (Colin Dwyer, NPR).
Italo Calvino’s beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of a “cosmic know-it-all” with the unpronounceable name of Qfwfq, Calvino explores...
Italo Calvino’s beloved cosmicomics cross planets and traverse galaxies, speed up time or slow it down to the particles of an instant. Through the eyes of a “cosmic know-it-all” with the unpronounceable name of Qfwfq, Calvino explores...
4) The Apparitionists: A Tale of Phantoms, Fraud, Photography, and the Man Who Captured Lincoln's Ghost
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A story of faith and fraud in post–Civil War America, told through the lens of a photographer who claimed he could capture images of the dead.
In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized America’s imagination. A “spirit photographer,” William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler
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Honeymooners Viktor and Liesel Landauer are filled with the optimism and cultural vibrancy of central Europe of the 1920s when they meet modernist architect Rainer von Abt. He builds for them a home to embody their exuberant faith in the future, and the Landauer House becomes an instant masterpiece. Viktor and Liesel, a rich Jewish mogul married to a thoughtful, modern gentile, pour all of their hopes for their marriage and budding family into...
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An empty suit of armor is the hero of this witty novella set in the Early Middle Ages by the acclaimed author of If on a Winter’s Night a Traveler.
As a paladin in the court of Charlemagne, Agilulf is the very embodiment of valor and dedication to duty—but he is also a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. While he has stolen the heart of the female knight Bradamante, she in turn is loved...
As a paladin in the court of Charlemagne, Agilulf is the very embodiment of valor and dedication to duty—but he is also a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. While he has stolen the heart of the female knight Bradamante, she in turn is loved...
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This new illustrated of Camus's final novel tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like Camus's own. This stunning, fully illustrated edition summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood defined by poverty and a father's death, yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria—and the young protagonist's attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. In telling the story of his metaphorical search for his father,...
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American author, naturalist, and abolitionist, Henry David Thoreau was a principal figure of the 19th century movement of Transcendentalism. Central to the philosophy is a belief that people, who are inherently good, are corrupted by the organized institutions of society and that consequently the best community is one that is built upon on independence and self-reliance. This corrupting influence is discussed in one of Thoreau's most famous essay,...
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In the most ingenious and provocative thriller yet from acclaimed New York Times bestselling author Jeffery Deaver, a conscience-plagued mobster turned government hitman struggles to find his moral compass amid rampant treachery and betrayal in 1936 Berlin.
Paul Schumann, a German American living in New York City in 1936, is a mobster hitman known as much for his brilliant tactics as for taking only "righteous" assignments. But then...
Paul Schumann, a German American living in New York City in 1936, is a mobster hitman known as much for his brilliant tactics as for taking only "righteous" assignments. But then...
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Lamar Jimmerson is the leader of the Gnomon Society, the international fraternal order dedicated to preserving the arcane wisdom of the lost city of Atlantis. Stationed in France in 1917, Jimmerson comes across a little book crammed with Atlantean puzzles, Egyptian riddles, and extended alchemical metaphors. It's the Codex Pappus - the sacred Gnomon text. Soon he is basking in the lore of lost Atlantis, convinced that his mission on earth is to administer...
11) A Happy Death
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In his first novel, A Happy Death, written when he was in his early twenties and retrieved from his private papers following his death in I960, Albert Camus laid the foundation for The Stranger, focusing in both works on an Algerian clerk who kills a man in cold blood. But he also revealed himself to an extent that he never would in his later fiction. For if A Happy Death is the study of a rule-bound being shattering the fetters of his existence,...
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The first complete English-language edition of one of Calvino's important early short story collections Blending reality and illusion with elegance and precision, the stories in this collection-one of Calvino's earliest-take place in a World War II—era and postwar Italy tinged with the visionary and fablelike qualities that would come to define this master storyteller's later style. A trio of gluttonous burglars invade a pastry shop; two children...
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For the first time in paperback--a volume of thirty-seven diabolically inventive stories, fables, and "impossible interviews" from one of the great fantasists of the 20th century, displaying the full breadth of his vision and wit. Written between 1943 and 1984 and masterfully translated by Tim Parks, the fictions in Numbers in the Dark display all of Calvino's dazzling gifts: whimsy and horror, exuberance of style, and a cheerful grasp of the absurdities...
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Against all odds, Constance has found a way back to the place of her origins, New York City in the late 1800s, and sets off on a quest to prevent the events that lead to the deaths of her sister and brother, and stop Manhattan's most infamous serial killer, Dr. Enoch Leng of the seminal Pendergast novel The Cabinet of Curiosities, before his nefarious experiments come to fruition. Meanwhile, in present-day New York, Pendergast is desperate to find...
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Paris, France: September 1929. Private investigator Harris Stuyvesant, on the hunt for a missing twenty-two year old woman from Boston, must descend into the darkest depths of perversion to find a killer hiding in the Theatre du Grand-Guignol in Montmartre.
16) The Weekend
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Bernhard Schlink burst onto the literary scene with the internationally best-selling Oprah's Book Club selection The Reader. Through his unique brand of gripping narrative, Schlink scores again with The Weekend, the tale of old friends who come together for a remarkable reunion. One of the group is a convicted murderer and terrorist, fresh out of prison and joined by his devoted sister. But another guest has remained true to the cause that might spell...
17) Cave Dwellers
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A gripping novel of historical espionage, about an eleventh-hour attempt by members of the German elite to unseat Adolf Hitler, and its endlessly complex consequences. In late 1937, the young lieutenant Oskar Langweil is recruited to this cause while attending a party at the lavish home of a baroness. A high-ranking officer in Germany's counterintelligence agency brings Oskar into the fold because of their mutual involvement in a patriotic youth league,...
18) The Soul Thief
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As a graduate student in upstate New York, Nathaniel Mason is drawn into a tangle of relationships with people who seem to hover just beyond his grasp. There's Theresa, alluring but elusive, and Jamie, who is fickle if not wholly unavailable. But Jerome Coolberg is the most mysterious and compelling. Not only cryptic about himself, he seems also to have appropriated parts of Nathaniel's past that Nathaniel cannot remember having told him about. In...
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When Mitya was two years old, he swallowed his grandmother's sewing needle. For his family, it marks the beginning of the end, the promise of certain death. For Mitya, it is a small, metal treasure that guides him from within. As he grows, his life mirrors the uncertain future of his country, which is attempting to rebuild itself after the collapse of the Soviet Union, torn between its past and the promise of modern freedom. Mitya finds himself facing...
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Bosnian-American author and MacArthur genius recipient Aleksandar Hemon pens novels of high insight and deft literary accomplishment. The Lazarus Project, alternating between turn-of-the-century Chicago and modern times, features a man attempting to reimagine the death of a Jewish immigrant.