Jefferson Mays
21) Netherland
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English
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In a New York City made phantasmagorical by the events of 9/11, Hans, a banker originally from the Netherlands-finds himself marooned among the strange occupants of the Chelsea Hotel after his English wife and son return to London. Alone and untethered, feeling lost in the country he had come to regard as home, Hans stumbles upon the vibrant New York subculture of cricket, where he revisits his lost childhood and, thanks to a friendship with a charismatic...
22) Tiamat's wrath
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Expanse volume 8
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English
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"Thirteen hundred gates have opened to solar systems around the galaxy. But as humanity builds its interstellar empire in the alien ruins, the mysteries and threats grow deeper. In the dead systems where gates lead to stranger things than alien planets, Elvi Okoye begins a desperate search to discover the nature of a genocide that happened before the first human beings existed, and to find weapons to fight a war against forces at the edge of the imaginable....
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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,...
24) Leviathan falls
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Expanse volume 9
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English
Appears on list
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"The Laconian Empire has fallen, setting the thirteen hundred solar systems free from the rule of Winston Duarte. But the ancient enemy that killed the gate builders is awake, and the war against our universe has begun again. In the dead system of Adro, Elvi Okoye leads a desperate scientific mission to understand what the gate builders were and what destroyed them, even if it means compromising herself and the half-alien children who bear the weight...
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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...
26) The Listener
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Nayman's debut novel, The Listener is a tale of madness and passion set in a psychiatric hospital just after the end of WWII.
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An empty suit of armor is the hero in this witty novella, a picaresque gem-now available in an independent volume for the first time-that brilliantly parodies medieval knighthood. Set in the time of Charlemagne and narrated by a nun with her own secrets to keep, The Nonexistent Knight tells the story of Agilulf, a gleaming white suit of armor with nothing inside it. A challenge to his honor sends Agilulf on a search through France, England, and North...
28) Empty Theatre
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A wildly over-the-top social satire reimagining the mad misadventures of the iconic royal cousins King Ludwig and Empress Sisi, from the incomparable Jac Jemc.
History knows them as King Ludwig II of Bavaria and Empress Elizabeth of Austria, icons of the late nineteenth century who died young and left behind magnificent portraits and palaces. But to each other they were Ludwig and Sisi, cousins who shared a passion for beauty and a stubborn refusal...
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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.
30) The First Man
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Camus tells the story of Jacques Cormery, a boy who lived a life much like his own. Camus summons up the sights, sounds and textures of a childhood circumscribed by poverty and a fathers death yet redeemed by the austere beauty of Algeria and the boys attachment to his nearly deaf-mute mother. Published thirty-five years after its discovery amid the wreckage of the car accident that killed Camus, The First Man is the brilliant consummation of the...
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The definitive account of the bizarre hostage drama that gave rise to the term Stockholm Syndrome. On the morning of August 23, 1973, a man wearing a wig, makeup, and a pair of sunglasses walked into the main branch of Sveriges Kreditbank, a prominent bank in central Stockholm. He ripped out a submachine gun, fired it into the ceiling, and shouted, The party starts! This was the beginning of a six-day hostage crisis - and media circus -that would...
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Several dozen stories by the late Italian writer. In Nothing and Not Much, a creature which witnessed the birth of the world describes the event, Henry Ford is an analysis of a captain of capitalism, and in Beheading the Heads, politicians are regularly executed to keep them on their toes.
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Once upon a time, there were four of them. And though each was good at a number of things, all of them were very good at games... Dagmar is a game designer trapped in Jakarta in the middle of a revolution. The city is tearing itself apart around her and she needs to get out. Her boss Charlie has his own problems -- 4.3 billion of them, to be precise, hidden in an off-shore account. Austin is the businessman -- the VC. He's the one with the plan and...
35) Pal Joey
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For its 75th anniversary and Frank Sinatra's centennial: the Jazz Age masterpiece that inspired the iconic Sinatra film and the hit Broadway musical, and featuring the musical's libretto and lyrics, On the seedy side of Chicago, nightlife in the 1930s, Joey Evans is a poor man's Bing Crosby, a big-talking, small-time nightclub crooner down on his luck but always on the make. In slangy, error-littered letters signed “Pal Joey,” he recounts his...
36) 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,...
37) Starbound
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After spending six years travelling to a distant solar system that is home to the enigmatic, powerful race known as "The Others," in the hopes of finding enough common purpose between their species to forge a delicate truce, Carmen Dula and her husband return to Earth to find a massive flotilla of warships defending Earth against The Others. But The Others have more power than any could imagine--and they will brook no insolence from the upstart human...
38) 13 Rue Therese
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French-born author Elena Mauli Shapiro vividly recreates Paris during World War I in this captivating novel. 13 rue Therese follows Trevor Stratton, an American academic working in Paris who discovers a keepsake box dated back to the Great War. The box, Trevor discovers, belonged to a piano teacher named Louise Brunet. Inside it are mementos that give Trevor clues to Louise's life, including the love she lost in the war and her affair with a neighbor....
39) Meeks: A Novel
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No woman will have Ben without a proper bachelor's suit... and the tailor refuses to make him one. Back from war with a nameless enemy, Ben finds that his mother is dead and his family home has been reassigned by the state. As if that isn't enough, he must now find a wife, or he'll be made a civil servant and given a permanent spot in one of the city's oppressive factories. Meanwhile, Meeks, a foreigner who lives in the park and imagines he's a member...
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Winner of the Katherine Anne Porter Prize in Short Fiction, A Bright Soothing Noise by Peter Brown is a captivating collection of short stories with the "scenic intensity and quality of Tennessee Williams' one-act plays" (Josip Novakovich, best-selling author). Always on the verge of something better, Brown's characters are often hard drinking and fast driving-tending to be both violent and religious. And as they grasp for hope, they sometimes make...