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(0)Richard Powers
When the Internet suddenly stops working, society reels from the loss of flowing data and streaming entertainment in Wayne Gladstone's provactive novel, Notes from the Internet Apocalypse.
Addicts wander the streets talking to themselves in 140 characters or forcing cats to perform tricks for their amusement, while the truly desperate pin their requests for casual encounters on public bulletin boards. The economy tumbles and the
In the insightful narrative tradition of Oliver Sacks, Monkey Mind is an uplifting, smart, and very funny memoir of life with anxiety—America's most common psychological complaint.
We all think we know what being anxious feels like—it is the instinct that made us run from wolves in the prehistoric age and pushes us to perform in the modern one—but for forty million American adults, anxiety is an insidious condition that
...Fate—is it written in the stars from the moment we are born, or is it a bendable thing that we can shape with our own hands? Jepp of Astraveld needs to know. He left his countryside home on the empty promise of a stranger, only to become a captive in the strange, luxurious prison that is Coudenberg Palace, the royal court of the Spanish infanta. Nobody warned Jepp that, as a court dwarf, daily injustices would become his seemingly unshakeable
...A "skillful, literate" (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer
To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As
...8) 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
...9) Pygmy
"Begins here first account of operative me, agent number 67 on arrival Midwestern airport ____ . Flight ____. Date ____. Priority mission top success to complete. Code name: Operation Havoc."
Thus speaks Pygmy, one of a handful of young adults from a totalitarian state sent to the US, disguised as exchange students to live with typical American families and blend in, all the while planning an unspecified attack of massive terrorism.
...Tom Fairchild is a man with a past he can't shake. He's struggling to make it as a graphic artist, but his probation officer thinks he belongs in jail. Then millionaire Miami real estate developer Stuart Barlowe offers him fifty thousand dollars to travel to Italy with his daughter Allison, a map expert and Tom's childhood love, to duplicate a rare Renaissance map. But Tom soon suspects that Barlowe wants a forgery, not a duplicate. He just doesn't
...It's been twenty years since the quixotic and worlds-weary Louis Wu discovered the Ringworld. Now he and Speaker-to-Animals are going back, captives of the Hindmost, a deposed puppeteer leader.
With Louis' help, the Hindmost intends to regain his status by bringing back such extraordinary treasures from the Ringworld that his fellow puppeteers will have to be impressed. But when they arrive, Louis discovers that the Ringworld is no longer
...12) 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
...He knows the secret, she knows the truth...
"The list. You're on the list. God's chosen Gene."
When children's hospital volunteer and high school student Gene Adamson hears the words of the dying man, the gunman who used him as a shield after murdering a prominent geneticist, Gene thinks the man delirious. But then the bodies of killer and victim disappear from the morgue, and a ten-year-old girl desperately needing a heart transplant
...This hilarious, take-no-prisoners novel about a cynical, sex-obsessed teenager's pining love for an intelligent girl is now a major motion picture from Dimension Films starring Michael Cera.
Youth in Revolt brings us the journals of Nick Twisp, California's most precocious diarist, whose ongoing struggles to make sense out of high school, deal with his divorced parents, and lose his virginity result in his transformation from an unassuming
...15) Bottomland
16) Streams of Babel
17) Fire Will Fall
ShadowStrike poisoned the water of Trinity Falls two months ago. Now the Trinity Four, the teens most affected by the poison, have been isolated in a remote mansion under twenty-four-hour medical care while scientists on four...
"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
...From one of Outside magazine's "Literary All-Stars" comes the thrilling true tale of the fastest boat ride ever, down the entire length of the Colorado River and through the Grand Canyon, during the legendary flood of 1983.In the spring of 1983, massive flooding along the length of the Colorado River confronted a team of engineers at the Glen Canyon Dam with an unprecedented emergency that may have resulted in the most catastrophic dam failure
...Nic Sheff was drunk for the first time at age eleven. In the years that followed, he regularly smoked pot, did cocaine and ecstasy, and developed addictions to crystal meth and heroin. Even so, he felt like he would always be able to quit and put his life together whenever he needed to. It took a violent relapse one summer in California to convince him otherwise.
In writing that is raw and honest, Nic spares no detail in telling us the compelling,
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