Richard Powers
On a winter night on a remote Nebraska road, twenty-seven year old Mark Schluter flips his truck in a near fatal accident. His older sister, Karin, returns to nurse Mark back from a traumatic head injury. But when he emerges from a coma, Mark believes that this woman is really an impostor who looks just like his sister. Shattered, Karin contacts the cognitive neurologist Gerald Weber, who eagerly investigates. What he discovers in Mark slowly undermines
...6) Friday
On October 2, 2006, a gunman named Charles Roberts entered a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. He took ten schoolgirls hostage, killing five and critically wounding the others before taking his own life. To explain his motivation,...
Bobby Eckstrum is known around the town of Columbia as a drunk. In a surprising turn of events, he is thought to have murdered and robbed Roger Simms, a local rancher. A posse is organized, and they hunt down and kill the man they believe to be Bobby.
But Destiny Eckstrum, Bobby's daughter, believes they did not kill her father, but rather his equally shiftless brother who lives elsewhere in Colorado. When no one heeds her, she decides to
...11) Pygmy
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,
...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
...When the Internet suddenly stops working, society reels from the loss of flowing data, instant messages, and streaming entertainment. Addicts wander the streets, talking to themselves in 140 characters or less and 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 further and the government passes the draconian NET Recovery Act.
For
...With its blend of fool's wisdom and deeply felt humanity, Panorama City is heir to Marilynne Robinson's Gilead and Steve Martin's The Jerk.
From his deathbed*, twenty-eight-year-old Oppen Porter—an open-hearted, bicycle-riding, binocular-toting, self-described "slow absorber"—unspools into a cassette recorder his tale of self-determination, from "village idiot" to "man of the world," for the benefit of his unborn son. Told in an astonishingly
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