Jefferson Mays
21) The Apparitionists: a tale of phantoms, fraud, photography, and the man who captured Lincoln's ghost
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In the early days of photography, in the death-strewn wake of the Civil War, one man seized Americas imagination. A "spirit photographer," William Mumler took portrait photographs that featured the ghostly presence of a lost loved one alongside the living subject. Mumler was a sensation: The affluent and influential came calling. Peter Manseau brilliantly captures a nation wracked with grief and hungry for proof of the existence of ghosts and for...
23) The end
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"A small, incongruous man receives an excruciating piece of news. His son has died in a POW camp in Korea. It is August 15, 1953, the day of a tumultuous street carnival in Elephant Park, an Italian immigrant enclave in Ohio. The man is Rocco LaGrassa, and his many years of dogged labor, paternal devotion, and steadfast Christian faith are about to come to a crashing end. He is the first of many characters we meet that day, each of whom will come...
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"From the acclaimed, bestselling author of Stardust, The Good German, and Los Alamos--a gripping tale of an American undercover agent in 1945 Istanbul who descends into the murky cat-and-mouse world of compromise and betrayal that will come to define the entire post-war era. A neutral capital straddling Europe and Asia, Istanbul has spent the war as a magnet for refugees and spies. Even American businessman Leon Bauer has been drawn into this shadow...
25) I am the night
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[2019].
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Tells the story of Fauna Hodel who was given away at birth and grew up outside of Reno, Nevada, as she begins to question her past and together with a ruined reporter, follows a trail leading to Hollywood gynecologist, Dr. George Hodel, who was a suspect in the unsolved Black Dahlia murder.
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From the publisher. Philosopher, naturalist, poet and rugged individualist, Henry David Thoreau (1817-1862) has inspired generations of readers to think for themselves, to follow the dictates of their own conscience and to make an art of their lives. This representative sampling of his thought includes five of his most frequently cited and read essays: 'Civil Disobedience,' his most powerful and influential political essay, exalts the law of conscience...
27) The Monk
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In what is widely considered to be the first Gothic novel, a monk must resist a temptation that could consume his soul Ambrosio has developed a reputation across Madrid for his piety and selflessness in his role as a monk. Left on the abbey's doorstep as a child, Ambrosio took quickly to monastic life, and his fellow monks pronounced him a gift from the Virgin Mary. Despite his virtue, his status as the abbey's favorite son is put in jeopardy with...
28) Crooked River
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2020
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From the #1 New York Times bestselling authors: Racing to uncover the mystery of several severed feet found floating in the Gulf of Mexico, Agent Pendergast is faced with the most inexplicable challenge of his career.
A startling crime with dozens of victims. Appearing out of nowhere to horrify the quiet resort town of Sanibel Island, Florida, dozens of identical, ordinary-looking shoes float in on the tide and are washed...
A startling crime with dozens of victims. Appearing out of nowhere to horrify the quiet resort town of Sanibel Island, Florida, dozens of identical, ordinary-looking shoes float in on the tide and are washed...
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2023
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Preston & Child continue their #1 bestselling series featuring FBI Special Agent Pendergast and Constance Greene, as they cross paths with New York’s deadliest serial killer: Pendergast’s own ancestor…and now his greatest foe.
AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY
Astoundingly, Constance has found a way back to the place of her origins: New York City in the late 1800s. She leaps at the chance to return…although...
AN INCREDIBLE JOURNEY
Astoundingly, Constance has found a way back to the place of her origins: New York City in the late 1800s. She leaps at the chance to return…although...
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"We were peering into this darkness, crisscrossed with voices, when the change took place: the only real, great change I've ever happened to witness, and compared to it the rest is nothing." -from The Complete Cosmicomics
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 an ageless guide named Qfwfq, Calvino explores natural phenomena and tells...
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These intoxicating stories delve down to the core of our senses of taste, hearing, and smell. Amid the flavors of Mexico's fiery chiles and spices, a couple on holiday discovers dark truths about the maturing of desire in the title story, "Under the Jaguar Sun." In "A King Listens," a gripping portrait of a frenzied mind, the menacing echoes in a huge palace spur a tyrant's thoughts to the heights of paranoid intensity. "The Name, the Nose" drives...
32) 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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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...
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Cosimo di Rondó, a young Italian nobleman of the eighteenth century, rebels against his parents by climbing into the trees and remaining there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an existence in the forest canopy he hunts, sows crops, plays games with earth-bound friends, fights forest fires, solves engineering problems, and even manages to have love affairs. From his perch in the trees, Cosimo sees the Age of Enlightenment pass by...
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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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A darkly comic portrait of a man who comes to life in the most unexpected of ways: through his online reviews. Reginald Edward Morse is one of the top reviewers on RateYourLodging.com, where his many reviews reveal more than just details of hotels around the globe - they tell his life story.
37) 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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"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 counter-intelligence agency, brings Oskar into the fold because of their mutual involvement in a patriotic youth...
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Terra Ignota volume 1
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Mycroft Canner is a convict. For his crimes he is required, as is the custom of the 25th century, to wander the world being as useful as he can to all he meets. Carlyle Foster is a sensayer-a spiritual counselor in a world that has outlawed the public practice of religion, but which also knows that the inner lives of humans cannot be wished away. The world into which Mycroft and Carlyle have been born is as strange to our 21st-century eyes as ours...
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From a variety of masterfully rendered perspectives, these six stories depict people at painful odds with the world around them. A wife can only surrender to a desert night by betraying her husband. An artist struggles to honor his own aspirations as well as society's expectations of him. A missionary brutally converted to the worship of a tribal fetish is left with but an echo of his identity. Whether set in North Africa, Paris, or Brazil, the stories...