Author: Robin Sloan Publisher: Harper Collins ISBN: 1443415804 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 301
Book Description
The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon out of his life as a web-design drone, and serendipity, sheer curiosity and the ability to climb a ladder like a monkey have landed him a new gig working the night shift at Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore. But Clay begins to realize that this store is even more curious than its name suggests. There are only a few customers, but they come in repeatedly and never seem to actually buy anything. Instead they “check out” impossibly obscure volumes from strange corners of the store, all according to some elaborate, long-standing arrangement with the gnomic Mr. Penumbra. The store must be a front for something larger, Clay concludes, and soon he has embarked on a complex analysis of the customers’ behaviour and roped his friends into helping him figure out just what’s going on. But once they take their findings to Mr. Penumbra, they discover the secrets extend far beyond the walls of the bookstore. Evoking both the fairy-tale charm of Haruki Murakami and the enthusiastic novel-of-ideas wizardry of Neal Stephenson or Umberto Eco, Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore is exactly what it sounds like—an establishment you have to enter and will never want to leave.
Author: Michael Shewmaker Publisher: Ohio University Press ISBN: 0821446045 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 71
Book Description
Penumbra—Michael Shewmaker’s debut collection—explores the half-shadows of a world torn between faith and doubt. From intricate descriptions of the rooms in a dollhouse, to the stark depiction of a chapel made of bones, from pre-elegies for a ghostly father, to his compelling treatment of his obsessed, human characters (a pastor, a tattoo artist, a sleepwalker, to name only a few), these are poems that wrestle with what it means to believe in something beyond one’s own mortality. Learned and formally adept, these poems consist of equal parts praise and despair. They announce Shewmaker as an important new voice in American poetry.
Author: Joseph Conrad Publisher: Cambridge University Press ISBN: 9780521323888 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 618
Book Description
This is the fourth of the eight volumes of a widely acclaimed edition comprising all the surviving letters of Joseph Conrad. It covers the period during which he wrote Under Western Eyes, and the mental and physical breakdown that followed the novel's completion. The tale of these years emerges vividly from the correspondence. Of special interest are frank critiques of John Galsworthy's work, an indignant falling out with Ford Madox Ford, revealing accounts of his writing in progress, and reactions to the tumultuous politics of the day.
Author: Jean Cocteau Publisher: New Directions Publishing ISBN: 0811231607 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 52
Book Description
Like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, Jean Cocteau offers a powerful reminder to Americans of their own potential—and issues In 1949, Jean Cocteau spent twenty days in New York, and began composing on the plane ride home this essay filled with the vivid impressions of his trip. With his unmistakable prose and graceful wit, he compares and contrasts French and American culture: the different values they place on art, literature, liberty, psychology, and dreams. Cocteau sees the incredibly buoyant hopes in America’s promise, while at the same time warning of the many ills that the nation will have to confront—its hypocrisy, sexism, racism, and hegemonic aspirations—in order to realize this potential. Never before translated into English, Letter to the Americans remains as timely and urgent as when it was first published in France over seventy years ago.
Author: Eric Gray Forbes Publisher: CRC Press ISBN: 1040285392 Category : Science Languages : en Pages : 1006
Book Description
Professor Eric Forbes left behind at his death an important collection of the letters of John Flamsteed (1646-1719), First Astronomer Royal. A leading figure in the final phases of the seventeenth-century scientific revolution, his extensive correspondence with 129 British and foreign scholars all over the world touches on many of the scientific discussions of the day. A detailed, scholarly work of reference, The Correspondence of John Flamsteed, The First Astronomer Royal: Volume 1 is an essential guide to the exciting developments in scientific thinking that occurred during the seventeenth century. It supplements the published correspondence of Isaac Newton and Henry Oldenburg, and will be an invaluable research tool, not only for historians of astronomy, but also for researchers examining how scientific thought developed.
Author: Robin Sloan Publisher: Macmillan ISBN: 0374214913 Category : Fiction Languages : en Pages : 306
Book Description
After a layoff during the Great Recession sidelines his tech career, Clay Jannon takes a job at the titular bookstore in San Francisco, and soon realizes that the establishment is a facade for a strange secret.
Author: Robin Sloan
Author: William James
Author: Tennessee Williams
Author: Michael Shewmaker
Author: Joseph Conrad
Author: Jean Cocteau
Author: Eric Gray Forbes
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Author: Charles De Lano Hine
Author: Robin Sloan