万本电子书0元读

万本电子书0元读

Hummingbirds
Hummingbirds
Gaylord, Joshua
¥85.05
A wonderfully compelling debut novel about the intertwining—and darkly surprising—relationships between the teachers and students at an all-girls prep school Spend a year at the Carmine-Casey School for Girls, an elite prep school on Manhattan's Upper East Side: the year when the intimate private school community becomes tempestuous and dangerously incestuous as the rivalries and secrets of teachers and students intersect and eventually collide.In the world of students, popular and coquettish Dixie Doyle, with her ironic pigtails, battles to wrest attention away from the smart and disdainful Liz Warren, who spends her time writing and directing plays based on the Oresteia. In the world of teachers, the adored Leo Binhammer struggles to share his territory with Ted Hughes, the charming new English teacher who threatens to usurp Binhammer's status as the department's only male teacher and owner of the girls' hearts. When a secret is revealed between them, Binhammer grows increasingly fascinated by the man he has determined is out to get him.As seasons change and tensions mount, the girls long for entry into the adult world, toying with their premature powers of flirtation. Meanwhile, the deceptive innocence of the adolescent world—complete with plaid skirts and scented highlighters—becomes a trap into which the flailing teachers fall. By the end of the year the line between maturity and youth begins to blur, and the question on the final exam is: Who are the adults and who are the children?
Blackbox
Blackbox
Walker, Nick
¥85.05
Cross a road, take a train, or get on an airplane and you put your life in the hands of a stranger -- every bit as screwed up, every bit as fallible and as human as you are. Then the person turns out not to be a stranger at all, and suddenly it's much worse.In America and Britain and the sky in between, an apparently disparate group of people is connected, whether intimately or by chance, to the tragic death of a stowaway on board flight AF266.As the action veers across countries and time zones, the stowaway's real identity is revealed through stolen black box recordings, answering machine messages, sitcom outtakes, and court tran*s. Told in a shifting, circular narrative, the interwoven lives make up a jolting and layered puzzle that builds to a heart-stopping, chilling climax.An intelligent and invigorating novel with a bizarre menu of dysfunctional characters, Blackbox is the story of an attempt to erase a life on tape.
What's Your Number?
What's Your Number?
Bosnak, Karyn
¥85.05
How many men does it take to find true love?When Delilah Darling reads a survey revealing that most people have 10.5 sexual partners in their lifetime, she begins to feel like a tramp. She’s slept with nineteen men so far—almost twice the national average. During a self-help moment, she vows to cap her “number” at twenty, swearing she’ll save her last spot for the right guy. But after losing her job and having a wild night on the town, she falls into bed with Mr. Wrong. Unwilling to up her number, but also unable to imagine a life of celibacy, Delilah does the only thing a girl in her situation can do: she tracks down every man she’s ever slept with in a last-ditch effort to make it work with one of them.A hilarious romp through Delilah’s past loves, What’s Your Numbershines a spotlight on every woman’s dirty little secret and proves that, when it comes to matters of the heart, sometimes numbers tell only a fraction of the story.
The Scatter Here Is Too Great
The Scatter Here Is Too Great
Tanweer, Bilal
¥85.05
A vivid and intricate novel-in-stories, The Scatter Here Is Too Great explores the complicated lives of ordinary people whose fates unexpectedly converge after a deadly bomb blast at a train station in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet, is harassed on a bus full of college students minutes before the blast. His son, a wealthy, middle-aged businessman, yearns for his own estranged child. A young man, Sadeq, has a dead-end job snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans, while his girlfriend spins tales for her young brother to conceal her own heartbreak. An ambulance driver picking up the bodies after the blast has a shocking encounter with two strange-looking men whom nobody else seems to notice. And in the midst of it all, a solitary writer, tormented with grief for his dead father and his decimated city, struggles to find words.Bilal Tanweer reveals the pain, loneliness, and longing of these characters and celebrates the power of the written word to heal lives and communities plagued by violence. Elegantly weaving together these voices into a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a tale as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.
The Dog Fighter
The Dog Fighter
Bojanowski, Marc
¥85.05
The anonymous narrator of this remarkable debut novel is a young drifter in search of his future. The son of a passionate beauty and gentle doctor, he roams the border between the United States and Mexico, eventually settling in a sleepy Baja town on the verge of transformation. Here he learns to stand face-to-face with dogs in a makeshift ring, to fight for money and fame, and becomes involved with a powerful and corrupt entrepreneur. But when he finds friendship with a revolutionary old poet and love with a beautiful, innocent girl, everything changes. Caught between the ways of his past and the dreams of his future, he must make a devastating choice that could cost him everything.The Dog Fighter is an exhilarating tale of brutality and violence, love and wisdom, heartbreak and redemption.
I Was a Revolutionary
I Was a Revolutionary
Milward, Andrew Malan
¥85.05
Grounded in place, spanning the Civil War to the present day, the stories in I Was a Revolutionary capture the roil of history through the eyes of an unforgettable cast of characters: the visionaries and dreamers, the radical farmers and socialist journalists, the quack doctors and protesters who haunt the past and present landscape of the American heartland.In these stories, each set in the author's home state of Kansas, Andrew Malan Milward traces how we live amid the inconvenient ghosts of history. "The Burning of Lawrence" vibrates with the raw terror of a town pillaged by pro-Confederate raiders. "O Death" recalls the harrowing, desperate journey of the exodusters—African-American migrants who came to Kansas to escape oppression in the South. And, in the collection's haunting title piece, a professor of Kansas history surveys his decades-long slide from radicalism to complacency, a shift that parallels the landscape around him.Using his own home state as a prism through which to view both a nation's history and our own universal battles as individuals, Milward has created a fresh and complex new palimpsest of the American experience.
The Savage Girl
The Savage Girl
Shakar, Alex
¥85.05
In the wake of her sister Ivy's widely publicized suicide attempt, Ursula Van Urden arrives in the metropolis of Middle City with hopes of starting her own life anew. In an attempt to understand the events leading up to her sister's breakdown, Ursula meets Ivy's mysterious boyfriend, Chas Lacouture, and joins his trendspotting firm, Tomorrow, Ltd. Armed with only a sketch pad and the mandate to "find the future," she begins an odyssey into the strangely intoxicating world of trendspotting where one lesson prevails: At the heart of every product lies a paradox, and when cultivated successfully, it yields untold riches. As Ivy's delusions grow stronger and more apocalyptic, Ursula's observations of a filthy, rodent-eating homeless girl -- an urban savage -- lead to an elaborate advertising scheme gone awry that has unexpected consequences.
Playing House
Playing House
Pearson, Patricia
¥85.05
Even in a tiny apartment, there were enough rooms for Frannie to get into trouble...First, there was the bedroom...where it all began in such a casually romantic way.Next, the bathroom...where things took a suspicious turn.Finally, the living room...where she picked up the phone and prepared to break the news to the boyfriend she barely knew...When Frannie Mackenzie got sick all over the sweater section of a major urban retailer, she couldn't quite believe that this was a reaction to gray being this year's black. So she went back to her postage-stamp-sized apartment and took inventory. Jeans tighterYes. Boobs biggerYes. And the absolute proof-positive...the stick had turned blue.Frannie decides to give up cocktails, late nights, and anything else fun that the big city has to offer. But one thing -- or rather person -- she's not sure she's going to get to keep is the surprised father in the situation -- an experimental jazz musician with the improbable name of Calvin, who'd taken off to Europe before Frannie figured out parenthood had awkwardly united them. Falling in love was the last thing that Frannie expected, and the happiest surprise of all.
Stone Garden
Stone Garden
Moynahan, Molly
¥85.05
A smart young woman making her way through the privileged terrain of northeastern prep-school land, Alice McGuire is certain of her world and her future -- until the summer her best friend and soul mate, Matthew Swan, vanishes on a trip to Mexico. Stunned, Alice and the rest of the close-knit town that adored Matthew search for answers. For Alice, the journey of heartbreak leads from everything that is familiar to forbidden places and forgotten people who will teach her about kindness and forgiveness: lessons that will open her to new possibilities and unexpected hope.Vividly wrought, deeply resonant, and told in a remarkable voice that sparkles with wit and wisdom, Stone Garden is a splendid triumph from an accomplished new writer.
Strange Skies
Strange Skies
Marinovich, Matt
¥85.05
What kind of man would lie to his own wife about having cancerA man desperate to avoid being saddled with life's responsibilities. A man like Paul.On a miserable October afternoon, as he stares down at his brother's whiny new baby, Paul realizes he's run out of excuses. His wife wants a family, but the last thing Paul wants is dirty diapers and a constantly screaming stranger robbing him of sleep. Then a lump is discovered on his arm, and with a little elaboration, the parenthood question is rendered moot.With the dwindling time he pretends he's got left, he intends to start looking out for number one. But his "cancer vacation" hits a snag when he meets a mother and son in an airport bar who turn everything around—and even bring Paul to the brink of a life he thought he never wanted—because sometimes a man's got to lose himself completely to discover who he really is.
The Best Seat in the House
The Best Seat in the House
Rucker, Allen
¥85.05
Like the day Elvis died or O.J. was acquitted, the Tuesday you wake up paralyzed is not a day you soon forget. For writer Allen Rucker baby boomer, husband, father of two, aging Hollywood also-ran life started over that Tuesday when, at the age of fifty-one, he was struck by a rare disorder transverse myelitis that left him paralyzed from the waist down. Why himWas he being punishedWas it his stressful lifeHis frustrating careerTelling too many Christopher Reeve jokesDazed and paralyzed, he was forced to reevaluate everything, from the simplest bodily functions to the mysteries of the universe. In a style that is at once funny and moving, The Best Seat in the House offers an unpretentious and unapologetic account of learning to live with paralysis. Without trivializing his situation, and without sermons or clichs, Rucker invites all readers, whether disabled or not, to identify with him for better or for worse. This remarkably comic and heartfelt book speaks to the fragility of life and to the resilience and adaptability of a single, ordinary human being. Lucky for us, this human being has a sense of humor. At first, it may not look like the best seat in the house, but read on. You might be surprised.
Dark Cosmos
Dark Cosmos
Hooper, Dan
¥85.05
The twentieth century was astonishing in all regards, shaking the foundations of practically every aspect of human life and thought, physics not least of all. Beginning with the publication of Albert Einstein's theory of relativity, through the wild revolution of quantum mechanics, and up until the physics of the modern day (including the astonishing revelation, in 1998, that the Universe is not only expanding, but doing so at an ever-quickening pace), much of what physicists have seen in our Universe suggests that much of our Universe is unseen that we live in a dark cosmos.Everyone knows that there are things no one can see the air you're breathing, for example, or, to be more exotic, a black hole. But what everyone does not know is that what we can see a book, a cat, or our planet makes up only 5 percent of the Universe. The rest fully 95 percent is totally invisible to us; its presence discernible only by the weak effects it has on visible matter around it.This invisible stuff comes in two varieties dark matter and dark energy. One holds the Universe together, while the other tears it apart. What these forces really are has been a mystery for as long as anyone has suspected they were there, but the latest discoveries of experimental physics have brought us closer to that knowledge. Particle physicist Dan Hooper takes his readers, with wit, grace, and a keen knack for explaining the toughest ideas science has to offer, on a quest few would have ever expected: to discover what makes up our dark cosmos.
Casa Nostra
Casa Nostra
Manzo, Caroline Seller
¥85.05
Englishwoman Caroline Seller met Marcello Manzo at a Halloween party in London in the mid-seventies. Although she spoke little Italian and he spoke practically no English, the chemistry between them was undeniable, and it wasn't long before Caroline was invited to visit Marcello's family in Mazara del Vallo, Sicily. A large, eccentric, and loving clan living in a magnificent, crumbling villa, Santa Maria, the Manzos welcomed Caroline warmly, and soon she and Marcello were married. Together they traveled the world and started a family, but through it all, Santa Maria was never far from their thoughts. So when the Manzo brothers united to save the family's deteriorating estate, Marcello and Caroline eagerly signed on to the project not entirely prepared for what they were getting into!As seen through the eyes of Caroline Seller Manzo an outsider who is often surprised and always delighted by her Italian family and adopted hometown Casa Nostra is the captivating story of a villa's difficult, glorious rebirth and a celebration of the unique beauty and history of western Sicily and its people.
The Gospel of Food
The Gospel of Food
Glassner, Barry
¥85.05
For many Americans, eating is a religion. We worship at the temples of celebrity chefs. We raise our children to believe that certain foods are good and others are bad. We believe that if we eat the right foods, we will live longer, and if we eat in the right places, we will raise our social status. Yet what we believe to be true about food is, in fact, quite contradictory.Part expose, part social commentary, The Gospel of Food is a rallying cry to abandon the fads and fallacies in favor of calmer, more pleasurable eating. By interviewing chefs, food chemists, nutritionists, and restaurant critics about the way we eat, sociologist Barry Glassner helps us recognize the myths, half-truths, and guilt trips they promulgate, and liberates us for greater joy at the table.
Latin Love Lessons
Latin Love Lessons
Higgins, Charlotte
¥85.05
It wasn't just heated floors, hot baths, aqueducts, and paved roads that the Romans did first and best they were also experts at the art of love. From the most effective pickup lines to percipient advice on getting over a breakup, from grooming tips to sex tips, the Romans had time-proof solutions. Charlotte Higgins brings them together in this indispensable guide to love a collection of the richest, most illuminating, and sensuous writing about this mysterious emotion that can move us to joy or despair.Filled with the sage advice of Catullus, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Propertius, and Tibullus, this witty, smart, and laugh-out-loud-funny handbook offers a fresh, new take on romance based on some of civilization's oldest adages.
Queen of the Oddballs
Queen of the Oddballs
Carlip, Hillary
¥85.05
A hilariously offbeat memoir about an adventurous young woman's escapades as she defies conventions and transforms an ordinary Los Angeles life into a star-studded, extraordinary miracle of self-discovery.Queen of the Oddballs forms a chronology of Hillary Carlip's habitual straying from roads more traveled -- from a wisecracking third-grader suspended from school for smoking (while imitating Holly Golightly) to a headline-making teen activist, juggler and fire eater, friend (NOT "fan") of Carly Simon and Carole King, grand prize-winning Gong Show contestant, cult rock star, and seeker of spiritual and romantic truths that definitely defy expectations.Illustrated with ephemera -- from diary entries and photographs to a handwritten letter from Carly Simon -- Queen of the Oddballs presents a virtual time capsule of pop culture's last four decades and celebrates a creative life lived to the hilt.
She's Having a Baby
She's Having a Baby
Barron, James D.
¥85.05
A Man's Survival Guide to PregnancyIt's easy for a man to feel like a bystander during pregnancy. Finally, from one man to another, here is a pregnancy book with funny, down-to-earth, and practical advice on: figuring out what you wife's obstetrician is saying keeping your sex life alive staying on top of insurance forms and other paperwork and much, much more This book will help make pregnancy the experience of a lifetime.
The End of Anger
The End of Anger
Cose, Ellis
¥85.05
From a venerated and bestselling voice on American life comes a contemporary look at the decline of black rage; the demise of white guilt; and the intergenerational shifts in how blacks and whites view, and interact with, each otherIn the heady aftermath of President Obama's election, conventional wisdom suggested that the bitter, angry, and destructive elements of discrimination were ebbing at last and America was becoming a postracial nation. But with this dawning age that promised so much came shifting demographics and a newfound seat of rage in the polarizing Tea Party movement, even as black optimism gained ground, giving rise to questions about assumed truths concerning race in America.Combining the talents earned from a lifetime in journalism with the insights and thoughtfulness of a close observer of the American experience, renowned author Ellis Cose offers a fresh, original appraisal of our nation at this extraordinary time, tracking the diminishment of black anger and investigating the "generational shifting of the American mind." Weaving material from myriad interviews as well as two large and ambitious surveys that he conducted one of black Harvard MBAs and the other of graduates of A Better Chance, a program offering elite educational opportunities to thousands of young people of color since 1963 Cose offers an invaluable portrait of contemporary America that attempts to make sense of what a people do when the dream, for some, is finally within reach as one historical era ends and another begins. In short, The End of Anger is not just about blacks but about America its past and its hoped-for future and may well be the most important book dealing with race to be published in recent decades.
Nothing
Nothing
Butler, Blake
¥85.05
One of the most acclaimed young voices of his generation, Blake Butler now offers his first work of nonfiction: a deeply candid and wildly original look at the phenomenon of insomnia.Invoking scientific data, historical anecdote, Internet obsession, and figures as diverse as Andy Warhol, Gilles Deleuze, John Cage, Anton LaVey, Jorge Luis Borges, Brian Eno, and Stephen King, Butler traces the tension between sleeping and conscious life. And he reaches deep into his own experience from disturbing waking dreams, to his father's struggles with dementia, to his own epic 129-hour bout of insomnia to reveal the effect of sleeplessness on his imaginative landscape. The result is an exhilarating exploration of dream and awareness, desperation and relief, consciousness and conscience a fascinating maze-map of the borders between sleep and the waking world by one of today's most talked-about writers.
The Portland Vase
The Portland Vase
Brooks, Robin
¥85.05
For thousands of years an enigmatic and astonishingly beautiful piece of Roman art has captivated those who have come in contact with it.Made before the birth of Christ, the Portland Vase, as it is called, is renowned for both its beauty and its mystery.In The Portland Vase, Robin Brooks takes us on a vivid journey across Europe and through the centuries, as this delicate piece of glass, less than ten inches in height, passes through the hands of a stunning cast of characters, including the first Roman emperor, Augustus; a notorious tomb raider; a reckless cardinal; a princess with a nasty gambling habit; the ceramics genius Josiah Wedgwood; the secretive Duchess of Portland; and a host of politicians, dilettantes, and scam artists.Rich with passion, inspiration, jealousy, and endless speculation, the story of The Portland Vase spans more than two thousand years and remains one of the art world's greatest enigmas.
A Broom of One's Own
A Broom of One's Own
Peacock, Nancy
¥85.05
For the twice-published novelist, reading an article about herself in the National Enquirer under the headline "Here's One for the Books: Cleaning Lady Is an Acclaimed Author" was more than a shock. It was an inspiration. In A Broom of One's Own, Nancy Peacock, whose first novel was selected by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year, explores with warmth, wit, and candor what it means to be a writer. An encouragement to all hard-working artists, no matter how they make a living, Peacock's book provides valuable insights and advice on motivation, craft, and criticism while offering hilarious anecdotes about the houses she cleans.