Full of bleak brutality contrasted with lyrical warmth, this beautiful novel left me aching.Įlizabeth Wein, author of Printz Honor winner CODE NAME VERITY smart and fresh supernatural take on the spy novel… Debut novelist Smith’s background in foreign affairs and Russian culture shines through in the historical context of her story and the political savvy of her characters and plot.Īmidst the gritty, controlled dangers of a fearful dystopia, Yulia struggles for her identity and her life in a harsh world doubly frightening for being no fantasy. Yulia quickly realizes she can trust no one-not her KGB superiors or the other operatives vying for her attention-and must rely on her own wits and skills to survive in this world where no SEKRET can stay hidden for long. space program, she’s thrust into a world of suspicion, deceit, and horrifying power. But when she’s captured by the KGB and forced to work as a psychic spy with a mission to undermine the U.S. She must hide her thoughts and control her emotions to survive in Communist Russia-especially because she is able to read the minds of the people she touches. Yulia’s father always taught her that an empty mind is a safe mind. Krisis: a Sekret short story in Kisses & Curses: A Fierce Reads Anthologyįrom debut author Lindsay Smith comes an espionage thriller with a dash of both history and dystopia.In 1960s Soviet Russia, a group of psychic teenagers are forced to spy for the KGB, with world-changing consequences.
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"I started writing when I was seven or eight. She recounts her formative years and where she headed once she encountered that inevitable fork in the road where we can choose between being shut in and shut down by our traumatic experiences, or using them as fertile clay for character-building: What makes Lamott so compelling is that all of her advice comes not from the ivory tower of the pantheon but from an honest place of exquisite vulnerability and hard-earned life-wisdom. Another is that writing motivates you to look closely at life, at life as it lurches by and tramps around." "One of the gifts of being a writer is that it gives you an excuse to do things, to go places and explore. Lamott adds to the collected wisdom of great writers with equal parts candor and conviction, teaching us as much about writing as she does about creativity at large and, even beyond that, about being human and living a full life - because, after all, as Lamott notes in the beginning, writing is nothing more nor less than a sensemaking mechanism for life: Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life ( public library) is among my 10 favorite books on writing - a treasure trove of insight both practical and profound, timelessly revisitable and yielding deeper resonance each time. Includes Special, Never-Before-Solicited Opinions on Breastfeeding, Princesses, Photoshop, the Electoral Process, and Italian Rum Cake! Read Excerpt Tina Fey reveals all, and proves what we’ve always suspected: you’re no one until someone calls you bossy. From her youthful days as a vicious nerd to her tour of duty on Saturday Night Live from her passionately halfhearted pursuit of physical beauty to her life as a mother eating things off the floor from her one-sided college romance to her nearly fatal honeymoon - from the beginning of this paragraph to this final sentence. She has seen both these dreams come true.Īt last, Tina Fey’s story can be told. She also had a dream that one day she would be a comedian on TV. Spirited and whip-smart, these laugh-out-loud autobiographical essays are “a masterpiece” from the Emmy Award-winning actress and comedy writer known for 30 Rock, Mean Girls, and SNL” ( Sunday Telegraph).īefore Liz Lemon, before “Weekend Update,” before “Sarah Palin,” Tina Fey was just a young girl with a dream: a recurring stress dream that she was being chased through a local airport by her middle-school gym teacher. One year later, my fifteen-year-old son, Matthew, died from bone cancer, and thereafter my fiction tended to depict the search for a son, particularly in Fireflies (1988) and Desperate Measures (1994). With two professions, I worked seven days a week until exhaustion forced me to make a painful choice and resign from the university in 1986. During this period, I was a professor of American literature at the University of Iowa. The search for a father is prominent in that book, as it is in later ones, most notably The Brotherhood of the Rose (1984), a thriller about orphans and spies. The result of their influence is my 1972 novel, First Blood, which introduced Rambo. Eventually I decided to be a writer and sought help from two men who became metaphorical fathers to me: Stirling Silliphant, the head writer for the classic TV series "Route 66" about two young men in a Corvette who travel America in search of themselves, and Philip Klass (whose pen name is William Tenn), a novelist who taught at the Pennsylvania State University where I went to graduate school from 1966 to 1970. I grew up unsure of who I was, desperately in need of a father figure. My mother had difficulty raising me and at the same time holding a job, so she put me in an orphanage and later in a series of boarding homes. My father was killed during World War II, shortly after I was born in 1943. His hands have no lines, and his index fingers are as long as his middle fingers. His eyes changed color, depending on who saw them. When Leland Gaunt first appeared in Castle Rock, Maine, he seemed like a charming man in his 50's or 60's. In the film, he was portrayed by the late Max von Sydow, who also portrayed Ernst Stavro Blofeld in Never Say Never Again, Ming the Merciless in Flash Gordon, Lamar Burgess in Minority Report, and Varden Reynard in Rush Hour 3, and voiced Vigo the Carpathian in Ghostbusters II. It is later revealed that he is actually a powerful demon that tricks customers into giving him their souls. Gaunt is the proprietor of the store Needful Things, a this n' that shop that seemed to have an item perfectly suited for anyone who ever came in. He is also the unseen overarching antagonist of the short story It Grows on You. Leland Gaunt is the main antagonist of Stephen King's horror novel Needful Things, as well as the 1993 film of the same name. Of course I was gone before they realized what they'd purchased. When I started out I was just a peddler moving across the blind face of a distant land. Hammett's childhood, his life in San Francisco, and especially his experience as a detective deeply informed his writing and his characters, from the nameless Continental Op, hero of his stories and early novels, to Sam Spade and Nick Charles. That largely overlooked phase is the subject of Nathan Ward's enthralling The Lost Detective. While Hammett's life on center stage has been well-documented, the question of how he got there has not. The tuberculosis he contracted during the war forced him to leave the Pinkertons-but it may well have prompted one of America's most acclaimed writing careers. Born in 1894 into a poor Maryland family, Hammett left school at fourteen and held several jobs before joining the Pinkerton National Detective Agency as an operative in 1915 and, with time off in 1918 to serve at the end of World War I, he remained with the agency until 1922, participating alike in the banal and dramatic action of an operative. Before he became a household name in America as perhaps our greatest hard-boiled crime writer, before his attachment to Lillian Hellman and blacklisting during the McCarthy era, and his subsequent downward spiral, Dashiell Hammett led a life of action. William plans to use her as bait to draw Spider out, but once he starts to have feelings for her, it’s not quite so easy to put her in danger, well in more danger than she’s already in that is. He quickly learns that the hobo lady is putting on an act and is actually Cerise Mar, the one person the Mirror told him to get close to. There is a dirty hobo lady taking the same tour and she eventually kills their guide leaving William and herself to work together to get through the dangers of the swamp. He follows the Mirror’s instructions and goes into the weird and takes a tour that will lead him into the Edge and the swamps that makes up the Mire. They want him to go to the Mire, where they believe Spider has gone and kill him. William is then visited by a couple of associates from an organization that is hunting Spider, known as the Mirror. When he gets an unexpected package on his porch a box that includes pictures of changeling children that were brutally murdered and a note from the one who is responsible, William’s enemy, Spider. It’s been two years since Rose ran off with Declan and William has made a residence in the Edge, keeping to himself and accepting that he will always live alone. Bayou Moon The Edge, Book #2 By Ilona Andrews ISBN# 9780441019458 Author’s Website: Something is lurking in the black heart of their city, and it is more depraved than either of them could ever imagine. A page-turning historical mystery full of twists and turns from the author of The Wicked Cometh. But both she and Rebekah are lured into the most sinister of investigations as whispers from Hester's old life return to poison the present. Out of these shadows comes Hester White, a young woman who is desperate to escape the slums by any means possible.When Hester is thrust into the world of the aristocratic Brock family, she leaps at the chance to improve her station in life under the tutelage of the mysterious Rebekah Brock. The year is 1831.Down murky alleyways and in filthy hovels, acts of unspeakable wickedness take place and vulnerable people begin to disappear from the streets. The Wicked Cometh will take readers on a heart-racing journey through backstreets swathed with fog to richly curtained, brightly lit country houses from the libraries and colleges of gentlemen, to sawdust-strewn gin palaces where ne'er-do-wells drink and scheme, all told through the eyes of a heroine with nothing to lose. This review has been corrected: an earlier version stated this was the first biography of Betty MacDonald another biography, “Betty: The Story of Betty MacDonald, Author of ‘The Egg and I,’” by Anne Wellman, was published earlier this year. Becker's book whets the reader's appetite for MacDonald's lesser-known works, such as her memoirs of her stint in a tuberculosis ward (The Plague and I) and of her Depression-era struggles as a single mother with two young daughters (Anybody Can Do Anything.) This accessible and entertaining bio will leave readers wanting more-which might be just the way to inspire them to dip into MacDonald's work. Reading about MacDonald has some of the aspect of trailing a woman astride a bucking bronco, and readers can only admire her for keeping her seat through turbulent times. Her life wasn't easy, given the constricted nature of women's roles, the Great Depression, lawsuits, battles with tuberculosis and cancer, and the rough-and-tumble publishing world. Becker's (The Future Remembered) account, created with the cooperation of surviving relatives and access to private letters, outlines what life was like for MacDonald, a precursor to later female humorists such as Erma Bombeck. The book created a small empire of Ma and Pa Kettle movies and several children’s books with similar characters. Piggle-Wiggle books and The Egg and I (genesis of a series of popular movies). Betty MacDonald’s first memoir, The Egg and I, was a total hoot. This is a succinct and lively biography of Betty MacDonald, the bestselling mid-20th-century author of the Mrs. Supernatural Noir edited by Ellen Datlow.The Siege of Trencher's Farm by Gordon Williams.Werewolves and Shapeshifters: Encounters with the Beast Within edited by John Skipp.The Disappeared and Other Stories by Ray Garton.Is There A Demon In You? edited by Kim and Tony Duarte.The Secretary of Dreams: Volume Two by Stephen King.Halloween: New Poems edited by Al Sarantonio.Brides of the Impaler by Edward Lee (hard cover and paperback).Once Upon a Time in Midnight by John Urbancik.In Laymon's Terms edited by Kelly Laymon, Steve Gerlach, and Richard Chizmar.On Dangerous Ground: Stories of Western Noir edited by Ed Gorman, Dave Zeltserman and Martin H. Anyhow, here's a list of my unread books, in order of next to read at the top. I'm working hard to keep the list under 500. Something not helped by all the $0.99 specials on books that I'm interested in. A result of a massive life change including kids plus an increase in my book buying addiction. I'm kind of embarrassed that it is now past 400 books. At one point the list used to be in the 30s or 40s but that was years ago. This list will vary in length depending on how fast I'm reading, how fast the authors I follow are turning out new material and which new books I see that are interesting. I'm not sure about others but I generally will buy new books and throw them into my stack of unread books. |