Richard Powers
In a time when much of the country sees red whenever the subject of gay marriage comes up, Dan Savage—outspoken author of the column Savage Love—makes it personal.
Dan Savage's mother wants him to get married. His boyfriend, Terry, says "no thanks" because he doesn't want to act like a straight person. Their six-year-old son, D.J., says his two dads aren't "allowed" to get married but that he'd like to come to the reception and eat
...A "skillful, literate" (New York Times Book Review) biography of the persecuted genius who helped create the modern computer
To solve one of the great mathematical problems of his day, Alan Turing proposed an imaginary computer. Then, attempting to break a Nazi code during World War II, he successfully designed and built one, thus ensuring the Allied victory. Turing became a champion of artificial intelligence, but his work was cut short. As
...24) Drive
Much later, as he sat with his back against an inside wall of a Motel 6 just north of Phoenix, watching the pool of blood lap toward him, Driver would wonder whether he had made a terrible mistake. Later still, of course, there'd be no doubt. But for now Driver is, as they say, in the moment. And the moment includes this blood lapping toward him, the pressure of dawn's late light at windows and door, traffic sounds from the interstate nearby, the
...Chilling and complex, Nightblind is an extraordinary thriller from Ragnar Jónasson, an undeniable new talent.
Ari Thor Arason is a local policeman who has an uneasy relationship with the villagers in an idyllically quiet fishing village in Northern Iceland—where no one locks their doors.
The peace of this close-knit community is shattered by a murder. One of Ari's colleagues is gunned down at point-blank range in the
Come back to the Ringworld—the most astonishing feat of engineering ever encountered. A place of untold technological wonders, home to myriad humanoid races, and world of some of the most beloved science fiction stories ever written.
The human Louis Wu; the puppeteer known as the Hindmost; Acolyte, son of the Kzin called Chmeee: legendary beings brought together once again in the defense of the Ringworld. Something is going on with the
...In 1991, flight attendant Nancy Ludwig checked in to an airport hotel near Detroit. The next morning she was found gagged, raped, and tortured—her throat slit with such rage that she was nearly decapitated. Her husband Arthur never gave up hope that the future would bring enough evidence to close the case. But it was the past that held the clue.
In 1985, fifty-five-year-old Margarette Eby, a music professor, met the same grisly death
...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
...Dazzling, enchanting, and epic, The Bells is the confession of a thief, kidnapper, and unlikely lover—a boy with the voice of an angel whose exquisite sense of hearing becomes both his life's tragic curse and its greatest blessing.
Moses Froben was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps, the bastard son of a deaf-mute woman, banished to the church tower to ring the Loudest and Most Beautiful Bells in the land each day. His life is simple
...Bill Gates told Wired that if he were a teenager today, he would be hacking biology. "If you want to change the world in some big way," he says, "that's where you should start—biological molecules."
The most disruptive force on the planet resides in DNA. Biotech companies and academic researchers are just beginning to unlock the potential of piecing together life from scratch. Champions of synthetic biology believe that turning
...32) Destiny's Road
Get ready for an adventure on a world from the brilliant imagination of New York Times bestselling author Larry Niven.
Wide and smooth, the Road was seared into planet Destiny's rocky surface by the fusion drive of the powered landing craft, Cavorite. The Cavorite deserted the original interstellar colonists, stranding them without hope of contacting Earth.
Now, descendants of those pioneers have many questions about the Road, but no settler
...33) Lowboy
Early one morning in New York City, Will Heller, a sixteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, gets on a New York City uptown B train on a fantastic and terrifying quest to save the world.
Violet Heller, his frantic mother, is joined by Ali Lateef, a missing-persons specialist, in a desperate attempt to locate her son before psychosis claims him completely. As the stakes grow higher, Lateef gradually comes to realize that this is more than
...34) Berserker Lies
Our wars were behind us. Mankind was moving out from the planet of its birth. New worlds were settled, and with the wealth of the galaxy at hand, poverty was eliminated. Then out of a clear summer sky came the first berserker attack.
The great battles began—between life and nonlife, between freethinking humanity and the preprogrammed killing machines we came to call berserkers. And some of those battles would be waged with lies.
This
...On a moonlit night 30,000 years ago, a young Neanderthal boy dreamed a true dream. In his dream, the spirit of the cave bear commanded the boy to follow her. Transported to a distant future beyond our own, he entered a strange world of brilliant and terrifying possibilities, a world inhabited by people who did not know the nature spirits, or even understand the spirits of their own technology.
Guided only by memories, the young Neanderthal must
...36) The Numerati
Every day, we produce loads of data about ourselves simply by living in the modern world: we click web pages, flip channels, drive through automatic toll booths, shop with credit cards, and make cell phone calls. Now, in one of the greatest undertakings of the twenty-first century, a savvy group of mathematicians and computer scientists is beginning to sift through this data to dissect us and map out our next steps. Their goal? To manipulate our
...Irving Kirsch has the world doubting the efficacy of antidepressants. Do they work, or are they no better than placebos? Like his colleagues, Kirsch spent years referring patients to psychiatrists to have their depression treated with drugs. Eventually, however, he decided to investigate for himself just how effective the drugs actually were.
With fifteen years of research, Kirsch demonstrates that what everyone "knew" about antidepressants
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A boy's family travels to the Allegheny Mountains in order for his entomologist father to find an undiscovered moth he remembers seeing there in his youth. Over the course of the summer, the boy's sister, who suffers from autism, finds she can speak the language of various insects and creatures of nature, allowing her to understand the world around her for the first time in her life. And as the boy himself comes of age, he discovers that he
...39) Starman Jones
The stars were closed to Max Jones. To get into space you either needed connections, a membership in the arcane Guild, or a whole lot more money than Max, the son of a widowed, poor mother, was ever going to have. What Max does have going for him are his uncle's prized astrogation manuals—books on star navigation that Max literally commits to memory word for word, equation for equation. When Max's mother decides to remarry a bullying oaf,
...This hilarious, take-no-prisoners novel about a cynical, sex-obsessed teenager's pining love for an intelligent girl is now a major motion picture from Dimension Films starring Michael Cera.
Youth in Revolt brings us the journals of Nick Twisp, California's most precocious diarist, whose ongoing struggles to make sense out of high school, deal with his divorced parents, and lose his virginity result in his transformation from an unassuming
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