Jacques Roy
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English
Description
A captivating novel of Renaissance Italy detailing the mysterious life of Bartolomeo Scappi, the legendary chef to several popes and author of one of the bestselling cookbooks of all time, and the nephew who sets out to discover his late uncle's secrets-including the identity of the noblewoman Bartolomeo loved until he died.
When Bartolomeo Scappi dies in 1577, he leaves his vast estate-properties, money, and his position-to his nephew and apprentice...
22) Players
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English
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In Players, DeLillo explores the dark side of contemporary affluence and its discontents. Pammy and Lyle Wynant are an attractive, modern couple who seem to have it all. Yet behind their "ideal" life is a lingering boredom and quiet desperation: their talk is mostly chatter, their sex life more a matter of obligatory "satisfaction" than pleasure. Then Lyle sees a man killed on the floor of the Stock Exchange and becomes involved with the terrorists...
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A young college grad buys a house in Detroit for $500 and attempts to restore it-and his new neighborhood-to its original glory in this deeply felt, sharply observed personal quest to create meaning and community out of the fallen…A standout.
Drew Philp, an idealistic college student from a working-class Michigan family, decides to live where he can make a difference. He sets his sights on Detroit, the failed metropolis of abandoned buildings,...
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This book follows the search for a missing sister in a near-future world where infertility has produced a dangerous underground.
'Find her. You need to keep looking, no matter what. I'm afraid of what might've happened to her. You be afraid too.' After months of disturbing behavior, Gardner Quinn has vanished. Her older sister Fredericka is desperate to find her, but Fred is also pregnant-miraculously so, in a near-future America struggling with...
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From the author of White Noise (winner of the National Book Award) and Zero K
Bucky Wunderlick, rock star and budding messiah, has hit a spiritual wall. In mid-tour he bolts from his band to hole up in a dingy East Village apartment and separate himself from the paranoid machine that propels the culture he has helped create. As faithful fans await messages, Bucky encounters every sort of roiling farce he is trying to escape. A penetrating look at...
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Weaving together scientific studies from clinical psychologists, longitudinal studies of health and happiness, historical accounts and literary depictions, child-rearing manuals, and the language of online dating sites, Jonah Lehrer's A Book About Love plumbs the most mysterious, most formative, most important impulse governing our lives.
Love confuses and compels us-and it can destroy and define us. It has inspired our greatest poetry, defined our...
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Across a continent still reeling from World War I, a story about a love affair between two Americans and the lie that changes everything.
France, 1921-Tom, a young American orphaned in World War I, is working at an ossuary in Verdun, helping priests comfort families seeking answers about their loved ones. But nothing in his past-not his rough-and-tumble Chicago childhood nor his experiences driving ambulances across French battlefields-can prepare...
28) Galgorithm
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English
Description
A romantic comedy about high school, heartbreak, and having all the answers. What if the secrets of dating and love were revealed in one simple formula? That's the tantalizing proposition high school senior Shane Chambliss offers the hopeless and hapless guys who come to him for relationship advice. After the girl of his dreams breaks his heart, Shane devises a mysterious formula called the Galgorithm and establishes himself as the resident dating...
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Award-winning journalist and author Joe Posnanski enters the world of Harry Houdini and his legions of devoted fans in an immersive, entertaining, and magical work on the illusionist's impact on American culture-and why his legacy endures to this day.
Harry Houdini. Say his name and a number of things come to mind. Escapes. Illusions. Magic. Chains. Safes. Live burials. Close to a century after his death, nearly every person in America knows his...
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A dazzling account of the world's longest road, the Pan-American Highway, and the epic quest to link North and South America, a dramatic story of commerce, technology, politics, and the divergent fates of the Americas in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.
The Pan-American Highway, monument to a century's worth of diplomacy and investment, education and engineering, scandal and sweat, is the longest road in the world, passable everywhere save...
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A timely work of groundbreaking history explains how the American middle class ballooned at mid-century until it dominated the nation, showing who benefited and what brought the expansion to an end.
In Promised Land, David Stebenne examines the extraordinary revival of the middle class in mid-twentieth century America and how it drastically changed the country. The story begins with the pervasive income and wealth inequality of the pre-New Deal...
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A sweeping, definitive biography of Samuel Colt-the inventor of the legendary Colt revolver (a.k.a. six-shooter)-which changed the US forever, triggering the industrial revolution and the settlement of the American West.
Patented in 1836, the Colt pistol with its revolving cylinder was the first practical firearm that could shoot more than one bullet without reloading. For many reasons, Colt's gun had a profound effect on American history. It’s...
33) The Waiter
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English
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In the tradition of modern classics The Dinner and A Gentleman in Moscow comes The Waiter, in which the finely tuned balance of a grand European restaurant (that has seen better days) is irrevocably upset by an unexpected guest.
In a centuries-old European restaurant called The Hills, a middle-aged waiter takes pride in the unchangeable aspects of his job: the well-worn uniform, the ragged but solid tablecloths, and the regular diners. Some are there...
34) Such Good Work
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From Johannes Lichtman comes a wisely comic debut novel about a teacher whose efforts to stay sober land him in Sweden, but the refugee crisis forces a very different kind of reckoning.
You don't have to be perfect to do good.
Jonas Anderson wants a fresh start.
He's made plenty of bad decisions in his life, and at age twenty-eight he's been fired from yet another teaching position after assigning homework like, Attend a stranger's funeral and...
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A brilliant examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, that shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs-rivaling any scientific inventions-and engineering enchantments to the human heart and mind.
Literature is a technology like any other. And the writers we revere-from Homer, Shakespeare, Austen, and others-each made a unique technical breakthrough that can be viewed as both a narrative...
36) The Names
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English
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Set against the backdrop of a lush and exotic Greece, The Names is considered the book which began to drive "sharply upward the size of his readership" (Los Angeles Times Book Review). Among the cast of DeLillo's bizarre yet fully realized characters in The Names are Kathryn, the narrator's estranged wife; their son, the six-year-old novelist; Owen, the scientist; and the neurotic narrator obsessed with his own neuroses. A thriller, a mystery, and...
37) Ratner's Star
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English
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One of DeLillo's first novels, Ratner's Star follows Billy, the genius adolescent, who is recruited to live in obscurity, underground, as he tries to help a panel of estranged, demented, and yet lovable scientists communicate with beings from outer space. It is a mix of quirky humor, science, mathematical theories, as well as the complex emotional distance and sadness people feel. Ratner's Star demonstrates both the thematic and prosaic muscularity...
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A former parole officer shines a bright light on a huge yet hidden part of our justice system through the intertwining stories of seven parolees striving to survive the chaos that awaits them after prison in this illuminating and dramatic book.
Prompted by a dead-end retail job and a vague desire to increase the amount of justice in his hometown, Jason Hardy became a parole officer in New Orleans at the worst possible moment. Louisiana's incarceration...
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From the bestselling and award-winning author of Whistling Past the Graveyard comes an adventure tale about two daredevils and a farm boy who embark on the journey of a lifetime across America's heartland in the Roaring Twenties. Set in the rapidly changing world of 1920s America, this is a story of three people from very different backgrounds: Henry "Schuler" Jefferson, son of German immigrants from Midwestern farm country; Cora Rose Haviland, a...
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From the Academy Award-winning cowriter of Birdman, a wonderfully eccentric, suspenseful debut in the tradition of Misery and Kiss of the Spiderwoman about a screenwriter kidnapped by a world-famous director who orders him to compose a masterpiece.
Pablo, a failed Argentine novelist-turned-screenwriter, has been kidnapped by the greatest Latin American film director of all time and is kept in a basement where he works, day after day, on what he is...