Three surreal, erotically charged stories from Nobel Prize winner Yasunari Kawabata. In the three long tales in this collection, Yasunari Kawabata examines the boundaries between fantasy and reality in the minds of three lonely men. Piercing examinations of sexuality and human psychology—and works of remarkable subtlety and beauty—these stories showcase one of the twentieth century’s great writers—in any language—at his very best.
THE STORIES: FOB is told in a style that moves quickly between myth and reality, with the characters occasionally speaking directly to the audience. Grace and Dale are cousins, living in the Los Angeles area and attending college. Dale is fully Ame
Shortlisted for the Royal Society Science Book Prize 2021 'To compare any book to a Sacks is unfair, but this one lives up to it . . . I finished it feeling thrillingly unsettled, and wishing there was more.' James McConnachie, Sunday Times 'A study of diseases that we sometimes say are 'all in the mind', and an explanation of how unfair that characterisation is.' Tom Whipple, The Times Books of the Year In Sweden, refugee children fall asleep for months and years at a time. In upstate New York, high school students develop contagious seizures. In the US Embassy in Cuba, employees complain of headaches and memory loss after hearing strange noises in the night. These disparate cases are some of the most remarkable diagnostic mysteries of the twenty-first century, as both doctors and scientists have struggled to explain them within the boundaries of medical science and – more crucially – to treat them. What unites them is that they are all examples of a particular type of psychosomatic illness: medical disorders that are influenced as much by the idiosyncratic aspects of individual cultures as they are by human biology. Inspired by a poignant encounter with the sleeping refugee children of Sweden, Wellcome Prize-winning neurologist Suzanne O’Sullivan travels the world to visit other communities who have also been subject to outbreaks of so-called ‘mystery’ illnesses. From a derelict post-Soviet mining town in Kazakhstan, to the Mosquito Coast of Nicaragua via an oil town in Texas, to the heart of the Maria Mountains in Colombia, O’Sullivan hears remarkable stories from a fascinating array of people, and attempts to unravel their complex meaning while asking the question: who gets to define what is and what isn’t an illness? Reminiscent of the work of Oliver Sacks, Stephen Grosz and Henry Marsh, The Sleeping Beauties is a moving and unforgettable scientific investigation with a very human face. 'To compare any book to a Sacks is unfair, but this one lives up to it.' Sunday Times
In this spectacular New York Times bestselling father/son collaboration that “barrels along like a freight train” (Publishers Weekly), Stephen King and Owen King tell the highest of high-stakes stories: what might happen if women disappeared from the world of men? In a future so real and near it might be now, something happens when women go to sleep: they become shrouded in a cocoon-like gauze. If they are awakened, if the gauze wrapping their bodies is disturbed or violated, the women become feral and spectacularly violent. And while they sleep they go to another place, a better place, where harmony prevails and conflict is rare. One woman, the mysterious “Eve Black,” is immune to the blessing or curse of the sleeping disease. Is Eve a medical anomaly to be studied? Or is she a demon who must be slain? Abandoned, left to their increasingly primal urges, the men divide into warring factions, some wanted to kill Eve, some to save her. Others exploit the chaos to wreak their own vengeance on new enemies. All turn to violence in a suddenly all-male world. Set in a small Appalachian town whose primary employer is a woman’s prison, Sleeping Beauties is a wildly provocative, gloriously dramatic father-son collaboration that feels particularly urgent and relevant today.
"The most powerful stories encompass a paradox. Spindle is both mythic and true, old beyond reckoning and dazzlingly, gloriously new. You've known this story all your life; you have never heard its like before. The Storyteller Queen lives, and her name is E. K. Johnston." -Rachel Hartman, New York Times best-selling author of Seraphina/DIV DIVThe world is made safe by a woman...but it is a very big world. It has been generations since the Storyteller Queen drove the demon out of her husband and saved her country from fire and blood. Her family has prospered beyond the borders of their village, and two new kingdoms have sprouted on either side of the mountains where the demons are kept prisoner by bright iron, and by the creatures the Storyteller Queen made to keep them contained. But the prison is crumbling. Through years of careful manipulation, a demon has regained her power. She has made one kingdom strong and brought the other to its knees, waiting for the perfect moment to strike. When a princess is born, the demon is ready with the final blow: a curse that will cost the princess her very soul, or force her to destroy her own people to save her life. The threads of magic are tightly spun, binding princess and exiled spinners into a desperate plot to break the curse before the demon can become a queen of men. But the web of power is dangerously tangled--and they may not see the true pattern until it is unspooled.
The official graphic novel adaptation of the horror novel by Stephen King and Owen King concludes in this haunting interpretation of the chilling, timely bestseller. The mysterious plague known as Aurora has blanketed the world, and, to the men, all but a handful of sleep-deprived women seem trapped—cocooned—in seemingly endless slumber. In reality, their minds have been transported to a strange, utopic dream world. It's a world where small-town sheriff Lila Norcross and the other women can build their own society. And from which they might not want to wake. In the real world of Dooling, West Virginia, Lila's husband, beleaguered prison psychiatrist Clint Norcross, is struggling. He's trying to protect the woman called Eve Black from the ill-thought-out actions of increasingly desperate men. But Eve, as the only woman capable of waking up, has her own plans: a test with global consequences. A test Clint will have to pass if he ever hopes to see his wife again. Collects Sleeping Beauties issues #6-10, by writer Rio Youers (The Forgotten Girl) and artist Alison Sampson (Winnebago Graveyard), from the novel by Stephen King (The Institute, The Stand) and Owen King (Intro to Alien Invasion).
AN ELLE MAGAZINE BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR AN O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE MUST-READ LGBTQ BOOK OF THE YEAR AN ELECTRIC LIT BEST SHORT STORY COLLECTION OF THE YEAR A GRINDR QUEER BOOK OF THE YEAR A THE ADVOCATE LGBT+ Book You Absolutely Need to Read "Riveting… Every lie reveals itself so exquisitely that the parallels become an added pleasure, as soon as we uncover the ways they diverge." —New York Times Book Review "Dazzling. Here is a confident, psychologically astute new writer with a bold new vision." —Garrard Conley, New York Times bestselling author of Boy Erased Throughout this striking debut collection we meet characters who have lied, who have sometimes created elaborate falsehoods, and who now must cope with the way that those deceptions eat at the very fabric of their lives and relationships. In the title story, the narrator, desperate to save a love affair on the rocks, hires an actor to play a friend he invented in order to seem less lonely, after his boyfriend catches on to his compulsion for lying and demands to know this friend is real; in "Aim for the Heart," a man's lies about a hunting habit leave him with an unexpected deer carcass and the need to parse unsettling high school memories; in "Rorschach," a theater producer runs a show in which death row inmates are crucified in an on-stage rendering of the New Testament, while being haunted daily by an unrequited love and nightly by ghosts of his own creation. In I Know You Know Who I Am, Kispert deftly explores deception and performance, the uneasiness of reconciling a queer identity with the wider world, and creates a sympathetic, often darkly humorous, portrait of characters searching for paths to intimacy.
With the help of three good fairies, Princess Aurora grows up safe and protected from the evil Maleficent. But everything changes when she meets Prince Phillip and falls in love. Disney Princess fans ages 2 to 5 will love this Little Golden Book retelling of Disney Sleeping Beauty!
