In the perfect match of author and subject, poet and novelist Erica Jong charts the life and legacy of Henry Miller, the archetypal sensualist whose notorious Tropic of Cancer and subsequent books ultimately changed the boundaries of literature. With the same exuberance and love of language that coined "the zipless fuck" in Fear of Flying, she has created "a fascinating book about writers and writing as she meditates on Henry Miller who in turn meditates on her" (Gore Vidal).
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • Publishers Weekly New Hyde Hospital’s psychiatric ward has a new resident. It also has a very, very old one. Pepper is a rambunctious big man, minor-league troublemaker, working-class hero (in his own mind), and, suddenly, the surprised inmate of a budget-strapped mental institution in Queens, New York. He’s not mentally ill, but that doesn’t seem to matter. He is accused of a crime he can’t quite square with his memory. In the darkness of his room on his first night, he’s visited by a terrifying creature with the body of an old man and the head of a bison who nearly kills him before being hustled away by the hospital staff. It’s no delusion: The other patients confirm that a hungry devil roams the hallways when the sun goes down. Pepper rallies three other inmates in a plot to fight back: Dorry, an octogenarian schizophrenic who’s been on the ward for decades and knows all its secrets; Coffee, an African immigrant with severe OCD, who tries desperately to send alarms to the outside world; and Loochie, a bipolar teenage girl who acts as the group’s enforcer. Battling the pill-pushing staff, one another, and their own minds, they try to kill the monster that’s stalking them. But can the Devil die? The Devil in Silver brilliantly brings together the compelling themes that spark all of Victor LaValle’s radiant fiction: faith, race, class, madness, and our relationship with the unseen and the uncanny. More than that, it’s a thrillingly suspenseful work of literary horror about friendship, love, and the courage to slay our own demons. Praise for The Devil in Silver “A fearless exploration of America’s heart of darkness . . . a dizzying high-wire act.”—The Washington Post “LaValle never writes the same book and his recent is a stunner. . . . Fantastical, hellish and hilarious.”—Los Angeles Times “It’s simply too bighearted, too gentle, too kind, too culturally observant and too idiosyncratic to squash into the small cupboard of any one genre, or even two.”—The New York Times Book Review “Embeds a sophisticated critique of contemporary America’s inhumane treatment of madness in a fast-paced story that is by turns horrifying, suspenseful, and comic.”—The Boston Globe “LaValle uses the thrills of horror to draw attention to timely matters. And he does so without sucking the joy out of the genre. . . . A striking and original American novelist.”—The New Republic
Develop equity, excellence, and well-being across the whole system! The world is troubled! We need to combine a moral imperative and a system transformation to survive for the better. Education is crucial to our future but needs to play a more direct role in shaping our future. The Devil is in the Details shows how we can re-think the education system and its three levels of leadership—local, middle, and top—so that each level can contribute to dramatic turnaround for education and society. The focus is on examining details to ensure effective actions are taken, rather than assuming large pronouncements and policies will drive change. Readers will find: • Details and analysis about successful systems in California, Ontario, and Australia • Ideas for how leaders at all levels can take steps to begin • Vignettes, actions and strategies that illustrate how to address equity, excellence and well-being With the goal of transforming the culture of learning to develop greater equity, excellence, and student wellbeing, this book will help you liberate the system and maintain focus.
NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS’ CHOICE • Big Tobacco meets Silicon Valley in this “deeply reported and illuminating” (The New York Times Book Review) corporate exposé of what happened when two of the most notorious industries collided—and the vaping epidemic was born. “The best business book I’ve read since Bad Blood.”—Jonathan Eig, New York Times bestselling author of Ali: A Life Howard Willard lusted after Juul. As the CEO of tobacco giant Philip Morris’s parent company and a veteran of the industry’s long fight to avoid being regulated out of existence, he grew obsessed with a prize he believed could save his company—the e-cigarette, a product with all the addictive upside of the original without the same apparent health risks and bad press. Meanwhile, in Silicon Valley, Adam Bowen and James Monsees began working on a device that was meant to save lives and destroy Big Tobacco, but they ended up baking the industry’s DNA into their invention’s science and marketing. Ultimately, Juul’s e-cigarette was so effective and so market-dominating that it put the company on a collision course with Philip Morris and sparked one of the most explosive public health crises in recent memory. In a deeply reported account, award-winning journalist Lauren Etter tells a riveting story of greed and deception in one of the biggest botched deals in business history. Etter shows how Philip Morris’s struggle to innovate left Willard desperate to acquire Juul, even as his own team sounded alarms about the startup’s reliance on underage customers. And she shows how Juul’s executives negotiated a lavish deal that let them pocket the lion’s share of Philip Morris’s $12.8 billion investment while government regulators and furious parents mounted a campaign to hold the company’s feet to the fire. The Devil’s Playbook is the inside story of how Juul’s embodiment of Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things” ethos wrought havoc on American health, and how a beleaguered tobacco company was seduced by the promise of a new generation of addicted customers. With both companies’ eyes on the financial prize, neither anticipated the sudden outbreak of vaping-linked deaths that would terrorize a nation, crater Juul’s value, end Willard’s career, and show the costs in human life of the rush to riches—while Juul’s founders, board members, and employees walked away with a windfall.
“The Devil holds the strings which move us!” (Charles Baudelaire, The Flowers of Evil, 1857.) Satan, Beelzebub, Lucifer... the Devil has many names and faces, all of which have always served artists as a source of inspiration. Often commissioned by religious leaders as images of fear or veneration, depending on the society, representations of the underworld served to instruct believers and lead them along the path of righteousness. For other artists, such as Hieronymus Bosch, they provided a means of denouncing the moral decrepitude of one’s contemporaries. In the same way, literature dealing with the Devil has long offered inspiration to artists wishing to exorcise evil through images, especially the works of Dante and Goethe. In the 19th century, romanticism, attracted by the mysterious and expressive potential of the theme, continued to glorify the malevolent. Auguste Rodin’s The Gates of Hell, the monumental, tormented work of a lifetime, perfectly illustrates this passion for evil, but also reveals the reason for this fascination. Indeed, what could be more captivating for a man than to test his mastery by evoking the beauty of the ugly and the diabolic?
Ashley Reeves is a young journalist at freak-of-nature magazine Missing Link. His future's bright, even if he does spend most of his time investigating hoaxes. When he receives a letter promising him a once-in-a-lifetime story, he jumps at the opportunity. The only thing is, his life is exactly what it might cost him. The letter is from Reginald Mather, a man who at first seems no more than an eccentric collector of insects, happy to live in isolation on a remote island. But when Ashley finds himself stranded with Mather and unearths the horrific truth behind the collector's past, he is thrown headlong into a macabre nightmare that quickly spirals out of control. Ashley's life is in danger. . . . And Mather is not the only enemy. . . . Gruesome, compelling, and terrifying, The Hand of the Devil will make you never want to leave the house without bug spray again.
“A personal how-to guide for investigative journalists, a twisted tale of a scam of huge proportions, and a really good read” (Bethany McLean, author of The Smartest Guys in the Room), this spellbinding true story follows a pair of award-winning CNN investigative journalists as they track down the mysterious psychic at the center of an international scam that stole tens of millions of dollars from the elderly and emotionally vulnerable. While investigating financial crimes for CNN Money, Blake Ellis and Melanie Hicken were intrigued by reports that elderly Americans were giving away thousands of dollars to mail-in schemes. With a little digging, they soon discovered a shocking true story. Victims received personalized letters from a woman who, claiming amazing psychic powers, convinced them to send money in return for riches, good health, and good fortune. The predatory scam had been going on unabated for decades, raking in more than $200 million in the United States and Canada alone—with investigators from all over the world unable to stop it. And at the center of it all—an elusive French psychic named Maria Duval. Based on the five-part series that originally appeared on CNN’s website in 2016 and was seen by more than three million people, A Deal with the Devil picks up where the series left off as Ellis and Hicken reveal more bizarre characters, follow new leads, close in on Maria Duval, and connect the dots in an edge-of-your-seat journey across the US to England and France. A Deal with the Devil is a fascinating, thrilling search for the truth that will suck you “deep into the heart of a labyrinthine investigation that raises bigger questions about greed, manipulation, and the desperate hunger to believe” (Megan Abbott, author of You Will Know Me).
Charles Carter, dubbed Carter the Great by Houdini himself, was born into privilege but became a magician out of need: only when dazzling an audience can he defeat his fear of loneliness. But in 1920s America the stakes are growing higher, as technology and the cinema challenge the allure of magic and Carter's stunts become increasingly audacious. Until the night President Harding takes part in Carter's act only to die two hours later, and Carter finds himself pursued not only by the Secret Service but by a host of others desperate for the terrible secret they believe Harding confided in him. Seamlessly blending reality and fiction, Gold lays before us a glittering and romantic panorama of our modern world at a point of irrevocable change.
New York Times bestselling author Jeff Rovin has held readers in breathless suspense with his Tom Clancy’s Op-Center novels. He has created compelling characters with vividly rendered emotions and actions. His page-turning thrillers have addressed questions of good and evil in our times. Now, Rovin confronts the question of Good and Evil on the ultimate battleground. A human soul hangs in the balance, and thousands of years of religious teachings depict only the beginning of the fight for dominion over man. Psychologist Sarah Lynch is stunned when one of her young patients hangs himself. Evidence reveals that Fredric had become a Satanist. Intending to solve the puzzle of Fredric’s death, Sarah attempts to conjure the devil—surely then she will understand what the teenager was thinking. Sarah knows that belief in God and the Devil is a construct of the human mind and that people contain within them both good and evil. Her own family is the perfect example. Sarah’s mother is still in denial about her dead husband’s alcoholism, but acts as a wonderful grandparent to the son of the family’s live-in housekeeper. Her alcoholic brother bounces from girlfriend to girlfriend and job to job, but is always there when Sarah needs him. And Sarah herself? She lost her faith more than a decade ago, during a personal crisis. But she is dedicated to giving others the help she did not receive. Even the nun who is Sarah’s best friend cannot break through Sarah’s shield of cynicism. But Satan can. The Devil himself rises in Sarah’s office, sometimes a being of dark smoke and sometimes a creature of all-too-perfect, seductive flesh. Most disturbing is Satan’s claim that only by following him can people find real happiness. In the Devil’s theology, God is a brutal, jealous bully. And as God and Satan battle for Sarah’s soul, Sarah comes to believe him. She forgets that he is the Master of Lies . . . .
