Limber up for life with this seductive guide to all the right moves to tone up your body. The latest trend in urban gyms, classes are based on exotic dancing and pole dancing and are fun and a sleaze-free way to get fit and boost confidence.

About the Author

Leach Stoffer teaches exotic dancing for everyday women at The Learning Studio in Pennsylvania, USA. The Learning Studio run classes in exotic dancing in the USA, Canada and Britain and have produced The Art of Exotic Dancing for Everyday Women video. Classes and video have been widely reviewed in national newspapers and magazines in Britain and North America.

A young man's decision to rob a bank profoundly impacts his loved ones as well as several strangers as they all discover the importance of each moment in life.

What is Un Lun Dun?

It is London through the looking glass, an urban Wonderland of strange delights where all the lost and broken things of London end up . . . and some of its lost and broken people, too–including Brokkenbroll, boss of the broken umbrellas; Obaday Fing, a tailor whose head is an enormous pin-cushion, and an empty milk carton called Curdle. Un Lun Dun is a place where words are alive, a jungle lurks behind the door of an ordinary house, carnivorous giraffes stalk the streets, and a dark cloud dreams of burning the world. It is a city awaiting its hero, whose coming was prophesied long ago, set down for all time in the pages of a talking book.

When twelve-year-old Zanna and her friend Deeba find a secret entrance leading out of London and into this strange city, it seems that the ancient prophecy is coming true at last. But then things begin to go shockingly wrong.

From School Library Journal

Starred Review. Grade 5–9—In present-day London, strange things start happening around Zanna: dogs stop to stare at her, birds circle her head. Then, she and her friend Deeba find themselves in an alternate reality where obsolete objects such as old typewriters eventually "seep" and strange people and creatures dwell, including sentient "unbrellas." The girls learn that Zanna is the chosen one, the "shwazzy," of UnLondon. However, her first fight with the nefarious Smog isn't what was predicted in the book of prophecies. The girls soon end up back in London with Zanna unable to recall their time away. Alone in the memory, Deeba pieces together the Smog's plot and finds a way back to UnLondon via library stacks. Readers soon realize that sometimes the chosen one doesn't get to save a city, and that sometimes steps in a preordained quest don't come out as planned. Miéville's fantastical city is vivid and splendidly crafted. Who would have thought a milk carton could make such an endearing pet? Or that words, or utterlings, could have a life and form of their own? Fans of Neil Gaiman's Coraline (HarperCollins, 2002) or Norton Juster's The Phantom Tollbooth (Knopf, 1961) will love this novel. The story is exceptional and the action moves along at a quick pace. Given that the girls are 12, older readers might be put off, but it is well worth selling to them.—Nancy Kunz, Tuckahoe Public Library, NY 
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Bookmarks Magazine

Award-winning author China Miéville (King Rat; Perdido Street Station; The Scar; Iron Council, HHHH Jan/Feb 2005) claims that he meant Un Lun Dun for younger readers, but, like the Harry Potterseries, the novel will appeal to a wide range of ages. While it includes the basics of the genre—magic, monsters, quests, heroes—it breaks the mold in many ways. An urban adventure with a strong environmental message, the novel harkens back to London's Great Smog of 1952, which bridges the real and the fantastical. Miéville's playful, clever language and plot, reminiscent of Lewis Carroll's, also impressed most critics, though a few thought them contrived and tedious. "Finding it as a grown-up may not be the optimum way to stumble into UnLondon," concludes Salon, "but it's pretty miraculous all the same."
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.

Too Important to Fail: Saving America’s Boys is the companion volume to TAVIS SMILEY REPORTS PBS special which is funded by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting as part of its American Graduate: Let’s Make It Happen initiative. It examines an undeclared crisis in America—the staggering dropout rate among young black males. In countless urban schools the graduation rate has plummeted to less than 20% and nationwide fewer than 50% of young black males will graduate from high school. Low graduation rates combined with disproportionate rates of suspensions, expulsion and young black males assigned to special education classes, fuel this state of emergency.

Tavis Smiley’s candid conversations in Los Angeles, Chicago, Philadelphia and Oakland with frontline experts and educators, detention center administrators and the boys themselves urges viewers to ponder the societal and economic cost of losing another generation of uneducated young black males to lifetimes of prison and poverty. This volume picks up where the special leaves off with expanded discussion, dot-connecting data and real life examples of the information and resources needed to harness our frustration and concern into collective and effective action. The e-book contains an extensive resource guide that lists 125 organizations who have a stake in solving this monumental challenge.

#1 New York Times Bestseller 

There’s no such thing as safe in a city at war, a city overrun with monsters. In this dark urban fantasy from acclaimed author Victoria Schwab, a young woman and a young man must choose whether to become heroes or villains—and friends or enemies—with the future of their home at stake. The first of two books, This Savage Song is a must-have for fans of Holly Black, Maggie Stiefvater, and Laini Taylor.

Kate Harker and August Flynn are the heirs to a divided city—a city where the violence has begun to breed actual monsters. All Kate wants is to be as ruthless as her father, who lets the monsters roam free and makes the humans pay for his protection. All August wants is to be human, as good-hearted as his own father, to play a bigger role in protecting the innocent—but he’s one of the monsters. One who can steal a soul with a simple strain of music. When the chance arises to keep an eye on Kate, who’s just been kicked out of her sixth boarding school and returned home, August jumps at it. But Kate discovers August’s secret, and after a failed assassination attempt the pair must flee for their lives. In This Savage Song, Victoria Schwab creates a gritty, seething metropolis, one worthy of being compared to Gotham and to the four versions of London in her critically acclaimed fantasy for adults, A Darker Shade of Magic. Her heroes will face monsters intent on destroying them from every side—including the monsters within.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. As powerful and relevant today as it on its initial publication, them chronicles the tumultuous lives of a family living on the edge of ruin in the Detroit slums, from the 1930s to the 1967 race riots. Praised by The Nation for her “potent, life-gripping imagination,” Oates traces the aspirations and struggles of Loretta Wendall, a dreamy young mother who is filled with regret by the age of sixteen, and the subsequent destinies of her children, Maureen and Jules, who must fight to survive in a world of violence and danger.

Winner of the National Book Award, them is an enthralling novel about love, class, race, and the inhumanity of urban life. It is, raves The New York Times, “a superbly accomplished vision.”

Them is the third novel in the Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and Wonderland, are also available from the Modern Library.

Winner of the National Book Award and in print for more than thirty years, them ranks as one of the most masterly portraits of postwar America ever written by a novelist. Including several new pages and text substantially revised and updated by the author, this Modern Library edition is the most current and accurate version available of Oates' seminal work.
A novel about class, race, and the horrific, glassy sparkle of urban life, them chronicles the lives of the Wendalls, a family on the steep edge of poverty in the windy, riotous Detroit slums. Loretta, beautiful and dreamy and full of regret by age sixteen, and her two children, Maureen and Jules, make up Oates' vision of the American fam-ily--broken, marginal, and romantically proud. The novel's title, pointedly uncapitalized, refers to those Americans who inhabit the outskirts of society--men and women, mothers and children--whose lives many authors in the 1960s had left unexamined. Alfred Kazin called her subject "the sheer rich chaos of American life." The Nation wrote, "When Miss Oates' potent, life-gripping imagination and her skill at narrative are conjoined, as they are preeminently in them, she is a prodigious writer."
In addition to the text revisions, this--new edition contains an Afterword by the author and a new Introduction by Greg Johnson, Oates' biographer and the author of two monographs on the work of Joyce Carol Oates.

All the beautiful people live in the idyllic village of Stepford, Connecticut, an affluent suburban Eden populated with successful, satisfied hubbys and their beautiful, dutiful wives. For Joanna Eberhart, a recent arrival with her husband and two children, it all seems too perfect to be true -- from the sweet, accommodating Welcome Wagon lady to all those cheerful, friendly faces in the supermarket checkout lines. But just beneath the town's flawless surface, something is sordid and wrong -- something abominable with roots in the local Men's Association. And it may already be too late for Joanna to save herself from being devoured by Stepford's hideous perfection.

In The Reckoning, Randall Robinson examines the crime and poverty that grips much of urban America and urges black Americans to speak out and reach back to ensure their social and economic success in this country. With insight, compassion, and unflinching honesty, Robinson explores the twin blights of crime and poverty—the former often a symptom of the latter—and asks questions that are critical to the rebuilding of black communities: How do we create awareness of the heroic efforts already being made and how can we bring our troubled youth to safety?  A product of Robinson’s work with gang members, ex-convicts, and others who have been scarred by the harshness of life in our inner cities, The Reckoning is certain to be as important and controversial as his earlier books.

In suburban Georgetown, a killer’s Reeboks whisper on the floor of a posh home. In a seedy D.C. porno house, a patron is swiftly garroted to death. The next day America learns that two of its Supreme Court justices have been assassinated. And in New Orleans, a young law student prepares a legal brief.

To Darby Shaw it was no more than a legal shot in the dark, a brilliant guess. To the Washington establishment it’s political dynamite. Suddenly Darby is witness to a murder–a murder intended for her. Going underground, she finds that there is only one person–an ambitious reporter after a newsbreak hotter than Watergate–she can trust to help her piece together the deadly puzzle. Somewhere between the bayous of Louisiana and the White House’s inner sanctums, a violent cover-up is being engineered. For someone has read Darby’s brief–someone who will stop at nothing to destroy the evidence of an unthinkable crime.

Delve into the stories from Amy Tan's life that inspired bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement and the new memoir, Where the Past Begins

Amy Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer, The Opposite of Fate offers vivid portraits of choices, attitudes, charms, and luck in action--a refreshing antidote to the world-weariness and uncertainties we all face today.

With their park view and old-fashioned detail, the Victorian houses on San Francisco's Steiner Street were highly valuable. But with their wooden construction, they were also  highly vulnerable. So when Paul Hanover's multimillion-dollar home went up in flames, it was all over very quickly. And when the bodies of Hanover and his girlfriend were found in the charred debris, it appeared that the end came even more quickly for them-judging from the bullet holes in their heads. But this isn't just any double homicide. Hanover was a friend-and donor-to the mayor, who wants answers. And in trying to provide them, Abe Glitsky and Dismas Hardy will face an old lover and an old enemy-and follow a trail of evidence that stretches far beyond their usual jurisdiction.

From Publishers Weekly

In the latest installment of the Glitsky-Hardy crime-solving series (The 13th Juror; The Second Chair; etc.), San Francisco–based Lescroart again demonstrates his mastery of how things work in the city by the bay. Arson investigators at a Victorian townhouse fire do not call in Abe Glitsky or Dismas Hardy when they discover two bodies believed to be the remains of influential businessman Paul Hanover and his girlfriend, Missy D'Amiens. Glitsky, now deputy chief of inspectors, doesn't handle individual cases, and attorney Dismas Hardy has long since left the police force. Sgt. Dan Cuneo takes charge, quickly jumping to conclusions and slowly rekindling his grudge against the detecting duo. Unhappy with Cuneo's approach, the mayor puts Glitsky on the job, while Hardy is hired by Hanover's daughter-in-law, who was also Hardy's college sweetheart and is now a murder defendant with no alibi but plenty of motive. Parallel inquiries uncover contradictory evidence as well as loose ends: at the time of his death, Hanover was up for a federal appointment, his company was up for a city contract and his girlfriend has a mysterious past. Lescroart draws the reader in with a step-by-step description of the fire, mesmerizes with an account of the intricacies of the auto-towing business and winds up with a disturbing parable of intrigue abroad, adding the wistful touch of a new baby in the Glitsky household. Lescroart may be testing the waters for fiction with an international flavor. For now, the winningly ironic author remains more credible on urban and legal ground than spy craft, but his authentic voice, methodical presentation and ability to juggle red herrings until all pieces fall into place will keep fans following wherever his cop-lawyer friends-heroes lead.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

These are the last days ... Travel the blood-stained trails of Kathmandu. Explore doorways to other worlds. Fight for humanity's darkening soul. ... when the powers of the Gods wane and evil walks the Earth. The Last Days of Kali Yuga is urban fantasy at its darkest. You won't find traditional vampires or werewolves in Paul Haines's stories. Instead, you will stare deep into the heart of the cruelest monster of all: man. Paul Haines is one of Australia's and New Zealand's leading dark fiction authors. He pioneered the 'backpacker horror' sub-genre with stories of Westerners confronted by dark powers and corrupted souls in the developing world. His novellas "The Last Days of Kali Yuga", "Doorways for the Dispossessed", and "Wives" - all of which appear in this book - have won Australia's and New Zealand's highest honours for speculative fiction. The Last Days of Kali Yuga is the definitive collection of Paul Haines's best work.

Kuan Yin, the Compassionate One or literally 'the one who sees and hears the cries of the world' is the principal goddess in the eastern firmament. She is centuries older than the Christian Virgin Mary, but not unconnected with her in that in most illustrations she holds a rosary, suggesting purification of the cycle of birth and death, and a willow branch, a symbol of Buddhist virtues. Kuan Yin's image can be found wherever there are Chinese or Japanese speaking people in the world - in homes, restaurants, workplaces, small urban temples, Buddhist, Taoist and Shinto shrines - and the ritual of consulting her has brought solace, hope and insight to countless people. It continues to be an integral part of the lives of tens of millions of people throughout the East today. Stephen Karcher's interpretation of this ancient text presents 'The 100 Poems of the Goddess', to be as relevant today as they were 1000 years ago, leading the reader to answers to specific questions about family, professional success, travel, health and love.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Stephen King, the most riveting and unforgettable story of kids confronting evil since It—publishing just as the second part of It, the movie, lands in theaters.

In the middle of the night, in a house on a quiet street in suburban Minneapolis, intruders silently murder Luke Ellis’s parents and load him into a black SUV. The operation takes less than two minutes. Luke will wake up at The Institute, in a room that looks just like his own, except there’s no window. And outside his door are other doors, behind which are other kids with special talents—telekinesis and telepathy—who got to this place the same way Luke did: Kalisha, Nick, George, Iris, and ten-year-old Avery Dixon. They are all in Front Half. Others, Luke learns, graduated to Back Half, “like the roach motel,” Kalisha says. “You check in, but you don’t check out.”

In this most sinister of institutions, the director, Mrs. Sigsby, and her staff are ruthlessly dedicated to extracting from these children the force of their extranormal gifts. There are no scruples here. If you go along, you get tokens for the vending machines. If you don’t, punishment is brutal. As each new victim disappears to Back Half, Luke becomes more and more desperate to get out and get help. But no one has ever escaped from the Institute.

As psychically terrifying as Firestarter, and with the spectacular kid power of It, The Institute is Stephen King’s gut-wrenchingly dramatic story of good vs. evil in a world where the good guys don’t always win.

A National Book Award Longlist title with eight starred reviews! #1 New York Times Bestseller!

"Absolutely riveting!" —Jason Reynolds

"Stunning." —John Green

"This story is necessary. This story is important." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Heartbreakingly topical." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A marvel of verisimilitude." —Booklist (starred review)

"A powerful, in-your-face novel." —The Horn Book (starred review)

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter moves between two worlds: the poor neighborhood where she lives and the fancy suburban prep school she attends. The uneasy balance between these worlds is shattered when Starr witnesses the fatal shooting of her childhood best friend Khalil at the hands of a police officer. Khalil was unarmed.

Soon afterward, his death is a national headline. Some are calling him a thug, maybe even a drug dealer and a gangbanger. Protesters are taking to the streets in Khalil’s name. Some cops and the local drug lord try to intimidate Starr and her family. What everyone wants to know is: what really went down that night? And the only person alive who can answer that is Starr.

But what Starr does—or does not—say could upend her community. It could also endanger her life.

About the Author

Angie Thomas was born, raised, and still resides in Jackson, Mississippi as indicated by her accent. She is a former teen rapper whose greatest accomplishment was an article about her in Right-On Magazine with a picture included. She holds a BFA in Creative Writing from Belhaven University and an unofficial degree in Hip Hop. She is an inaugural winner of the Walter Dean Myers Grant 2015, awarded by We Need Diverse Books.

In New York Times bestselling author Wendy Corsi Staub's electrifying new thriller,a mother races to save her daughter before her darkest nightmare comes true.

“A chilling, captivating and all-too-timely tale of suburban suspense, THE GOOD SISTER is guaranteed to keep you up at night -- and keep a closer eye on your kids, too! I couldn’t put it down.” --Alison Gaylin, USA Today bestselling author

Sacred Sisters Catholic girls' school has hardly changed since Jen Archer was a student. Jen hoped her older daughter would thrive here. Instead, shy, studious Carley becomes the target of vicious bullies. But the real danger at Sacred Sisters goes much deeper.

The only person Carley can talk to is "Angel," a kindred spirit she met online. Carley tells Angel everything—about her younger sister, about school, about the sudden death of her former best friend. Angel is her lifeline. And Angel is closer than she knows.

When another schoolgirl is found dead, Jen's unease grows. There are too many coincidences, too many links to her past. Every instinct tells her that Carley is the next target. For someone is intent on punishing the guilty, teaching the ultimate lesson in how to fear . . . and how to die.

Bobby's a classic urban teenager. He's restless. He's impulsive. But the thing that makes him different is this: He's going to be a father. His girlfriend, Nia, is pregnant, and their lives are about to change forever. Instead of spending time with friends, they'll be spending time with doctors, and next, diapers. They have options: keeping the baby, adoption. They want to do the right thing. 

If only it was clear what the right thing was.

About the Author

Angela Johnson is the author of the Coretta Scott King Honor picture book When I Am Old with You; as well as A Sweet Smell of Roses, illustrated by Eric Velasquez; Just Like Josh Gibson, illustrated by Beth Peck; and I Dream of Trains, which was also illustrated by Loren Long. She has won three Coretta Scott King Awards, one each for her novels Heaven, Toning the Sweep, and The First Part Last. In recognition of her outstanding talent, Angela was named a 2003 MacArthur Fellow. She lives in Kent, Ohio.

Reset your diet and reclaim your health!

In our super-busy society, it's easy to become overwhelmed. Long work hours, home and family obligations, and everyday stress can make anyone feel tired. Add to that relationship problems, serious illness, or a family crisis, and the flood of stress-related hormones can put some people into a state of constant fatigue. This is known as adrenal fatigue. Adrenal fatigue syndrome affects the adrenal glands’ ability to regulate hormones, resulting in body aches, sleep disturbances, and digestive problems.

The Everything Guide to Adrenal Fatigue offers a natural lifestyle plan to identify symptoms, calm adrenal glands, and restore energy levels. You'll find more than 100 low-glycemic recipes to help reverse adrenal fatigue, including:

• Almond Joy Smoothie
• Mini Quiche
• Pork Chops with Balsamic Glaze
• Mediterranean Seafood Soup
• Chipotle-Lime Mashed Sweet Potatoes
• Vanilla-Poached Pears

Using the information and techniques in this guide, you'll be able to create a personalized nutrition plan guaranteed to return your body to a state of balance and health.

The Counterlife is about people enacting their dreams of renewal and escape, some of them going so far as to risk their lives to alter seemingly irreversible destinies. Wherever they may find themselves, the characters of The Counterlife are tempted unceasingly by the prospect of an alternative existence that can reverse their fate.Illuminating these lives in transition and guiding us through the book's evocative landscapes, familiar and foreign, is the mind of the novelist Nathan Zuckerman. His is the skeptical, enveloping intelligence that calculates the price that's paid in the struggle to change personal fortune and reshape history, whether in a dentist's office in suburban New Jersey, a tradition-bound English Village in Gloucestershire, a church in London's West End, or a tiny desert settlement in Israel's occupied West Bank.

A Publisher's Weekly Top 10 Best Books of 2017
Long-listed for the National Book Award

"Rothstein has presented what I consider to be the most forceful argument ever published on how federal, state, and local governments gave rise to and reinforced neighborhood segregation." ―William Julius Wilson

In this groundbreaking history of the modern American metropolis, Richard Rothstein, a leading authority on housing policy, explodes the myth that America’s cities came to be racially divided through de facto segregation―that is, through individual prejudices, income differences, or the actions of private institutions like banks and real estate agencies. Rather, The Color of Law incontrovertibly makes clear that it was de jure segregation―the laws and policy decisions passed by local, state, and federal governments―that actually promoted the discriminatory patterns that continue to this day.

Through extraordinary revelations and extensive research that Ta-Nehisi Coates has lauded as "brilliant" (The Atlantic), Rothstein comes to chronicle nothing less than an untold story that begins in the 1920s, showing how this process of de jure segregation began with explicit racial zoning, as millions of African Americans moved in a great historical migration from the south to the north.

As Jane Jacobs established in her classic The Death and Life of Great American Cities, it was the deeply flawed urban planning of the 1950s that created many of the impoverished neighborhoods we know. Now, Rothstein expands our understanding of this history, showing how government policies led to the creation of officially segregated public housing and the demolition of previously integrated neighborhoods. While urban areas rapidly deteriorated, the great American suburbanization of the post–World War II years was spurred on by federal subsidies for builders on the condition that no homes be sold to African Americans. Finally, Rothstein shows how police and prosecutors brutally upheld these standards by supporting violent resistance to black families in white neighborhoods.

The Fair Housing Act of 1968 prohibited future discrimination but did nothing to reverse residential patterns that had become deeply embedded. Yet recent outbursts of violence in cities like Baltimore, Ferguson, and Minneapolis show us precisely how the legacy of these earlier eras contributes to persistent racial unrest. “The American landscape will never look the same to readers of this important book” (Sherrilyn Ifill, president of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund), as Rothstein’s invaluable examination shows that only by relearning this history can we finally pave the way for the nation to remedy its unconstitutional past.

13 illustrations

This "brilliant caper" (New York Times) from bestselling author Elmore Leonard is a rollicking tale of modern urban crime featuring a cast of small-time criminals with big-time dreams.

Ernest Stickley Jr. figures his luck's about to change when Detroit used-car salesman Frank Ryan catches him trying to boost a ride from Ryan's lot. Frank's got some surefire schemes for getting rich quick—all of them involving guns—and all Stickley has to do is follow "Ryan's Rules" to share the wealth.

But sometimes rules need to be bent, maybe even broken to succeed in the world of crime, especially when the "brains" of the operation knows less than nothing.

Review

You will look long and hard before you find anyone with a bad word to say about Leonard. About the worst thing I can think of to say about SWAG is that it might be said to make armed robbery look like a enticing career move... if you haven't read him before, you are in for a treat. -- Nicholas Lezard The Guardian

From the Back Cover

The smallest of small-time criminals, Ernest Stickley Jr. figures his luck's about to change when Detroit used car salesman Frank Ryan catches him trying to boost a ride from Ryan's lot. Frank's got some surefire schemes for getting rich quick—all of them involving guns—and all Stickley has to do is follow "Ryan's Rules" to share the wealth. But sometimes rules need to be bent, maybe even broken, if one is to succeed in the world of crime, especially if the "brains" of the operation knows less than nothing.

SOULS FOR SALE: THE DIARY OF AN EX-COLORED MAN is a riveting portrayal of a second generation advocate's experience in the post civil rights era of the 1980s. Anthony Asadullah Samad offers this retrospect through the eyes of a young advocate's effort to give back to his community, when he takes up membership in the local branch of the NAACP. As a lead official of the Los Angeles NAACP (Vice President 1985-88, President 1988-89), Samad (whose name was Anthony Essex at the time) discovered that the progressive civil rights agenda has been supplanted by inner race conflict and leadership succession battles within the organization, and a cultural compromise that came with the Reagan era social and economic reconstruction (1981-1988). Samad is currently the host of the Urban Issues Forum of Greater Los Angeles, a monthly public affairs forum that discusses critical issues impacting American's urban cities.

“Readers who enjoyed The Strain Trilogy, by Guillermo Del Toro and Chuck Hogan, will find plenty to satisfy them here.”—San Francisco Book Review on Omega Days

In the weeks following the Omega Virus outbreak, survivors form desperate clusters, uniting to defend against hordes of the walking dead. But they can only hide for so long…

Father Xavier Church never wanted to be a leader. Nonetheless, he’s grown attached to his fellow survivors, and he won’t let anyone cause them harm—though he may be the one who inadvertently leads them to destruction…

Ex-con Bill Carnes may crave freedom, but he still prefers sticking with the group rather than fleeing to Mexico with his former cellmate TC. Maybe he’s changing. Or maybe the look in TC’s eyes is more dangerous than the undead…

EMT Rosa Escobedo gave up on hope after she watched the man she loved rise from the dead. But when a patient seems to start getting better, she can’t help but hope for a cure, even if it means risking her life…

As the numbers of the dead swell, the living are running out of safe havens—especially when the biggest threats lie within their own ranks.

For centuries, rope tricks have been staples of the magician's repertoire. Surprisingly, many of the best ones are "self-working," meaning they do not require unusual dexterity or long hours of practice. This excellent guidebook, written by one of today's foremost authorities on magic, presents 70 of the best, most amazing self-working rope tricks ever devised — tricks that amateur magicians can master in a short time.

After a brief introduction and a section devoted to acquiring and preparing the proper ropes, Karl Fulves begins the book by introducing rope tricks based on simple overhand knots, slip knots and square knots. These are followed by such tricks as the "Vishnu Rope Mystery" and the "Hindu Turban Mystery" in the chapter entitled "Cut-and-Restored Rope." In "Ropes That Think" he demonstrates such fascinating maneuvers as "Liar's Ropes" and "Séance." You'll also learn how to do a one-hand figure eight, perform a "double-ring ceremony" and make an endless chain.

Novice magicians as well as veterans can learn these foolproof tricks quickly and easily with Karl Fulves' clearly worded instructions and over 400 step-by-step illustrations. Along with the specifics of how to perform each trick, Mr. Fulves provides helpful phrases and bits of patter to help readers present each routine with a professional flourish.

Tradition, Honor, Excellence...and secrets so dark they're almost invisible 

Fifteen-year-old Reed Brennan wins a scholarship to Easton Academy -- the golden ticket away from her pill-popping mother and run-of-the-mill suburban life. But when she arrives on the beautiful, tradition-steeped campus of Easton, everyone is just a bit more sophisticated, a bit more gorgeous, and a lot wealthier than she ever thought possible. Reed realizes that even though she has been accepted to Easton, Easton has not accepted her. She feels like she's on the outside, looking in. 

Until she meets the Billings Girls. 

They are the most beautiful, intelligent, and intensely confident girls on campus. And they know it. They hold all the power in a world where power is fleeting but means everything. Reed vows to do whatever it takes to be accepted into their inner circle. 

Reed uses every part of herself -- the good, the bad, the beautiful -- to get closer to the Billings Girls. She quickly discovers that inside their secret parties and mountains of attitude, hanging in their designer clothing-packed closets the Billings Girls have skeletons. And they'll do anything to keep their secrets private.

Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans. 

In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of the City of Light. Gopnik is a longtime New Yorker writer, and the magazine has sent its writers to Paris for decades--but his was above all a personal pilgrimage to the place that had for so long been the undisputed capital of everything cultural and beautiful. It was also the opportunity to raise a child who would know what it was to romp in the Luxembourg Gardens, to enjoy a croque monsieur in a Left Bank café--a child (and perhaps a father, too) who would have a grasp of that Parisian sense of style we Americans find so elusive. 

So, in the grand tradition of the American abroad, Gopnik walked the paths of the Tuileries, enjoyed philosophical discussions at his local bistro, wrote as violet twilight fell on the arrondissements. Of course, as readers of Gopnik's beloved and award-winning "Paris Journals" in The New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with day-to-day, not-so-fabled life. Evenings with French intellectuals preceded middle-of-the-night baby feedings; afternoons were filled with trips to the Musée d'Orsay and pinball games; weekday leftovers were eaten while three-star chefs debated a "culinary crisis."

As Gopnik describes in this funny and tender book, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar journeys--both hold new routines, new languages, a new set of rules by which everyday life is lived. With singular wit and insight, Gopnik weaves the magical with the mundane in a wholly delightful, often hilarious look at what it was to be an American family man in Paris at the end of the twentieth century. "We went to Paris for a sentimental reeducation-I did anyway-even though the sentiments we were instructed in were not the ones we were expecting to learn, which I believe is why they call it an education."

Although mathematics majors are usually conversant with number theory by the time they have completed a course in abstract algebra, other undergraduates, especially those in education and the liberal arts, often need a more basic introduction to the topic.

In this book the author solves the problem of maintaining the interest of students at both levels by offering a combinatorial approach to elementary number theory. In studying number theory from such a perspective, mathematics majors are spared repetition and provided with new insights, while other students benefit from the consequent simplicity of the proofs for many theorems.

Among the topics covered in this accessible, carefully designed introduction are multiplicativity-divisibility, including the fundamental theorem of arithmetic, combinatorial and computational number theory, congruences, arithmetic functions, primitive roots and prime numbers. Later chapters offer lucid treatments of quadratic congruences, additivity (including partition theory) and geometric number theory.

Of particular importance in this text is the author's emphasis on the value of numerical examples in number theory and the role of computers in obtaining such examples. Exercises provide opportunities for constructing numerical tables with or without a computer. Students can then derive conjectures from such numerical tables, after which relevant theorems will seem natural and well-motivated.

George E. Andrews, Evan Pugh Professor of Mathematics at Pennsylvania State University, author of the well-established text Number Theory (first published by Saunders in 1971 and reprinted by Dover in 1994), has led an active career discovering fascinating phenomena in his chosen field — number theory. Perhaps his greatest discovery, however, was not solely one in the intellectual realm but in the physical world as well.

In 1975, on a visit to Trinity College in Cambridge to study the papers of the late mathematician George N. Watson, Andrews found what turned out to be one of the actual Holy Grails of number theory, the document that became known as the "Lost Notebook" of the great Indian mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan. It happened that the previously unknown notebook thus discovered included an immense amount of Ramanujan's original work bearing on one of Andrews' main mathematical preoccupations — mock theta functions. Collaborating with colleague Bruce C. Berndt of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Andrews has since published the first two of a planned three-volume sequence based on Ramanujan's Lost Notebook, and will see the project completed with the appearance of the third volume in the next few years.

In the Author's Own Words:
"It seems to me that there's this grand mathematical world out there, and I am wandering through it and discovering fascinating phenomena that often totally surprise me. I do not think of mathematics as invented but rather discovered." — George E. Andrews

Patriotism or practical joke?

Harrison, NH -- Ninth-grade student Philip Malloy was suspended from school for singing along to The Star-Spangled Banner in his homeroom, causing what his teacher, Margaret Narwin, called "a disturbance." But was he standing up for his patriotic ideals, only to be squelched by the school system? Was Ms. Narwin simply trying to be a good teacher? Or could it all be just a misunderstanding gone bad -- very bad? What is the truth here? Can it ever be known?

Heroism, hoax, or mistake, what happened at Harrison High changes everything for everyone in ways no one -- least of all Philip -- could have ever predicted.

If you thought Tinseltown was tough...

Tori Spelling might have grown up with everything a girl could wish for, but these days she's just another suburban working mom...whose toddler regularly recognizes her in the pages of Us Weekly. Welcome to Mommywood, where the stars are two feet tall and your neighbors know who you are before you move in.

Like most parents, Tori wants her children to have the one thing she didn't have as a kid -- a normal family. On their hit Oxygen reality show, Tori & Dean: Home Sweet Hollywood, the starlet and her husband Dean McDermott regularly wrestle dirty diapers, host the neighborhood block party, and tackle temper tantrums on the red carpet. But when the cameras aren't rolling, Tori's still having awkward run-ins with a former 90210 costar at a laser tag birthday party, scooping rogue poo out of the kiddie pool on a resort vacation, and racing to win back her pre-baby body before the media starts calling her fat. For all her suburban fantasies, Tori Spelling is no June Cleaver.

With the same down-to-earth wit that made her entertaining memoir sTORI telling a #1 New York Timesbestseller, Tori tells the hilarious and humbling stories of life as a mom in the limelight. From learning to be the kind of parent her own mother never was to revealing what it's like to raise a family while everyone is watching, Mommywood is an irresistible snapshot of celebrity parenthood that you won't get from the paparazzi.

"The most cosmically elegiac writer in literature . . . no one reading Ballard could doubt the tidal gravity of his intellect." ―Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book Review

Violent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in this “fascinating” (San Francisco Chronicle) novel from the same author of Crash and Empire of the Sun. Never more timely, Millennium People “seeks to illuminate our hearts of darkness while undermining our assumptions about what literature is meant to do” (Los Angeles Times).

“Consider Ballard's late novel Millennium People.... The events of 9/11 had not yet begun to fade into memory...but Ballard was right on time with his depiction of a police psychologist who, infiltrating a band of terrorists in the London suburbs, finds them to be―well, suburbanites....  [A]s Norton embarks on a program to reissue his work...the thought of more Ballard to read is enough to make even a dystopian think a little better of the world.”
- Gregory McNamee, Kirkus Reviews

Five original tales set in a shared urban future―from some of the hottest young writers in modern SF

More than an anthology, Metatropolis is the brainchild of five of science fiction's hottest writers―Elizabeth Bear, Tobias Buckell, Jay Lake, Karl Schroeder, and project editor John Scalzi―-who combined their talents to build a new urban future, and then wrote their own stories in this collectively-constructed world. The results are individual glimpses of a shared vision, and a reading experience unlike any you've had before.

A strange man comes to an even stranger encampment...a bouncer becomes the linchpin of an unexpected urban movement...a courier on the run has to decide who to trust in a dangerous city...a slacker in a "zero-footprint" town gets a most unusual new job...and a weapons investigator uses his skills to discover a metropolis hidden right in front of his eyes.

Welcome to the future of cities. Welcome to Metatropolis.

The long and storied career of Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. one of the nation's finest speakers, has carried him from work on the civil rights front lines in the South to the National Urban League to positions of influence at the highest level of business and politics. A friend and confidant to presidents, Vernon Jordan has never forgotten the men and women, from Wiley Branton to Martin Luther King, from Fannie Lou Hamer to Whitney Young to Primus King, whose oratorical skill in service to social justice deeply influenced him. Their examples, and voices, mixed with Vernon's own make this book both a history and an embodiment of black speech at its finest, full of emotion, controlled force, righteous indignation, love of country, and awe in front of the challenges ahead.

Vernon E. Jordan, Jr. is a senior managing director of Lazard Frères & Co. LLC in New York. He was previously president and chief executive officer of the National Urban League, executive director of the United Negro College Fund, Inc., and director of the Voter Education Project of the Southern Regional Council. He served as chairman of the Clinton Presidential Transition Team in 1992 and is senior counsel at Akin Gump Strauss Hauer & Feld, LLP.