![]() 303 rifle, your scope of cancellation is defined by how far your antagonists can fire their Tweeted missiles that declare you no longer worthy of human attention.įor those who somehow missed the story, my Apple drama was well documented by Matt Taibbi, and you can listen to my take on it on the Sam Harris podcast. Like frontier forts in 19th-century Afghanistan where the limits of the British Empire were defined by the range of a. It is admittedly somewhat ironic to be bemoaning the horrors of my cancellation via my relaunched Substack, whose generous advance grants me the enviable freedom to pontificate widely and wildly for an entire year.īut I assure you, I’m canceled. ![]() If you want to criticize a religion, write a book. *Note: The title is a self-deprecating reference to a ‘bad apple’ that falls off the tree, not a reference to any company. ![]() ![]() ‘Martírio de São Sebastião’, Gregório Lopes (1536) ![]()
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![]() You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. ![]() You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. ![]() Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. ![]() Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell. ![]() ![]() ![]() It was also selected for YALSA's Quick Picks for Reluctant Young Adult Readers and Best Fiction for Young Adults and Kirkus Reviews' Best Books of 2020. In 2021, the book won the Teen Buckeye Book Award and was nominated for the Edgar Award for Young Adult, the Goodreads Choice Award for Young Adult, and YALSA's Teen's Top Ten. The book received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews, as well as positive reviews from Booklist and School Library Journal and a mixed review from the Bulletin of the Center for Children's Books. It was a New York Times and IndieBound best seller. The Inheritance Games was published September 1, 2020. In The Inheritance Games, Avery is revealed to have been chosen to inherit the will of deceased billionaire Tobias Hawthorne. A standalone book that follows the events of the series is set to be released on August 29th, 2023, The Brothers Hawthorne It currently consists of three books: The Inheritance Games (2020), The Hawthorne Legacy (2021), and The Final Gambit (2022). The series focuses on a girl named Avery Kylie Grambs, and the Hawthorne family. The Inheritance Games is a young adult novel series by Jennifer Lynn Barnes, published by Little, Brown Books for Young Readers. ![]() ![]() Young adult novel series by Jennifer Lynn Barnes ![]() ![]() ![]() I didn’t make the connection of “Ying” and Qin Shi Huang’s (Dragon Emperor) family name “嬴” until I stared at the gorgeous book cover for one long minute before starting the book. To save his mother from disappearing forever and China from being overrun with malevolent underworld creatures, Zack has to travel to China, the country that had killed his father for speaking out, with Qin Shi Huang attached to his AR headset. Zachary “Zack” Ziyang Ying (12, gay) loves the video game Mythrealm, and it helps him make “friends.” When a Chinese boy, Simon Li, shows up at his school, Zack finds his life turning upside down as the spirit of Qin Shi Huang tries to possess him when he stands up for Simon to his “friends.” It doesn’t help that his mother’s spirit gets abducted by bad ghosts. ![]() ![]() If you love history, mythology, and chaos, this book is for you. McElderry Books, May 10th 2022Ĭlick on the cover for my review on Goodreads. ZACHARY YING AND THE DRAGON EMPEROR ( Zachary Ying #1) by Xiran Jay Zhao ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() There is a subtle Christian theme running through the story. ![]() The story is set in the future where civilisation has reverted to a more medieval setting in relation to technology and a feudal society. The Stonegate Sword would not be my typical reading choice but the blurb grabbed my attention and I thought I would try something new and I'm glad I did. But how can he find and rescue one small captive in a wilderness teeming with enemies? And even if he succeeds, should he wield his sword beside the tiny band of defenders? Is Donald to become yet another victim, or is he, just possibly, the deliverer promised in prophecy? What can one person do in the face of a war that will shape the future of a continent? Donald of Fisher, outcast and alone, is in the path of the march, searching for Rachel, who has been captured by the Raiders-minions of the Prophet. The Prophet's armies are coming, filled with hatred and armed with terrible, rediscovered weapons. The free towns of the rugged mountains and plains are in the path of conquest. Now grass grows in the streets and rusted hulks are all that remain of the proud machines. Do you love historical fiction, knights in armor and romance? How about a tale with all of these set in future North America? Escape to a passionate world of danger, love, war and redemption - the world of Stonegate.īut tales still tell of marvels from long ago-flying machines and devices run by the power of lightning. ![]() ![]() ![]() This set of stories is going to stay with me into the deepest dark of night, chilling me to the marrow and leaving me with a constant sense of unease. Wounds is a beautiful yet deeply unsettling collection. From the eerie dread descending upon a New Orleans dive bartender after a cell phone is left behind in a rollicking bar fight in “The Visible Filth” to the search for the map of hell in “The Butcher’s Table,” Ballingrud’s beautifully crafted stories are riveting in their quietly terrifying depictions of the murky line between the known and the unknown. Now, in Wounds, Ballingrud follows up with an even more confounding, strange, and utterly entrancing collection of six stories, including one new novella. In his first collection, North American Lake Monsters, Nathan Ballingrud carved out a distinctly singular place in American fiction with his “piercing and merciless” (Toronto Globe and Mail) portrayals of the monsters that haunt our lives-both real and imagined: “What Nathan Ballingrud does in North American Lake Monsters is to reinvigorate the horror tradition” (Los Angeles Review of Books). ![]() A gripping collection of six stories of terror-including the novella “The Visible Filth,” the basis for the upcoming major motion picture-by Shirley Jackson Award–winning author Nathan Ballingrud, hailed as a major new voice by Jeff VanderMeer, Paul Tremblay, and Carmen Maria Machado-“one of the most heavyweight horror authors out there” (The Verge). ![]() ![]() ![]() I loved the way Warga takes on so many of the most difficult themes of immigration, like language and cultural differences and self-consciousness, and the split that often occurs within families, and distills them all down to the simplest and most affecting language that so clearly conveys for young readers and older readers alike. With a little time though, Jude makes a new friend or two, finds camaraderie in her ESL classmates, leans into her pride in starting to wear hijab and decides she may even try out for the school musical. ![]() ![]() Adjusting to America, where everything seems too big and too loud and Jude is self-conscious about her English and her “Middle Eastern” identity and, instead of loving the limelight like she did back home, all she wants is to fade into the background, is difficult. When the situation in her hometown becomes violent, Jude leaves Syria with her pregnant mother to stay with family in the United States, leaving her father and beloved older brother behind. Other Words for Home is told from Jude’s perspective, a young Syrian Muslim girl. “America / like every other place in the world, / is a place where some people sleep / and some people / other people / dream.” ![]() ![]() ![]() The alternative title, The Parish Boy's Progress, alludes to Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, as well as the 18th-century caricature series by painter William Hogarth, A Rake's Progress and A Harlot's Progress. Oliver Twist unromantically portrays the sordid lives of criminals, and exposes the cruel treatment of the many orphans in London in the mid-19th century. The story follows the titular orphan, who, after being raised in a workhouse, escapes to London, where he meets a gang of juvenile pickpockets led by the elderly criminal Fagin, discovers the secrets of his parentage, and reconnects with his remaining family. It was originally published as a serial from 1837 to 1839, and as a three-volume book in 1838. Oliver Twist or, The Parish Boy's Progress, is the second novel by English author Charles Dickens. ![]() Oliver Twist or, The Parish Boy's Progress Illustration and design by George Cruikshank ![]() Frontispiece and title-page, first edition 1838 ![]() ![]() Machiavelli's Prince is not a practical advice manual aimed at any specific individual - rather it creates a fantastic creature, a kind of armoured colossus bestriding (and in Machiavelli's precocious dream, uniting) Italy. Even today, the description Machiavellian is routinely used to denote any form of political action that challenges our quaint notions of good faith and moral authenticity. For centuries the author and his Prince were seen as antichrists and early editions of The Prince in English come with notes piously refuting his cynicism. In his 1513 work, Il Principe (The Prince), Machiavelli created a monster that has haunted politics ever since. A modern awareness that human affairs are not transparent, but devious, complex and unpredictable, dates from the Italian Renaissance with its mixture of ruthlessness, ambition, fantasy, failure and self-knowledge given voice by the first modern political thinker, Niccolò Machiavelli. ![]() ![]() T he art of politics is an Italian invention - politics as a self-conscious way of acting and thinking. ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() If you downloaded this ebook via a pirating site, know that you have committed theft which is punishable by law. Any resemblance to actual persons, things, living or dead, locales, or events is entirely coincidental. All names, characters, locations, and incidents are products of the author’s imagination. No part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying, recording, or other electronic or mechanical methods, without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in reviews and certain other non-commercial uses permitted by copyright law. ![]() In Fury Lies Mischief (Midnight Mayhem: Book II)Īll Rights reserved. ![]() |