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It seems like any other day: You wake up, pour a cup of coffee, and head out. But today when you open your front door, waiting for you is a small wooden box. This box holds your fate inside: the answer to the exact number of years you will live. From suburban doorsteps to desert tents, every person on every continent receives the same box. In an instant, the world is thrust into a collective frenzy. Where did these boxes come from? What do they mean?...
2) Calypso
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Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality.
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"You like it darker? Fine, so do I," writes Stephen King in the afterword to this magnificent new collection of twelve stories that delve into the darker part of life--both metaphorical and literal. King has, for half a century, been a master of the form, and these stories, about fate, mortality, luck, and the folds in reality where anything can happen, are as rich and riveting as his novels, both weighty in theme and a huge pleasure to read. King...
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"A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels. of his generation" (Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now, his second novel departs from...
6) Mortality
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"Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of our most celebrated writers"--Provided by the publisher.
On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour, Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture. Hitchens poignantly describes the torments...
7) Mermaid moon
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Blood calls to blood; charm calls to charm. It is the way of the world. Come close and tell us your dreams. Sanna is a mermaid -- but she is only half seavish. The night of her birth, a sea-witch cast a spell that made Sanna's people, including her landish mother, forget how and where she was born. Now Sanna is sixteen and an outsider in the seavish matriarchy, and she is determined to find her mother and learn who she is. She apprentices herself...
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"In the half a square mile of decay and demolition that was England's Saxon capital, eternity is loitering between the firetrap housing projects. Embedded in the grubby amber of the district's narrative among its saints, kings, prostitutes, and derelicts a different kind of human time is happening, a soiled simultaneity that does not differentiate between the petrolcolored puddles and the fractured dreams of those who navigate them. Fiends last mentioned...
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Eudora Honeysett is done with this noisy, moronic world;all of it. She has witnessed the indignities and suffering of old age and has lived a full life. At eighty-five, she isn't going to leave things to chance. Her end will be on her terms. With one call to a clinic in Switzerland, a plan is set in motion. Then she meets ten-year-old Rose Trewidney, a whirling, pint-sized rainbow of color and sparkling cheer. All Eudora wants is to be left alone...
10) Bloodbath nation
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"Each year, approximately forty thousand Americans are killed by gunshot wounds, which is roughly equivalent to the annual rate of traffic deaths on American roads and highways. Of those forty thousand gun fatalities, more than half of them are suicides, which in turn account for half of all suicides per year. Add in the murders caused by guns, the accidental deaths caused by guns, the law enforcement killings caused by guns, and the average comes...
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"'I have been writing about death for as long as I have been writing.' [Danticat's] book moves outward from the shock of her mother's [cancer] diagnosis and sifts through Danticat's writing life and personal history, all the while shifting ... from examples that range from Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude to Toni Morrison's Sula. The narrative, which continually circles the many incarnations of death from individual to large-scale...
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In a novel of breathtaking reach and inspired imagination, the Booker Prize-winning author of Schindler's Ark tells the stories of two men who have much in common. What separates them is 42,000 years. Shade lives with his second wife amid their clan on the shores of a bountiful lake. A peaceable man, he knows that when danger threatens, the Hero ancestors will call on him to kill, or sacrifice himself, to save his people. Over 40,000 years later,...
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A decade ago Leaf, a cancer survivor himself, began to investigate why we had made such limited progress fighting this terrifying disease. The result is a gripping narrative that reveals why the public's immense investment in research has been badly misspent, why scientists seldom collaborate and share their data, why new drugs are so expensive yet routinely fail, and why our best hope for progress-- brilliant young scientists-- are now abandoning...
14) Robocop
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When a good cop gets blown away by some ruthless criminals, innovative scientists and doctors are able to piece him back together as an unstoppable crime-fighting cyborg called "Robocop." Impervious to bullets and bombs, and equipped with high-tech weaponry, Robocop quickly makes a name for himself by cleaning up the crime-ridden streets of violence-ravaged Detroit. But despite his new, hardened exterior, Robocop is tormented by scraps of memory of...
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From the acclaimed author of The Hard Way on Purpose comes a vibrant, heartfelt memoir about confronting mortality, surviving loss, finding resilience in one's roots and seeking a father's wisdom through an unusual woodworking project -- constructing his own coffin. With wisdom and humor, Giffels grapples with the hard questions as he and his father saw, hammer, and sand their way through a year bowed by loss.
When Giffels enlisted his dad to help...
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"A fresh, fierce, and timely meditation on data, pain, time, and the limited capacity of literature to comprehend life and death in a sensate and vulnerable body." --
When Boyer was diagnosed with highly aggressive triple-negative breast cancer, the illness was both a crisis and an initiation into new ideas about mortality and the gendered politics of illness. Here she explores the experience of illness as mediated by digital screens, weaving in...
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This is a hauntingly moving memoir of the relationship between a cadaver named Eve and the first-year medical student who cuts her open. Christine Montross was a nervous first-year medical student, standing outside the anatomy lab on her first day of class, preparing herself for what was to come. Entering a room with stainless-steel tables topped by corpses in body bags is shocking no matter how long you've prepared yourself, but a strange thing happened...