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Hailed for its uproarious sense of humor, big-hearted portrait of an imperfect family, and keen observations about our current American moment, here is "not just the first big novel of the post-Obama era, but the first truly great novel of it" (Salon), from critically acclaimed, bestselling author Gary Shteyngart. Narcissistic, hilariously self-deluded, and divorced from the real world as most of us know it, hedge-fund manager Barry Cohen oversees...
2) Crome yellow
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On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive history of chrome. Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he...
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Discworld volume 31
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A seemingly routine day in the life of City Watch commander Sam Vimes is abruptly interrupted by an unsolved murder, an impending war, an unwanted new recruit, and a pesky government inspector. By the author of Going Postal. It's a game of Trolls and Dwarfs where the player must take both sides to win. It's the noise a troll club makes when crushing in a dwarf skull, or when a dwarfish axe cleaves a trollish cranium. It's the unsettling sound of history...
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"Carl Hiaasen's Squeeze Me is set among the landed gentry of Palm Beach. A prominent high-society matron--who happens to be a fierce supporter of the President and founding member of the POTUSSIES--has gone missing at a swank gala. When the wealthy dowager Kiki Pew Fitzsimmons is later found dead in a concrete grave, panic and chaos erupt. The President immediately declares that Kiki Pew was the victim of rampaging immigrant hordes. This, as it turns...
5) Nightbitch
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An ambitious mother puts her art career on hold to stay at home with her newborn son, but the experience does not match her imagination. Two years later she steps into the bathroom for a break from her toddler's demands, only to discover a dense patch of hair on the back of her neck; her canines look sharper than she remembers. Her husband dismisses her fears from faraway hotel rooms. She struggles to keep her alter-canine-identity secret, and discovers...
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Deb and Chip, a couple honeymooning at a Caribbean resort, meet a marine biologist who claims to have sighted mermaids at a nearby coral reef, and join with other adventurers to protect the mermaids when the resort reveals plans to build a theme park on the reef.
7) Tono-Bungay
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The story of an apprentice chemist whose uncle's worthless medicine becomes a spectacular marketing success, Tono-Bungay earned H. G. Wells immediate acclaim when it appeared in 1909. It remains a sparkling chronicle of chicanery and human credulity, and is today regarded by many as Wells's greatest novel. As Andrea Barrett observes in her Introduction, "Through its detailed, often brilliant descriptions and powerful imagery, [Tono-Bungay] slyly satirizes...
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"There are 1.2 million human-size rabbits living in the UK. They can walk, talk, drive cars, and they like to read Voltaire, the result of an Inexplicable Anthropomorphizing Event fifty-five years before. A family of rabbits is about to move into Much Hemlock, a cozy little village in Middle England where life revolves around summer fetes, jam making, gossipy corner stores, and the oh-so-important Best Kept Village awards. No sooner have the rabbits...
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Receiving an invitation to his ex-boyfriend's wedding, Arthur, a failed novelist on the eve of his fiftieth birthday, embarks on an international journey that finds him falling in love, risking his life, reinventing himself, and making connections with the past.
10) Startup: a novel
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"Mack McAllister has a $600 million dollar idea. His mindfulness app, TakeOff, is already the hottest thing in tech and he's about to launch a new and improved version that promises to bring investors running and may turn his brainchild into a $1 billion dollar business--in startup parlance, an elusive unicorn. Katya Pasternack is hungry for a scoop that will drive traffic. An ambitious young journalist at a gossipy tech blog, Katya knows that she...
11) Cat's cradle
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From the Publisher: Cat's Cradle is Vonnegut's satirical commentary on modern man and his madness. An apocalyptic tale of this planet's ultimate fate, it features a midget as the protagonist; a complete, original theology created by a calypso singer; and a vision of the future that is at once blackly fatalistic and hilariously funny.
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Aging science fiction writer Kilgore Trout, finds to his horror that a Midwest car dealer is taking his fiction as truth. The result is murderously funny satire as Vonnegut looks at war, sex, racism, success, politics, and pollution in America and reminds us how to see the truth.
14) A mirror mended
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Fractured fables volume 2
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"Zinnia Gray, professional fairy-tale fixer and lapsed Sleeping Beauty is over rescuing snoring princesses. Once you've rescued a dozen damsels and burned fifty spindles, once you've gotten drunk with twenty good fairies and made out with one too many members of the royal family, you start to wish some of these girls would just get a grip and try solving their own narrative issues. Just when Zinnia's beginning to think she can't handle one more princess,...
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"When penniless businessman Mr. Bedford retreats to the Kent coast to write a play, he meets by chance the brilliant Dr. Cavor, an absent-minded scientist on the brink of developing a material that blocks gravity. Cavor soon succeeds in his experiments, only to tell a stunned Bedford the invention makes possible one of the oldest dreams of humanity: a journey to the moon. With Bedford motivated by money and Cavor by the desire for knowledge, the two...
16) Fahrenheit 451
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In a future totalitarian state where books are banned and destroyed by the government, Guy Montag, a fireman in charge of burning books, meets a revolutionary schoolteacher who dares to read and a girl who tells him of a past when people did not live in fear ... This sixtieth-anniversary edition commemorates Ray Bradbury's masterpiece with a new introduction by Neil Gaiman ; personal essays on the genesis of the novel by the author; a wealth of critical...
17) Going postal
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Discworld volume 30
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English
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Arch-swindler Moist Van Lipwig never believed his confidence crimes were hanging offenses--until he found himself with a noose tightly around his neck, dropping through a trapdoor, and falling into--a government job? By all rights, Moist should have met his maker. Instead, it's Lord Vetinari, supreme ruler of Ankh-Morpork, who promptly offers him a job as Postmaster. Since his only other option is a nonliving one, Moist accepts the position--and the...
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For an ambitious, keenly intelligent woman, lying proves to be the easiest way to get through life, in this Victorian-era classic. Lizzie Greystock is a woman of rare cunning and determination-both of which she uses to better her lot in life. This is especially true when she manages to convince the ailing Sir Florian Eustace to marry her shortly before his demise, leaving Lizzie both a wealthy widow and the mother to Florian's young son. A born...
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John Harmon returns to England as his father's heir. Believed drowned under suspicious circumstances--a situation convenient to his wish for anonymity--John evaluates Bella Wilfer whom he must marry to secure his inheritance. The story is filled with colorful Victorian characters and incidents -- the faded aristocrats and parvenus gathered at the Veneering's dinner table, Betty Higden and her terror of the workhouse and the greedy plottings of Silas...
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Signet books Signet novels volume Q4412
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A cautionary tale about the rise of fascism in the United States first published in 1935. During the presidential election of 1936, Doremus Jessup, a newspaper editor, observes with dismay that many of the people he knows support the candidacy of a fascist, Berzelius Windrip. When Windrip wins the election, he forcibly gains control of Congress and the Supreme Court, and, with the aid of his personal paramilitary storm troopers, turns the United States...