Showing results by narrator "Jennifer Van Dyck" in All Categories

Boss loves to dive historical ships, derelict spacecraft found adrift in the blackness between the stars. Sometimes she salvages for money, but mostly she's an active historian. She wants to know about the past--to experience it firsthand. Once she's dived the ship, she'll either leave it for others to find or file a claim so that she can bring tourists to dive it as well. It's a good life for a tough loner, with more interest in artifacts than people.

First published in 1973, this is a study of the force of photographic images, which are continually inserted between experience and reality. When anything can be photographed, and photography has destroyed the boundaries and definitions of art, a viewer can approach a photograph freely, with no expectations of discovering what it means. This collection of six lucid and invigorating essays, with the most famous being "In Plato's Cave", make up a deep exploration of how the image has affected society.

A peaceful Minnesota town, where crime is something that just doesn’t happen, is about to face its worst nightmare. A young boy disappears. There are no witnesses, no clues — only a note, cleverly taunting, casually cruel. Has a cold-blooded kidnapper struck? Or is this the reawakening of a long-quiet serial killer?

For Meridian Wallace - and many other smart, driven women of the 1940s - being ambitious meant being an outlier. Ever since she was a young girl, Meridian had been obsessed with birds, and she was determined to get her PhD, become an ornithologist, and make her mother's sacrifices to send her to college pay off. But she didn't expect to fall in love with her brilliant physics professor, Alden Whetstone. When he's recruited to Los Alamos, New Mexico, to take part in a mysterious wartime project, she reluctantly defers her own plans and joins him.

This, the second of three volumes of Susan Sontag’s journals and notebooks, begins where the first volume left off, in the middle of the 1960s. It traces and documents Sontag’s evolution from fledgling participant in the artistic and intellectual world of New York City to world-renowned critic and dominant force in the world of ideas with the publication of the groundbreaking Against Interpretation in 1966.

Beelzebub, the prince of demons, is bored. It's his destiny to one day rule the dark underworld known as the Red Realm, but it's sooo boring down there. All he wants to do is lay around all day in the lava pits (ahhh), boss everyone around (rude!), and maybe play a cruel prank (or two). But Beelzebub's father has had it with his son's nasty attitude. No one backtalks the Red King. NO ONE. A disgraced Beelzebub is banished by his father and cursed to spend his days in the worst place either of them can imagine. EARTH.

When police rescue five-year-old Jenna Thompson from the dark closet where she's been held captive for days, they tell her she's a lucky girl. Compared to the rest of her family, it's true. But even with their killer dead of an overdose, Jenna is still trying to find peace 25 years later.

Former Black Ops army sniper Mercy Gunderson isn’t adjusting well to the laid-back rhythm of civilian life on her family’s ranch in South Dakota. To fill her time, Mercy accepts a temporary bartending gig at a local watering hole. Yet her attempts to settle in back home are tested when Titan Oil, a Canadian company proposing to run an underground pipeline through Eagle River County, sends Jason Hawley, Mercy’s former army buddy, to the area to convince ranchers to get behind the project.

You aspire to lead with greater impact. The problem is you're busy executing on today's demands. You know you have to carve out time from your day job to build your leadership skills, but it's easy to let immediate problems and old mindsets get in the way. Leadership and development expert Herminia Ibarra shows how managers and executives at all levels can step up to leadership by making small but crucial changes in their jobs, their networks, and themselves.

"I intend to do everything...I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!" This first selection from Susan Sontag's diaries (from 1947-1963) takes us from early adolescence through to when Sontag was in her early 30s. It is an astonishingly affecting and honest self-portrait which is also a fascinating, revealing account of an artist and critic being born. We see Sontag honing her skills and fashioning herself, by a supreme act of will, into an intellectual force.

As METAtropolis: Green Space moves into the 22nd Century, human social evolution is heading in new directions after the Green Crash and the subsequent Green Renaissance. Nearly everyone who cares to participate in the wired world has become part of the "Internet of things", a virtual environment mapped across all aspects of the natural experience. At the same time, the serious back-to-the-land types have embraced a full-on paleo lifestyle, including genetically engineering themselves and their offspring.

"Do you still miss your little Bonnie?" This one sentence, spoken by a madman in an anonymous phone call, is all it takes to drag Eve Duncan right back to that horrifying day years ago when her only daughter vanished without a trace.

The Volcano Lover follows the fortunes of a British ambassador, the ravishing woman he marries, and the young British admiral with whom she falls in love. Set in 18th-century Naples and based on the lives of Sir William Hamilton, his celebrated wife Emma, and Lord Nelson, the novel is peopled with many of the great figures of the day.

From a High Tower is newest adventure in Mercedes Lackey's Elemental Masters series, featuring a retelling of Rapunzel's not-so-happily-ever-after ending.

Fall under the intoxicating spell of their hex appeal…In the magical world that lies hidden beneath our own, witches and conjurers play deadly games. They know just the right spell to kill a man with one kiss—or raise him back again. And they’re not afraid to exact sweet revenge on those who dare to cross them. But what if you’re the unlucky soul who falls victim to a conjurer’s curse? And if you had the power to cast a magic spell of your own, would you use it?

Today's hottest urban fantasy authors come together in this delicious brew that crackles and boils over with tales of powerful witches and dark magic! For anyone who's ever wondered what lies beyond the limits of reality, who's imagined the secret spaces where witches wield fearsome magic, come and drink deep. Let yourself fall under the spell of this bewitching collection!

Interstellar antiquities dealer Alex Benedict receives a cryptic message asking for help from celebrated writer Vicki Greene - who has been mind-wiped. She has no memory of her past life, or of her plea for assistance. But she has transferred an enormous sum of money to Alex, also without explanation. The answers to this mystery lie on the most remote of human worlds, where Alex will uncover a secret connected to a decades-old political upheaval - a secret that somebody desperately wants hidden.

Virginia Miner, a 50-something, unmarried tenured professor, is in London to work on her new book about children's folk rhymes. Despite carrying a U.S. passport, Vinnie feels essentially English and rather looks down on her fellow Americans. But in spite of that, she is drawn into a mortifying and oddly satisfying affair with an Oklahoman tourist who dresses more Bronco Billy than Beau Brummel.

Forty-one years ago the renowned physicist Chris Robin vanished. Before his disappearance, his fringe-science theories about the existence of endless alternate universes had earned him both admirers and enemies. Alex Benedict and Chase Kolpath discover that Robin had several interstellar yachts flown far outside the planetary system, where they too vanished. And following Robin's trail into the unknown puts Benedict and Kolpath in danger.

Sixty years ago, the space yacht Polaris was found deserted, the fate of its pilot and passengers a mystery. Now, to mark the anniversary of the disappearance, there is to be an auction of what was left behind on the ship. Using his insider knowledge, Alex Benedict, one of the preeminent antiquities dealers in the galaxy, secures some of the artifacts.