Showing results by author "Margo" in All Categories

Picture yourself as a young mother with a three-year-old daughter and a newborn at the playground. In the moment you’ve turned to the diaper bag, your toddler disappears—at first, all you can feel is terror, and then instinctively you look up—and there she is at the top of the slide, looking so proud of herself. At this moment, you might find yourself deluged with conflicting feelings, including anger and relief and resentment and gratitude and fear and even flashes of hate—you told her to wait for you before running off.

There are a million ways to end up in the Alien Bride Lottery, but it takes only one. Every unmarried female human over the age of 21 gets entered once a year. You can also accept extra entries for legal infractions—instead of paying a parking fine, for example, you can request an extra entry. Lots of women do that. I mean, why not? The chances are astronomical that your name will get chosen to be one of the hundred or so women who get shipped off to space every year.

One Sunday in 2001 ear, nose and throat specialist Dr Peter Friedland received an unexpected call from Nelson Mandela’s personal physician. The former president was struggling to hear. Could Peter visit him at home? Friedland discovered that Mandela was using antiquated hearing aids and was struggling to maintain them. Soon he became a regular visitor to Mandela’s home in Houghton where he experienced the elderly statesman, in the frailty of old age, away from the crowds. He was full of stories and always bearing a lesson.

Somehow, I knew my name was going to be drawn in the Bride Lottery—the hellish agreement that Earth's leaders had made to sell us to the aliens who protected our planet. I'd grown up with the propaganda. It was our civic duty. Men registered for the draft; women registered for the Bride Lottery. No way in hell was I going to be handed over to some giant man to be brutalized into bearing his children. Instead, I cut out my bio-tracker and walked away from everything. I should have realized they'd send one of those hulking, brightly colored aliens to track me down and bring me back.

In her stunning first book, Margo Jefferson gives us the incontrovertible lowdown on call-him-what-you-wish; she offers a powerful reckoning with a quintessential, richly allusive signifier of American society and popular culture. Michael Jackson: provocateur, icon, enigma. Who was he really? And how does his spectacular rise, his catastrophic fall, reflect upon those who made him, those who broke him and those who loved him?

In Driving the Future Oge portrays a future where clean, intelligent vehicles with lighter frames and alternative power trains will produce zero emissions and run at 100+ mpg. With electronic architectures more like that of airplanes, cars will be smarter and safer, will park themselves, and will network with other vehicles on the road to drive themselves.

On remote Rollrock Island, the sea-witch Misskaella discovers she can draw a girl from the heart of a seal. So, for a price, any man might buy himself a bride; an irresistibly enchanting sea-wife. But what cost will be borne by the people of Rollrock? The men, the women, the children? Once Misskaella sets her heart on doing such a thing?Margo Lanagan weaves an extraordinary tale of desire and revenge, of loyalty, heartache and human weakness, and of the unforeseen consequences of all-consuming love.

Don't call them heroes. But these six Californian teens have powers that set them apart. Take Ethan, aka Scam. He's got a voice inside him that'll say whatever you want to hear, whether it's true or not. Which is handy, except when it isn't - like when the voice starts gabbing in the middle of a bank robbery. The only people who can help are the other Zeroes, who aren't exactly best friends these days.

Darkness, both literal and psychological, holds its own unique fascination. Despite our fears, or perhaps because of them, listeners have always been drawn to tales of death, terror, madness, and the supernatural, and no more so than today when a wildly imaginative new generation of dark dreamers is carrying on in the tradition of Poe and Lovecraft and King, crafting exquisitely disturbing literary nightmares that gaze without flinching into the abyss - and linger in the mind long after.

Revered as a symbol of fertility, sexuality, purity and childhood, beloved as a children’s pet and widely represented in the myths, art and collectibles of almost every culture, the rabbit is one of the most popular animals known to humans. Ironically, it has also been one of the most misunderstood and abused. Indeed, the rabbit is the only animal that our culture adores as a pet, idolizes as a storybook hero and slaughters for commercial purposes.

Maud Martha Brown is a little girl growing up on the South Side of 1940s Chicago. Amidst the crumbling taverns and overgrown yards, she dreams: of New York, romance, her future. She admires dandelions, learns to drink coffee, falls in love, decorates her kitchenette, visits the Jungly Hovel, guts a chicken, buys hats, gives birth. But her lighter-skinned husband has dreams, too: of the Foxy Cats Club, other women, war. And the 'scraps of baffled hate'—a certain word from a saleswoman, that visit to the cinema, the cruelty of a department store Santa Claus—are always there.

I thought I'd escaped being given to an alien warrior. I was wrong. I was one hour away from washing out of the Alien Bride Games. None of the Khanavai warriors had chosen me, and I was scheduled on the next shuttle off the filming station. Then, a bright red alien passed me in a hallway—and the next thing I knew, we were all over each other. Bad enough that my name had been drawn in the Bride Lottery. Now, even though they're supposedly over, I'm back in the Games. And not the usual ones, either—a whole new set of challenges, just for me. Guess it'll make for good television back home.

I thought if I played by the rules, I’d be spared from the cruelty of the vampires. Boy, was I wrong. My plant magic was supposed to keep me safe, but when a fertility plant that I created for a rich vamp is stolen, my neck is on the line. Not only do I lose my cushy position with my master vampire, but I’m also thrown into prison.

In this intimate and innovative memoir, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Margo Jefferson gives us her own personal and intellectual formation. As she comes of age in an America whose freedoms are distorted by race and gender, she finds herself reflected in a cast of others—jazz luminaries, writers, artists, athletes and stars. Bing Crosby and Ike Turner are among the author’s alter egos. The sounds of a jazz LP emerge as the intimate and instructive sounds of a parent’s voice. W.E.B. Du Bois and George Eliot meet illicitly.

Georgie de Luca is a tradeswoman who runs an all-female pool cleaning business in Sydney. Managing The Pool Chicks is challenging, but it's her dream. Surrounded by a supportive group of women and a well-to-do surgeon husband, Georgie's got everything she could ever want. Life is perfect. Or so she thinks. When she meets her new neighbor, Drew, a Navy pilot from Perth, she avoids his cheeky grin and shirtless torso at all costs. But over time, as their friendship blossoms and Drew becomes her closest ally, she can't help but wonder: What if she has married the wrong man?

My name is Sierra Reeves, and my life is built on lies. I’m not a regular girl. My telekinetic powers can flip the precarious balance between good and evil. On the run from those that seek to use me as a weapon, I seek protection from the magic-bearing marshal Gavin McLoughlin. If anyone can teach me how to stay alive, it’s Gavin, a well-connected supernatural who hums with authority. Too bad Gavin has no interest in training me. He doesn’t trust me and wants me to stay far away from him and his city. I can’t. I need him, and I’m driven to him like a moth to the flame.

Growing up with a kind but alcoholic father and a suspicious, passive-aggressive mother, the Bernal sisters each developed their own way of coping: Dulcina had her art and drugs and alcohol, Claudia plunged into her studies and fled to Princeton, and Maritza watched one Disney movie after another in between devouring romance novels. Now all grown up, the sisters are reunited at last for Maritza’s dream wedding. With all three Bernal sisters back in their East L.A. home, each begins to take steps to come to terms with each other, their parents, and secrets from their shared past.

A dark artifact. A run against time. A deadly demonic power. I’ve decimated my uncle’s generals, but not his will. In his desperation to rule the supernaturals, my uncle will go to any lengths to obtain power, even if it means claiming the dark lord’s legacy and putting our world in danger. Three hundred years ago, when the dark lord was defeated, the Phoenix emblem broke into two pieces. Now, my uncle is set on finding both emblem parts and uniting them, no matter how great the damage. If he succeeds, a great evil will be unleashed, and everyone I care about will die.

When Margo Price was nineteen years old, she dropped out of college and moved to Nashville to become a musician. She busked on the street, played open mics, and even threw out her TV so that she would do nothing but write songs. She met Jeremy Ivey, a fellow musician who would become her closest collaborator and her husband. But after working on their craft for more than a decade, Price and Ivey had no label, no band, and plenty of heartache. Maybe We’ll Make It is a memoir of loss, motherhood, and the search for artistic freedom in the midst of the agony.

This collection of unabridged, spectacular steampunk speculations includes several classics of the genre. These tales will sweep you away with their amazing automata, daring dirigibles, grinding gears, and scintillating steam as days gone by are infused with tech. In "Smoke City," by Christopher Barzak, a woman comes to terms with the loss of her family to the child labor mills of the city. A doctor tries to cope with a strange plague terrorizing the citizens of London in Jeffrey Ford's "Dr. Lash Remembers."