The Israeli Air Force´s elite rescue team left her for dead. She pierced her nose She hiked the desert. She fell in love. And then she left. It was a big year. The September after graduating high school, Nancy Wassner´s friends went to college. She went to Israel instead. Follow Nancy from behind the Chocolate Curtain of Hershey, Pennsylvania, through the beginnings of Israel´s Second Intifada, down cinnamon-scented ancient streets to the shore of the Mediterranean Sea and back to New England. And learn as she does to live in a way that can only be described in Hebrew.

A Certain Kind of Light could be described as a confessional, cosmic diary where a man steps into Eileen McCarthy's life, leaving the landscape changed and charged forever with a certain kind of light.

In voices that are hip and raunchy, bemused and sardonic, award-winning writer Reginald McKnight conjures a chorus of narratives that reveal the African-American middle class to be a crucible of human experience. Outrageously inventive, disarmingly comic, and urgently disturbing, this collection brings a disparate cast of characters face to face with fault lines of identity and the limbo of living between cultures. The Kind of Light That Shines on Texas was first published by Little, Brown and Company in 1992. This edition is published in cooperation with the Living Writers course at Colgate University.

Told through the eyes of a nameless teenage boy, A Certain Kind of Light sees the narrator attempt to find some kind of cohesion in a life from which he feels increasingly disconnected. As his family, friendships, sexuality and even his taste in music and pornography begin to feel distant from him, his alienation expands. The things that once meant everything to him are stripped of an essence he begins to doubt they ever had. He fixates on a profile of a boy that he finds on the Internet, projecting illusory ideas upon a person that he has never met but feels a profound intimacy with. Feeling more and more lost, he attempts to work out the connection between a disparate set of coincidences, objects and events: a dead, mangled bird, the funeral of his best friend's father, a horrific experience with LSD, obsessive sexual fantasies and the disintegrating suburban life in which he was raised. Intensely emotional and disorientating, A Certain Kind of Light focuses on the intricacies of confusion.

*NOW A NETFLIX LIMITED SERIES—from producer and director Shawn Levy (Stranger Things) starring Mark Ruffalo, Hugh Laurie, and newcomer Aria Mia Loberti* Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award finalist, the beloved instant New York Times bestseller and New York Times Book Review Top 10 Book about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II. Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. When she is six, Marie-Laure goes blind and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris, and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, the orphan Werner grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments, a talent that wins him a place at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the Resistance. More and more aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge. Doerr’s “stunning sense of physical detail and gorgeous metaphors” (San Francisco Chronicle) are dazzling. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, he illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another. Ten years in the writing, All the Light We Cannot See is a magnificent, deeply moving novel from a writer “whose sentences never fail to thrill” (Los Angeles Times).

Argues that human freedom is threatened by systems of intelligent persuasion developed by tech giants who compete for our time and attention. This title is also available as Open Access.