Seeking to reclaim humanity's early secrets, the Umbra Arca Society was forged. Equipped with only a compass, a journal, and devotion to truth, these adventurers braved cursed landscapes. The Shadow Atlas collects their adventures.

The biographer—so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts—comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers’ lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers’ lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas’s professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas’s first subject, the “self-doomed” poet Delmore Schwartz. And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the “tall pines,” as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, by the “merciless pruning of mortality”) and, of course, the elusive Bellow, “a metaphysician of the ordinary.” Atlas revisits the lives and works of the classical biographers, the Renaissance writers of what were then called “lives,” Samuel Johnson and the obsessive Boswell, and the Victorian masters Mrs. Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an image of them—“as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.” (With black-and-white illustrations throughout)

“Reveals a political trend that threatens both our form of government and our species.” - Timothy Snyder, author of ON TYRANNY "Riveting.... Want to understand how so many Americans turned against truth? Read this book." Nancy Maclean, author of DEMOCRACY IN CHAINS In 1981, emboldened by Ronald Reagan's election, a group of some fifty Republican operatives, evangelicals, oil barons, and gun lobbyists met in a Washington suburb to coordinate their attack on civil liberties and the social safety net. These men and women called their coalition the Council for National Policy. Over four decades, this elite club has become a strategic nerve center for channeling money and mobilizing votes behind the scenes. Its secretive membership rolls represent a high-powered roster of fundamentalists, oligarchs, and their allies, from Oliver North, Ed Meese, and Tim LaHaye in the Council's early days to Kellyanne Conway, Ralph Reed, Tony Perkins, and the DeVos and Mercer families today. In Shadow Network, award-winning author and media analyst Anne Nelson chronicles this astonishing history and illuminates the coalition's key figures and their tactics. She traces how the collapse of American local journalism laid the foundation for the Council for National Policy's information war and listens in on the hardline broadcasting its members control. And she reveals how the group has collaborated with the Koch brothers to outfit Radical Right organizations with state-of-the-art apps and a shared pool of captured voter data - outmaneuvering the Democratic Party in a digital arms race whose result has yet to be decided. In a time of stark and growing threats to our most valued institutions and democratic freedoms, Shadow Network is essential reading.

This version of 'Shadows from the Walls of Death' is a tribute to Robert Clark Kedzie, who produced the originals of which there are now only two left in existence. They are located at the University of Michigan and Michigan State University. The originals are approximately 22 x 30 inches containing a title page and an 8 page preface followed by 86 samples cut from rolls of arsenic impregnated wallpaper. The book is sealed in a protective container and each individual page is encapsulated. This particular edition does not actually contain any arsenic. Further to that the content of this volume including both text and images are for entertainment purposes.

This is Capote’s In Cold Blood for serial killer enthusiasts: meticulously researched, superbly written, and incredibly vivid. Don’t miss it.” —Gabino Iglesias, author of Coyote Songs America’s First Female Serial Killer novelizes the true story of first-generation Irish-American nurse Jane Toppan, born as Honora Kelley. Although all the facts are intact, books about her life and her crimes are all facts and no story. Jane Toppan was absolutely a monster, but she did not start out that way. When Jane was a young child, her father abandoned her and her sister to the Boston Female Asylum. From there, Jane was indentured to a wealthy family who changed her name, never adopted her, wrote her out of the will, and essentially taught her how to hate herself. Jilted at the altar, Jane became a nurse and took control of her life—and the lives of her victims. “A thoughtful and inspired take on one of the greatest poisoners in history. America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster seethes with rage, compulsion, and a righteous condemnation of the servitude of the underclass. A chilling and sobering read.” —Robert Levy, author of The Glittering World “McBrayer offers us a complex—and terrifying—portrait of a killer who seemed almost doomed from birth.” —Kate Winkler Dawson, author of American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI “Brings the horrifying true story of Jane Toppan to lurid, novelistic life, and forces the reader face-to-face with the thoughtlessness and cruelty that helped turn a gifted, damaged child into one of America’s most legendary killers.” —Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters

Earth is a legend amongst legends; it survived the meteors that decimated the dinosaurs, it survived the coming of the great comet half its size and most importantly it survived humans, its greatest threat. In time humans realized that they could not survive without the Earth and peace emerged and with that came great civilizations. These civilizations prospered and grew; the earth was no longer enough, they needed more, more than just the moon, sun and the stars. They expanded past their moon, at first they found nothing but as their minds developed so did their technology. Finally they found it, they were scared at first but in time they embraced it and finally came to terms with the fact that they were not alone and as time would allow it, the Earth grew with the rest of the seven great planets in the solar system. There was no more need for exploration, no more room for questions, this is was an era of solutions. Solutions that brought great nations together, continents became countries and race; became a thing of the past. Peace was no longer a distant reality but as time would have it, nothing lasts forever; Earth became part of a solution, a solution that would cost it all its inhabitants, will the Earth survive once more?

Pickard County, Nebraska, July 1979. Sheriff's deputy Harley Jensen is restless, looking for something to take his mind off the past. Pam bristles against her role as wife and mother; her husband, Rick, struggles with the wreckage of his youth. Paul Reddick, town miscreant, is flint to Harley's steel. It's just a matter of time before their conflict burns Pickard County to the ground. -- adapted from jacket

"Ricky Zamora brings his love of map-making and his boundless curiosity to the arid landscapes east of the Cascades Mountains. He arrives during a wild thunderstorm, and watches his family and their neighbors scramble to deal with a wildfire sparked by lightning. Joined by his friend Ellie, he sees how plants, animals, and people adjust to life with wildfires"--

All Ben wants is a Mongolian fighting fish. He's saved his allowance for weeks and finally has enough to go to the pet store. But instead of his fish, he comes home with a talking cat from Eidolon, the Secret Country. Ben learns that this is just a small piece of the magical creature smuggling that is going on and that with each creature taken from their home, the magical land grows weaker. And so does Ben's mom, the long-lost queen of Eidolon. Ben exposed Mr. Dodd's vile pet emporium in The Secret Country, but that was not enough to put a stop to his evil scheme. In The Shadow World, Queen Isadora goes back to her homeland to help the magical creatures overcome the dog-headed Dodman. Ellie, Ben's sister, follows and lands in a trap. The Arnold children are destined to save the Secret Country, but first they must save each other. The battle continues in The Dragon's Fire, but the magical creatures under Queen Isadora's guide are not fairing so well. Before Ben and the others ride to her rescue, she is captured by the Dodman and taken to the castle for a wedding ceremony. Her wedding ceremony. But first the Dodman must get rid of Ben's father. It is a fight to the finish when baby sister Alice goes through the most extraordinary transformation, vanquishes the Dodman, and reunites her family for good.

In The Atlas of an Anxious Man, Christoph Ransmayr offers a mesmerizing travel diary--a sprawling tale of earthly wonders seen by a wandering eye. This is an exquisite, lyrically told travel story. Translated by Simon Pare, this unique account follows Ransmayr across the globe: from the shadow of Java's volcanoes to the rapids of the Mekong and Danube Rivers, from the drift ice of the Arctic Circle to Himalayan passes, and on to the disenchanted islands of the South Pacific. Ransmayr begins again and again with, "I saw. . ." recounting to the reader the stories of continents, eras, and landscapes of the soul. Like maps, the episodes come together to become a book of the world--one that charts the life and death, happiness and fate of people bound up in images of breathtaking beauty. "One of the German language's most gifted young novelists."--Library Journal, on The Terrors of Ice and Darkness