In the shadow of the Eiffel Tower, an assassin's bullet strikes James Styles just two weeks before the Democratic Party names his spouse Vice President Harriet Styles its candidate for the Presidency. The task of apprehending the shooter falls to Richard Thatcher, the Director of the FBI, and Thatcher dispatches his protégé Barbara Collins to Paris to lead the investigation. Barbara's quest takes her to the edge of the Arabian Peninsula then back to Paris where she uncovers evidence that suggests a domestic American plot. Candidate Harriet Styles mounts a bitter campaign that condemns the FBI for its failure to apprehend the terrorist assassin. Thatcher, determined to protect his embattled agency, mounts a parallel investigation. A sympathetic American public elects the grieving widow to the highest office in the land. Before the inauguration, Thatcher identifies the shooter and in doing so shakes the very foundations of the American political system.

Hugo is a dapper little bird who adores the Eiffel Tower -- or at least his view of it from down here. Hugo, you see, has never left the ground. So when he meets another bird, the determined Lulu, who invites him to fly with her to the top of the tower, Hugo stalls, persuading Lulu to see, on foot, every inch of the park in which he lives instead. Will a nighttime flying lesson from Bernard the Owl, some sweet and sensible encouragement from Lulu, and some extra pluck from Hugo himself finally give this bird the courage he needs to spread his wings and fly?

A terrorist bomb destroys a corporate jet, and a reluctant Conor Gifford, the Chief of the Office of Special Investigations, is thrust into an investigation that takes him to picturesque but bloody Kashmir where he is greeted with disdain and encouraged to withdraw. With a solitary Indian Special Branch shadow as his only companion, Gif stubbornly ignores the advice and warnings of competing Indian and American investigators and eventually follows a trail that takes him to Karachi, Islamabad and Reston, Virginia. Gif uncovers two vital clues which he turns over to the FBI investigative team. A distracted Gifford eagerly withdraws from the hunt for the bomber and hurries back to Richmond only to have the governor dispatch him to Virginia Beach to join a hunt for a serial killer. Before Gif is able to fully engage with the search for the serial killer, an eccentric billionaire contrives Gif's return to the quest for the bomber. Forced to balance the pressures of two distracting investigations, Gif commutes between Washington, D.C., Richmond, and Virginia Beach until assistance from two unlikely sources lead him two very dissimilar antagonists. Both investigations culminate in one tumultuous weekend.

Poppy Gore, a local realtor, discovers the body of a client she had met only once lying on the floor of an isolated cabin on a West Virginia mountaintop with four bullet holes in his chest. Sheriff Billy Jones calls on a fellow law professional, the Chief of the Fairfax Police, who assigns Lieutenant Chase Mansfield of the Criminal Investigations Bureau to the case. The investigation begins with the eccentric Scott family, a clan at war with itself. Mary Scott, the family matriarch, points a finger at Barbara, the tearless widow, and demands that Mansfield arrest the bitch. Barbara indifferently explains that she and Dred Scott, the victim, were legally separated. She denies knowing that Scott had owned a mountain cabin and offers a solid alibi affirmed by a companion, a Russian diplomat with a FBI tail. Before Lieutenant Mansfield can identify the killer, Dreds brother Clayton Scott is murdered in his Fairfax home. High-level corruption, corporate conspiracy, political warfare, and the bitter disintegration of a prominent family greatly complicate the investigation.

A prominent foreign correspondent takes a sabbatical, attempts to write a magnum opus, stalls, and is enticed into an assignment that implicates him in espionage, multiple murders, and the competition for a Pulitzer Prize. It all begins when his fiance dumps him without warning.

The first book in Chris Colfer's #1 New York Times bestselling series The Land of Stories about two siblings who fall into a fairy-tale world! Alex and Conner Bailey's world is about to change forever, in this fast-paced adventure that uniquely combines our modern day world with the enchanting realm of classic fairy tales. The Land of Stories tells the tale of twins Alex and Conner. Through the mysterious powers of a cherished book of stories, they leave their world behind and find themselves in a foreign land full of wonder and magic where they come face-to-face with fairy tale characters they grew up reading about. But after a series of encounters with witches, wolves, goblins, and trolls alike, getting back home is going to be harder than they thought.

The #1 New York Times bestselling (mostly true) memoir from the hilarious author of Furiously Happy. “Gaspingly funny and wonderfully inappropriate.”—O, The Oprah Magazine When Jenny Lawson was little, all she ever wanted was to fit in. That dream was cut short by her fantastically unbalanced father and a morbidly eccentric childhood. It did, however, open up an opportunity for Lawson to find the humor in the strange shame-spiral that is her life, and we are all the better for it. In the irreverent Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Lawson’s long-suffering husband and sweet daughter help her uncover the surprising discovery that the most terribly human moments—the ones we want to pretend never happened—are the very same moments that make us the people we are today. For every intellectual misfit who thought they were the only ones to think the things that Lawson dares to say out loud, this is a poignant and hysterical look at the dark, disturbing, yet wonderful moments of our lives. Readers Guide Inside

In a bold rethinking of the Hollywood blacklist and McCarthyite America, Joseph Litvak reveals a political regime that did not end with the 1950s or even with the Cold War: a regime of compulsory sycophancy, in which the good citizen is an informer, ready to denounce anyone who will not play the part of the earnest, patriotic American. While many scholars have noted the anti-Semitism underlying the House Un-American Activities Committee’s (HUAC’s) anti-Communism, Litvak draws on the work of Theodor W. Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Alain Badiou, and Max Horkheimer to show how the committee conflated Jewishness with what he calls “comic cosmopolitanism,” an intolerably seductive happiness, centered in Hollywood and New York, in show business and intellectual circles. He maintains that HUAC took the comic irreverence of the “uncooperative” witnesses as a crime against an American identity based on self-repudiation and the willingness to “name names.” Litvak proposes that sycophancy was (and continues to be) the price exacted for assimilation into mainstream American culture, not just for Jews, but also for homosexuals, immigrants, and other groups deemed threatening to American rectitude. Litvak traces the outlines of comic cosmopolitanism in a series of performances in film and theater and before HUAC, performances by Jewish artists and intellectuals such as Zero Mostel, Judy Holliday, and Abraham Polonsky. At the same time, through an uncompromising analysis of work by informers including Jerome Robbins, Elia Kazan, and Budd Schulberg, he explains the triumph of a stoolpigeon culture that still thrives in the America of the early twenty-first century.

Patrick Edward's fierce monster mother helps him deal with some obnoxious bullies.

"Both timely and well worth the time."-Thomas Keenan, Newsline. aia Award Winner & Oculus Bestseller.