Hell is definitely out to get Vivian Dante. Everywhere she goes, a trap awaits. Everybody she meets wants to hurt her or worse. Vivian isn’t even sure she can trust herself - after all, if you’re in hell, don’t you deserve to be? Too bad she can’t remember anything. Maybe then all that’s happening to her would make sense. Who is Vivian Dante? What is hell, really? Only one way to find out - keep hitting till you hit upon what you’re looking for. There’s not much else to do when you’re dead.

In the small rural town of Qonda, South Africa, the power and water supplies are unreliable, property prices are down, and citizens are slowly suffocating in the acrid smoke from the municipal dump. Recently retired English teacher Megan Merton has lived here all her life, most of it at No. 8 Serpent Crescent. So who better than this self-styled pillar of society to shine a spotlight on the decline and dysfunction, not to mention the dubious activities, past and present, of many of her neighbours. Nefarious deeds and bad behaviour deserve harsh treatment and appropriate retribution, if not consignment to one of Dante’s fiendish nine circles of hell. At least that’s what Megan believes – in fact she’s been taking matters into her own hands, unnoticed, for years. And now she has decided to write it all down, to shake all of the skeletons loose, and rejoice in the inventive punishments she devised and personally delivered to the wicked. Then her neighbour Elizabeth Cardew, a lecturer in Classical Studies, suffers a stroke and Megan is entrusted with the keys to No. 9. While Elizabeth begins a long recovery at the local care facility, Whispering Pines, Megan relishes the chance to snoop. Curious as to ‘what a stroke victim looks like’, she decides to visit and see for herself. A bond develops between the two women – one a cold and calculating sociopath, the other a courageous and lonely academic – something that takes both of them by surprise. Vivian de Klerk’s sharp observations and brilliantly acerbic satirical wit make this multi-layered novel at once horrifying, shocking and poignant – and very, very funny.

Praise for Sun Yung Shin: Finalist for the Believer Poetry Award "[her] work reads like redactions, offering fragments to be explored, investigated and interrogated, making her reader equal partner in the creation of meaning."—Star Tribune Sun Yung Shin moves ideas—of identity (Korean, American, adoptee, mother, Catholic, Buddhist) and interest (mythology, science fiction, Sophocles)— around like building blocks, forming and reforming new constructions of what it means to be at home. What is a cyborg but a hybrid creature of excess? A thing that exceeds the sum of its parts. A thing that has extended its powers, enhanced, even superpowered.

For every athlete or sports fanatic who knows she's just as good as the guys. This is for fans of The Running Dream by Wendelin Van Draanen, Grace, Gold, and Glory by Gabrielle Douglass and Breakaway: Beyond the Goal by Alex Morgan. The summer before Caleb and Tessa enter high school, friendship has blossomed into a relationship . . . and their playful sports days are coming to an end. Caleb is getting ready to try out for the football team, and Tessa is training for cross-country. But all their structured plans derail in the final flag game when they lose. Tessa doesn’t want to end her career as a loser. She really enjoys playing, and if she’s being honest, she likes it even more than running cross-country. So what if she decided to play football instead? What would happen between her and Caleb? Or between her two best friends, who are counting on her to try out for cross-country with them? And will her parents be upset that she’s decided to take her hobby to the next level? This summer Caleb and Tessa figure out just what it means to be a boyfriend, girlfriend, teammate, best friend, and someone worth cheering for. “A great next choice for readers who have enjoyed Catherine Gilbert Murdock’s Dairy Queen and Miranda Kenneally’s Catching Jordan.”—SLJ “Fast-paced football action, realistic family drama, and sweet romance…[will have] readers looking for girl-powered sports stories…find[ing] plenty to like.”—Booklist “Tessa's ferocious competitiveness is appealing.”—Kirkus Reviews “[The Football Girl] serve[s] to illuminate the appropriately complicated emotions both of a young romance and of pursuing a dream. Heldring writes with insight and restraint.”—The Horn Book

Now streaming on Netflix and BBC iPlayer! The Breakfast Club meets Pretty Little Liars in Gretchen McNeil's sharp and thrilling sequel to Get Even. Perfect for fans of E. Lockhart, Karen M. McManus, and Maureen Johnson. The members of Don't Get Mad aren't just mad anymore . . . they're afraid. And with Margot in a coma and Bree under house arrest, it's up to Olivia and Kitty to try to catch their deadly tormentor. But just as the girls are about to go on the offensive, Ed the Head reveals a shocking secret that turns all their theories upside down. The killer could be anyone, and this time he—or she—is out for more than just revenge. The girls desperately try to discover the killer's identity as their own lives are falling apart: Donté is pulling away from Kitty and seems to be hiding a secret of his own, Bree is sequestered under the watchful eye of her mom’s bodyguard, and Olivia's mother is on an emotional downward spiral. The killer is closing in, the threats are becoming more personal, and when the police refuse to listen, the girls have no choice but to confront their anonymous “friend” . . . or die trying.

Jews arrived in the Republic of Rome some time in the second or first century B.C.E. They soon formed their own community which absorbed Roman cultural forms but was able to maintain its identity and integrity. For more than twenty centuries, the Italian peninsula has been home to the heirs of this ancient minority community, whose culture is a blend of traditional Jewish content with Roman, then Italian cultural forms. Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy is the title of an exhibition curated by Vivian B. Mann and Emily Braun for The Jewish Museum, New York (September 1989-January 1990), an exhibition that explores the extraordinarily rich artistic legacy of Italian Jewry. This book, like the exhibition itself, focuses on four time periods: the Empire, the Era of the City States (1300-1550), the Era of the Ghettos (1550-1750), and the period since the Risorgimento. Artifacts and architecture are generously represented along with fine arts. Essays by prominent scholars introduce us to the historical and cultural context of a splendid array of works, from ancient Roman architectural fragments and gold glass to illuminated manuscripts and printed books from the Renaissance, baroque ceremonial textiles and silver, and paintings, graphics, and sculpture of the modern era. The many illustrations illuminate the art and life of a minority community in dynamic tension with dominant society and show the vibrant, ongoing contribution by Jews to the arts of Italy. Jews arrived in the Republic of Rome some time in the second or first century B.C.E. They soon formed their own community which absorbed Roman cultural forms but was able to maintain its identity and integrity. For more than twenty centuries, the Italian peninsula has been home to the heirs of this ancient minority community, whose culture is a blend of traditional Jewish content with Roman, then Italian cultural forms. Gardens and Ghettos: The Art of Jewish Life in Italy is the title of an exhibition curated by Vivian B. Mann and Emily Braun for The Jewish Museum, New York (September 1989-January 1990), an exhibition that explores the extraordinarily rich artistic legacy of Italian Jewry. This book, like the exhibition itself, focuses on four time periods: the Empire, the Era of the City States (1300-1550), the Era of the Ghettos (1550-1750), and the period since the Risorgimento. Artifacts and architecture are generously represented along with fine arts. Essays by prominent scholars introduce us to the historical and cultural context of a splendid array of works, from ancient Roman architectural fragments and gold glass to illuminated manuscripts and printed books from the Renaissance, baroque ceremonial textiles and silver, and paintings, graphics, and sculpture of the modern era. The many illustrations illuminate the art and life of a minority community in dynamic tension with dominant society and show the vibrant, ongoing contribution by Jews to the arts of Italy.

A fresh and vivid new voice brings a contemporary edge to the classic espionage novel. At twenty-six, Princeton grad Michael Wang is trapped. Stifled under the bamboo ceiling at General Motors, he’s working quietly on a breakthrough in self-driving car technology that he hopes will catapult him out of obscurity. Disaffected and largely friendless in San Francisco, he’s dogged by resentment towards the Ivy Leaguers who never accepted him and his colleagues at GM who see him as passive and faceless. But all that changes when one night, on a freelance coding platform, he meets the beautiful and enigmatic Vivian. She’s been admiring Michael’s work from afar and represents a rival Beijing tech company that’s eager to poach him as a newly minted executive, liberate his ideas from the stagnant confines of GM, and help him find success in the wilder, less regulated business environs of China. For Michael—alienated and underappreciated—it’s no choice at all. But as soon as Michael arrives in Beijing, Vivian vanishes. When the true nature of his new position is made clear, Michael finds himself enmeshed in a dangerous web of industrial espionage and counterintelligence. Caught between two countries that view him as a pawn, where do his loyalties lie? Piercingly intelligent and ruthlessly contemporary, The Expat is both a white-knuckle spy novel and a thrilling exploration of the myth of meritocracy, high-tech immigration, U.S.-China conflicts, identity, and disaffection that asks: in the pursuit of self-actualization, who will we betray and how far will we go?

Archaic Torso of Gumby is a series of interlinked stories and essays by Geoffrey Morrison and Matthew Tomkinson that explore the gooey, prickly, sticky materials of late-capitalist pop culture, from video games to claymation to children's picture-books commissioned by oil and gas companies. Here lyric essay, personal memoir, fable, pseudohistory, and science fiction all coexist alongside more conventional short story forms. Each part reveals unlikely connections between subjects as different as a sentient wallet, a gathering of headless saints, abject descriptions of 3D-printed food, a sixteenth-century courtier who thinks he's a horse, a virtual reality religious experience, and a couple with a fetish involving crustaceans. By turns cerebral, goofy, and heartfelt, Archaic Torso of Gumby is a delirious rabbit hole for the adventurous reader.

A 2015 Whitney Award Nominee! A powerful story of loss, second chances, and first love, reminiscent of Sarah Dessen and John Green. When Oakley Nelson loses her older brother, Lucas, to cancer, she thinks she’ll never recover. Between her parents’ arguing and the battle she’s fighting with depression, she feels nothing inside but a hollow emptiness. When Mom suggests they spend a few months in California with Aunt Jo, Oakley isn’t sure a change of scenery will alter anything, but she’s willing to give it a try. In California, Oakley discovers a sort of safety and freedom in Aunt Jo’s beach house. Once they’re settled, Mom hands her a notebook full of letters addressed to her—from Lucas. As Oakley reads one each day, she realizes how much he loved her, and each letter challenges her to be better and to continue to enjoy her life. He wants her to move on. If only it were that easy. But then a surfer named Carson comes into her life, and Oakley is blindsided. He makes her feel again. As she lets him in, she is surprised by how much she cares for him, and that’s when things get complicated. How can she fall in love and be happy when Lucas never got the chance to do those very same things? With her brother’s dying words as guidance, Oakley knows she must learn to listen and trust again. But will she have to leave the past behind to find happiness in the future? Sky Pony Press, with our Good Books, Racehorse and Arcade imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of books for young readers—picture books for small children, chapter books, books for middle grade readers, and novels for young adults. Our list includes bestsellers for children who love to play Minecraft; stories told with LEGO bricks; books that teach lessons about tolerance, patience, and the environment, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

England has traditionally been understood as a latecomer to the use of forensic medicine in death investigation, lagging nearly two-hundred years behind other European authorities. Using the coroner's inquest as a lens, this book hopes to offer a fresh perspective on the process of death investigation in medieval England. The central premise of this book is that medical practitioners did participate in death investigation – although not in every inquest, or even most, and not necessarily in those investigations where we today would deem their advice most pertinent. The medieval relationship with death and disease, in particular, shaped coroners' and their jurors' understanding of the inquest's medical needs and led them to conclusions that can only be understood in context of the medieval world's holistic approach to health and medicine. Moreover, while the English resisted Southern Europe's penchant for autopsies, at times their findings reveal a solid understanding of internal medicine. By studying cause of death in the coroners' reports, this study sheds new light on subjects such as abortion by assault, bubonic plague, cruentation, epilepsy, insanity, senescence, and unnatural death.