Sixteen-year-old Logan is dead, but he realizes he still has unfinished business.

An enigmatic genius discovers it. A woman obsessed with power exploits it. One man will risk everything to find the answer behind it, but he could never have been prepared for where the truth would take him. It is Los Angeles of the near future. People are dazzled by technology driven by an insatiable demand for virtual excitement. EXIT POINT; One man’s odyssey into a dark landscape of the near future as he desperately tries to unravel the mystery while struggling with his own crisis in belief.

Logan always takes the easy way out. After a night of drinking and driving he wakes up to find he has been involved in a senseless car accident and is dead. With the help of his guide, Wade, and the spirit of his grandmother, he realizes he has taken the wrong exit—he wasn't meant to die. His life had a purpose—to save his sister—but he took the easy way out and he failed. Now, before he can rest in peace, he has to try and save his sister from a future no child should face. He will only get one chance and he cannot afford to fail this time—for Amy’s sake and for his own.

An innovator in contemporary thought on economic and political development looks here at decline rather than growth. Albert O. Hirschman makes a basic distinction between alternative ways of reacting to deterioration in business firms and, in general, to dissatisfaction with organizations: one, “exit,” is for the member to quit the organization or for the customer to switch to the competing product, and the other, “voice,” is for members or customers to agitate and exert influence for change “from within.” The efficiency of the competitive mechanism, with its total reliance on exit, is questioned for certain important situations. As exit often undercuts voice while being unable to counteract decline, loyalty is seen in the function of retarding exit and of permitting voice to play its proper role. The interplay of the three concepts turns out to illuminate a wide range of economic, social, and political phenomena. As the author states in the preface, “having found my own unifying way of looking at issues as diverse as competition and the two-party system, divorce and the American character, black power and the failure of ‘unhappy’ top officials to resign over Vietnam, I decided to let myself go a little.”

Winner of CLR James Book Prize from the Working Class Studies Association and 2nd Place for the Victor Turner Prize in Ethnographic Writing. In 1980, Christine J. Walley’s world was turned upside down when the steel mill in Southeast Chicago where her father worked abruptly closed. In the ensuing years, ninety thousand other area residents would also lose their jobs in the mills—just one example of the vast scale of deindustrialization occurring across the United States. The disruption of this event propelled Walley into a career as a cultural anthropologist, and now, in Exit Zero, she brings her anthropological perspective home, examining the fate of her family and that of blue-collar America at large. Interweaving personal narratives and family photos with a nuanced assessment of the social impacts of deindustrialization, Exit Zero is one part memoir and one part ethnography— providing a much-needed female and familial perspective on cultures of labor and their decline. Through vivid accounts of her family’s struggles and her own upward mobility, Walley reveals the social landscapes of America’s industrial fallout, navigating complex tensions among class, labor, economy, and environment. Unsatisfied with the notion that her family’s turmoil was inevitable in the ever-forward progress of the United States, she provides a fresh and important counternarrative that gives a new voice to the many Americans whose distress resulting from deindustrialization has too often been ignored. This book is part of a project that also includes a documentary film.

An enigmatic genius discovers it. A woman obsessed with power exploits it. One man will risk everything to find the answer behind it, but he could never have been prepared for where truth would take him. It is Los Angeles of the near future. People are dazzled by technology driven by an insatiable demand for virtual excitement. Secretly, network executives employ a fantastic new technology that causes people to lose touch with reality. This hidden influence suddenly affects everyone in sinister and unexpected ways. EXIT POINT is the odyssey of Nash DeCoucy into the dark landscape of the near future as he desperately tries to unravel the mystery while struggling with his own crisis in belief.

Exploring a wide range of role changes, Ebaugh focuses on voluntary exits from significant roles and the common stages--from disillusionment with a particular identity to search for alternative roles to turning points and finally to the creation of an identity as an ex.

FINALIST FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE & WINNER OF THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR FICTION and THE ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE “It was as if Hamid knew what was going to happen to America and the world, and gave us a road map to our future… At once terrifying and … oddly hopeful.” —Ayelet Waldman, The New York Times Book Review “Moving, audacious, and indelibly human.” —Entertainment Weekly, “A” rating The New York Times bestselling novel: an astonishingly visionary love story that imagines the forces that drive ordinary people from their homes into the uncertain embrace of new lands, from the author of The Reluctant Fundamentalist and the forthcoming The Last White Man. In a country teetering on the brink of civil war, two young people meet—sensual, fiercely independent Nadia and gentle, restrained Saeed. They embark on a furtive love affair, and are soon cloistered in a premature intimacy by the unrest roiling their city. When it explodes, turning familiar streets into a patchwork of checkpoints and bomb blasts, they begin to hear whispers about doors—doors that can whisk people far away, if perilously and for a price. As the violence escalates, Nadia and Saeed decide that they no longer have a choice. Leaving their homeland and their old lives behind, they find a door and step through. . . . Exit West follows these remarkable characters as they emerge into an alien and uncertain future, struggling to hold on to each other, to their past, to the very sense of who they are. Profoundly intimate and powerfully inventive, it tells an unforgettable story of love, loyalty, and courage that is both completely of our time and for all time.

Given the choice between dying and saving your world, which would you choose? In a world parallel to our own, twenty-three-year-old Delinda Patterson's life is turned upside down when she is hit by a vehicle on her morning run. She is given a life-altering choice and decides to leave her old life behind, but her current struggle brings her closer to her past before she is able to walk away from it. After discovering that humans are not the only beings on the planet, Delinda is determined to find out the reason for their presence. When her quest for answers puts her dad in danger, Delinda is forced to make yet another difficult decision: to make her escape before anyone notices and continue on her ordained journey, or to save her dad before he is taken away forever. In the midst of leaving her past behind, Delinda meets the mysterious man who has been appearing in her dreams, but she fears they can never be together because he is not of this earthly plane. Will Delinda finally get her chance at true love, or will her uncertainty ruin her chances forever?