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Best Book of the Year The Los Angeles Times • The Washington Post Los Angeles was the fastest growing city in the world, mad with oil fever, get-rich-quick schemes, and celebrity scandals. It was also rife with organized crime, with a mayor in the pocket of the syndicates and a DA taking bribes to throw trials. In A Bright and Guilty Place, Richard Rayner narrates the entwined lives of two men, Dave Clark and Leslie White, who were caught up in the crimes, murders, and swindles of the day. Over a few transformative years, as the boom times shaded into the Depression, the adventures of Clark and White would inspire pulp fiction and replace L.A.’s reckless optimism with a new cynicism. Together, theirs is the tale of how the city of sunshine went noir.
NOW A NETFLIX FILM, STARRING ELLE FANNING AND JUSTICE SMITH! The New York Times bestselling love story about two teens who find each other while standing on the edge. And don’t miss Take Me with You When You Go, Jennifer Niven’s highly anticipated new book with bestselling author David Levithan! Theodore Finch is fascinated by death. Every day he thinks of ways he might kill himself, but every day he also searches for—and manages to find—something to keep him here, and alive, and awake. Violet Markey lives for the future, counting the days until graduation, when she can escape her small Indiana town and her aching grief in the wake of her sister’s recent death. When Finch and Violet meet on the ledge of the bell tower at school—six stories above the ground— it’s unclear who saves whom. Soon it’s only with Violet that Finch can be himself. And it’s only with Finch that Violet can forget to count away the days and start living them. But as Violet’s world grows, Finch’s begins to shrink. . . . “A do-not-miss for fans of Eleanor & Park and The Fault in Our Stars, and basically anyone who can breathe.” —Justine Magazine “At the heart—a big one—of All the Bright Places lies a charming love story about this unlikely and endearing pair of broken teenagers.” —The New York Times Book Review “A heart-rending, stylish love story.” —The Wall Street Journal “A complex love story that will bring all the feels.” —Seventeen Magazine “Impressively layered, lived-in, and real.” —Buzzfeed
In the third gripping crime novel in Ace Atkins’s New York Times bestselling series, small town sheriff Quinn Colson takes on deadly criminals and even deadlier weather... A year after becoming sheriff of Tibbehah County, Mississippi, Quinn Colson is faced with a pardoned killer’s return to Jericho. Jamey Dixon now preaches redemption and forgiveness, but the family of the woman he was convicted of killing isn’t buying it. They warn Quinn that his sister’s relationship with Dixon could be fatal. Others don’t think the new preacher is a changed man, either—a couple of dangerous convicts who confided in Dixon about an armored car robbery believe he’s after the money they hid. So they do the only thing they can: break out and head straight to Jericho, leaving a trail of bodies in their wake. Colson and his deputy, Lillie, have their work cut out for them. But they don’t count on one more unwelcome visitor: a tornado that causes havoc just as the manhunt heats up. Communications are down, the roads are impassable—and the rule of law is just about to snap.
Screenwriter Nunn draws on her true-life experience growing up in Africa to create this darkly romantic crime novel set in 1950s apartheid South Africa. Detective Emmanuel Cooper is caught up in a time and place where racial tensions and the raw hunger for power make for dangerous times.
From bestselling author Gary Krist, the story of the metropolis that never should have been and the visionaries who dreamed it into reality Little more than a century ago, the southern coast of California—bone-dry, harbor-less, isolated by deserts and mountain ranges—seemed destined to remain scrappy farmland. Then, as if overnight, one of the world’s iconic cities emerged. At the heart of Los Angeles’ meteoric rise were three flawed visionaries: William Mulholland, an immigrant ditch-digger turned self-taught engineer, designed the massive aqueduct that would make urban life here possible. D.W. Griffith, who transformed the motion picture from a vaudeville-house novelty into a cornerstone of American culture, gave L.A. its signature industry. And Aimee Semple McPherson, a charismatic evangelist who founded a religion, cemented the city’s identity as a center for spiritual exploration. All were masters of their craft, but also illusionists, of a kind. The images they conjured up—of a blossoming city in the desert, of a factory of celluloid dreamworks, of a community of seekers finding personal salvation under the California sun—were like mirages liable to evaporate on closer inspection. All three would pay a steep price to realize these dreams, in a crescendo of hubris, scandal, and catastrophic failure of design that threatened to topple each of their personal empires. Yet when the dust settled, the mirage that was LA remained. Spanning the years from 1900 to 1930, The Mirage Factory is the enthralling tale of an improbable city and the people who willed it into existence by pushing the limits of human engineering and imagination.
As garment workers, longshoremen, autoworkers, sharecroppers and clerks took to the streets, striking and organizing unions in the midst of the Depression, artists, writers and filmmakers joined the insurgent social movement by creating a cultural front. Disney cartoonists walked picket lines, and Billie Holiday sand 'Strange Fruit' at the left-wing cabaret, Café Society. Duke Ellington produced a radical musical, Jump for Joy, New York garment workers staged the legendary Broadway revue Pins and Needles, and Orson Welles and his Mercury players took their labor operas and anti-fascist Shakespeare to Hollywood and made Citizen Kane. A major reassessment of US cultural history, The Cultural Front is a vivid mural of this extraordinary upheaval which reshaped American culture in the twentieth century.
In the “thrilling conclusion”* to the dystopian trilogy that began with Gilded Cage and Tarnished City, the people of Britain rise up against their magically gifted masters. They must break the system—or be broken. MAGIC RUINS. WE RISE. The rules are simple, the system cruel: the lower classes must give ten years in service to Britain’s powerfully gifted rulers. With one uprising crushed by the glittering elite, commoners and aristocrats alike now take sides for a final confrontation. At the center of it all are two ordinary siblings: Abi Hadley and her brother, Luke. Each has reason to hate the ruling Jardine family. Abi, who was once their servant, now seeks revenge for a terrible wrong. Luke was imprisoned on their whim—but his only hope may be an alliance with the youngest and most powerful of the clan, the cold and inscrutable Silyen Jardine. Risking everything to end a bright and shining tyranny, Abi, Luke, and Silyen find themselves bound by a single destiny. Their actions will change their fates—and change the world. But at a cost almost too terrible to contemplate. What price would you pay for freedom? *Library Journal (starred review, Pick of the Month) Look for all three books in the mesmerizing Dark Gifts trilogy: GILDED CAGE • TARNISHED CITY • BRIGHT RUIN Praise for Bright Ruin “Fast-paced, entertaining, and a satisfying end to an epic story [with] dramatic class division based not on mere financial wealth but on a family’s magic.”—Booklist “A triumphant conclusion to this outstanding fantasy series . . . It will keep you up at night until you finish it, and you’ll take a huge breath as you can’t believe the story is over. If you haven’t read the first two installments, please do so, and then jump into the finale. You’ll fly through them all as you see Britain as you’ve never imagined—and you’ll hope against hope for the freedom that may never come.”—Bookreporter “Rebellion comes to a deadly boil in the final chapter of James’s Dark Gifts alternate history fantasy trilogy (after Tarnished City). . . . [An] intricate tale of ruthless scheming and bloody betrayals backlit by an unquenchable glimmer of hope.”—Publishers Weekly
The incredible true story of one woman's journey to relocate the place inside herself where strength, hope, and personal truth reside. After Hurricane Katrina, Alice Anderson has returned home to assess the damage to her beloved Mississippi coastline and the once-immaculate home she’d carefully cultivated for her husband, Dr. Liam Rivers, one of the community's highly respected doctors. But in the wake of this natural disaster, a more terrifying challenge emerges as Liam’s mental health spirals out of control, culminating in a violent attack at knifepoint, from which Alice is saved by their three-year-old son. Afraid for her life, she flees with her children. What ensues is an epic battle—emotional, psychological, spiritual, and legal—for her children’s welfare, for self-preservation, and ultimately for redemption. It’s an unrelenting battle that persists even as life goes on, finally coming full circle when the same son who saved Alice ten years before endures an eerily-familiar violent encounter at his father’s hands. Yet even as she confronts the harsh realities of high-powered Southern lawyers and an inadequate legal system, Alice forges a new life with her blossoming children and an ultimate reclamation of her true self.
The life of Raymond Chandler has long been obscured by secrets and half-truths as deceptive as anything in his novel The Long Goodbye. Now, drawing on new interviews, previously unpublished letters, and archives on both sides of the Atlantic, Tom Williams casts a new light on this most mysterious of writers. The Raymond Chandler revealed is a man troubled by loneliness and desertion from an early age. Born in Chicago in 1888, his childhood was overshadowed by the collapse of his parents' marriage, his father's alcohol-fuelled violence eventually forcing the boy and his doting mother to leave for Ireland and later London. But class-bound England proved stifling, and Chandler, in his twenties and eager to forge a new life, returned to the United States where—in corruption-ridden Los Angeles—he met his one great love, Cissy Pascal, a married woman eighteen years his senior. It was only during middle age, after his alcoholism wrecked a lucrative career as an oilman, that Chandler seriously turned to crime fiction. And his legacy—the lonely, ambiguous world of Philip Marlowe—endures, compelling generations of crime writers to follow him. In this long-awaited new biography, Tom Williams shadows one of the true literary giants of the twentieth century and considers how crime writing was raised to the level of art.
When Elvis crooned "Bright light city . . . gonna set my soul on fire," he voiced and embraced the siren call of a glittering urban utopia that continues to mesmerize millions. Call it Sin City or Lost Wages, Las Vegas definitely deserves its rapturous "Viva!" Larry Gragg, however, invites readers to view Las Vegas in an entirely new way. While countless other authors have focused on its history or gaming industry or entertainment ties, Gragg considers how popular culture has depicted the city and its powerful allure over its first century. Drawing on hundreds of films, television programs, novels, and articles, Gragg identifies changing trends in the city's portraits. Until the 1940s, boosters promoted it as the "last frontier town," a place where prospectors and cowboys enjoyed liquor, women, and wide-open gambling. Then in the early 1950s commentators increasingly characterized Las Vegas as a sophisticated resort city in the desert, and ever since then journalists, filmmakers, and novelists have depicted a city largely built by organized crime and featuring non-stop entertainment, gambling, luxury, and, of course, beautiful-and available-women. In Gragg's narrative, these images form a kaleidoscope of lights, sounds, characters, and ultimately amazement about this neon oasis. In these pages, readers will meet gangsters like Bugsy Siegel, Tony Spilotro, and Lefty Rosenthal, as well as Las Vegas's most popular entertainers: Elvis Presley, Sinatra's Rat Pack, Liberace, and Wayne Newton, not to mention the Folies Bergere showgirls. And Gragg's skillful interweaving of fictional and journalistic accounts of organized crime shows just how mutually reinforcing they have become over the years. Vegas will always make people's eyes light up as bright as the Strip, witness the new TV show Vegas or the recent film The Hangover. For everyone entranced by its glitter and glamour, Bright Light City is a must read boasting color photos and bursting with insider details: an eclectic blend of stories, people, sights, and sounds that together make up this desert city's extraordinary appeal.