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A gripping novel about the dangers and draws of contemporary Russia--from the author of The Geographer's Library With The Geographer's Library, Jon Fasman made an "inventive and spirited" debut (The New Yorker) that landed him on The New York Times bestseller list. Every bit as dazzling, The Unpossessed City takes readers into the Wild East that is Russia today. There we meet Jim Vilatzer--an American expat whose Russian language skills land him a job interviewing former inmates of the Gulag and ensnare him in a web of deceit involving the CIA, Russia's Interior Ministry, and Central Asian arms dealers selling the most dangerous technologies to the highest bidder. From its brooding portrayal of Moscow to its riveting pace, The Unpossessed City is an atmospheric triumph in the tradition of Donna Leon's novels of Venice.
Fleeing America and his gambling debts, Jim Vilatzer uses the Russian language skills he learned from his émigré grandparents to land a job in Moscow interviewing Gulag survivors, work that brings him into the rich lives of his new neighbors and catches the suspicious attentions of Russia's Interior Ministry and the CIA.
"A brainy noir . . . [a] winningly cryptic tale . . . a cabinet of wonders written by a novelist whose surname and sensibility fit comfortably on the shelf between Umberto Eco and John Fowles." —Los Angeles Times "One of the year’s most literate and absorbing entertainments." —Kirkus Reviews Jon Fasman’s dizzyingly plotted intellectual thriller suggests a marriage between Dan Brown and Donna Tartt. When reporter Paul Tomm is assigned to investigate the mysterious death of a reclusive academic, he finds himself pursuing leads that date back to the twelfth century and the theft of alchemical instruments from the geographer of the Sicilian court. Now someone is trying to retrieve them. Interspersed with the present action are the stories of the men and women who came to possess those charmed—and sometimes cursed—artifacts, which have powers that go well beyond the transmutation of lead into gold. Deftly combining history, magic, suspense, and romance—and as handsomely illustrated as an ancient incunabulum—The Geographer’s Library is irresistible.
‘Walker is my name and I am the same. Riddley Walker. Walking my riddels where ever theyve took me and walking them now on this paper the same. There aint that many sir prizes in life if you take noatis of every thing. Every time will have its happenings out and every place the same. Thats why I finely come to writing all this down. Thinking on what the idear of us myt be. Thinking on that thing whats in us lorn and loan and oansome.’ Composed in an English which has never been spoken and laced with a storytelling tradition that predates the written word, RIDDLEY WALKER is the world waiting for us at the bitter end of the nuclear road. It is desolate, dangerous and harrowing, and a modern masterpiece.
Tess Slesinger’s 1934 novel, The Unpossessed details the ins and outs and ups and downs of left-wing New York intellectual life and features a cast of litterateurs, layabouts, lotharios, academic activists, and fur-clad patrons of protest and the arts. This cutting comedy about hard times, bad jobs, lousy marriages, little magazines, high principles, and the morning after bears comparison with the best work of Dawn Powell and Mary McCarthy.
This investigation into the legal, political, and moral issues surrounding how the police and justice system use surveillance technology asks the question: what are citizens of a free country willing to tolerate in the name of public safety? As we rethink the scope of police power, Jon Fasman’s chilling examination of how the police and the justice system use the unparalleled power of surveillance technology—how it affects privacy, liberty, and civil rights—becomes more urgent by the day. Embedding himself within police departments on both coasts, Fasman explores the moral, legal, and political questions posed by these techniques and tools. By zeroing in on how facial recognition, automatic license-plate readers, drones, predictive algorithms, and encryption affect us personally, Fasman vividly illustrates what is at stake and explains how to think through issues of privacy rights, civil liberties, and public safety. How do these technologies impact how police operate in our society? How should archaic privacy laws written for an obsolete era—that of the landline and postbox—be updated? Fasman looks closely at what can happen when surveillance technologies are combined and put in the hands of governments with scant regard for citizens’ civil liberties, pushing us to ask: Is our democratic culture strong enough to stop us from turning into China, with its architecture of control?
A brilliant physicist attempts to salvage his planet of anarchy.
This set of readings presents useful insights into urbanization and provides a fresh perspective on American cities and their inhabitants. Advancing the premise that it is not possible to understand how people live in cities without understanding how they think of them, the editor presents historical and contemporary materials that illustrate vividly the variety of ways in which Americans have viewed their cities, and urbanization in general.This book sheds light on what the city is and does by analyzing what its citizens think it should be and do. Its lively, readable selections include contributions from businessmen, ministers, journalists, reporters, city planners, and reformers, as well as sociologists. Strauss shows that Americans' views of cities have been profoundly influenced by their history of continental expansion, successive waves of immigration, massive industrialization and similar objective developments. He points out that certain perspectives or themes relations of social classes within the city, of country to city, of small city to big city, of city to region, etc.persist regardless of the social or historical perspective of the writer.The author's comprehensive introduction and his introductions to each section of the book delineate the thematic structure of the readings and guide the reader toward the insights and principles illuminated in the different sections. A fruitful contribution to courses in urban sociology, the book is a useful addition to the libraries of sociologists, political scientists, planners, and city officials who wish to understand more fully the contemporary urban milieu.
Sheds light on what the city is and does by analyzing what its citizens think it should be and do.
Maybe it’s the end of the world, but not for Candace Chen, a millennial, first-generation American and office drone meandering her way into adulthood in Ling Ma’s offbeat, wryly funny, apocalyptic satire, Severance. "A stunning, audacious book with a fresh take on both office politics and what the apocalypse might bring." —Michael Schaub, NPR.org “A satirical spin on the end times-- kind of like The Office meets The Leftovers.” --Estelle Tang, Elle NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY: NPR * The New Yorker ("Books We Loved") * Elle * Marie Claire * Amazon Editors * The Paris Review (Staff Favorites) * Refinery29 * Bustle * Buzzfeed * BookPage * Bookish * Mental Floss * Chicago Review of Books * HuffPost * Electric Literature * A.V. Club * Jezebel * Vulture * Literary Hub * Flavorwire Winner of the NYPL Young Lions Fiction Award * Winner of the Kirkus Prize for Fiction * Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist Award * Finalist for the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel * A New York Times Notable Book of 2018 * An Indie Next Selection Candace Chen, a millennial drone self-sequestered in a Manhattan office tower, is devoted to routine. With the recent passing of her Chinese immigrant parents, she’s had her fill of uncertainty. She’s content just to carry on: She goes to work, troubleshoots the teen-targeted Gemstone Bible, watches movies in a Greenpoint basement with her boyfriend. So Candace barely notices when a plague of biblical proportions sweeps New York. Then Shen Fever spreads. Families flee. Companies cease operations. The subways screech to a halt. Her bosses enlist her as part of a dwindling skeleton crew with a big end-date payoff. Soon entirely alone, still unfevered, she photographs the eerie, abandoned city as the anonymous blogger NY Ghost. Candace won’t be able to make it on her own forever, though. Enter a group of survivors, led by the power-hungry IT tech Bob. They’re traveling to a place called the Facility, where, Bob promises, they will have everything they need to start society anew. But Candace is carrying a secret she knows Bob will exploit. Should she escape from her rescuers? A send-up and takedown of the rituals, routines, and missed opportunities of contemporary life, Ling Ma’s Severance is a moving family story, a quirky coming-of-adulthood tale, and a hilarious, deadpan satire. Most important, it’s a heartfelt tribute to the connections that drive us to do more than survive.