Immaginate di trovarvi in una tranquilla via suburbana di villette bifamiliari. Una donna - Miss Vicks - porta a spasso il cane, chiacchiere da vicinato, dei bambini - Eddie, Mary - giocano in strada. Fin qui tutto bene. Ma capita che i vicini di casa siano dei robot, degli oggetti non bene identificati navighino nel cielo e uno stregone playboy vi rapisca promettendo di realizzare ogni vostro sogno in cambio della vostra anima. Benvenuti in Duplex, un romanzo di formazione dentro una favola per adulti dentro atmosfere surreali e sci-fi. Ci sono due pianeti, o due dimensioni, o due livelli di uno stesso pianeta, comunicanti, fluidamente interconnessi. Così passato e futuro si ripiegano l'uno sull'altro, l'infanzia è un eterno presente, l'adolescenza una parentesi dai contorni elastici. E oltre, per Eddie, per Mary, c'è l'età adulta, un mondo di robot e stregoni, schiavi e padroni, corpi senz'anima. Kathryn Davis ci regala un romanzo coming-of-age fuori da ogni schema, al di là di ogni logica e di ogni definizione, un multiverso eccentrico in cui le vicende scivolano, inanellandosi le une nelle altre come in un sogno o in una riuscita magia.

Aurelia, Aurélia inizia su una nave. L'autrice, sedici anni, sta viaggiando verso l'Europa a un'età in cui ci si può "provare addosso persone come abiti". Ha la fiducia adamantina di un'adolescente che coltiva le sue prime ossessioni, sicura della sua maturità, sicura della vita che l'aspetta. Poi capita che la vita vada per i fatti propri, indifferente ai desideri, programmi, aspirazioni. Capita che il proprio secondo marito muoia ed è l'esperienza del lutto il centro - o meglio, il motore - di questo straordinario memoir. La morte di Eric Zencey è l'occasione per l'autrice di ripartire per un viaggio, un viaggio interiore tra arte e letteratura, ricordi e serie tv, cotte giovanili e film, e ogni narrazione, ogni tassello di vissuto aiutano ad avere uno sguardo sempre più profondo sulla vita. Davis ci traghetta da un'esperienza a una considerazione, da una interpretazione a un'emozione con l'agilità che è tipica del suo linguaggio: uno svolazzo tra gli abissi, nelle terre di mezzo che l'esistenza ci offre. Questo memoir non è composto solo dai ricordi, ma dai movimenti dell'anima che si nutre di ogni esperienza attraverso la parola.

«Il luogo sottile», secondo la mitologia celtica, è quello in cui la membrana fra il mondo fisico e quello spirituale si fa più cedevole; in questo romanzo originalissimo e affabulatorio, il luogo sottile è Varennes, piccolo centro attorno a un lago del New England dove si intrecciano le vite e le voci di un coro di personaggi: la giovane Mees, che scopre all'improvviso di avere il potere di restituire la vita a ciò che è morto, le sue amiche sul limitare dell'adolescenza, le anziane (ma tutt'altro che spente) signore della casa di riposo, un impenitente dongiovanni di mezza età, due minacciosi sconosciuti che turbano la quiete della cittadina (e saranno protagonisti di un drammatico finale) - ma anche i cani e i gatti degli abitanti, i castori che popolano il lago, perfino i licheni e i fiori che ne ricoprono le sponde. Un microcosmo brulicante di vita - misteriosa, paradossale, a volte violenta.

Capturing an engineer’s creative vision and mind for detail, this fully illustrated picture book biography sheds light on how the American inventor George Ferris defied gravity and seemingly impossible odds to invent the world’s most iconic amusement park attraction, the Ferris wheel.
A fun, fact-filled text by Kathryn Gibbs Davis combines with Gilbert Ford’s dazzling full-color illustrations to transport readers to the 1893 World’s Fair, where George Ferris and his big, wonderful wheel lifted passengers to the skies for the first time.

Time, place, and mind all bend in extraordinary ways in this new novel from the acclaimed author of The Thin Place and Versailles

Mary and Eddie are meant for each other—but love is no guarantee, not in these suburbs. Like all children, they exist in an eternal present; time is imminent, and the adults of the street live in their assorted houses like numbers on a clock. Meanwhile, ominous rumors circulate, and the increasing agitation of the neighbors points to a future in which all will be lost. Soon a sorcerer’s car will speed down Mary’s street, and as past and future fold into each other, the resonant parenthesis of her girlhood will close forever. Beyond is adulthood, a world of robots and sorcerers, slaves and masters, bodies without souls. In Duplex, Kathryn Davis, whom the Chicago Tribune has called “one of the most inventive novelists at work today,” has created a coming-of-age story like no other. Once you enter the duplex—that magical hinge between past and future, human and robot, space and time—there’s no telling where you might come out.

New York Times Bestseller

How women can make it to the top by adopting the new rules of leadership

Women hold just 11 percent of the most senior-level leadership positions in U.S. Corporations—a number that hasn't changed in over 30 years. How can women break through? Break Your Own Rules distills the six faulty assumptions (or "rules") most women follow that get in the way—then delivers the correlating new rules that promise to clear that path. For example, the old rule of "Focus on Others" must be replaced by "Take Center Stage," "Hard Work Will Get You There" must yield to "Be Politically Savvy." "Play It Safe" must give way to "Play to Win." "Ask Permission" must be replaced by "Proceed Until Apprehended."

• Features the results of over 1,700 interviews with executives in Fortune 1000 companies, as well as the authors' new research and ongoing work with over 5,000 professional women
• Showcases previously-untold stories from high profile women including Ann Moore (CEO, Time Inc.), Susan Ivey (CEO, Reynolds American), Cathy Bessant (Global Executive for Technology and Operations for Bank of America), Lynn Ford (CEO, ING Solutions), and more
• Reveals what it really takes for any woman to succeed at the highest levels
• Foreword by Sharon Allen, Chairman of Deloitte

This hands-on guide is for women who are ready to transform their assumptions and join the senior ranks of American business.

Eight-year-old Molly and her ten-year-old brother Ralph are inseparable, in league with each other against the stodgy and stupid routines of school and daily life; against their prim mother and prissy older sisters; against the world of authority and perhaps the world itself. One summer they are sent from the genteel Los Angeles suburb that is their home to backcountry Colorado, where their uncle Claude has a ranch. There the children encounter an enchanting new world—savage, direct, beautiful, untamed—to which, over the next few years, they will return regularly, enjoying a delicious double life. And yet at the same time this other sphere, about which they are both so passionate, threatens to come between their passionate attachment to each other. Molly dreams of growing up to be a writer, yet clings ever more  fiercely to the special world of childhood. Ralph for his part feels the growing challenge, and appeal, of impending manhood. Youth and innocence are hurtling toward a devastating end.

In The Summer Book Tove Jansson distills the essence of the summer—its sunlight and storms—into twenty-two crystalline vignettes. This brief novel tells the story of Sophia, a six-year-old girl awakening to existence, and Sophia's grandmother, nearing the end of hers, as they spend the summer on a tiny unspoiled island in the Gulf of Finland. The grandmother is unsentimental and wise, if a little cranky; Sophia is impetuous and volatile, but she tends to her grandmother with the care of a new parent. Together they amble over coastline and forest in easy companionship, build boats from bark, create a miniature Venice, write a fanciful study of local bugs. They discuss things that matter to young and old alike: life, death, the nature of God and of love. “On an island,” thinks the grandmother, “everything is complete.” In The Summer Book, Jansson creates her own complete world, full of the varied joys and sorrows of life.

Tove Jansson, whose Moomintroll comic strip and books brought her international acclaim, lived for much of her life on an island like the one described in The Summer Book, and the work can be enjoyed as her closely observed journal of the sounds, sights, and feel of a summer spent in intimate contact with the natural world. 

The Summer Book is translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal.

"Il luogo sottile", secondo la mitologia celtica, è quello in cui si fa più cedevole la membrana fra il mondo fisico e quello spirituale; in questo romanzo originalissimo e affabulatorio, il luogo sottile è Varennes, piccolo centro attorno a un lago del New England dove si intrecciano le vite e le voci di un coro di personaggi: la giovane Mees, che scopre all'improvviso di avere il potere di restituire la vita a ciò che è morto, le sue amiche sul limitare dell'adolescenza, le anziane (ma tutt'altro che spente) signore della casa di riposo, un impenitente dongiovanni di mezza età, due minacciosi sconosciuti che turbano la quiete della cittadina (e saranno protagonisti di un drammatico finale) - ma anche i cani e i gatti degli abitanti, i castori che popolano il lago, perfino i licheni e i fiori che ne ricoprono le sponde.

In a thin place, according to legend, the membrane separating this world from the spirit world is almost nonexistent. The small New England town of Varennes is such a place, and Kathryn Davis transports us there - revealing a surprising pageant of life as, in the course of one summer, Varennes' tranquillity is shattered by the arrival of a threatening outsider, worldly and otherworldly forces come into play, and a young local girl finds her miraculous gift for resurrecting the dead tested by the conflict between logic and wish.

Kids will be kids—even when they live in the White House! From Tad Lincoln (secretly called a “tyrant” ) to the Roosevelt gang (who kept a pet badger, a rat, dogs, snakes, horses, parrots, and a one-legged chicken!) to the Kennedys (who used the oval office as a playground) to Chelsea Clinton (who transformed herself from an awkward teen into an accomplished scholar), the children featured in First Kids shared a unique experience and role in American history.

Kids will be kids—even when they live in the White House! From Tad Lincoln (secretly called a “tyrant” ) to the Roosevelt gang (who kept a pet badger, a rat, dogs, snakes, horses, parrots, and a one-legged chicken!) to the Kennedys (who used the oval office as a playground) to Chelsea Clinton (who transformed herself from an awkward teen into an accomplished scholar), the children featured in First Kids shared a unique experience and role in American history.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

An eerie, dark, surreal look at domesticity brings together three diverse households--a dollhouse, a family in 1950s Philadelphia, and the home of a nineteenth-century woman--held together by the vision of Napoleon's chef and architect. Reprint.

The Vet's Daughter combines shocking realism with a visionary edge. The vet lives with his bedridden wife and shy daughter Alice in a sinister London suburb. He works constantly, captive to a strange private fury, and treats his family with brutality and contempt. After his wife's death, the vet takes up with a crass, needling woman who tries to refashion Alice in her own image. And yet as Alice retreats ever deeper into a dream world, she discovers an extraordinary secret power of her own.

Harrowing and haunting, like an unexpected cross between Flannery O'Connor and Stephen King, The Vet's Daughter is a story of outraged innocence that culminates in a scene of appalling triumph.

Nature and humans build their devices with the same earthly materials and use them in the same air and water, pulled by the same gravity. Why, then, do their designs diverge so sharply? Humans, for instance, love right angles, while nature's angles are rarely right and usually rounded. Our technology goes around on wheels-and on rotating pulleys, gears, shafts, and cams-yet in nature only the tiny propellers of bacteria spin as true wheels. Our hinges turn because hard parts slide around each other, whereas nature's hinges (a rabbit's ear, for example) more often swing by bending flexible materials. In this marvelously surprising, witty book, Steven Vogel compares these two mechanical worlds, introduces the reader to his field of biomechanics, and explains how the nexus of physical law, size, and convenience of construction determine the designs of both people and nature. "This elegant comparison of human and biological technology will forever change the way you look at each."-Michael LaBarbera, American Scientist