Not all illusions happen on the stage.
Wren Lockhart, apprentice to master illusionist Harry Houdini, uses life on a vaudeville stage to escape the pain of her past. She continues her career of illusion after her mentor’s death, intent on burying her true identity.
But when a rival performer’s act goes tragically wrong, the newly formed FBI calls on Wren to speak the truth—and reveal her real name to the world. She transfers her skills for misdirection from the stage to the back halls of vaudeville, as she finds herself the unlikely partner in the FBI’s investigation.
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Every garden is a story, waiting to be told…
At the nursery she runs with her sisters on the New England coast, Sorrel Sparrow has honed her rare gift for nurturing plants and flowers. Now that reputation, and a stroke of good timing, lands Sorrel an unexpected opportunity: reviving a long-dormant Shakespearean garden on an English country estate.
Arriving at Kirkwood Hall, ancestral home of Sir Graham Kirkwood and his wife Stella, Sorrel is shocked by the desolate state of the walled garden. Generations have tried—and failed—to bring it back to glory.
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A New York Times Editor’s Choice
In Animals Strike Curious Poses, Elena Passarello channels her own potent sense of natural wonder into sixteen wondrous essays about legendary animals of history, constructing a bestiary that informs, astonishes, and delights. Passarello’s menagerie spans nearly 40 millennia, from Yuka, the 39,000-year-old wooly mammoth recently pulled from Siberian permafrost to Cecil, the beloved lion killed for sport in Zimbabwe in 2015. The collection celebrates the vibrancy of the human imagination as it approaches the animal other: Albrecht Durer’s sixteenth century woodcut Rhinocerus; Mozart’s collaborative compositions with a starling;
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The incredible true story of the women who fought America’s undark danger.
The Curies’ newly discovered element of radium makes gleaming headlines across the nation as the fresh face of beauty, and wonder drug of the medical community. From body lotion to tonic water, the popular new element shines bright in the otherwise dark years of the First World War.
Meanwhile, hundreds of girls toil amidst the glowing dust of the radium-dial factories. The glittering chemical covers their bodies from head to toe; they light up the night like industrious fireflies. With such a coveted job,
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A New York Times Book Review Favorite Read of 2016
“Despair is always described as dull,” writes Daphne Merkin, “when the truth is that despair has a light all its own, a lunar glow, the color of mottled silver.” This Close to Happy—Merkin’s rare, vividly personal account of what it feels like to suffer from clinical depression—captures this strange light.
Daphne Merkin has been hospitalized three times: first, in grade school, for childhood depression; years later, after her daughter was born, for severe postpartum depression; and later still, after her mother died,
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I work in an office. I take cards out of a file. Once I have taken them out, I put them back in again. That is it.
Twenty-three-year-old Frits—office worker, daydreamer, teller of inappropriate jokes—finds life absurd and inexplicable. He lives with his parents, who drive him mad. He has terrible, disturbing dreams of death and destruction. Sometimes he talks to a toy rabbit.
This is the story of ten evenings in Frits’s life at the end of December, as he drinks, smokes, sees friends, aimlessly wanders the gloomy city streets and tries to make sense of the minutes,
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