Monstrous Devices

Monstrous Devices
Author: Damien Love
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 354
Release: 2018-10-16
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0451478606

“I enjoyed everything about Damien Love’s debut—its title, its breakneck action, its sly sense of humor. I wish my first novel had been as imaginative and assured.” —Anthony Horowitz, New York Times bestselling author of the Alex Rider series On a winter’s day in a British town, twelve-year old Alex receives a package in the mail: an old tin robot from his grandfather. “This one is special,” says the enclosed note, and when strange events start occurring around him, Alex suspects this small toy is more than special; it might be deadly. Right as things get out of hand, Alex’s grandfather arrives, pulling him away from an attack—and his otherwise humdrum world of friends, bullies, and homework—and into the macabre magic of an ancient family feud. Together, the duo flees across snowy Europe, unraveling the riddle of the little robot while trying to outwit relentless assassins of the human and mechanical kind. With an ever-present admiration for the hidden mysteries of our world, Monstrous Devices plunges readers into a gripping adventure that’s sure to surprise.

The Shadow Arts

The Shadow Arts
Author: Damien Love
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2020-03-03
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 0451478614

The thrilling sequel to Monstrous Devices--Alex and his grandfather hold the fate of history itself in their hands in a Rick Riordan meets Raiders of the Lost Ark adventure of epic proportions! A few months ago, Alex's world changed...forever. Now, just when it seems life is almost getting back to normal, Alex's grandfather crashes back into the picture with grave news: their friend Harry has fallen into the clutches of a familiar foe, and the old man needs Alex's help to rescue him. This time, the duo's desperate dash across Europe leads from Paris deep into Germany's foreboding Black Forest, as they chase down the mystery Harry had been investigating when he disappeared. A series of art thefts has made headlines across the continent, but the thieves are after more than priceless paintings. In the wrong hands, these stolen artifacts could unlock an ancient secret bigger than anything Alex ever dreamed of. If they can't solve the riddle in time, innocent lives - and even history itself - could be at stake.

Below Zero

Below Zero
Author: Dan Smith
Publisher: Chicken House
Total Pages: 251
Release: 2018-01-04
Genre: Juvenile Fiction
ISBN: 1911077554

Twelve-year-old Zak is plane-wrecked on an abandoned research outpost in the Antarctic with his sister and parents. Here, a series of nightmarish occurrences and bizarre visions suggest a link to something else - a presence beneath the ice - which only Zak can understand ...

The Book of Devices

The Book of Devices
Author: İhsan Oktay Anar
Publisher: Imprint
Total Pages: 137
Release: 2018
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9786059389747

"He had sought to be the agent of all forces and actions on the Earth, and thus, just as he had transformed iron ingot into a music box, so had he strived to transform the Earth and all it contained into a machine." Ihsan Oktay Anar's 1996 novella, "The Book of Devices," is a skeleton key to the ever-inventive author's fictional world set in the Ottoman times. Here are the wonderful histories of the triumphs and tribulations of three Ottoman inventors, "as reported by the narrators of events and relators of traditions." By turns humorous and touching, these interlinked stories are nutshells of vividly imagined past. While we follow Yafes Chelebi and his two successors in their search for the secret of the perpetual motion, the crumbling empire undergoes drastic changes in the background and the city of their dreams, Istanbul, witnesses coup d''tats, Westernizing reforms, and the advent of technological innovation. Written in a unique idiom that is both a tender mimicry and witty parody of the Ottoman bureaucratic prose, The Book of Devices is Anar at his imaginative best. One cannot help but wonder how a twenty-first-century author can dwell in the past with such ease and come back to the present, as in a Borgesian parable, with a cabinet of dreamy curiosities.

What Big Teeth

What Big Teeth
Author: Rose Szabo
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)
Total Pages: 384
Release: 2021-02-02
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0374314314

A Strand February 2021 Book of the Month "With a layered mystery, a haunting setting, and thrilling tension, What Big Teeth has an otherness to it that pulls you in and forces you to keep reading." —Tricia Levenseller, Publisher’s Weekly-bestselling author of The Shadows Between Us Eleanor Zarrin has been estranged from her wild family for years. When she flees boarding school after a horrifying incident, she goes to the only place she thinks is safe: the home she left behind. But when she gets there, she struggles to fit in with her monstrous relatives, who prowl the woods around the family estate and read fortunes in the guts of birds. Eleanor finds herself desperately trying to hold the family together—in order to save them all, Eleanor must learn to embrace her family of monsters and tame the darkness inside her. Rose Szabo's thrilling debut is a dark fantasy novel about a teen girl who returns home to her strange, wild family after years of estrangement, perfect for fans of Wilder Girls. This exquisitely terrifying and beautiful tale will sink its teeth into you and never let go.

Monstrous Heart (the Monstrous Heart Trilogy, Book 1)

Monstrous Heart (the Monstrous Heart Trilogy, Book 1)
Author: Claire McKenna
Publisher: Harper Voyager
Total Pages: 400
Release: 2021-04
Genre:
ISBN: 9780008337162

A sensational debut novel: gothic, romantic gaslamp fantasy at it's very best. A magical tale of intrigue on dangerous waters and a love story for the ages. Perfect for fans of V.E. Schwab and China Mieville Arden Beacon arrives in the salt-swept port of Vigil with a job to do. Tasked with using the magic in her blood to keep the lighthouse burning, she needs to prove herself worthy of her family name and her ancestors' profession. But the coastline Arden must keep alight - battered by a sea teeming with colossal, ancient beasts - is far from the cultured, urban world she knows. It is a place of secrets, rumours and tight-lipped expectations of a woman's place. More than anyone, the town folk whisper about Arden's neighbour, Jonah Riven, the hunter of leviathans. They say he murdered his wife. They say he is as much a monster as his prey. Amidst all her determination and homesickness Arden cannot get this shadowy stranger out of her head. A plot swirls around the lighthouse keeper, the hunter and the authorities. Arden must make sense of these dark waters - before they wash her away.

Monster

Monster
Author: Frank E. Peretti
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Total Pages: 464
Release: 2011-10-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1418509272

The suspense is bone-chilling when you realize the monsters are real . . . Miles away from the hectic city, Reed and Rebecca hike into the beautiful Northwester woods. They are surrounded by gorgeous mountains, waterfalls, and hundreds of acres of unspoiled wilderness. During their first night camping, an unearthly wail pierces the calm of the forest. Then something emerges from the dense woods. Everything that follows is a blur to Reed—except the unforgettable image of a huge creature carrying his wife into the darkness. Enter into deep wilderness where the rules of civilization no longer apply. A world where strange shadows lurk. Where creatures long attributed to overactive imaginations and nightmares are the hunters . . . and people are the hunted. New York Times bestseller Full length, standalone novel Includes discussion questions for book clubs

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous

The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous
Author: Asa Simon Mittman
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 626
Release: 2017-02-24
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1351894315

The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art history, religious studies, history, classics, and cultural and media studies. The companion will offer scholars and graduate students the first comprehensive and authoritative review of this emergent field.

Monstrous Ontologies: Politics Ethics Materiality

Monstrous Ontologies: Politics Ethics Materiality
Author: Caterina Nirta
Publisher: Vernon Press
Total Pages: 255
Release: 2021-06-01
Genre: Social Science
ISBN: 1648892191

While the presence of monsters in popular culture is ever-increasing, their use as an explicit or implicit category to frame, stigmatise, and demonise the other is seemingly on the rise. At the same time, academic interest for monsters is ever-growing. Usually, monstrosity is understood as a category that emerges to signal a transgression to a given order; this approach has led to the demystification of the insidious characterisations of the (racial, sexual, physical) other as monstrous. While this effort has been necessary, its collateral effects have reduced the monstrous to a mere (socio-cultural) construction of the other: a dialectical framing that de facto deprives monstrosity from any reality. 'Monstrous Ontologies: Politics, Ethics, Materiality' proffers the necessity of challenging these monstrous otherings and their perverse socio-political effects, whilst also asserting that the monstrous is not simply an epistemological construct, but that it has an ontological reality. There is a profound difference between monsters and monstrosity. While the former is an often sterile political and social simplification, the end-product of rhetorical and biopolitical apparatuses; the latter may be understood as a dimension that nurtures the un-definable, that is, that shows the limits of these apparatuses by embodying their material excess: not a 'cultural frame', but the limit to the very mechanism of 'framing'. The monstrous expresses the combining, hybridising, becoming, and creative potential of socio-natural life, albeit colouring this powerful vitalism with the dark hue of a fearful, disgusting, and ultimately indigestible reality that cannot simply be embraced with multicultural naivety. As such, it forces us towards radically changing not the categories, but the very mechanisms of categorisation through which reality is framed and acted upon. Here lies the profound ethical dimension that monstrosity forces us to acknowledge; here lies its profoundly political potential, one that cannot be unfolded by merely deconstructing monstrosity, and rather requires to engage with its uncomfortable, appalling, and revealing materiality. This book will appeal to postgraduate students, PostDocs, and academics alike in the fields of philosophy, critical theory, humanities, sociology and social theory, criminology, human geography, and critical legal theory.

Monstrous Regiment

Monstrous Regiment
Author: Terry Pratchett
Publisher: Harper Collins
Total Pages: 415
Release: 2009-10-13
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0061826804

"Wickedly satirical . . . nothing short of brilliant.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) Another ingenious entry in Sir Terry Pratchett’s internationally bestselling Discworld fantasy series about the art of war and the brave women who wage it. War has come to Discworld. The homes and businesses throughout the duchy of Borogravia limp along, doing the best they can without their men, sent to fight their age-old enemy. Polly has taken over the lion’s share of responsibility for the running of her family’s humble inn, The Duchess. Her beloved brother Paul marched off to war almost a year ago, but it has been more than two months since his last letter home, and the news from the front is bad: the fighting has reached the border, supplies are dwindling, and the brave Borogravians are losing precious ground. So the resourceful Polly cuts off her hair and joins the army as a young man named Oliver. As Polly closely guards her secret, she notices that her fellow recruits seem to be guarding secrets of their own. A novel that explores the inanity of war, the ins and outs of sexual politics, and why often the best man for the job is a woman, Monstrous Regiment is vintage Pratchett in top form. The Discworld novels can be read in any order but Monstrous Regiment is a standalone.