Blackfish City

Blackfish City
Author: Sam J. Miller
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 356
Release: 2018-04-17
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062684841

“One of the most intriguing future cities in years.” —Charlie Jane Anders “Simmers with menace and heartache, suspense and wonder.” —Ann Leckie A Best Book of the Month in Entertainment Weekly The Washington Post Tor.com B&N Sci-Fi Fantasy Blog Amazon After the climate wars, a floating city is constructed in the Arctic Circle, a remarkable feat of mechanical and social engineering, complete with geothermal heating and sustainable energy. The city’s denizens have become accustomed to a roughshod new way of living, however, the city is starting to fray along the edges—crime and corruption have set in, the contradictions of incredible wealth alongside direst poverty are spawning unrest, and a new disease called “the breaks” is ravaging the population. When a strange new visitor arrives—a woman riding an orca, with a polar bear at her side—the city is entranced. The “orcamancer,” as she’s known, very subtly brings together four people—each living on the periphery—to stage unprecedented acts of resistance. By banding together to save their city before it crumbles under the weight of its own decay, they will learn shocking truths about themselves. Blackfish City is a remarkably urgent—and ultimately very hopeful—novel about political corruption, organized crime, technology run amok, the consequences of climate change, gender identity, and the unifying power of human connection.

The Art of Starving

The Art of Starving
Author: Sam J. Miller
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2017-07-11
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0062456733

Winner of the 2017 Andre Norton Award for Outstanding Young Adult Science Fiction or Fantasy Book! “Funny, haunting, beautiful, relentless, and powerful, The Art of Starving is a classic in the making.”—Book Riot Matt hasn’t eaten in days. His stomach stabs and twists inside, pleading for a meal, but Matt won’t give in. The hunger clears his mind, keeps him sharp—and he needs to be as sharp as possible if he’s going to find out just how Tariq and his band of high school bullies drove his sister, Maya, away. Matt’s hardworking mom keeps the kitchen crammed with food, but Matt can resist the siren call of casseroles and cookies because he has discovered something: the less he eats the more he seems to have . . . powers. The ability to see things he shouldn’t be able to see. The knack of tuning in to thoughts right out of people’s heads. Maybe even the authority to bend time and space. So what is lunch, really, compared to the secrets of the universe? Matt decides to infiltrate Tariq’s life, then use his powers to uncover what happened to Maya. All he needs to do is keep the hunger and longing at bay. No problem. But Matt doesn’t realize there are many kinds of hunger…and he isn’t in control of all of them. A darkly funny, moving story of body image, addiction, friendship, and love, Sam J. Miller’s debut novel will resonate with any reader who’s ever craved the power that comes with self-acceptance.

The Blade Between

The Blade Between
Author: Sam J. Miller
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 360
Release: 2020-12-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0062969854

A Library Journal Horror Best Seller From Nebula Award winner Sam J. Miller comes a frightening and uncanny ghost story about a rapidly changing city in upstate New York and the mysterious forces that threaten it. Ronan Szepessy promised himself he’d never return to Hudson. The sleepy upstate town was no place for a restless gay photographer. But his father is ill and New York City’s distractions have become too much for him. He hopes that a quick visit will help him recharge. Ronan reconnects with two friends from high school: Dom, his first love, and Dom’s wife, Attalah. The three former misfits mourn what their town has become—overrun by gentrifiers and corporate interests. With friends and neighbors getting evicted en masse and a mayoral election coming up, Ronan and Attalah craft a plan to rattle the newcomers and expose their true motives. But in doing so, they unleash something far more mysterious and uncontainable. Hudson has a rich, proud history and, it turns out, the real-state developers aren’t the only forces threatening its well-being: the spirits undergirding this once-thriving industrial town are enraged. Ronan’s hijinks have overlapped with a bubbling up of hate and violence among friends and neighbors, and everything is spiraling out of control. Ronan must summon the very best of himself to shed his own demons and save the city he once loathed.

Beneath the Surface

Beneath the Surface
Author: John Hargrove
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2015-03-24
Genre: Nature
ISBN: 1466878819

*Now a New York Times Best Seller* Over the course of two decades, John Hargrove worked with 20 different whales on two continents and at two of SeaWorld's U.S. facilities. For Hargrove, becoming an orca trainer fulfilled a childhood dream. However, as his experience with the whales deepened, Hargrove came to doubt that their needs could ever be met in captivity. When two fellow trainers were killed by orcas in marine parks, Hargrove decided that SeaWorld's wildly popular programs were both detrimental to the whales and ultimately unsafe for trainers. After leaving SeaWorld, Hargrove became one of the stars of the controversial documentary Blackfish. The outcry over the treatment of SeaWorld's orca has now expanded beyond the outlines sketched by the award-winning documentary, with Hargrove contributing his expertise to an advocacy movement that is convincing both federal and state governments to act. In Beneath the Surface, Hargrove paints a compelling portrait of these highly intelligent and social creatures, including his favorite whales Takara and her mother Kasatka, two of the most dominant orcas in SeaWorld. And he includes vibrant descriptions of the lives of orcas in the wild, contrasting their freedom in the ocean with their lives in SeaWorld. Hargrove's journey is one that humanity has just begun to take-toward the realization that the relationship between the human and animal worlds must be radically rethought.

Destroy All Monsters

Destroy All Monsters
Author: Sam J. Miller
Publisher: HarperCollins
Total Pages: 322
Release: 2019-07-02
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0062456768

A crucial, genre-bending tale, equal parts Ned Vizzini and Patrick Ness, about the life-saving power of friendship. Solomon and Ash both experienced a traumatic event when they were twelve. Ash lost all memory of that event when she fell from Solomon’s treehouse. Since then, Solomon has retreated further and further into a world he seems to have created in his own mind. One that insulates him from reality, but crawls with foes and monsters . . . in both animal and human form. As Solomon slips further into the place he calls Darkside, Ash realizes her only chance to free her best friend from his pain is to recall exactly what happened that day in his backyard and face the truth—together. Fearless and profound, Sam J. Miller’s follow up to his award-winning debut novel, The Art of Starving, spins an intimate and impactful tale that will linger with readers.

Wonderblood

Wonderblood
Author: Julia Whicker
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Total Pages: 300
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250066069

Set 500 years in the future, a mad cow-like disease called “Bent Head” has killed off most of the U.S. population. Those remaining turn to magic and sacrifice to cleanse the Earth. Wonderblood is Julia Whicker's fascinating literary debut, set in a barren United States, an apocalyptic wasteland where warring factions compete for control of the land in strange and dangerous carnivals. A mad cow-like disease called "Bent Head" has killed off millions. Those who remain worship the ruins of NASA's space shuttles, and Cape Canaveral is their Mecca. Medicine and science have been rejected in favor of magic, prophecy, and blood sacrifice. When traveling marauders led by the bloodthirsty Mr. Capulatio invade her camp, a young girl named Aurora is taken captive as his bride and forced to join his band on their journey to Cape Canaveral. As war nears, she must decide if she is willing to become her captor's queen. But then other queens emerge, some grotesque and others aggrieved, and not all are pleased with the girl's ascent. Politics and survival are at the centre of this ravishing novel.

Prayers in Steel

Prayers in Steel
Author: Michael McClung
Publisher: Michael McClung
Total Pages: 207
Release: 2018-01-06
Genre:
ISBN:

I am a wheel whose edge is death. This is the mantra that Andines are taught from their first day as novices. Their swords are their souls, and their patron saint, Andos, was the living embodiment of their tenets - Protect the helpless. Obey the emperor in Axumwiste. Pray for guidance in times of peace, and pray with steel in times of strife. A time of strife has come once more. Brother Caida is sent on a quest to rescue a princess kidnapped by bandits en route to her wedding. Armed with a great sword and armored in his faith, Caida soon finds both tested beyond endurance - for nothing is as it seems, and it is the world that needs to be rescued from the princess, not the princess from anything or any one. And waiting in the darkness, behind stolen faces, are the skin walkers - an ancient evil long thought banished from the world of men...

Boys, Beasts, & Men

Boys, Beasts, & Men
Author: Sam J. Miller
Publisher:
Total Pages: 330
Release: 2022-05-10
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9781616963729

Introduction by Amal El-Mohtar Allosaurus Burgers 57 Reasons for the Slate Quarry Suicides We Are the Cloud Conspicuous Plumage Shattered Sidewalks of the Human Heart Shucked The Beasts We Want to Be Calved When Your Child Strays from God Things with Beards Ghosts of Home The Heat of Us: Notes Towards an Oral History Angel, Monster, Man Sun in an Empty Room

The City in American Literature and Culture

The City in American Literature and Culture
Author: Kevin R. McNamara
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 417
Release: 2021-08-05
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1108901549

The city's 'Americanness' has been disputed throughout US history. Pronounced dead in the late twentieth century, cities have enjoyed a renaissance in the twenty-first. Engaging the history of urban promise and struggle as represented in literature, film, and visual arts, and drawing on work in the social sciences, The City in American Literature and Culture examines the large and local forces that shape urban space and city life and the street-level activity that remakes culture and identities as it contests injustice and separation. The first two sections examine a range of city spaces and lives; the final section brings the city into conversation with Marxist geography, critical race studies, trauma theory, slow/systemic violence, security theory, posthumanism, and critical regionalism, with a coda on city literature and democracy.

Imagining the End

Imagining the End
Author: James Craig Holte
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
Total Pages: 332
Release: 2019-11-11
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 1440861021

Imagining the End provides students and general readers with contextualized examples of how the apocalypse has been imagined across all mediums of American popular culture. Detailed entries analyze the development, influence, and enjoyment of end-times narratives. Imagining the End provides a contextual overview and individual description and analysis of the wide range of depictions of the end of the world that have appeared in American popular culture. American writers, filmmakers, television producers, and game developers inundated the culture with hundreds of imagined apocalyptic scenarios, influenced by the Biblical Book of Revelation, the advent of the end of the second millennium (2000 CE), or predictions of catastrophic events such as nuclear war, climate change, and the spread of AIDS. From being "raptured" to surviving the zombie apocalypse, readers and viewers have been left with an almost endless sequence of disasters to experience. Imagining the End examines this phenomenon and provides a context for understanding, and perhaps appreciating, the end of the world. This title is composed of alphabetized entries covering all topics related to the end times, covering popular culture mediums such as comic books, literature, films, and music.