The House on Mango Street

The House on Mango Street
Author: Sandra Cisneros
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 130
Release: 2013-04-30
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0345807197

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A coming-of-age classic about a young girl growing up in Chicago • Acclaimed by critics, beloved by readers of all ages, taught in schools and universities alike, and translated around the world—from the winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature. “Cisneros draws on her rich [Latino] heritage...and seduces with precise, spare prose, creat[ing] unforgettable characters we want to lift off the page. She is not only a gifted writer, but an absolutely essential one.” —The New York Times Book Review The House on Mango Street is one of the most cherished novels of the last fifty years. Readers from all walks of life have fallen for the voice of Esperanza Cordero, growing up in Chicago and inventing for herself who and what she will become. “In English my name means hope,” she says. “In Spanish it means too many letters. It means sadness, it means waiting." Told in a series of vignettes—sometimes heartbreaking, sometimes joyous—Cisneros’s masterpiece is a classic story of childhood and self-discovery and one of the greatest neighborhood novels of all time. Like Sinclair Lewis’s Main Street or Toni Morrison’s Sula, it makes a world through people and their voices, and it does so in language that is poetic and direct. This gorgeous coming-of-age novel is a celebration of the power of telling one’s story and of being proud of where you're from.

How Magicians Think

How Magicians Think
Author: Joshua Jay
Publisher: Workman Publishing Company
Total Pages: 320
Release: 2021-09-28
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 1523510919

Professional magician Joshua Jay's (author of Magic: The Complete Course) brief and fascinating essays offer an inside look at how the very best magicians think about magic, how they practice and put together a show, what inspires them, and the psychology behind creating wonder and being tricked when we expect both, as well as why we seek magic in the first place.

Tempt the Stars

Tempt the Stars
Author: Karen Chance
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2013-10-01
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101616903

Being a goddess is a lot less fun than you might think. Especially when you’re only a half goddess, and you only found out about it recently, and you still don’t know what you’re doing half the time. And when you’ve just used your not-so-reliable powers to burglarize the booby-trapped office of a vampire mob boss. Yeah, that part sucks. But that’s just the tip of the iceberg for Cassandra Palmer, aka the Pythia, the freshly minted chief seer of the supernatural world. After all, Cassie still has to save a friend from a fate worse than death, deal with an increasingly possessive master vampire, and prevent a party of her own acolytes from unleashing a storm of fury upon the world. Totally just your average day at the office, right?

The Magicians

The Magicians
Author: Lev Grossman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2010-05-25
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0452296293

Lev Grossman’s new novel THE BRIGHT SWORD will be on sale July 2024 The New York Times bestselling novel about a young man practicing magic in the real world, now an original series on SYFY “The Magicians is to Harry Potter as a shot of Irish whiskey is to a glass of weak tea. . . . Hogwarts was never like this.” —George R.R. Martin “Sad, hilarious, beautiful, and essential to anyone who cares about modern fantasy.” —Joe Hill “A very knowing and wonderful take on the wizard school genre.” —John Green “The Magicians may just be the most subversive, gripping and enchanting fantasy novel I’ve read this century.” —Cory Doctorow “This gripping novel draws on the conventions of contemporary and classic fantasy novels in order to upend them . . . an unexpectedly moving coming-of-age story.” —The New Yorker “The best urban fantasy in years.” —A.V. Club Quentin Coldwater is brilliant but miserable. A high school math genius, he’s secretly fascinated with a series of children’s fantasy novels set in a magical land called Fillory, and real life is disappointing by comparison. When Quentin is unexpectedly admitted to an elite, secret college of magic, it looks like his wildest dreams have come true. But his newfound powers lead him down a rabbit hole of hedonism and disillusionment, and ultimately to the dark secret behind the story of Fillory. The land of his childhood fantasies turns out to be much darker and more dangerous than he ever could have imagined. . . . The prequel to the New York Times bestselling book The Magician King and the #1 bestseller The Magician's Land, The Magicians is one of the most daring and inventive works of literary fantasy in years. No one who has escaped into the worlds of Narnia and Harry Potter should miss this breathtaking return to the landscape of the imagination.

Road of the King

Road of the King
Author: Patrick Hoban
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
Total Pages: 470
Release: 2016-03-10
Genre:
ISBN: 9781523990719

This book will teach a systematic approach to winning tournaments that we will be able to apply to any format, independent of context. While our focus will be on winning tournaments, much of what we talk about can be applied in a broader sense and the scope of what is written extends to many disciplines. We will take from areas such as philosophy, economics, psychology, business, and many of my own personal experiences as a player. The first section of the book will introduce the framework that we will build on throughout the book. Patrick Chapin's "Theory of Everything" is commonly used as the framework for card theory. We are going to start off by taking a look at it, but then we are going to get into some of the problems with using it as a guiding framework. After discussing the problems it has, we are going to attempt to build a better guiding framework. The second section of the book will focus on self. Much of this section will focus on what it means to be rational. We will begin by ensuring that we have the proper tools to make good decisions at our disposal. Next we will explore the various biases that cloud our judgments. Then we will discuss ways we can guard ourselves against these biases and come up with some ways of thinking about things that can better guide our decisions. The final part of this section will deal with properly motivating ourselves to do what it takes to see success. The third section will focus on developing our circle. Our circle is our team. These are the people who will help us see success and who we will help see success. We are going to talk about the tools our circle will use and how to get the most out of those tools, as well as discuss the kind of people we want in our circle. In the fourth section we're going to get down to the ins and outs of technical play. We are going to be talking about the different kinds of resources within a game and about how our role varies within a game. Then we are going to discuss different approaches we can take with our plays to ensure that we are getting the most out of them. The final part of this section will talk about the right approach to have to tournaments to make sure we are on top of our game when the big day comes. The fifth section is going to focus on the mental aspects of the game. We are going to start off by talking about how to gauge our opponents' skill level so that we can adjust our plays and make them more effective. Then we are going to talk about how to get a read on our opponent's card and how to effectively get information out of them. After that we're going to talk about different ways of persuading our opponent into making the moves we want them to make. In the sixth section we will discuss effective deckbuilding. We will start off by discussing the deckbuilding philosophy and the first principles of deckbuilding. We will then discuss the various role cards can play in a game and talk about some shortcuts for evaluating them. Then we're going to talk about how probability affects our deckbuilding. After that we're going to build on the first principles of deckbuilding by introducing some deckbuilding rules to build consistent and powerful decks. We are also going to discuss deckbuilding curves that we can use to guide our choices. Finally we are going to discuss how to effectively side deck. In the final section we will discuss metagames. We will talk about how to identify shifts in the metagame and then move on to discussing some tournament strategies we can take to overcome the metagame. In the final chapter, we will come to understand how we can influence the format and plan for incremental development, so that we will be able to succeed throughout a format.

Stone Junction

Stone Junction
Author: Jim Dodge
Publisher: Canongate Books
Total Pages: 433
Release: 2004-01-31
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 184767724X

When Daniel's mother dies, he is brought under the protection of the AMO: the Alliance of Magicians and Outlaws. It is an introduction to a world of revenge, revolution and mind-bending chemicals, where anarchists, alchemists and high-stake gamblers co-exist. It is a place in which magic and murder are the norm. So begins an extraordinary quest for knowledge and understanding in this unforgettable outlaw classic.

The Proving Trail

The Proving Trail
Author: Louis L'Amour
Publisher: Bantam
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2004-06-29
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0553899589

They tried to tell him that his father had killed himself, but Kearney McRaven knew better. No matter what life had dealt him, his father would go down fighting. And as he delved deeper into the mystery, he learned that just before his father died, the elder McRaven had experienced a remarkable run of luck: he’d won nearly ten thousand dollars and the deed to a cattle ranch. Not yet eighteen, Kearney was determined enough to track down his father’s murderer and claim what was rightfully his. Now, followed every step of the way by a shadowy figure, Kearney must solve the mystery of his father’s hidden past—a past that concealed a cold-blooded killer who would stop at nothing to keep a chilling secret.

The Magician's Land

The Magician's Land
Author: Lev Grossman
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 418
Release: 2014-08-05
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1101633530

Lev Grossman’s new novel THE BRIGHT SWORD will be on sale July 2024 The stunning #1 New York Times bestselling conclusion to the Magicians trilogy A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR ONE OF THE YEAR’S BEST BOOKS • The San Francisco Chronicle • Salon • The Christian Science Monitor • AV Club • Buzzfeed • Kirkus • NY 1 • Bustle • The Globe and Mail Quentin Coldwater has been cast out of Fillory, the secret magical land of his childhood dreams. With nothing left to lose he returns to where his story began, the Brakebills Preparatory College of Magic. But he can’t hide from his past, and it’s not long before it comes looking for him. Along with Plum, a brilliant young undergraduate with a dark secret of her own, Quentin sets out on a crooked path through a magical demimonde of gray magic and desperate characters. But all roads lead back to Fillory, and his new life takes him to old haunts, like Antarctica, and to buried secrets and old friends he thought were lost forever. He uncovers the key to a sorcery masterwork, a spell that could create magical utopia, a new Fillory—but casting it will set in motion a chain of events that will bring Earth and Fillory crashing together. To save them he will have to risk sacrificing everything. The Magician’s Land is an intricate thriller, a fantastical epic, and an epic of love and redemption that brings the Magicians trilogy to a magnificent conclusion, confirming it as one of the great achievements in modern fantasy. It’s the story of a boy becoming a man, an apprentice becoming a master, and a broken land finally becoming whole.

52 Ways to Cheat at Poker

52 Ways to Cheat at Poker
Author: Allan Kronzek
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2008-03-25
Genre: Games & Activities
ISBN: 9780452289116

Thoroughly illustrated and researched, and enlivened with historical sidebars, 52 Ways to Cheat at Poker is essential reading for anyone who plays cards for money—or anyone interested in the ingenious ways cheats steal your money while appearing to do nothing at all. It’s no news that cheating pervades American culture. Americans cheat on taxes, tests, sports and spouses. But the largest arena for cheating may be at the poker table! With an estimated 60-80 million Americans playing poker every week—for the highest stakes ever—you can be sure that not everyone is playing by the rules! In this fascinating look at the card sharper’s art—from its origins in Renaissance Italy to the high-tech methods of today—deception expert Allan Kronzek reveals 52 of the most diabolical scams ever invented. Topics include codes and signaling systems, hidden cameras and miniature ear pieces, false shuffles, cuts and deals, peeking and flashing, deck and card switches, culling, instant stacks, marked cards, location play, the cooler, and dozens of other devious devices. Each chapter zeroes in on a single cheating concept and provides expert advice on how to spot and foil the scam (when possible!). You’ll learn the secrets of shade, flash, and juice—the subtlest marking systems; why cutting the cards doesn’t guarantee an honest deal, how a crooked dealer can stack the flop in hold ’em, why casino card rooms are not 100% safe, and how cheating crews crush the opposition without marked cards or sleight of hand.