Even in a family of chaotic necromancers, Daria “Dasha” Avramov has always been an outlier. An event planner at the Arcane Emporium occult megastore, Dasha is also a devil eater: a rare necromantic witch with an affinity for banishing demons and traversing the veil, the boundary between this realm and the next.
Still grieving the loss of both beloved parents years ago, and plagued by a dangerous obsession with the world beyond the veil, Dasha is fiery yet guarded, an expert at dodging commitment. Her worst regret is a devastating breakup with the wise, empathetic, and sensual Ivy Thorn, her event-planning counterpart at Honeycake Orchards, and probably the love of Dasha’s life. Dasha has managed to break Ivy’s heart not once, but twice, so things are more than a little tense between them.
Cuba, 1998: Rafa, an Afro-Cuban orphan, moves to Havana with nothing to his name and falls into a job at a café. He is soon drawn into a web of ever-shifting entanglements with his boss’s son, the charismatic Renato, leader of the counterrevolutionary group “Los Injected Ones,” which is planning a violent overthrow of the Castro government during Pope John Paul II’s upcoming visit.
When Renato goes missing, Rafa’s search for his friend takes him through various haunts in Havana: from an AIDS sanatorium, to the guest rooms of tourist hotels, to the outskirts of the capital, where he enters a phantasmagorical slum cobbled together from the city’s detritus by Los Injected Ones.
A novel of cascading prose that captures a nation in slow collapse, Sacrificio is a visionary work, capturing the fury, passion, fatalism, and grim humor of young lives lived at the margins of a society they desperately wish to change.
The award-winning, best-selling author of Station Eleven and The Glass Hotel returns with a novel of art, time, love, and plague that takes the reader from Vancouver Island in 1912 to a dark colony on the moon five hundred years later, unfurling a story of humanity across centuries and space.
Sea of Tranquility is a novel of time travel and metaphysics that precisely captures the reality of our current moment.
As the head of a prestigious movie studio for nearly two decades, Andy Westfield has had every conceivable professional luxury: a stunning office on the forty-fourth floor, a loyal assistant who can all but read his mind, access to a private jet and company cars. The son of Hollywood royalty, Andy always put his career before his marriage, and now, besides his daughter and young grandchildren, it’s the only thing he truly loves.
But then Andy’s world is upended. The studio is sold, and the buyer’s son demands the top seat. Out of a job and humiliated, Andy spirals. When his head clears, he decides to get as far away from Los Angeles as possible until the dust settles and he can find a new way forward.
Andy signs a six-month rental agreement for a luxurious home in a tiny, forgotten coastal town two hours from London. When he arrives, he hires a local woman to help get his affairs in order. A former journalist, Violet Smith is at a crossroads as well, and this temporary job is exactly what she needs to tide her over. But when Violet leaves the manuscript of her unfinished novel behind after work one day, Andy lets his curiosity get the best of him and is captivated by a story that begs to be adapted for the big screen. Could this be the miracle they’ve both been looking for?
In Second Act, Danielle Steel presents a heartening tale of how challenging times give way to opportunities and an original outline does not always contain the perfect ending.
Our current definition of “productivity” is broken. It pushes us to treat busyness as a proxy for useful effort, leading to impossibly lengthy task lists and ceaseless meetings. We’re overwhelmed by all we have to do and on the edge of burnout, left to decide between giving into soul-sapping hustle culture or rejecting ambition altogether. But are these really our only choices?
Long before the arrival of pinging inboxes and clogged schedules, history’s most creative and impactful philosophers, scientists, artists, and writers mastered the art of producing valuable work with staying power. In this timely and provocative book, Cal Newport harnesses the wisdom of these traditional knowledge workers to radically transform our modern jobs. Drawing from deep research on the habits and mindsets of a varied cast of storied thinkers – from Galileo and Isaac Newton, to Jane Austen and Georgia O’Keefe – Newport lays out the key principles of “slow productivity,” a more sustainable alternative to the aimless overwhelm that defines our current moment. Combining cultural criticism with systematic pragmatism, Newport deconstructs the absurdities inherent in standard notions of productivity, and then provides step-by-step advice for cultivating a slower, more humane alternative.
When Jessica Chen entered the workforce, she felt like everything she had been taught growing up in a Quiet Culture household—where deference, humility, harmony, and dogged hard work were praised—failed to set her up for success in the “real world.” Her ingrained values were in direct contrast with what was actually needed to stand out in a Loud Culture workplace. The result? Feeling underappreciated, passed over for opportunities and promotions, and completely stuck.
Building on the lessons she learned as an award-winning TV news journalist, Chen—who now speaks at Fortune 100 companies and whose LinkedIn Learning courses have been watched by over 2 million people—introduces a new way of getting noticed at work, without being loud, aggressive, or boastful. In Smart, Not Loud, Chen teaches readers how they can look within, to the values they already hold, to more effectively show up.