NOVEDADES

Jimmy Barranco Ventura es un hombre de ciencias, acostumbrado al rigor del pensamiento racional, a la búsqueda de evidencias y a las consultas y erudición especializadas. Cuando nos asomamos a sus escritos, lo comprobamos con facilidad. Allí sobresalen la exactitud y la precisión. Por supuesto, así tiene que ser porque se trata de una Maestro de la Medicina, de un profesor de Bioquímica y Nutrición Clínica por varias décadas. Pero hay un momento en que la paradoja se deja ver con su piel contradictoria. Jimmy Barranco Ventura es un hombre de ciencias que escribe con sentido de claridad, con preocupación de ser comprendido. Es decir, su escritura no es hermética, cerrada, no camina por los senderos de la especialidad ni recurre a la nomenclatura de sus saberes. El sabe que los medios de prensa, particularmente las publicaciones apoyadas en papel, como los periódicos diarios, son los libros del pueblo, son las bibliotecas de la población media. Entonces, su escritura se ubica en ese plano y, sin renunciar al rigor y a la exactitud que le vienen de las ciencias, pone a su lector en el centro de sus textos porque ese lector es su objetivo, para él es su conversación, su diálogo, su enseñanza, su magisterio. El maestro José Ortega y Gasset, cuya obra pasó por las páginas de los diarios antes de llegar a la imprenta que la convirtió en libros, enseñaba que todo hombre tiene en la tierra una misión de claridad.

Deborah Harkness first introduced the world to Diana Bishop, an Oxford scholar and witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew de Clermont in A Discovery of Witches. Drawn to each other despite long-standing taboos, these two otherworldly beings found themselves at the center of a battle for a lost, enchanted manuscript known as Ashmole 782. Since then, they have fallen in love, traveled to Elizabethan England, dissolved the Covenant between the three species, and awoken the dark powers within Diana’s family line. Now, Diana and Matthew receive a formal demand from the Congregation: They must test the magic of their seven-year-old twins, Pip and Rebecca. Concerned with their safety and desperate to avoid the same fate that led her parents to spellbind her, Diana decides to forge a different path for her family’s future and answers a message from a great-aunt she never knew existed, Gwyneth Proctor, whose invitation simply reads: It’s time you came home, Diana.

It is twenty years after the catastrophic war between the United States and China that brought down the old American political order. A new party has emerged in the US, one that’s held power for over a decade. Efforts to cement its grip have resulted in mounting violent resistance. The American president has control of the media, but he is beginning to lose control of the streets. Many fear he’ll stop at nothing to remain in the White House. Suddenly, he collapses in the middle of an address to the nation. After an initial flurry of misinformation, the administration reluctantly announces his death. A cover-up ensues, conspiracy theories abound, and the country descends into a new type of civil war.

In the early 1980s, Giselle Chin, Jackie Ong, and Ellen Ng are three teenagers drawn together by their shared sense of alienation and desire for something different. “Allied in the weirdest parts of themselves,” they envision each other as artistic collaborators and embark on a future defined by freedom and creativity. By the time they are adults, their dreams are murkier. As a performance artist, Giselle must navigate an elite social world she never conceived of. As a coder thrilled by the internet’s early egalitarian promise, Jackie must contend with its more sinister shift toward monetization and surveillance. And as a community activist, Ellen confronts the increasing gentrification and policing overwhelming her New York City neighborhood. Over time their friendship matures and changes, their definitions of success become complicated, and their sense of what matters evolves. Moving from the predigital 1980s to the art and tech subcultures of the 1990s to a strikingly imagined portrait of the 2040s, Memory Piece is an innovative and audacious story of three lifelong friends as they strive to build satisfying lives in a world that turns out to be radically different from the one they were promised.

She found the right guy at the dead wrong time . . . When thirty-year-old post-double-mastectomy BRCA1 carrier and reluctant thrill-seeker Alison Mullally arrives at her ex-boyfriend Sam’s funeral to discover that no one knows he dumped her, she agrees to play the grieving girlfriend over the holidays for the sake of the family. Little did she know this would mean packing up Sam’s apartment with his prickly best friend, Adam Berg. After all, it’ll only take four weekends . . . But Adam doesn’t want Alison anywhere near him. Forced to spend long hours with the grump and his monosyllabic demeanor, Alison decides to put her people-pleasing abilities to the test. She will make him like her. And after awkward family affairs, snowy mishaps, and packing up dilemmas, the two form a tenuous friendship . . . if “friendship” means incredible chemistry and sexual tension. Can Alison come clean and finally embrace the life and love she’s always wanted? Or will her little white lie get in the way of her new, unexpected romance?

A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn , both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond. While many narrative set pieces of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn remain in place (floods and storms, stumbling across both unexpected death and unexpected treasure in the myriad stopping points along the river’s banks, encountering the scam artists posing as the Duke and Dauphin…), Jim’s agency, intelligence and compassion are shown in a radically new light