Crackpot Palace
10 best books like Crackpot Palace (Jeffrey Ford): Song of Kali, The White Death: A History of Tuberculosis, Frankissstein: A Love Story, Jagannath, A Month in the Country, Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth, And Shall Machines Surrender, The Complete Short Novels, Moy Sand and Gravel, Errantry: Strange Stories
| Author | Dan Simmons |
| ISBN | 0575076593 |
Calcutta: a monstrous city of immense slums, disease and misery, is clasped in the foetid embrace of an ancient cult. At its decaying core is the Goddess Kali: the dark mother of pain, four-armed and eternal, her song the sound of death and destruction. Robert Luczak has been hired by Harper's to find...
| Author | Thomas Dormandy |
| ISBN | 1852853328 |
This is a history of tuberculosis, including its social, artistic and human impact. Thomas Dormandy's account of the search for the cure is complemented by a description of its complex natural history; portraits of individual sufferers, including writers, artists and musicians, whose lives were...
Frankissstein: A Love Story
| Author | Jeanette Winterson |
| ISBN | 1473563259 |
From 'one of the most gifted writers working today' (New York Times) comes an audacious new novel about the bodies we live in and the bodies we desire
In Brexit Britain, a young transgender doctor called Ry is falling in love – against their better judgement – with Victor Stein, a celebrated...
Enter the strange and wonderful world of Swedish sensation Karin Tidbeck with this feast of darkly fantastical stories. Whether through the falsified historical record of the uniquely weird Swedish creature known as the “Pyret” or the title story, “Jagannath,” about a biological ark in...
| Author | J.L. Carr |
| ISBN | 0940322471 |
In J. L. Carr's deeply charged poetic novel, Tom Birkin, a veteran of the Great War and a broken marriage, arrives in the remote Yorkshire village of Oxgodby where he is to restore a recently discovered medieval mural in the local church. Living in the bell tower, surrounded by the resplendent countryside...
Blowout: Corrupted Democracy, Rogue State Russia, and the Richest, Most Destructive Industry on Earth
#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Big Oil and Gas Versus Democracy—Winner Take All
In 2010, the words “earthquake swarm” entered the lexicon in Oklahoma. That same year, a trove of Michael Jackson memorabilia—including his iconic crystal-encrusted white glove—was sold at...
And Shall Machines Surrender
| Author | Benjanun Sriduangkaew |
On the dyson sphere Shenzhen, artificial intelligences rule and humans live in luxury, vying to be chosen as host bodies—called haruspices—for the next generation of AI, and thus be worshiped as gods.
Doctor Orfea Leung has come here to escape her past of mercenary violence. Krissana...
Anton Chekhov, widely hailed as the supreme master of the short story, also wrote five works long enough to be called short novels. Here, brought together in one volume for the first time, in a masterly new translation by the award-winning translators Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky.
The...
| Author | Paul Muldoon |
| ISBN | 0374528845 |
Paul Muldoon's ninth collection of poems, his first since Hay (1998), finds him working a rich vein that extends from the rivery, apple-heavy County Armagh of the 1950s, in which he was brought up, to suburban New Jersey, on the banks of a canal dug by Irish navvies, where he now lives. Grounded, glistening,...
| Author | Elizabeth Hand |
| ISBN | 1618730304 |
No one is innocent, no one unexamined in award-winner Elizabeth Hand's new collection. From the summer isles to the mysterious people next door all the way to the odd guy one cubicle over, Hand teases apart the dark strangenesses of everyday life to show us the impossibilities, broken dreams, and improbable...
| Author | Neil Astley |
| ISBN | 1401359264 |
Assembling a diverse mix of contemporary poets-Mary Oliver, W.H. Auden, Maya Angelou, Billy Collins, Louise Gluck, Gwendolyn MacEwen, Rita Dove, and hundreds more-Staying Alive is a unique anthology that illuminates the vital force of our humanity, the passion of our aspirations, the power of...
The Elusive Quest for Growth: Economists' Adventures and Misadventures in the Tropics
| Author | William Easterly |
| ISBN | 0262550423 |
Why economists' attempts to help poorer countries improve their economic well-being have failed.
Since the end of World War II, economists have tried to figure out how poor countries in the tropics could attain standards of living approaching those of countries in Europe and North America....
That morning, Jim Sams, clever but by no means profound, woke from uneasy dreams to find himself transformed into a gigantic creature.
Jim Sams has undergone a metamorphosis. In his previous life he was ignored or loathed, but in his new incarnation he is the most powerful man in Britain –...
Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household
| Author | Thavolia Glymph |
| ISBN | 0521703980 |
This book views the plantation household as a site of production where competing visions of gender were wielded as weapons in class struggles between black and white women. Mistresses were powerful beings in the hierarchy of slavery rather than powerless victims of the same patriarchal system responsible...
Zones of Exclusion: Pripyat and Chernobyl
| Author | Robert Polidori |
| ISBN | 3882439211 |
In the 11 days following the Chernobyl catastrophe on April 26, 1986, more than 116,000 people were permanently evacuated from the area surrounding the nuclear power plant. Declared unfit for human habitation, the Zones of Exclusion includes the towns of Pripyat (established in the 1970s to house...
The Last Englishmen: Love, War, and the End of Empire
A sumptuous biographical saga, both intimate and epic, about the waning of the British Empire in India
John Auden was a pioneering geologist of the Himalaya. Michael Spender was the first to draw a detailed map of the North Face of Mount Everest. While their younger brothers—W. H. Auden and Stephen...
Diaspora: Hard Science-Fiction Role-Playing with Fate
Diaspora is a role-playing game that uses the FATE system to deliver a hard science-fiction framework for adventure, where you build the setting on top of the basic, gritty axioms of the universe: everything is bigger than you are. You will pilot spaceraft driven by fusion torches that light the night...
The Graves of Tarim: Genealogy and Mobility across the Indian Ocean
| Author | Engseng Ho |
| ISBN | 0520244540 |
The Graves of Tarim narrates the movement of an old diaspora across the Indian Ocean over the past five hundred years. Ranging from Arabia to India and Southeast Asia, Engseng Ho explores the transcultural exchanges—in kinship and writing—that enabled Hadrami Yemeni descendants of the Muslim...
