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Music hath charms to soothe… among other things.<

La cesión de Hong Kong a China ha transformado completamente las costumbres y el estilo de vida de los habitantes de la colonia británica. Para Neville Mullard y su madre Betty estos cambios van a ser realmente traumáticos. Acostumbrados al ritual británico del té con pastas, a las carreras hípicas en Happy Valley y al rosbif de la Fatty Chop, toda su vida social parece condenada a desaparecer, y mientras Betty puede ver en ello la ocasión ideal para regresar a Gran Bretaña, Neville, nacido en Hong Kong y propietario de una importante empresa textil, se encuentra ante una auténtica encrucijada.Combinando una trama de intrigas financieras en la que las mafias chinas ocupan un destacado lugar, la investigación de la enigmática desaparición de una joven prostituta y los problemas afectivos y familiares de Neville, Paul Theroux aborda críticamente uno de los conflictos más controvertidos de este fin de siglo, la cesión de Hong Kong a China o, como lo llama Neville, «el gran atraco chino».<

Music hath charms to soothe… among other things.<

Following his widely acclaimed and —“Here is the effect of these two books,” wrote the “A reader finishes them buzzing with awe”—Jim Shepard now gives us his first entirely new collection in more than a decade.

Brimming with irony, compassion, and withering humor, these eleven stories are at once eerily pertinent and dazzlingly exotic, and they showcase the work of a protean, prodigiously gifted writer at the height of his form. Reading Jim Shepard, according to Michael Chabon, “is like encountering our national literature in microcosm.”

Si todo nació con la materia, debemos comprender los múltiples detalles de ese episodio crucial. Con este objetivo, el CERN creó el LHC cerca de Ginebra, el acelerador de partículas más potente del planeta, el dispositivo que mejor recrea las condiciones iniciales del universo. Así hemos conseguido capturar «la partícula de Dios» y por eso seguimos investigando. Hemos de entender mejor cómo apareció todo y cómo tendrá fin nuestra historia: si envueltos en el frío y las tinieblas, o con una catástrofe cósmica que al menos nos concedería el privilegio de un último acto espectacular.Con la audacia de los grandes exploradores, Guido Tonelli, uno de los principales guías de ese grupo de físicos visionarios, nos cuenta qué significa asomarse a los límites del conocimiento para descubrir cómo fue el inicio del mundo y cómo tal vez será su final.<

In the wilderness of junior high, Edwin Hanratty is at the bottom of the food chain. His teachers find him a nuisance. His fellow students consider him prey. And although his parents are not oblivious to his troubles, they can't quite bring themselves to fathom the ruthless forces that demoralize him daily.

Sharing in these schoolyard indignities is his only friend, Flake. Branded together as misfits, their fury simmers quietly in the hallways, classrooms, and at home, until an unthinkable idea offers them a spectacular and terrifying release.

From Jim Shepard, one of the most enduring and influential novelists writing today, comes an unflinching look into the heart and soul of adolescence. Tender and horrifying, prescient and moving, will not easily be forgotten.

La Compañía se ha disuelto y sus integrantes emprenden caminos separados. Frodo y Sam continúan solos su viaje a lo largo del gran río Anduin, perseguidos por la sombra misteriosa de un ser extraño que también ambiciona la posesión del Anillo. Mientras los hobbits deben enfrentarse al horror y tomar graves decisiones a las puertas del País Oscuro, hombres, elfos y enanos se preparan para la batalla final con las fuerzas del Señor del Mal.<

The acclaimed National Book Award finalist — "one of the United States' finest writers," according to Joshua Ferris, "full of wit, humanity, and fearless curiosity" — now gives us a novel that will join the short list of classics about children caught up in the Holocaust.

Aron, the narrator, is an engaging if peculiar and unhappy young boy whose family is driven by the German onslaught from the Polish countryside into Warsaw and slowly battered by deprivation, disease, and persecution. He and a handful of boys and girls risk their lives by scuttling around the ghetto to smuggle and trade contraband through the quarantine walls in hopes of keeping their fathers, mothers, brothers, and sisters alive, hunted all the while by blackmailers and by Jewish, Polish, and German police, not to mention the Gestapo.

When his family is finally stripped away from him, Aron is rescued by Janusz Korczak, a doctor renowned throughout prewar Europe as an advocate of children’s rights who, once the Nazis swept in, was put in charge of the Warsaw orphanage. Treblinka awaits them all, but does Aron manage to escape — as his mentor suspected he could — to spread word about the atrocities?

Jim Shepard has masterfully made this child's-eye view of the darkest history mesmerizing, sometimes comic despite all odds, truly heartbreaking, and even inspiring. Anyone who hears Aron's voice will remember it forever.

Following —awarded the Story Prize and a finalist for the National Book Award — Jim Shepard returns with an even more wildly diverse collection of astonishingly observant stories. Like an expert curator, he populates the vastness of human experience — from its bizarre fringes and lonely, breathtaking pinnacles to the hopelessly mediocre and desperately below average — with brilliant scientists, reluctant soldiers, workaholic artists, female explorers, depraved murderers, and deluded losers, all wholly convincing and utterly fascinating.

A “black world” operative at Los Alamos isn’t allowed to tell his wife anything about his daily activities, but he can’t resist sharing her intimate confidences with his work buddy. A young Alpine researcher falls in love with the girlfriend of his brother, who was killed in an avalanche he believes he caused. An unlucky farm boy becomes the manservant of a French nobleman who’s as proud of his military service with Joan of Arc as he’s aroused by the slaughter of children. A free-spirited autodidact, grieving her lost sister, traces the ancient steps of a ruthless Middle Eastern sect and becomes the first Western woman to travel the Arabian deserts. From the inventor of the Godzilla epics to a miserable G.I. in New Guinea, each comes to realize that knowing better is never enough.

Enthralling and unfailingly compassionate, traverses centuries, continents, and social strata, but the joy and struggle that Shepard depicts with such devastating sensitivity — all the heartbreak, alienation, intimacy, and accomplishment — has a universal resonance.

"Zero zero zero" flour is the finest, whitest available. "Zero zero zero" is also the nickname among narcotraffickers for the purest, highest quality cocaine on the market. And it is the title of Roberto Saviano’s unforgettable exploration of how the cocaine trade knits the world into its dark economy and imposes its own vicious rules and moral codes on its armies and, through them, on us all.

Saviano’s , his explosive account of the Neapolitan mob, the Camorra, was a worldwide publishing sensation. It struck such a nerve with the Camorra that Saviano has lived with twenty-four hour police protection in the shadow of death threats for more than seven years. During this time he has become intimate with law enforcement agencies around the world. Saviano has broadened his perspective to take in the entire global corporate” entity that is the drug trade in cooperation with law enforcement officials, who have fed him information and sources and used him to guide their own thinking and tactics. Saviano has used this extraordinary access to feed his own groundbreaking reportage.

The result is a truly amazing and harrowing synthesis of intimate literary narrative and geopolitical analysis of one of the most powerful dark forces in the global economy. In , Saviano tracks the shift in the cocaine trade’s axis of power, from Colombia to Mexico, and relates how the Latin American cartels and gangs have forged alliances, first with the Italian crime syndicates, then with the Russians, Africans, and others. On the one hand, he charts an astonishing increase in sophistication and diversification as these criminal entities diversify into many other products and markets. On the other, he reveals the threat of violence to protect and extend power and how the nature of the violence has grown steadily more appalling.

Saviano is a journalist of rare courage and a thinker of impressive intellectual depth and moral imagination, able to see the connections between far-flung phenomena and bind them into a single epic story. Most drug-war narratives feel safely removed from our own lives; Saviano offers no such comfort. As heart racing as it is heady, is a fusion of a variety of disparate genres into a brilliant new form that can only be called .

Un nuevo día amanece en Segeda. Segilo, a sus siete años, deambula felizmente por sus calles junto a su madre y su hermano mayor con el propósito de encontrarse con su padre, quien se halla afanado en las tareas de construcción de la muralla de la ciudad. Ese mismo día, Segeda sufrirá la ferocidad de Roma, un suceso que convertirá en un caos la vida de sus habitantes, entre ellas la de Segilo que contemplará como los cimientos de su familia se resquebrajarán. Junto a su hermano huirá, dejando atrás Segeda para no regresar, hasta encontrar cobijo en Numancia, una ciudad que se alzará como el principal baluarte de la resistencia de la Celtiberia ante las continuas ofensivas perpetradas por las legiones romanas. Entre sus muros, Segilo se fundirá con el carácter aguerrido de los numantinos, padeciendo la crueldad de una guerra prolongada en el tiempo, así como el sabor agridulce de un amor repleto de obstáculos. Todo ello de manera paralela a la épica que encumbrará a Numancia de forma legendaria, perdurando su hazaña en el tiempo incluso después de ver concluida su existencia.<

Stone Arabia, Dana Spiotta’s moving and intrepid third novel, is about family, obsession, memory, and the urge to create — in isolation, at the margins of our winner-take-all culture.

In the sibling relationship, “there are no first impressions, no seductions, no getting to know each other,” says Denise Kranis. For her and her brother, Nik, now in their forties, no relationship is more significant. They grew up in Los Angeles in the late seventies and early eighties. Nik was always the artist, always wrote music, always had a band. Now he makes his art in private, obsessively documenting the work, but never testing it in the world. Denise remains Nik’s most passionate and acute audience, sometimes his only audience. She is also her family’s first defense against the world’s fragility. Friends die, their mother’s memory and mind unravel, and the news of global catastrophe and individual tragedy haunts Denise. When her daughter, Ada, decides to make a film about Nik, everyone’s vulnerabilities seem to escalate.

Dana Spiotta has established herself as a “singularly powerful and provocative writer” (The Boston Globe) whose work is fiercely original. Stone Arabia — riveting, unnerving, and strangely beautiful — reexamines what it means to be an artist and redefines the ties that bind.

Los últimos cien días de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en el escenario europeo son la culminación del drama que se ha desarrollado a lo largo de toda la contienda. En esos tres meses los Aliados darán el golpe de gracia al Tercer Reich pero, antes de que éste se hunda definitivamente, Alemania tendrá que soportar una tragedia con escasos precedentes en la historia de la humanidad. Víctima de intensos bombardeos, del frío y la falta de alimento, de los excesos cometidos por las tropas rusas y del terror impuesto por los últimos guardianes del nazismo, la población germana acabará recibiendo la noticia de la derrota con indisimulado alivio. En estas páginas, el historiador John Toland ofrece una extensa, documentada y apasionante reconstrucción de esos últimos y dramáticos días. Su lenguaje ameno y directo, más cercano al periodismo que al propio de los libros de historia, transporta al lector a los diferentes escenarios en los que se libra esa partida final, en un fascinante relato de interés creciente que logra captar toda su atención desde el primer momento. Los últimos cien días, un clásico imprescindible del que se han vendido millones de ejemplares desde su aparición en 1965, está considerado hoy día como la obra más completa sobre el final de la Segunda Guerra Mundial en Europa.<