false 2716 4599 0786886323 9780786886326 302 <![CDATA[Carter Beats the Devil]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165446946m/4599.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1165446946s/4599.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4599.Carter_Beats_the_Devil 4.12 1676 Carter Beats the Devil, Glen David Gold subjects the past to the same wondrous transformations as the rabbit in a skilled illusionist's hat. Gold's debut novel opens with real-life magician Charles Carter executing a particularly grisly trick, using President Warren G. Harding as a volunteer. Shortly afterwards, Harding dies mysteriously in his San Francisco hotel room, and Carter is forced to flee the country. Or does he? It's only the first of many misdirections in a magical performance by Gold. In the course of subsequent pages, Carter finds himself pursued by the most hapless of FBI agents; falls in love with a beautiful, outspoken blind woman; and confronts an old nemesis bent on destroying him. Throw in countless stunning (and historically accurate) illusions, some beautifully rendered period detail, and historical figures like young inventor Philo T. Farnsworth and self-made millionaire Francis "Borax" Smith, and you have old-fashioned entertainment executed with a decidedly modern sensibility.

Gold has written for movies and TV, so it's no surprise that he delivers snappy, fast-paced dialogue and action scenes as expertly scripted as anything that's come out of Hollywood in years. Carter Beats the Devil has a mustachioed villain, chase scenes, a lion, miraculous escapes, even pirates, for God's sake. Yet none of this is as broadly drawn as it might sound: Gold's characters are driven by childhood sorrows and disappointments in love, just like the rest of us, and they're limned in clever, quicksilver prose. By turns suspenseful, moving, and magical, this is the historical novel to give to anyone who complains that contemporary fiction has lost the ability to both move and entertain. --Mary Park

]]> 2716 3.89 2911 486 2001 111088 140003339X 9781400033393 75 <![CDATA[McSweeney's Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171648355m/111088.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1171648355s/111088.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/111088.McSweeney_s_Mammoth_Treasury_of_Thrilling_Tales 3.53 925 A Vintage Contemporaries Original

Includes:
Jim Shepard's "Tedford and the Megalodon"

Glen David Gold's "The Tears of Squonk, and What Happened Thereafter"

Dan Chaon's "The Bees"

Kelly Link's "Catskin"

Elmore Leonard's "How Carlos Webster Changed His Name to Carl and Became a Famous Oklahoma Lawman"

Carol Emshwiller's "The General"

Neil Gaiman's "Closing Time"

Nick Hornby's "Otherwise Pandemonium"

Stephen King's "The Tale of Gray Dick"

Michael Crichton's "Blood Doesn’t Come Out"

Laurie King's "Weaving the Dark"

Chris Offutt's "Chuck’s Bucket"

Dave Eggers's "Up the Mountain Coming Down Slowly"

Michael Moorcock's "The Case of the Nazi Canary"

Aimee Bender's "The Case of the Salt and Pepper Shakers"

Harlan Ellison's "Goodbye to All That"

Karen Joy Fowler's "Private Grave 9"

Rick Moody's "The Albertine Notes"

Michael Chabon's "The Martian Agent, a Planetary Romance"

Sherman Alexie's "Ghost Dance"]]> 2715 3.86 70912 9819 21550 3.70 1972 345 12940 3.54 16473 1250 54462 3.71 2626 387 1221698 4.13 285432 26454 5194 3.47 191366 8491 2929 3.58 81868 7752 6760 3.98 22344 2588 10188 3.67 1332 137 3389 3.75 735004 32991 3371 3.75 89325 11522 16939 3.79 16208 876 5285 3.88 4754 648 7415 4.05 10089 673 2716 3.89 2911 486 1448 2.79 13883 1951 16560 3.67 3098 600 2278 3.46 4227 453 24902 3.90 5572 1048 2003 4745776 0307270688 9780307270689 77 <![CDATA[Sunnyside]]> http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1242098760m/4745776.jpg http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1242098760s/4745776.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/4745776.Sunnyside 3.45 165 From the author of the acclaimed best seller Carter Beats the Devil comes a grand entertainment with the brilliantly realized figure of Charlie Chaplin at its center: a novel at once cinematic and intimate, thrilling and darkly comic, that dramatizes the moment when American capitalism, a world at war, and the emerging mecca of Hollywood intersect to spawn an enduring culture of celebrity.

Sunnyside opens on a winter day in 1916 during which Chaplin is spotted in more than eight hundred places simultaneously, an extraordinary mass delusion. From there, the novel follows the overlapping fortunes of three men: Leland Wheeler, son of the world’s last (and worst) Wild West star, as he heads to the battlefields of France; snobbish Hugo Black, drafted to fight under the towering General Edmund Ironside in America’s doomed engagement with Russia; and Chaplin himself, as he faces a tightening vice of complications—studio moguls, questions about his patriotism, his unchecked heart, and, most menacing of all, his mother—to finally make a movie “as good as he was.”

With a cast of enthralling characters, both historical and fictional—Mary Pickford, Douglas Fairbanks, a thieving Girl Scout, a lovestruck film theorist, Russian princesses, even Rin Tin Tin—Sunnyside is a heartrending, spellbinding novel about American promises both kept and betrayed.

]]> 2716 3.89 2911 486 2009 6542871 1848561458 9781848561458 0 <![CDATA[The Spirit: v. 3]]> http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-111x148.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/images/nocover-60x80.jpg http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/6542871-the-spirit 0.0 0 89161 3.95 280 58 129038 4.03 239 30 2716 3.89 2911 486 28710 3.60 1366 145 45103 3.70 1066 97 2009