Richard Powers
21) Psycho II
You remember Norman Bates, the shy motel manager with the fatal mother fixation. Now, years after his horrific bout of butchery, Norman is at large again. Breaking free from the psycho ward, he cuts a shocking swath of blood all the way to Hollywood—where, it so happens, they are making a movie about Norman's life and crimes. A movie that suddenly and terrifyingly becomes a lot like real life.
In the insightful narrative tradition of Oliver Sacks, Monkey Mind is an uplifting, smart, and very funny memoir of life with anxiety—America's most common psychological complaint.
We all think we know what being anxious feels like—it is the instinct that made us run from wolves in the prehistoric age and pushes us to perform in the modern one—but for forty million American adults, anxiety is an insidious condition that
...23) Psycho House
The new Bates Motel is a tourist attraction, a re-creation of the infamous murder site, and the developers are already counting their profits. But there's a new exhibit that nobody expected: the bloody corpse of a teenage girl crumpled in the front hall, stabbed to death. Among the avalanche of press and publicity is reporter and true-crime book writer Amelia Haines, who is studying the original Psycho killings. To her, the new murders are a golden
...Dazzling, enchanting, and epic, The Bells is the confession of a thief, kidnapper, and unlikely lover—a boy with the voice of an angel whose exquisite sense of hearing becomes both his life's tragic curse and its greatest blessing.
Moses Froben was born in a belfry high in the Swiss Alps, the bastard son of a deaf-mute woman, banished to the church tower to ring the Loudest and Most Beautiful Bells in the land each day. His life is simple
...25) The Loop
Lyman, a thirty-year-old loner, is sipping coffee on the front steps of the trailer he calls home one morning, when a parrot suddenly alights on his screen door. The parrot arrives with a mysterious past and beak full of cryptic sayings, such as "That which hath wings shall tell the matter." Convinced that heeding the bird's wisdom will lead him to answers about himself that he so desperately seeks, Lyman combines his night job as a courtesy patrolman,
...26) Lowboy
Early one morning in New York City, Will Heller, a sixteen-year-old paranoid schizophrenic, gets on a New York City uptown B train on a fantastic and terrifying quest to save the world.
Violet Heller, his frantic mother, is joined by Ali Lateef, a missing-persons specialist, in a desperate attempt to locate her son before psychosis claims him completely. As the stakes grow higher, Lateef gradually comes to realize that this is more than
...This is A Madman's Diary, and Other Stories by Lu Xun, a renowned writer of modern Chinese literature. Lu Xun was a novelist, editor, translator, literary critic, essayist, and poet who wrote both in Vernacular Chinese and Classical Chinese. He became the titular head of the League of Left-Wing Writers in Shanghai in the 1930s.
28) The Ace: A Novel
Four Americans—a twenty-year-old social outcast, a breezily iconoclastic Army officer, a ruthless U.S. senator, and a guilt-ridden heiress—are inexorably drawn together in their struggles to deal with America's chaotic involvement in World War I. Their interwoven destinies lead from poverty-stricken slums through the opulence of 1917–1918 Washington, London, and Paris and, climactically, into the Western Front's vicious aerial combat, which
...32) The Fisher Boy
With a gay resort, an art colony, and a working fishing port, Provincetown has long been a place of freedom, escape, diversity, and risk. Mark Winslow, a Boston comic, arrives with his troupe of actors, ready to break into the Provincetown club circuit. But the town and the region are far from peaceful this summer. When a public fight makes Mark the prime suspect in the grisly death of a Boston blueblood, Mark believes his choice is simple. He
...In his first book of stories since The Bridegroom, National Book Award-winning author Ha Jin gives us a collection that delves into the experience of Chinese immigrants in America.
A lonely composer takes comfort in the antics of his girlfriend's parakeet; young children decide to change their names so they might sound more "American," unaware of how deeply this will hurt their grandparents; a Chinese professor of English attempts
...On Monday morning, October 2, 2006, a gunman entered a one-room Amish school in Nickel Mines, Pennsylvania. In front of twenty-five horrified pupils, thirty-two-year-old Charles Roberts ordered the boys and the teacher to leave. After tying the legs of the ten remaining girls, Roberts prepared to shoot them execution style with an automatic rifle and four hundred rounds of ammunition. The oldest hostage, a thirteen-year-old, begged Roberts to "shoot
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