Manga, Thrillers, & Wall Street

Rated Y for Youth - 10+ The second volume in this gamer-oriented series. Here's a description of the first volume, which came out last year: "The World" is a massively multiplayer online game played by more than twelve million people across the globe. Within this virtual world Haseo, a PPK (Player Killer Killer), continues an endless fight. Everything he does is for the sake of the girl Shino, who back in the real world, is hospitalized by an unexplained coma. However, on finally meeting with his sole lead, a PK called “Tri-Edge,” Haseo is dropped back to Level 1 by a mysterious power! Can Haseo save Shino now that he has lost all of his abilities? Tatsuya Hamasaki, writer of the scenario for the ".hack//G.U." games, now turns his hand to its novelization!

Rated OT for Older Teen - 16+ A clever retelling of the "Alice in Wonderland" tale--manga-style--this title is releasing in time for the major motion picture directed by Tim Burton and starring Johnny Depp. A sudden kidnapping and a dark, mysterious hole...Handsome men with guns and bunny ears...A suspicious game of survival...Wonderland is officially at war! And Alice is trapped in the middle of it all. Will she ever make it out alive? A little arrogant, stubborn and determined to get back home, Alice isn't fazed by these challenges...until she wanders the strange country only to find that every man is weirdly in love with her and all the inhabitants are gun crazy and ready to kill without remorse. What is going on in Wonderland?!...A hilarious, dangerous tale of Alice the likes of which you've never seen before!

Acclaimed author John Burnside delivers a profound, page-turning novel about innocence, evil, morality, and the dark corners of the human psyche. Mysterious illnesses affect the inhabitants of the post-industrial village of Innertown, and a pervasive sense of malaise hangs everywhere. So when teenage boys disappear into the poisoned woods surrounding the village's abandoned chemical plant, no one notices, or if they do, they don't say a thing. Not even the town's only cop, whose leads have long since died. To one boy, however, the chemical plant is beautiful, and it is there he will enact a plan to change the fate of the children of Innertown. To do so he will have to confront the blinding reality that burns in the chemical plant's cavernous center.

Publishers Weekly (12/21/2009): In Haslett's excellent first novel (following Pulitzer and National Book Award finalist short story collection "You Are Not a Stranger Here"), a titan of the banking industry does battle with a surprisingly formidable opponent: a retired history teacher. Doug Fanning has built Union Atlantic from a mid-size Boston bank to an international powerhouse and rewards himself by building a rural palace in Finden, Mass. The land his house is built on, however, had been donated to Finden for preservation by Charlotte Graves's grandfather, and Charlotte believes she now has a claim on the lot. She may be right, and her disdain of modern decadence means bad news for Doug should she win in court. Meanwhile, high school senior Nate Fuller, who visits Charlotte for tutoring and Doug for awkward and lopsided sexual encounters, finds himself with the power to upset the legal and cultural war game. Haslett's novel is smart and carefully constructed, and his characters are brilliantly flawed. (Charlotte's emerging instability is especially heartbreaking.) This book should be of interest to readers fascinated but perplexed by the current financial crisis, as it is able to navigate the oubliette of Wall Street trading to create searing and intimate drama. "(Jan.)" Copyright 2009 Reed Business Information.

In this captivating double life, Adam Gopnik searches for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution. Born by cosmic coincidence on the same day in 1809 and separated by an ocean, Lincoln and Darwin coauthored our sense of history and our understanding of man's place in the world. Here Gopnik reveals these two men as they really were: family men and social climbers, ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers, grieving parents and brilliant scholars. Above all we see them as thinkers and writers, making and witnessing the great changes in thought that mark truly modern times. Review quotes: [A]rresting....lively and wide-ranging....[Gopnik's] astute analysis...shows us why these thinkers and writers, who maintained 'a tragic consciousness without robbing it of a hopeful view, ' have so robustly survived to our own time." - Christopher Benfey, "The New York Times Book Review" "entertaining....an introduction that brilliantly encapsulates ....Gopnik draws vividly characterized personal and intellectual portraits of each man....[he] has selected [the material] with a novelist's skill....Gopnik's writing is pungent, inventive and rich." - Richard Eder, "Los Angeles Times Book Review