The Islanders

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The Prestige

Description

In 1878, two young stage magicians clash in the dark during the course of a fraudulent séance. From this moment on, their lives become webs of deceit and revelation as they vie to outwit and expose one another.

Their rivalry will take them to the peaks of their careers, but with terrible consequences. In the course of pursuing each other's ruin, they will deploy all the deception their magicians' craft can command--the highest misdirection and the darkest science.

Blood will be spilled, but it will not be enough. In the end, their legacy will pass on for generations...to descendants who must, for their sanity's sake, untangle the puzzle left to them.

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The Washington Post called this "a dizzying magic show of a novel, chock-a-block with all the props of Victorian sensation fiction: seances, multiple narrators, a family curse, doubles, a lost notebook, wraiths, and disembodied spirits; a haunted house, awesome mad-doctor machinery, a mausoleum, and ghoulish horrors; a misunderstood scientist, impossible disappearances; the sins of the fathers visited upon their descendants." Winner of the 1996 World Fantasy Award, The Prestige is even better than that, because unlike many Victorians, Priest writes crisp, unencumbered prose. And anyone who's ever thrilled to the arcing electricity in the "It's alive!" scene in Frankenstein will relish the "special effects" by none other than Nikola Tesla.

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Affirmation (S.F. Masterworks)

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Christopher Priest is the Arthur C. Clarke Award and World Fantasy Award-winning author of THE SEPARATION, THE GLAMOUR, THE DREAM ARCHIPELAGO and THE PRESTIGE, which was filmed by Christopher Nolan and starred Hugh Jackman and Christian Bale. THE AFFIRMATION is his compulsive and original novel of an autobiography that isn't - partly a thriller, partly a haunting study of schizophrenia, it is the mark of one of Britain's finest novelists at the very height of his powers. Peter Sinclair is tormented by bereavement and failure. In an attempt to conjure some meaning from his life, he embarks on an autobiography, but he finds himself writing the story of another man in another, imagined, world, whose insidious attraction draws him even further in ...

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Inverted World (New York Review Books Classics)

Description

The city is winched along tracks through a devastated land full of hostile tribes. Rails must be freshly laid ahead of the city and carefully removed in its wake. Rivers and mountains present nearly insurmountable challenges to the ingenuity of the city’s engineers. But if the city does not move, it will fall farther and farther behind the “optimum” into the crushing gravitational field that has transformed life on Earth. The only alternative to progress is death.
The secret directorate that governs the city makes sure that its inhabitants know nothing of this. Raised in common in crèches, nurtured on synthetic food, prevented above all from venturing outside the closed circuit of the city, they are carefully sheltered from the dire necessities that have come to define human existence. And yet the city is in crisis. The people are growing restive, the population is dwindling, and the rulers know that, for all their efforts, slowly but surely the city is slipping ever farther behind the optimum.
Helward Mann is a member of the city’s elite. Better than anyone, he knows how tenuous is the city’s continued existence. But the world—he is about to discover—is infinitely stranger than the strange world he believes he knows so well.

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The Extremes

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FBI Agent Teresa Simons specializes in investigating mass murder and serial killings. Part of her training requires her to participate in extremely lifelike virtual reality scenarios that are almost indistinguishable from real life. When her husband, also an agent, is apparently killed in Texas on the same day as a similar mass murder in a small English town, she realizes that the eerie coincidence may mean that virtual reality is impinging on her own. Now she must find a way to distinguish what is really happening from what is not -- before it's too late.

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A bizarre and horrible coincidence draws FBI special agent Teresa Simons to England: on the same day that a mass murderer killed her husband and fourteen others in Kingwood City, Texas, another spree killer massacred seventeen in the small Sussex town of Bulverton. Teresa seeks to understand her husband's death by exploring the similar but unrelated event in Bulverton, as she once explored reconstructions of historical mass murders in ExEx (Extreme Experience, a brutally realistic form of virtual reality) to train for her FBI job. In Bulverton she finds a commercial ExEx parlor, which, she is horrified and fascinated to discover, offers a Bulverton mass-murder scenario. As Teresa explores both the town and the scenario of Bulverton, the separations between reality and ExEx, between ExEx murder reconstructions, between past and present, begin to blur--and so does the separation between Kingwood City and Bulverton, as Teresa realizes the simultaneity of the events may be more than a coincidence.

A New York Times Recommended Book, The Extremes received the British Science Fiction Association award for 1999. Christopher Priest's previous novel, The Prestige, won the World Fantasy Award and the James Tait Black Award. --Cynthia Ward

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Raped by a Catholic Priest: My True Story

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This is a true story of my rape and molestation by a Catholic priest during my youth. I have lived with these memories throughout my entire life, and have made it my mission to expose those who rape and molest innocent children and teens. I wish to expose many who hide cloaked behind their red and black robes of deceit and to reveal the hypocrisy that bleeds from within the walls of the Catholic Church. My Story shows how this satanic predator of a priest was finally defrocked by Pope John Paul II on January 11, 2004, after 39 long years. My attorney, the Honorable Justin "Chuck" Ravitz, believed my story along with the many others who came forward and bared their souls of torment from being raped and abused by these priests of the Catholic Church. He represented all of us in a class action lawsuit against the Archdiocese of Detroit in January, 2005 to no avail. The Catholic Church's lawyers and hierarchy blocked the victims from ever having their stories told in open courts. People need to know the truth about how these victims suffered at the hands of these "holy" priests. My book in a very small way opens the door to the truth of these matters and cites references for further education about these crimes, victims and perpetrators.My mentor, A.W. Richard Sipe, a well known court expert witness and consultant in over 200 cases, is a former priest trained in dealing with these problems. He is currently married having one son, and I am thankful to have him as my consultant while writing my book. He has his own website www.richardsipe.com dedicated specifically to this horrific problem. Another website to visit is www.bishop-accountability.org, where one will be aghast as to the many priests, bishops and cardinals whose names appear as perpetrators of these sexual crimes against the innocent as well as a resource cite to glean more from the many articles posted.My book is just one small story from just one victim who has the courage to come forward and bring this into the light. Too many "sexcretes" (my term for sex secrets within the Catholic Church), too many lies, too many cover-ups by the hierarchy, too many silent victims forced to live their personal horror the rest of their lives. It was not my fault for being a victim nor is it the fault of any of the other victims of these sexually deviant perverted privileged society of cardinals, bishops and priests.

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