Adult

Joan Crawford burst out of her poverty-stricken youth to become a bright young movie star in the 1920s, drawing the admiration of F. Scott Fitzgerald and the attention of audiences worldwide. She flourished for decades, working for multiple studios in every genre from romance to westerns (Mildred Pierce, Johnny Guitar), musicals to noir (Torch Song, A Woman’s Face), and being directed by a young Steven Spielberg in one of her last appearances. Along the way she accumulated four husbands, an Academy Award for Best Actress, and the undeniable status of a legend. JOAN CRAWFORD: A WOMAN'S FACE looks at the reality of this remarkable woman through the prism of groundbreaking primary research and interviews with friends and relatives.

John Edgar Wideman, acclaimed since the early 1970s for his award-winning fiction and memoirs, has long been engaged in a project to redefine, from the perspective of an American of color, the wondrous and appalling power of his country’s literary culture and history. Now, curated by him, in this first-time collection from his extensive body of long-form journalism and biographical essays, readers are offered a chance to see and judge for themselves how Wideman has proven himself to be a luminous witness of America’s history. This volume goes beyond mere compilation. Its challenging, insightful critical essays tell the story of a nation in transition.

Small creatures have been turning up throughout Charlotte, North Carolina, mutilated and displayed in a bizarre manner. But one day, Temperance Brennan gets a disturbing call. The perp is upping the ante. This find could be human. Tempe visits the scene and discovers that the victim is a dog. As one who has always found animal cruelty abhorrent, Tempe agrees to help apprehend the person responsible, and she acquires an equally outraged ally in semi-retired homicide detective Erskine “Skinny” Slidell. Then a woman is found disfigured and posed in a manner that mimics the animal killings. Subsequently, people Tempe cares about begin to go missing until it becomes clear she is being taunted, the target in a sick game that has her and Slidell racing against a ticking clock and facing a terrifying question: “What is pure evil?”

Carrie is a young mother desperate to reunite with her daughter. Frankie, newly pregnant, faces a romantic vacation that takes a terrifying turn. Then there’s the enigmatic older woman determined to protect her teenage daughter, Bunny, no matter what. Across South England, these three women must navigate survival amidst chaos when the country receives a nuclear bomb alert. With only 59 minutes before mass destruction, will they make it to their loved ones in time?

In 1943, the OSS came up with a plan to increase its support to the French resistance forces that were fighting the Nazis. They recruited some of the best American bomber pilots and crews to a secret airfield 20 miles west of London. Given a choice to stay or leave, every airman volunteered for what became known as Operation Carpetbagger. Their dangerous plan called for a new kind of flying: taking their B-24 Liberator bombers in the middle of the night across the English Channel and down to extremely low altitudes in Nazi-occupied France to find drop zones in dark fields. On the ground, resistance members waited to receive steel containers filled with everything from rifles and hand grenades to medicine and bicycle tires. Based on exclusive research and interviews, the definitive story of these heroic flyers --- and of the brave secret agents and resistance leaders they aided --- can now be told. 

The Hierarchy still call me Vis Telimus. Still hail me as Catenicus. They still, as one, believe they know who I am. But with all that has happened --- with what I fear is coming --- I am not sure it matters anymore. I am no longer one. I won the Iudicium, and lost everything --- and now, impossibly, the ancient device beyond the Labyrinth has replicated me across three separate worlds. A different version of myself in each of Obiteum, Luceum and Res. Three different bodies, three different lives. I have to hide; fight; play politics. I have to train; trust; lie. I have to kill; heal; prove myself again, and again, and again. I am loved, and hated, and entirely alone. Above all, though, I need to find answers before it’s too late. To understand the nature of what has happened to me, and why. I need to find a way to stop the coming Cataclysm, because if all I have learned is true, I may be the only one who can.

Gabriela Rose, recovery agent extraordinaire, can find just about anything. Too bad she can’t seem to lose her gorgeous but infuriating ex-husband, Rafer Jones. And now he needs her help. His cousin, Harley, is in big trouble. As the president of a too-big-to-fail bank, he invested an astronomical amount of money in insuring some of the world’s most priceless artifacts at the urging of his board. It seemed like a low-risk, high-reward business move, so he jumped in with both feet. But recently, these insured pieces started going missing, and there’s no paper trail of Harley being directed to make these risky investments. Unless the artwork can be recovered soon, it looks like Harley is going to be heading to jail as the fall guy for an ingenious crime. Gabriela must travel around the world with Rafer to find the missing works of art, keep Harley out of jail, and save both his skin and his bank.

Three years after losing his family in a Christmas Eve accident, grief-stricken Paul Wanlass hasn’t just given up on Christmas, he’s given up on life. When a stranger knocks on his door, claiming to be picking up a laptop, Paul allows him in --- but discovers the man has a very different mission in mind. Paul wakes up the next morning unsure if his encounter with the stranger really happened or if it was just a dream. But when the stranger shows up again, Paul challenges this individual to give him just one reason to live. The stranger agrees to the challenge but warns Paul not to expect a path he would have guessed or chosen. As the stranger promised, Paul’s life takes a wild and fateful turn, which involves meeting a woman and a young boy. The twists leave Paul wondering what these people have in common and why they were brought together.

Esther Nacht is born in Vienna in 1905. Her father dies on board the ship to Portland, Maine. Her mother is murdered by anti-Semites in Portland. Dr. Larch knows it won’t be easy to find a Jewish family to adopt Esther. In fact, he won’t find any family who’ll adopt her. When Esther is 14, soon to be a ward of the state, Dr. Larch meets the Winslows, a philanthropic New England family with a history of providing foster care for unadopted orphans. The Winslows aren’t Jewish, but they despise anti-Semitism. Esther’s gratitude for the Winslows is unending. Even as she retraces her roots back to Vienna, she never stops loving and protecting the Winslows. In the final chapter, set in Jerusalem in 1981, Esther Nacht is 76.

Born and raised in Port Talbot --- a small Welsh steelworks town --- amid war and depression, Sir Anthony Hopkins grew up around men who were tough, to say the least, and eschewed all forms of emotional vulnerability in favor of alcoholism and brutality. A struggling student in school, he was deemed by his peers, his parents and other adults as a failure with no future ahead of him. But, on a fateful Saturday night, the disregarded Welsh boy watched the 1948 adaptation of Hamlet, sparking a passion for acting that would lead him on a path that no one could have predicted. With candor and a voice that is both arresting and vulnerable, Sir Anthony recounts his various career milestones and provides a once-in-a-lifetime look into the brilliance behind some of his most iconic roles.