Shadow Atlas

Seeking to reclaim humanity's early secrets, the Umbra Arca Society was forged. Equipped with only a compass, a journal, and devotion to truth, these adventurers braved cursed landscapes. The Shadow Atlas collects their adventures.

The biographer—so often in the shadows, kibitzing, casting doubt, proving facts—comes to the stage in this funny, poignant, endearing tale of how writers’ lives get documented. James Atlas, the celebrated chronicler of Saul Bellow and Delmore Schwartz, takes us back to his own childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers’ lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas’s professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know Atlas’s first subject, the “self-doomed” poet Delmore Schwartz. And we are introduced to a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the “tall pines,” as Mary McCarthy once called them, cut down now, according to Atlas, by the “merciless pruning of mortality”) and, of course, the elusive Bellow, “a metaphysician of the ordinary.” Atlas revisits the lives and works of the classical biographers, the Renaissance writers of what were then called “lives,” Samuel Johnson and the obsessive Boswell, and the Victorian masters Mrs. Gaskell and Thomas Carlyle. And in what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary generation, Atlas celebrates the biographers who hoped to glimpse an image of them—“as fleeting as a familiar face swallowed up in a crowd.” (With black-and-white illustrations throughout)

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 5th International Conference on Entertainment Computing, ICEC 2006. The 17 revised full papers, 17 revised short papers and 28 poster papers presented together with one keynote paper were carefully reviewed and selected. The papers are organized in topical sections on agents, cultural and psychological metrics, transforming broadcast experience, culture, place, play, display technology, authoring tools, object tracking, edutainment, and network games.

For his fourteenth birthday, Atlas Sterling celebrated with his family at his favorite pizza restaurant. Three days later, he was abducted from his bed and taken to the planet Titan, 9,000 light years away. Forcibly conscripted into the Titan Academy, Atlas and fourteen other fourteen-year-olds must train to fulfill an ancient, interstellar prophecy by discovering and securing a legendary relic of incomprehensible power, the Celestial Sphere. Shrouded in myth and mystery, the Celestial Sphere holds the power to bring peace to the Galaxy. Whole civilizations have annihilated themselves and others seeking for it. Atlas has no choice. Uncovering the secrets of the Sphere is the only path that brings he and his friends home alive.

"This is a Borzoi Book

The second volume in the life of literary giant Saul Bellow, vividly capturing a personal life that was always tumultuous and career that never ceased being triumphant. Bellow, at forty-nine, is at the pinnacle of American letters--rich, famous, critically acclaimed. The expected trajectory is one of decline: volume 1, rise; volume 2, fall. Bellow never fell, producing in the latter half of his life some of his greatest fiction (Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift), winning two more National Book Awards, a Pulitzer Prize, and the Nobel Prize. At eighty, he wrote his last story; at eighty-five, he wrote Ravelstein. In this volume, his life away from the desk, including his love life, is if anything more dramatic than in the first. In the public sphere, he is embroiled in controversy over foreign affairs, race, religion, education, social policy, the state of culture, the fate of the novel. In this stunning second volume, Zachary Leader shows that Bellow's heroic energy and will were present to the very end of his life. His immense achievement and its cost, to himself and others, continue to be worth the examination of this vivid work of literary scholarship.

In this issue of Atlas of the Oral and Maxillofacial Surgery Clinics, guest editor Dr. Florencio Monje Gil brings his considerable expertise to the topic of Temporomandibular Joint Surgery. TMJ disorders affect 12% or more of the population in the U.S. alone, primarily women in their childbearing years. In this issue, top experts in the field provide comprehensive, current tutorials of every major TMJ surgery, including articles on pre- and postoperative treatment. Contains 14 practice-oriented topics including rules for surgical decision making in temporomandibular joint treatment; temporomandibular joint arthrocentesis; operative arthroscopy and electrocoagulation of the temporomandibular joint; open temporomandibular joint surgery: discectomy with or without interpositional reconstruction; temporomandibular joint surgery: open discopexy; and more. Provides in-depth clinical reviews on temporomandibular joint surgery, offering actionable insights for clinical practice. Presents the latest information on this timely, focused topic under the leadership of experienced editors in the field. Authors synthesize and distill the latest research and practice guidelines to create clinically significant, topic-based reviews.

This is Capote’s In Cold Blood for serial killer enthusiasts: meticulously researched, superbly written, and incredibly vivid. Don’t miss it.” —Gabino Iglesias, author of Coyote Songs America’s First Female Serial Killer novelizes the true story of first-generation Irish-American nurse Jane Toppan, born as Honora Kelley. Although all the facts are intact, books about her life and her crimes are all facts and no story. Jane Toppan was absolutely a monster, but she did not start out that way. When Jane was a young child, her father abandoned her and her sister to the Boston Female Asylum. From there, Jane was indentured to a wealthy family who changed her name, never adopted her, wrote her out of the will, and essentially taught her how to hate herself. Jilted at the altar, Jane became a nurse and took control of her life—and the lives of her victims. “A thoughtful and inspired take on one of the greatest poisoners in history. America’s First Female Serial Killer: Jane Toppan and the Making of a Monster seethes with rage, compulsion, and a righteous condemnation of the servitude of the underclass. A chilling and sobering read.” —Robert Levy, author of The Glittering World “McBrayer offers us a complex—and terrifying—portrait of a killer who seemed almost doomed from birth.” —Kate Winkler Dawson, author of American Sherlock: Murder, Forensics, and the Birth of American CSI “Brings the horrifying true story of Jane Toppan to lurid, novelistic life, and forces the reader face-to-face with the thoughtlessness and cruelty that helped turn a gifted, damaged child into one of America’s most legendary killers.” —Shaun Hamill, author of A Cosmology of Monsters