Central Skagit Library District

The Metamorphosis is a short novel by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. It is often, cited as one of the seminal works of fiction of the 20th century and is widely studied in colleges and universities across the western world. The story begins with a travelling salesman, Gregor Samsa, waking to find himself transformed into an insect. "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous...

Malcolm Gladwell, host of the podcast Revisionist History and number-one best-selling author of The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and What the Dog Saw, offers a powerful examination of our interactions with strangers - and why they often go wrong. How did Fidel Castro fool the CIA for a generation? Why did Neville Chamberlain think he could trust Adolf Hitler? Why are campus sexual assaults on the rise? Do television sitcoms teach...

Makes a case for the necessity of unstructured social time as a key element of our cultural vitality and how it can help take back our social lives from the constant swirl of contemporary life.

"The long-awaited conclusion to the beloved New York Times bestselling and "engrossing" (People) Beartown series--which inspired an HBO series of the same name--follows the small hockey town's residents as they grapple with change, pain, hope, and redemption."-- Two years have passed since the events that no one wants to think about. While the residents of Beartown struggle to overcome the past, great change is on the horizon. Someone is coming home...

""So delicately calibrated and precisely beautiful that one might not immediately sense the sledgehammer of pain building inside this book. And I mean that in the best way. What powerful tension and depth this provides!"-Aimee Bender. Fourteen-year-old Linda lives with her parents in the beautiful, austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and...

""Quiet, mysterious, menacing, taking you places you will never, never get out of your head." --Daniel Handler Welcome to Trace Italian, a game of strategy and survival! You may now make your first move. Isolated by a disfiguring injury since the age of seventeen, Sean Phillips crafts imaginary worlds for strangers to play in. From his small apartment in southern California, he orchestrates fantastic adventures where possibilities, both dark and bright,...

Black Rednecks and White Liberals is the capstone of decades of outstanding research and writing on racial and cultural issues by Thomas Sowell.

This explosive new book challenges many of the long-held assumptions about blacks, Jews, Germans and Nazis, slavery, and education. Through a series of essays, Sowell presents an in-depth look at key beliefs behind many mistaken and dangerous actions, policies, and trends. He presents eye-opening

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"With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata, whose Convenience Store Woman has now sold more than a million copies worldwide, returns with a brilliant and wonderfully unsettling collection, her most recent fiction to be published in Japan. In these twelve stories, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror and turns the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. In "A First-Rate Material," Nana and Naoki...

"In We Love Anderson Cooper, characters are treated as outsiders because of their sexual orientation, racial or religious identity, or simply because they look different. A young man courts the publicity that comes from outing himself at his bar mitzvah. When a painter is shunned because of his appearance, he learns to ink tattoos that come to life. A paranoid Jewish actuary suspects his cat of cheating on him--with his Protestant girlfriend."--Provided...

Everyone knows that timing is everything. But we don't know much about timing itself. Our lives are a never-ending stream of "when" decisions: when to start a business, schedule a class, get serious about a person. Yet we make those decisions based on intuition and guesswork. Drawing on a rich trove of research from psychology, biology, and economics, Daniel Pink reveals how best to live, work, and succeed. How can we use the hidden patterns of the...