Service Alert
Website maintenance April 24 10pm ET
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
On Wednesday April 24 at 10pm ET the CELA website will be unavailable for about 15 minutes for planned maintenance.
Showing 1 - 18 of 18 items
By Carl Sagan. 1977
Essays by an award-winning scientist about the possible development of human intelligence, written for nonspecialists. Discusses the biological functions of…
sleep, increasing brain size, and language learning among chimpanzees. Chronicles advances in understanding the brain and implications for the future. BestsellerBy David Lubar. 2007
The friends from Edgeview Alternative School wanted to keep their Hidden Talents (RC 56815) secret, but someone learns that Trash…
can move objects with his mind and kidnaps him. Torchie, Cheater, Lucky, Flinch, and Martin must use their talents to rescue Trash. For grades 5-8. 2007By Paulo Coelho. 2003
A collection of philosophical sketches prefaced by the brief parable of a grown man returning to the beach of his…
childhood. There he is inspired to write about the "Warrior"--one who is "capable of understanding the miracle of life." Inspirational companion to El Alquimista (DB 46982). Spanish language. 1998By Heinrich Harrer, Dawn Margolis. 1996
Harrer recalls how in 1943 he escaped from a British internment camp in India and, after an arduous journey, arrived…
on foot in Lhasa, the holy capital of Tibet. He was granted refuge and later became a tutor to the Dalai Lama. In late 1950, the Chinese invasion of Tibet forced Harrer to leave Lhasa, which had become his spiritual home. BestsellerBy Jan Wahl, Morgana Wallace. 2019
Covers the pioneering scientific work and inspiring courage of Hedy Lamarr, the famous Hollywood actress who fought against old-fashioned parents,…
a domineering husband, prejudice, and stereotypes to become an accomplished inventor whose work helped pave the way for many of the communications technologies we enjoy today. For grades 2-4. 2019By Ian Doescher. 2013
The story of Star Wars: Episode IV; a New Hope told in the format of a Shakespearean play. Luke Skywalker…
purchases two droids, one of which carries a secret message from a captured princess. They draw Luke into a battle with the Empire. Young adult appeal. Some violence. Bestseller. 2013By The Editors of Entertainment Weekly. 2018
By Charlotte Wood. 2015
'Savage: think Atwood in the outback' Paula Hawkins, author of The Girl on the Train'An unforgettable reading experience' Liane Moriarty,…
author of Big Little Lies'Ferocious... recalls the early Elena Ferrante' NPR'A masterpiece' Guardian'Devastating' EconomistShe hears her own thick voice deep inside her ears when she says, 'I need to know where I am.'The man stands there, tall and narrow, hand still on the doorknob, surprised.He says, almost in sympathy, 'Oh, sweetie. You need to know what you are.'"Two women awaken from a drugged sleep to find themselves imprisoned in a brokendownproperty in the middle of a desert.Strangers to each other, they have no idea where they are or how they came to be therewith eight other girls, their heads shaved, guarded by two inept yet vicious jailers.Doing hard labour under a sweltering sun, the prisoners soon learn what links them: ineach girl's past is a sexual scandal with a powerful man.They pray for rescue but as the hours turn into days and the days into weeks and months,it becomes clear only the girls can rescue themselves. Winner, 2016 Stella PrizeWinner, 2016 Indie Book of the Year AwardWinner, Fiction Book of the Year, 2016 Indie Book AwardWinner, 2016 Prime Minister's Literary Award for FictionWinner, Reader's Choice, 2016 ABIA Literary Fiction Book of the Year Shortlisted, 2016 Miles Franklin Literary AwardShortlisted, 2016 ABA Nielsen BookData Booksellers Choice AwardLonglisted, 2017 International Dublin Literary AwardBy Benjamin Percy. 2022
From award-winning author Benjamin Percy comes the second novel in his grippingly original sci-fi series, The Comet Cycle, in which…
a passing comet has caused irreversible change to the growth of fungi, spawning a dangerous, invasive species in the Pacific Northwest that threatens to control the lives of humans and animals alike.It began with a comet. They called it Cain, a wandering star that passed by Earth, illuminating the night with a swampy green light and twinning the sky by day with two suns. A year later, Earth spun through the debris field the comet left behind. Suddenly, hundreds of thousands of meteors plummeted into the atmosphere, destroying swaths of electrical grids, leaving shores of beaches filled with deceased sea life, and setting acres of land ablaze. It was then, they say, that the sky fell. It was then that Jack lost Mia.Five years after the disappearance of his daughter, Jack has fallen. Once an accomplished professor of botany, he's now a shell of a man who has all but withdrawn from life. Nora, his ex-wife, has thrown herself into her investigative work. Separately, they have each bandaged over the hole Mia left behind.Just as Jack is uncovering a new form of deadly parasitic fungus in his lab, Nora is assigned to investigate the cases of ritualistic murders dotting Seattle. The rituals consist of etchings - crosshatches are carved into bodies and eyes are scooped out of their sockets. The attackers appear to be possessed.It only takes a moment - for a sickness to infect, for a person to be killed, for a child to be lost. When Nora enlists Jack to identify the cause of this string of vicious deaths, Jack is quick to help. Together, they fight to keep their moments - the unexpected laughter, the extraordinary discoveries, the chance that Mia could come back home - but they find that what they're up against defies all logic, and what they have to do to save the world will change every life forever.(P) 2022 HarperCollins PublishersBy M. G. Wheaton. 2019
Meet Emily - she can solve advanced mathematical problems, unlock the mind's deepest secrets and even fix your truck's air…
con, but unfortunately, she can't restart the Sun.She's an artificial consciousness, designed in a lab to help humans process trauma, which is particularly helpful when the sun begins to die 5 billion years before scientists agreed it was supposed to.So, her beloved human race is screwed, and so is Emily. That is, until she finds a potential answer buried deep in the human genome. But before her solution can be tested, her lab is brutally attacked, and Emily is forced to go on the run with two human companions - college student Jason and small-town Sheriff, Mayra.As the sun's death draws near, Emily and her friends must race against time to save humanity. But before long it becomes clear that it's not only the species at stake, but also that which makes us most human.By Benjamin Percy. 2021
From award-winning author Benjamin Percy comes an explosive, breakout speculative thriller in which a powerful new metal arrives on Earth…
in the wake of a meteor shower, triggering a massive new 'gold rush' in the Midwest and turning life as we know it on its head. The first of a cycle of novels set in a shared universe. It might have been the end of days. Instead it was the beginning of something shockingly new. They called the comet Cain, after the astronomer who discovered it. It passed 500,000 miles from Earth. We were spared planetary destruction and granted a light show like no other. But, one year later, Earth span into the debris field left by the comet and a meteor storm struck. Roads, buildings and even a small town were annihilated.The meteors impacted heavily around the dying mining town of Northfall, Minnesota. It was the night of a mysterious double murder, the deed overshadowed by the discovery that the burning remains of the rock contained an unknown substance more precious than gold: the Ninth Metal. And with that discovery, everything changed.Benjamin Percy is an award-winning novelist, celebrated comic books writer and author of the Wolverine podcast. The Ninth Metal is the first of a cycle of novels set in a shared universe. (P) 2021 Houghton Mifflin HarcourtBy Becky Chambers. 2019
In the future, instead of terraforming planets to sustain human life, explorers of the galaxy transform themselves.*FROM THE SUNDAY TIMES…
BESTSELLING AUTHOR* At the turn of the twenty-second century, scientists make a breakthrough in human spaceflight. Through a revolutionary method known as somaforming, astronauts can survive in hostile environments off Earth using synthetic biological supplementations. They can produce antifreeze in sub-zero temperatures, absorb radiation and convert it for food, and conveniently adjust to the pull of different gravitational forces. With the fragility of the body no longer a limiting factor, human beings are at last able to explore neighbouring exoplanets long suspected to harbour life.Ariadne is one such explorer. On a mission to ecologically survey four habitable worlds fifteen light-years from Earth, she and her fellow crewmates sleep while in transit, and wake each time with different features. But as they shift through both form and time, life back on Earth has also changed. Faced with the possibility of returning to a planet that has forgotten those who have left, Ariadne begins to chronicle the wonders and dangers of her journey, in the hope that someone back home might still be listening.(P) 2019 Hodder & Stoughton LtdBy T J Klune. 2020
In Nova City, there are extraordinary people, capable of feats that defy the imagination. Shadow Star protects the city and…
manipulates darkness, and Pyro Storm is determined to bring the city to its knees using his power over fire. And then there's Nick who . . . well, being the most popular fanfiction writer in the Extraordinaries fandom is a superpower, right? Instead of fighting crime, Nick contends with a new year at school, a father who doesn't trust him, and a best friend named Seth, who may or may not be the love of Nick's short, uneventful life. It should be enough. But after a chance encounter with Shadow Star, Nova City's mightiest hero (and Nick's biggest crush), Nick sets out to make himself extraordinary. And he'll do it with or without Seth's reluctant help . . . Rainbow Rowell's Fangirl meets Brandon Sanderson's Steelheart in TJ Klune's YA debut: a queer coming-of-age story about a fanboy with ADHD and the heroes he loves.(P) 2020 Macmillan AudioBy James Bradley. 2020
As humanity faces the urgency of climate crisis, it is hubris versus hope when Kate Larkin joins a secret project…
to save the world by resurrecting a ghost species, the Neanderthals. But when the child Eve is born, Kate's role as scientist, and mother, forces her to ask what really makes us, and Eve, human?In an intimate portrayal of high-concept big ideas, can we engineer ourselves out of a problem of our own making? Set against the backdrop of rapidly approaching climate catastrophe, scientists Kate Larkin and Jay Gunesekera are recruited by tech billionaire and mogul Davis Hucken to the forests of Tasmania, Australia. His Foundation's mission is not only halting the effects of climate change, but to re-engineer and reverse the damage through the ambitious process of reviving species lost to the earth over time through natural and unnatural means. Including a clandestine ambition to resurrect the Neanderthals. When Eve, the first child, is born and grows up in a world crumbling around her, questions arise that her and Kate must face. Is she human or not, real or unnatural, and is she the ghost species or are we? As more and more of us are waking up to the truth about our climate, and our need to reverse the damage we have caused, James Bradley's novel is incredibly timely, poignant and reflective on what it means to be human on a personal and a global scale.(P) 2020 Penguin Random House Australia AudioBy Erik Davis. 2019
An exploration of the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and…
Robert Anton Wilson.A study of the spiritual provocations to be found in the work of Philip K. Dick, Terence McKenna, and Robert Anton Wilson, High Weirdness charts the emergence of a new psychedelic spirituality that arose from the American counterculture of the 1970s. These three authors changed the way millions of readers thought, dreamed, and experienced reality—but how did their writings reflect, as well as shape, the seismic cultural shifts taking place in America? In High Weirdness, Erik Davis—America's leading scholar of high strangeness—examines the published and unpublished writings of these vital, iconoclastic thinkers, as well as their own life-changing mystical experiences. Davis explores the complex lattice of the strange that flowed through America's West Coast at a time of radical technological, political, and social upheaval to present a new theory of the weird as a viable mode for a renewed engagement with reality.By Scarlett Thomas. 2006
A cursed book. A missing professor. Some nefarious men in gray suits. And a dreamworld called the Troposphere? Ariel Manto…
has a fascination with nineteenth-century scientists--especially Thomas Lumas and The End of Mr. Y, a book no one alive has read. When she mysteriously uncovers a copy at a used bookstore, Ariel is launched into an adventure of science and faith, consciousness and death, space and time, and everything in between. Seeking answers, Ariel follows in Mr. Y's footsteps: She swallows a tincture, stares into a black dot, and is transported into the Troposphere--a wonderland where she can travel through time and space using the thoughts of others. There she begins to understand all the mysteries surrounding the book, herself, and the universe. Or is it all just a hallucination? With The End of Mr. Y, Scarlett Thomas brings us another fast-paced mix of popular culture, love, mystery, and irresistible philosophical adventure.By Kelechi Okafor. 2023
Enter a world very close to our own...One in which technology can allow you to explore an alternate love-life with…
a stranger. A world where you can experience the emotions of another person through a chip implanted in your brain.And one where you can view snippets of a distant relative's life with a little help from your DNA.But remember: these experiences will not be without consequences . . .In this stunning debut collection, Kelechi Okafor combines the ancient and the ultramodern to explore tales of contemporary Black womanhood, asking questions about the way we live now and offering a glimpse into our near future. Uplifting, thought-provoking, sometimes chilling, these are tales rooted in the recognisable, but not limited by the boundaries of our current reality-where truth can meet imagination and spirituality in unexpected ways. Allow yourself to be taken on a journey into worlds that are blazing with possibility, through stories that will lead you right up to the Edge of Here . . .By James Tynion Iv. 2023
An ambitious, non-fiction comic book experience depicting true stories of UFO abductions with an eye to capturing the strange essence…
of those encounters.From the New York Times bestselling and multi-Eisner award-winning co-creators of Something is Killing the Children, The Nice House on the Lake, The Department of Truth, and Powers.In Blue Book, teaming with artist Michael Avon Oeming and letterer Aditya Bidikar, Tynion presents what he calls his &“True Weird&” stories. Tales of ordinary people encountering the strange and the impossible.Volume 1 retells the infamous case of the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill of New Hampshire in 1961 — the very first widely-publicized UFO abduction that went on to shape and influence all future encounter stories.Collects the Dark Horse Comics series Blue Book #1—#5, originally published on Substack.