Virga Bone

"It's impossible to imagine another writer in America who is better than Craig Childs at elegizing the fearsome and confounding appeal of our most austere landscapes." —KEVIN FEDARKO, author of The Emerald Mile From the author of The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World comes a deeply felt essay collection focusing upon a vivid series of desert icons—a sheet of virga over Monument Valley, white seashells in dry desert sand, boulders impossibly balanced. Craig Childs delves into the primacy of the land and the profound nature of the more–than–human. CRAIG CHILDS is the author of more than a dozen books on nature, adventure, and science, including The Secret Knowledge of Water and Atlas of a Lost World. His work has appeared in the New York Times, the Los Angeles Times, and Outside. Recipient of the Ellen Meloy Desert Writers Award and the Sigurd F. Olson Nature Writing Award, he lives in Colorado.

THE TWENTIETH ANNIVERSARY EDITION She looked like everyone’s grandmother: white-haired, plump, bespectacled, and kindly. Only Dorothea Montalvo Puente’s eyes, black and hard behind her glasses, hinted at the evil that lurked within. She was the rarest of murderers, a female serial killer—probably the most cold-blooded ever recorded in the annals of crime. This shocking story of the gruesome murder of seven men for profit comes from bestselling author William P. Wood, the Deputy D.A. who had earlier prosecuted Puente for drugging and robbing elderly people. He knew intimately the malice that coursed through her veins, and thought he had seen the last of this callous and calculating woman. But her chameleon-like deviousness helped her reappear as a sweet, benevolent landlord—and later allowed her to escape police custody as they stood in her yard surrounded by the gaping graves. The Bone Garden chronicles the discoveries that ignited a media firestorm and transfixed a nation, putting an entirely new face on evil in this country.

This new edition of a Craig Childs classic includes his original journal entries and pen-and-ink drawings inspired by the redrock desert of Canyonlands National Park. Originally published over twenty-five years ago, Stone Desert brings the wonder and wildness of one of our nation's most geologically and culturally unique national parks to readers everywhere. With a new introduction by the author, this edition includes Craig Childs's original journal—written over a winter in Canyonlands National Park and complete with pen-and-ink sketches—from which Stone Desert originated. Join Childs as he hikes the high mesas, navigates the winding canyons, and witnesses the ancient rock art of Utah’s most inscrutable and remote slickrock desert.

In this refreshing collection, one of our best writers on desert places, Gary Paul Nabhan, challenges traditional notions of the desert. Beautiful, reflective, and at times humorous, Nabhan’s extended essay also called “The Nature of Desert Nature” reveals the complexity of what a desert is and can be. He passionately writes about what it is like to visit a desert and what living in a desert looks like when viewed through a new frame, turning age-old notions of the desert on their heads. Nabhan invites a prism of voices—friends, colleagues, and advisors from his more than four decades of study of deserts—to bring their own perspectives. Scientists, artists, desert contemplatives, poets, and writers bring the desert into view and investigate why these places compel us to walk through their sands and beneath their cacti and acacia. We observe the spines and spears, stings and songs of the desert anew. Unexpected. Surprising. Enchanting. Like the desert itself, each essay offers renewed vocabulary and thoughtful perceptions. The desert inspires wonder. Attending to history, culture, science, and spirit, The Nature of Desert Nature celebrates the bounty and the significance of desert places. Contributors Thomas M. Antonio Homero Aridjis James Aronson Tessa Bielecki Alberto Búrquez Montijo Francisco Cantú Douglas Christie Paul Dayton Alison Hawthorne Deming Father David Denny Exequiel Ezcurra Thomas Lowe Fleischner Jack Loeffler Ellen McMahon Rubén Martínez Curt Meine Alberto Mellado Moreno Paul Mirocha Gary Paul Nabhan Ray Perotti Larry Stevens Stephen Trimble Octaviana V. Trujillo Benjamin T. Wilder Andy Wilkinson Ofelia Zepeda

DIVA woman gives birth to a child whose evilness threatens all mankind/divDIV /divDIVMary Kate is an ordinary woman: a waitress in a diner, stuck in a loveless marriage to an English-major-turned-cabbie. But whoever assaults her in a New York City alley is far from ordinary. As the man’s icy grip burns her skin, she couldn’t grasp the dark fate that awaits her./divDIV /divDIVThe rape leaves her carrying a child, who she and her husband name Jeffrey. As they try to live as a family, a mysterious force poisons them against each other. Finally overcome with hate for her husband, Mary Kate kills him, sending herself to jail and the child to an orphanage. There the boy takes a new name, Baal, and develops sinister powers that flourish as he approaches adulthood. When Baal becomes a man, the whole world will tremble before him./div

A world of endless sky, with no land, no gravity: this is Virga. Beginning in the seminal science fiction novel Sun of Suns, the saga of this striking world has introduced us to the people of stubborn pride and resilience who have made Virga their home; but also, always lurking beyond the walls of the world, to the mysterious threat known only as Artificial Nature. In The Sunless Countries, history tutor Leal Hieronyma Maspeth became the first human in centuries to learn the true nature of this threat. Her reward was exile, but now, in Ashes of Candesce, Artificial Nature makes its final bid to destroy Virga, and it is up to Leal to unite the quarrelling clans of her world to fight the threat. Ashes of Candesce brings together all the heroes of the Virga series, and draws the diverse threads of the previous storylines together into one climactic conflict. Blending steampunk styling with a far-future setting and meditations on the posthuman condition, Ashes of Candesce mixes high adventure and cutting-edge ideas in a fitting climax to one of science fiction's most innovative series. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

In Karl Schroeder's sci-fi thriller, Hayden Griffin has come to the city of Rush with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for his parents' deaths. It is the distant future. The world known as Virga is a fullerene balloon three thousand kilometers in diameter, filled with air, water, and aimlessly floating chunks of rock. The humans who live in this vast environment must build their own fusion suns and "towns" that are in the shape of enormous wood and rope wheels that are spun for gravity. Young, fit, bitter, and friendless, Hayden Griffin is a very dangerous man. He's come to the city of Rush in the nation of Slipstream with one thing in mind: to take murderous revenge for the deaths of his parents six years ago. His target is Admiral Chaison Fanning, head of the fleet of Slipstream, which conquered Hayden's nation of Aerie years ago. And the fact that Hayden's spent his adolescence living with pirates doesn't bode well for Fanning's chances . . . At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

To whom does the past belong? Is the archeologist who discovers a lost tomb a sort of hero -- or a villain? If someone steals a relic from a museum and returns it to the ruin it came from, is she a thief? Written in his trademark lyrical style, Craig Childs's riveting new book is a ghost story -- an intense, impassioned investigation into the nature of the past and the things we leave behind. We visit lonesome desert canyons and fancy Fifth Avenue art galleries, journey throughout the Americas, Asia, the past and the present. The result is a brilliant book about man and nature, remnants and memory, a dashing tale of crime and detection.