Urban City

From the wrought ironwork of the Eiffel Tower to the flourishing art nouveau movement, the Belle Époque is remembered as a golden age for Parisian culture. Beneath the veneer of elegance, however, fin de siècle Paris was a city at war with itself. In City of Light, City of Shadows, Mike Rapport uncovers a Paris riven by social anxieties and plagued by overlapping epidemics of poverty, political extremism, and anti-Semitism.

America is an urban nation. More than two thirds of us live on the three percent of land that contains our cities. Yet cities get a bad rap: they're dirty, poor, unhealthy, crime ridden, expensive, environmentally unfriendly. Or are they? As Edward Glaeser proves in this myth-shattering book, cities are actually the healthiest, greenest, and richest (in cultural and economic terms) places to live.

Young is a cynical yet fun-loving Korean student who pinballs from home to class to the beds of recent Tinder matches. He and Jaehee, his female best friend and roommate, frequent nearby bars where they push away their anxieties about their love lives, families, and money with rounds of soju and ice-cold Marlboro Reds that they keep in their freezer. Yet over time, even Jaehee leaves Young to settle down, leaving him alone to care for his ailing mother and to find companionship in his relationships with a series of men.

The crime-infested intersection of West Fayette and Monroe Streets is well-known - and cautiously avoided - by most of Baltimore. But this notorious corner's 24-hour open-air drug market provides the economic fuel for a dying neighborhood. David Simon, an award-winning author and crime reporter, and Edward Burns, a 20-year veteran of the urban drug war, tell the chilling story of this desolate crossroad.

Visionary physicist Geoffrey West is a pioneer in the field of complexity science, the science of emergent systems and networks. The term complexity can be misleading, however, because what makes West's discoveries so beautiful is that he has found an underlying simplicity that unites the seemingly complex and diverse phenomena of living systems, including our bodies, our cities, and our businesses.

James Stark, aka Sandman Slim, has managed to get out of Hell, renounce his title as the new Lucifer, and settle back into life in L.A. But he also lost the Qomrama Om Ya, an all-powerful weapon from the banished older gods. Older gods who are returning and searching for their lost power. The hunt leads Stark to an abandoned shopping mall - a global shopping paradise infested with Lurkers and wretched bottom-feeding Sub Rosa families, squatters who have formed tight tribes to guard their tiny patches of retail wasteland.

Report from Engine Co. 82 is the story of one company of New York firefighters battling unimaginable death and destruction every day. Dennis Smith worked as a firefighter in the South Bronx, New York City, and the graphic detail and gripping prose of this firefighting classic drives the most important, accomplished, terrifying audiobook ever published on firefighting.

The Cuban Missile Crisis was perhaps the most dramatic and dangerous period of the Cold War. What's less well known is that the city of Miami, mere miles away, was a pivotal, though less well known, part of Cold War history. With its population of Communist exiles from Cuba, its strategic value for military operations, and its lax business laws, Miami was an ideal environment for espionage. Covert City tells the history of how the entire city of Miami was constructed in the image of the US-Cuba rivalry.

I can turn into a housecat. It’s a fun magic, except in a world filled with vampires and werewolves, it doesn’t exactly make me a powerhouse. Instead, the supernatural community has classified me as an outcast, which means one thing: picking on me is open season all day, every day. The local fae are the worst of all, and it’s during one of their regular “capture the cat-girl” sessions that I shift into my cat form and meet HIM for the first time.

Julie Crews is a coked-up, burnt-out 30-something who packs a lot of magic into her small body. She’s trying to establish herself as a major psychic operative in the NYC magic scene, and she’ll work the most gruesome gigs to claw her way to the top. Desperate to break the dead-end grind, Julie summons a guardian angel for a quick career boost. But when her power grab accidentally releases an elder god hell-bent on the annihilation of our galaxy, the body count rises rapidly.

Oklahoma City was born from chaos. It was founded in a bizarre but momentous "Land Run" in 1889, when thousands of people lined up along the borders of Oklahoma Territory and rushed in at noon to stake their claims. Since then, it has been a city torn between the wild energy that drives its outsize ambitions and the forces of order that seek sustainable progress.

Novella Carpenter loves cities - the culture, the crowds, the energy. At the same time, she can't shake the fact that she is the daughter of two back-to-the-land hippies who taught her to love nature and eat vegetables. Ambivalent about repeating her parents' disastrous mistakes, yet drawn to the idea of backyard self-sufficiency, Carpenter decided that it might be possible to have it both ways.

Blatantly relentless and twice as deadly, Greyson rules the pack and expands its territory, even though it’s already the largest in the region. I just wish he’d stop interfering with my life. He’s got enough trouble of his own with his incomplete mate bond, but he’s made it his hobby to tease and test me at every opportunity.

Bailey has learned much and grown over the years, but the greatest challenges, the richest joys, and the deepest heartaches are still to come. As she enjoys the beginning of her new career and time spent with Brandon, Cody faithfully coaches his team on and off the field. Torn between her feelings for both of them, she has a difficult decision to make.

In the heart of Venice, a woman is sacrificed to a forgotten god, sparking a mystery lost for thousands of years. Dr. Penelope Bryne is ridiculed by the academic community for her quest to find the remnants of Atlantis, but when an ancient and mysterious script is found at a murder site, she flies to Venice determined to help the police before the killer strikes again. Penelope has spent her entire life trying to ignore the unexplainable and magical history of Atlantis, but when she meets the enigmatic Alexis Donato, everything she believes will be challenged.

I'm not supposed to push through the boundaries of reality without supervision. I'm definitely not meant to drag a cop Between with me. But stuff happens, you know? Hi. I'm Pet. Well, not Pet, exactly. I am a pet. Nothing too hard; I just cook and clean for the Behindkind who took over my house. Easy. But now one of my owners has gone missing. He's fae, so it shouldn't worry me, but if there's something out there that can kidnap fae, I don't wanna meet it. Good thing I've got another two owners and a spare cop up my sleeve....

Viv Abbot is an average twenty-one-year-old girl. She lives in an expensive city where the rent is too high, works long hours at a thankless job, and is dating a guy she doesn’t even like in the hopes of winning her prickly mother’s approval. She also happens to be a demon hunter. Ever since her father's murder, she's been forced to hunt deviants alone, meaning everyone, including her family, sees her as an outsider . . . until the day she crosses paths with a dangerously alluring demon, Reid Graveheart. The reformed deviant tells her of a school for people just like her.

Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: They are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. Though he is navigating the busy parts of town, the impression of countless faces does nothing to assuage his feelings of isolation.

There's a body beneath the skip bins. Fae on the forklift. A vampire in the manager's office. And there's definitely something skeevy going on in the locker rooms. Hi. I'm Pet. Well, not exactly Pet. I am a pet. I was meant to stay out of it, but somebody's gotta do something when humans are being killed by Behindkind creatures.

In part two of Homies, Lovers And Friends, Michelle is left with the fact that her life with Tasheem just might have caused her cousin to be murdered. When taking four steps forward, she feels as if she's pushed back fifteen. Just when she thought she had gotten rid of Tasheem and his evil ways, he came back and decided to cause harm to not just her, but Miracle.