Tim Powers Book order

After Many a Summer, a magisterial new novella from Tim Powers, borrows its title from a line in Tennyson's famous poem "Tithonus." An elegiac appeal for death on the part of the titular figure from myth, a man who was granted the everlasting life he had originally begged from the gods, only to have their gift turn to ashes in his mouth, only, as Tennyson wrote, to become someone whom "only cruel immortality consumes." What does this have to do with homelessness, troubled movie production companies, kidnapped heiresses, prophecies delivered by taxidermized heads, and a Los Angeles County rendered with such masterful, lived in, bone deep attention to physical detail that to read the opening is to feel the heat from cracked asphalt rising through your shoes and to taste cheap fortified wine grown warm in the sun cloying your tongue? Can all these seemingly disparate things be connected, cohered, clarified? This is a Tim Powers story. Of course they can. Conrad is a down on his luck screenwriter who takes a very strange assignment that leads him to encounter a kidnapped heiress after delivering her ransom--a hundred-year-old mummified head fond of cryptic utterances. Nothing goes Conrad's way, though, because nothing, no matter how bizarre, is what it seems.

THE TRUE STORY OF THE BRONTË SISTERS AS ONLY TIM POWERS COULD WRITE IT. This is a ghost story. It is a story about werewolves, and things that go bump in the night. It is a story of an ill-fated land, the pathless moors of Northern England so well chronicled in Wuthering Heights. And it is the story of a real family whose destiny it is to deal with this darkly glamorous and dangerous world. When young Emily Brontë helps a wounded man she finds at the foot of an ancient pagan shrine in the remote Yorkshire moors, her life becomes contentiously entwined with his. He is Alcuin Curzon, embittered member of a sect working to eradicate the resurgent plague of lycanthropy in Europe and northern England. But Emily’s father, curate of the Haworth village church, is responsible for having unwittingly brought a demonic werewolf god to Yorkshire forty years ago—and it is taking possession of Emily’s beloved but foolish and dissolute brother. Curzon must regard Emily’s family as a dire threat. In spite of being at deadly odds, Emily and Curzon find themselves thrown together in fighting werewolves, confronting pagan gods, even saving each other from the lures of moorland demons. And in a final battle that sweeps from the haunted village of Haworth to a monstrous shrine far out on the moors, the two of them must be reluctant allies against an ancient power that seems likely to take their souls as well as their lives.

"Sebastian Vickery has learned something about UFOs that he shouldn't have-and Naval Intelligence, desperate to silence him, orders his old partner, Agent Ingrid Castine, to trap him. But Castine risks career, liberty, and maybe even life to warn Vickery-and now they're both fugitives, on the run from both the U.S. government and agents of the Russian GRU Directorate, which has its own uses for the UFO intelligence. With the unlikely aid of a renegade Russian agent, a homeless Hispanic boy, and an eccentric old Flat-Earther, Vickery and Castine must find an ancient relic that spells banishment to the alien species, and then summon the things and use it against them-in a Samson-like confrontation that looks likely to kill them as well. Sweeping from the Giant Rock monolith in the Mojave Desert to a cultist temple in the Hollywood Hills, from a monstrous apparition in the Los Angeles River to a harrowing midnight visitation on a boat off Long Beach Harbor, Stolen Skies is an alien-encounter novel like no other"-- Provided by publisher

Set in 19th century London, the story follows Isaac Fairchild, a dimwitted beggar summoned by the sinister Horrabin, a clown who leads a guild of down-and-out individuals. Horrabin is rumored to maim his followers to enhance their begging skills. In a hidden chamber, Fairchild discovers Horrabin's plan to merge his mind with that of the Spoonsize Boys, tiny homunculi used for theft and assassination. While Fairchild longs for intelligence and understanding, he must confront the significant costs of such transformation.

AIDS and South Africa. Khosi, a 14-year-old girl, yearns for this thing called the future. Does she want too much?

Trends have become a commodityan element of culture in their own right and the very currency of our cultural life. Consumer culture relies on a new class of professionals who explain trends, predict trends, and in profound ways even manufacture trends.On Trend delves into one of the most powerful forces in global consumer culture. From forecasting to cool hunting to design thinking, the work done by trend professionals influences how we live, work, play, shop, and learn. Devon Powers' provocative insights open up how the business of the future kindles exciting opportunity even as its practices raise questions about an economy increasingly built on nonstop disruption and innovation. Merging industry history with vivid portraits of today's trend visionaries, Powers reveals how trends took over, what it means for cultural change, and the price all of us pay to seeand livethe future.

Set against the backdrop of Nazi-occupied Paris, the story follows Andrew Hale, a young double agent who infiltrates the Soviet spy network. His dangerous mission leads him into a secret war that leaves lasting scars. Two decades later, in 1963, he must confront the haunting remnants of his past, particularly an unresolved operation known as Declare, which threatens to resurface and disrupt his life once more. The narrative explores themes of loyalty, betrayal, and the long shadows cast by espionage.

"Something weird is happening to the Los Angeles freeways--phantom cars, lanes from nowhere, and sometimes unmarked offramps that give glimpses of a desolate desert highway--and Sebastian Vickery, disgraced ex-Secret Service agent, is a driver for a covert supernatural-evasion car service. But another government agency is using and perhaps causing the freeway anomalies, and their chief is determined to have Vickery killed because of something he learned years ago at a halted Presidential motorcade. Reluctantly aided by Ingrid Castine, a member of that agency, and a homeless Mexican boy, and a woman who makes her living costumed as Supergirl on the sidewalk in front of the Chinese Theater, Vickery learns what legendary hell it is that the desert highway leads to--and when Castine deliberately drives into it to save him from capture, he must enter it himself to get her out. Alternate Routes is a fast-paced supernatural adventure story that sweeps from the sun-blinded streets and labyrinthine freeways of Los Angeles to a horrifying other world out of Greek mythology, and Vickery and Castine must learn to abandon old loyalties and learn loyalty to each other in order to survive as the world goes mad around them"--

In the wake of their Aunt Amity's suicide, Scott and Madeline Madden are summoned to Caveat, the eerie, decaying mansion in the Hollywood hills in which they were raised. But their decadent and reclusive cousins, the malicious wheelchair-bound Claimayne and his sister, Ariel, do not welcome Scott and Madeline's return to the childhood home they once shared. While Scott desperately wants to go back to their shabby south of Sunset lives, he cannot get his sister away from this old house. Caveat hides a dark family secret that stretches back to the golden days of Rudolph Valentino and the silent film stars. A collection of hypnotic abstract images inked on paper allows the Maddens to briefly fragment and flatten time - to transport themselves into the past and future in visions that are both puzzling and terrifying. As Madeline falls more completely under Caveat's spell, Scott must fight to protect her.