• The Golden Exchange
    The ticker tape never stopped talking. That was the first thing Vincent Moretti learned on the floor of the New York Stock Exchange: the machine had opinions, and they came in the form of punched paper ribbons that fell like confetti from the ceiling of a cathedral built for a new god. He was nineteen, Irish-Italian from Hester Street, with ink on his fingers and a photographic memory that made...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 24 Views 0 voorbeeld
  • THE WEIGHT OF NOTHING
    ### Act I: The Spark Ethan Cross stood in the supermarket aisle for twelve minutes before making a decision. The decision was about cereal. There were fourteen brands on the shelf, from store-brand corn flakes at three dollars a box to artisanal granola at nine dollars, and Ethan was trying to choose one. Not because he was hungry—hunger was not the issue. The issue was that each choice carried...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 31 Views 0 voorbeeld
  • THE PEOPLE'S ENGINE
    ### Act I: The Spark James Callahan first understood what engineering meant at the age of twelve, when he was sent into the depths of the Homestead Steel Plant to unclog a jammed conveyor belt that had brought the entire rolling mill to a halt. The foreman had given him a choice: crawl through the gap between two moving rollers, or watch his father lose a week's wages for the downtime. James...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 43 Views 0 voorbeeld
  • The Double Life of Thomas Vance
    Thomas Vance opened the bookshop at nine in the morning and he closed it at six in the evening and he did exactly the same thing every day for three years. He straightened the books. He wiped the counter. He drank tea from a cup that said World's Best Bookseller in letters that were chipped and fading. He watched the people walk past the window and he thought about nothing. This was exactly...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 31 Views 0 voorbeeld
  • The Gardenias Bloom
    The gardenias were the only things in the house that knew how to bloom against their nature. Mercy watched them from the greenhouse bench, her bare feet curled against the hot terracotta. One hundred and eight degrees. The air tasted like green — thick with the smell of damp soil and crushed leaves and something sweeter, something that made her think of church on a summer morning, before the...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 46 Views 0 voorbeeld
  • The Foreign Color
    Every Wednesday at two o'clock, I took the train from Penn Station to the Plaza Hotel, where Victor had a suite with a view of Central Park and a record player that played Gershwin. He called me his dear bird. I called him Uncle Victor. This was the language of our arrangement. The suite was not a room — it was an apartment, really. A sitting room, a dining room, a bedroom that I was not...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 68 Views 0 voorbeeld
  • THE MIRROR IN THE BASEMENT
    ACT I: THE WINDOWLESS ROOM Lord Alistair Finch-Worthingham inherited Blackwood Park on a Tuesday in November, which seemed appropriate: Tuesdays were the kind of days on which serious things happened—inheritances, deaths, the slow realization that one's life has been a performance for an audience that stopped watching years ago. The house was exactly as one might expect a country house named...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 11 Views 0 voorbeeld
  • ACT I
    Dr. Julian Frost found his own biography in a Taiping archival document, written in 1854—twenty years before he was born. The discovery happened on a Tuesday, in the imperial archives of Tianjing, where Julian had spent the last three months cataloging rebel propaganda and religious texts for his forthcoming Oxford publication. He was thirty-two, a man of meticulous habits and rational...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 39 Views 0 voorbeeld
  • ACT I
    The Beauregard plantation looked like a dying animal: magnificent once, now skeletal, its ribs of white columns protruding through peeling paint like bone through rotting flesh. Elias Thorne stood at the gate and felt something he hadn't felt since Boston, something that was almost sympathy. He had come south as a Union intelligence officer, armed with maps and coded messages and a conviction...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 39 Views 0 voorbeeld
  • THE MIRROR IN THE BASEMENT
    ACT I: THE WINDOWLESS ROOM Lord Alistair Finch-Worthingham inherited Blackwood Park on a Tuesday in November, which seemed appropriate: Tuesdays were the kind of days on which serious things happened—inheritances, deaths, the slow realization that one's life has been a performance for an audience that stopped watching years ago. The house was exactly as one might expect a country house named...
    0 Reacties 0 aandelen 21 Views 0 voorbeeld