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The book of accidents : a novel / by Wendig, Chuck,author.;
"A new ... literary horror ... about a family returning to their hometown--and to the dark past that haunts them still. Long ago, Nathan Graves lived in a house in the country with his abusive father--and has never told his family what happened in that house. Long ago, Maddie Graves was a little girl making dolls in her bedroom when she saw something she shouldn't--and is trying to remember that lost trauma by making haunting sculptures. Long ago, something sinister, something hungry, walked in the tunnels and the mountains and the coal mines of their hometown in rural Pennsylvania. Now Nate and Maddie are married, and they have moved back to their hometown with their son, Oliver. And now what happened long ago is happening again ... and it is happening to Oliver. He meets a strange boy who becomes his best friend, a boy with secrets of his own, and a taste for dark magic. This dark magic puts them at the heart of a battle of good versus evil and a fight for the soul of the family--and perhaps for all of the world. But the Graves family has a secret weapon in this fight: their love for each other"--
Subjects: Horror fiction.; Paranormal fiction.; Homecoming; Haunted houses; Family secrets; Fathers and sons; Women sculptors; Empathy; Friendship in adolescence; Accident victims; Good and evil; Serial murderers;

Ai Weiwei / by Gaensheimer, Susanne,editor.; Krystof, Doris,editor.; Wolf, Falk,editor.; Kunstsammlung Nordrhein-Westfalen (Germany),host institution.;
Everything is art. Everything is politics, says internationally renowned artist Ai Weiwei. His statement informs this comprehensive book that features sculptural installations, photographs, and videos from every aspect of the artist's forty year career and touches on many contemporary social issues. The works featured in the book include Straight, Ai's gigantic installation made from 150 tons of rebar salvaged from the 2008 Sichuan earthquake, which comments on governmental corruption and negligence, and Sunflower Seeds for which the artist filled the enormous Turbine Hall of London's Tate Modern with 100,000,000 porcelain seeds, each made by Chinese craftspeople. Also highlighted are his most recent works addressing the refugee crisis, such as Laundromat and Life Cycle; his provocative ventures into social media; and several early works. Wide-ranging and penetrating, this collection of Ai's most important work to date illustrates the depth of his conviction that art is most powerful when it raises awareness and incites change.
Subjects: Exhibition catalogs.; Ai, Weiwei; Ai, Weiwei; Art, Chinese;

The resistance painter : a novel / by Jonathan, Kath,author.;
"1939. Irena Marianowka's dreams of attending art school in Paris are crushed when the Nazis invade Poland. Instead, she joins the Home Army and, together with her young husband, risks her life every day in the sewers of Warsaw. In 1944, after a harrowing mission, she returns home to learn that her sister, Lotta, has been abducted by the Gestapo. Determined to find her, Irena is willing to risk everything--all but the safety of her unit. 2011. Jo Blum lives in Toronto with her beloved grandmother, a lauded painter of WWII and a decorated war hero. Jo has a flourishing career creating sculptures for grave sites based on the life stories of her dying clients. Her recorded interviews with Stefan, her new Polish client, unveil a heroic wartime past eerily similar to her grandmother's. But Jo's quest to uncover the truth about Stefan and her grandmother opens an explosive Pandora's box with shockwaves that threaten all she has known. The Resistance Painter will resonate with fans of Woman with the Blue Star, The Book of Lost Names, The Tattooist of Auschwitz, The German Girl, and The Dutch Wife, confronting the questions of the accuracy of the stories we tell about our lives and whether buried secrets stay buried."--
Subjects: Historical fiction.; Novels.; Poland. Polskie Siły Zbrojne. Armia Krajowa; Grandmothers; Married people; Sisters; Survival; Women painters; World War, 1939-1945; World War, 1939-1945;

The deceptions : a novel / by Bialosky, Jill,author.;
Includes bibliographical references."A middle-aged poet finds herself adrift in her marriage and life now that her child has moved away to college. Her job teaching Greek myth to high school boys at a prestigious New York City academy has its small pleasures-her students offer surprising insights to stories she's studied for decades-but as her debut poetry collection approaches publication she starts to notice the seams of her life becoming unloosed. The chorus of voices in her life -- a mysterious neighbor in a potentially dangerous situation, a visiting poet at the academy struggling with writer's block, the word-starved dialogue with her distant husband --start to become overwhelming. She finds solace only at the Met, its history and sculptures beckon as a comfort and a warning for what happens to people who love wrongly, who love ambitions. The collapse of her life reaches a fever pitch just as betrayals are revealed all around her, and she must confront the realities of her life or be lost to its mythology forever. Suffused with the motifs of classic Greek mythology, especially the story of Leda and the Swan, The Deceptions is a seductively told, deeply moving exploration of female sexuality and ambition and a celebration of beauty and the invisible yet powerful ties that bind together a marriage, a life, work of art and its beholder"--
Subjects: Domestic fiction.; Psychological fiction.; Novels.; Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York, N.Y.); Empty nesters; High school teachers; Interpersonal relations; Man-woman relationships; Married people; Middle-aged women; Mythology, Greek; Poets; Women authors;

The lost story : a novel / by Shaffer, Meg,author.;
"Inspired by C. S. Lewis's The Chronicles of Narnia, this wild and wondrous novel is a fairy tale for grown-ups who still knock on the back of wardrobes - just in case - from the author of The Wishing Game. As boys, best friends Jeremy Cox and Rafe Howell vanished in a West Virginia state park, only to mysteriously reappear six months later with no explanation for where they'd gone or how they'd survived. Fifteen years after their miraculous homecoming, Jeremy is a famous missing persons investigator with an uncanny ability to find the lost, while Rafe is a reclusive artist unable to stop creating otherworldly paintings and sculptures he shows to no one. He bears scars inside and out from his disappearance but has no memory of what happened while they were gone. Jeremy alone knows the fantastical truth behind their time in the woods. While the rest of the world was searching for them, the two missing boys were in a magical realm filled with impossible beauty and terrible danger. However, Jeremy has kept Rafe in the dark since their return for his own inscrutable reasons. But the time for burying secrets comes to an end when vet tech Emilie Wendel hires Jeremy to find her long-lost sister ... the long-lost sister he and Rafe knew while living in that hidden kingdom. Now the former lost boys must confront their shared past, no matter how traumatic the memories. Alongside the headstrong Emilie, Rafe and Jeremy return to the enchanted world they called home for six months ... for only then can they get back everything and everyone they've lost"--
Subjects: Magic realist fiction.; Portal fantasy fiction.; Novels.; Artists; Friendship; Imaginary places; Magic; Missing persons; Missing persons; Secrecy;

No more plastic / by Fullerton, Alma.;
When she sees a beached whale that has starved to death after ingesting plastic, a young girl named Isley is inspired to adopt a plastic-free lifestyle, encouraging her family to join her. When people start falling back into old habits, Isley builds a plastic sculpture of a whale that inspires lasting change.LSC
Subjects: Plastic scrap; Plastic marine debris; Waste disposal in the ocean; Children and the environment;

The Mesopotamian riddle : an archaeologist, a soldier, a clergyman, and the race to decipher the world's oldest writing / by Hammer, Joshua,1957-author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index."It was one of history's great vanishing acts. As early as 3500 BCE, scribes in the mud-walled city-state of Sumer used a reed stylus to press tiny wedge-shaped symbols into clay. For three thousand years, the script chronicled the military conquests, scientific discoveries, and epic literature of the grand kingdoms of Mesopotamia-Assyria, Babylon, the mighty Achaemenid Empire -- along with precious minutia about everyday life so long ago. But as the palaces of these once great kingdoms sank beneath the desert sands, the meaning of these characters was lost. London, 1857. Colossal sculptures of winged bulls and alabaster bas-reliefs depicting cities under siege and vassals bearing tributes to Biblical kings lined the halls of the British Museum. In the Victorian era's obsession with the triumph of human progress, the mysterious kingdoms of ancient Mesopotamia -- the very cradle of civilization -- had captured the public imagination. Yet Europe's best philologists struggled to decipher the strange characters. Cuneiform seemed to have thousands of symbols -- with some scholars claiming each could be pronounced in up to eight, nine, even ten different ways. Others insisted they'd cracked the code and deciphered inscriptions that corresponded precisely to the Old Testament -- proving the veracity of the Word of God. Was it all a hoax? A delusion? A rollicking adventure through the golden age of archaeology, The Writing on the Wall tracks the decades-long race to decipher the oldest script in the world. It's the story of a swashbuckling young archaeologist, a suave British military officer, and a curmudgeonly Irish rector, all vying for glory -- from the ruins of Persepolis to the opulence of Ottoman-era Baghdad -- in a quest to unearth the relics of lost civilizations and unlock the secrets of humanity's past"--
Subjects: Assyriology; Cuneiform inscriptions.; Cuneiform writing.;

1000 years of joys and sorrows : a memoir / by Ai, Weiwei,author.; Barr, Allan Hepburn,translator.;
"In his widely anticipated memoir, Ai Weiwei--one of the world's most famous artists and activists--tells a century-long epic tale of China through the story of his own extraordinary life and the legacy of his father, Ai Qing, the nation's most celebrated poet. Hailed as "the most important artist working today" by the Financial Times and as "an eloquent and unsilenceable voice of freedom" by The New York Times, Ai Weiwei has written a sweeping memoir that presents a remarkable history of China over the last 100 years while illuminating his artistic process. Once an intimate of Mao Zedong, Ai Weiwei's father was branded a rightist during the Cultural Revolution, and he and his family were banished to a desolate place known as "Little Siberia," where Ai Qing was sentenced to hard labor cleaning public toilets. Ai Weiwei recounts his childhood in exile, and his difficult decision to leave his family to study art in America, where he befriended Allen Ginsberg and was inspired by Andy Warhol. With candor and wit, he details his return to China and his rise from artistic unknown to art world superstar and international human rights activist-and how his work has been shaped by living under a totalitarian regime. Ai Weiwei's sculptures and installations have been viewed by millions around the globe, and his architectural achievements include helping to design the iconic Bird's Nest Olympic Stadium in Beijing. His political activism has long made him a target of the Chinese authorities, which culminated in months of secret detention without charge in 2011. Here, for the first time, Ai Weiwei explores the origins of his exceptional creativity and passionate political beliefs through his own life story and that of his father, whose own creativity was stifled. At once ambitious and intimate, 1000 Years of Joys and Sorrows offers a deep understanding of the myriad forces that have shaped modern China, and serves as a timely reminder of the urgent need to protect freedom of expression"--
Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Ai, Weiwei.; Ai, Weiwei; Artists; Dissenters, Artistic; Expatriate artists;

Plant craft : 30 projects that add natural style to your home / by Atkinson, Caitlin,author.;
Includes bibliographical references and index.Not everyone has a garden--but with only a handful of materials and a little bit of time, everyone can bring the beauty of nature into their home. Plant Craft features projects inspired by the natural world and made out of live plants, cut flowers, foraged branches, and more. You'll learn how to create a colorful floral mural, an elegant table centerpiece, a serene underwater sculpture, a whimsical mobile, and more. The step-by-step instructions are clear, easy to follow, and fully illustrated with color photographs, and the projects vary in difficulty. Given the right care, they all have the potential to grace a home for a long time.
Subjects: Container gardening.; Indoor gardening.; Nature craft.;

Wool sculpting : needle felting for beginners / by Lambert, Louise,author.;
Needle felting is an increasingly popular craft because it can be used to create almost anything! This book has everything you need to know to make your very own three-dimensional needle felted sculptures. After learning about the different types of wools, materials and tools needed, discover how to 'jab' fibres into basic shapes and build your own armatures from wire. Featuring 10 step-by-step projects to get you started, ranging from toadstools and teacups to puffins and mice, learn how to create your very own sculptures.
Subjects: Felt work.;