Universal Harvester

New York Times Bestseller "A moving, beautifully etched picture of America’s lost and profoundly lonely." —Kazuo Ishiguro, author of The Remains of the Day and winner of the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature “Brilliant . . . Darnielle is a master at building suspense, and his writing is propulsive and urgent; it’s nearly impossible to stop reading . . . [Universal Harvester is] beyond worthwhile; it’s a major work by an author who is quickly becoming one of the brightest stars in American fiction.” —Michael Schaub, Los Angeles Times “Grows in menace as the pages stack up . . . [But] more sensitive than one would expect from a more traditional tale of dread.” —Joe Hill, New York Times Book Review Life in a small town takes a dark turn when mysterious footage begins appearing on VHS cassettes at the local Video Hut. So begins Universal Harvester, the haunting and masterfully unsettling new novel from John Darnielle, author of the New York Times Bestseller and National Book Award Nominee Wolf in White Van Jeremy works at the Video Hut in Nevada, Iowa. It’s a small town in the center of the state—the first a in Nevada pronounced ay. This is the late 1990s, and even if the Hollywood Video in Ames poses an existential threat to Video Hut, there are still regular customers, a rush in the late afternoon. It’s good enough for Jeremy: it’s a job, quiet and predictable, and it gets him out of the house, where he lives with his dad and where they both try to avoid missing Mom, who died six years ago in a car wreck. But when a local schoolteacher comes in to return her copy of Targets—an old movie, starring Boris Karloff, one Jeremy himself had ordered for the store—she has an odd complaint: “There’s something on it,” she says, but doesn’t elaborate. Two days later, a different customer returns a different tape, a new release, and says it’s not defective, exactly, but altered: “There’s another movie on this tape.” Jeremy doesn’t want to be curious, but he brings the movies home to take a look. And, indeed, in the middle of each movie, the screen blinks dark for a moment and the movie is replaced by a few minutes of jagged, poorly lit home video. The scenes are odd and sometimes violent, dark, and deeply disquieting. There are no identifiable faces, no dialogue or explanation—the first video has just the faint sound of someone breathing— but there are some recognizable landmarks. These have been shot just outside of town. In Universal Harvester, the once placid Iowa fields and farmhouses now sinister and imbued with loss and instability and profound foreboding. The novel will take Jeremy and those around him deeper into this landscape than they have ever expected to go. They will become part of a story that unfolds years into the past and years into the future, part of an impossible search for something someone once lost that they would do anything to regain. “This chilling literary thriller follows a video store clerk as he deciphers a macabre mystery through clues scattered among the tapes his customers rent. A page-tuning homage to In Cold Blood and The Ring.” —O: The Oprah Magazine “[Universal Harvester is] so wonderfully strange, almost Lynchian in its juxtaposition of the banal and the creepy, that my urge to know what the hell was going on caused me to go full throttle . . . [But] Darnielle hides so much beautiful commentary in the book’s quieter moments that you would be remiss not to slow down.” —Abram Scharf, MTV News “Universal Harvester is a novel about noticing hidden things, particularly the hurt and desperation that people bear under their exterior of polite reserve . . . Mr. Darnielle possesses the clairvoyant’s gift for looking beneath the surface.” —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal “[Universal Harvester is] constantly unnerving, wrapped in a depressed dread that haunts every passage. But it all pays off with surprising emotionality.” —Kevin Nguyen, GQ.com

"The second novel from the author of Wolf in White Van, inspired by his years living in a small town in Iowa"--

This highly topical technothriller blends mystery and suspense with gritty action in sharply researched Mediterranean settings. Technology, cyberwarfare and nautical content blend in the context of international politics and Chinese expansionism. Steve Baldwin has sailed to Crete in his search for a quiet life. The Royal Marines had been his family, but now he is alone – until he meets Helena. Is she really just a waitress? He is dragged into the pursuit of a psychopathic female assassin with whom he shares some painful, bloody history. Can he ever escape these two clever, dangerous and demanding women – one of whom he is ordered to kill? Islamist terrorism is spreading across the Sicilian Channel from the Maghreb into the soft underbelly of Europe – and Malta, with its Crusader history, is a key target. Abu ben-Zhair, the terrorist master planner, is upping the stakes. The chase – and the women – are more complex than Baldwin could ever have imagined.

Jesus Becoming Jesus, Volume 2: A Theological Interpretation of the Gospel of John: Prologue and the Book of Signs follows upon the first volume of this series entitled Jesus Becoming Jesus. The first volume was a theological interpretation of the Gospels of Matthew, Mark and Luke. Unlike many conventional biblical commentaries, Weinandy concentrates on the theological content contained within John’s Gospel. He does this in the light of the Church’s doctrinal and theological tradition, particularly in keeping with the Second Vatican Council’s Dogmatic Constitution, Dei Verbum. This is accomplished through a close reading of John’s Gospel, theologically interpreting each chapter of the Gospel sequentially. In so doing he also takes into account the Johannine corpus as a whole. He also relates John’s Gospel to relevant material found within the Synoptic Gospels, the Pauline Corpus and other New Testament writings. This original theological interpretation focuses primarily on the intertwining theological themes contained within John’s Gospel, specifically within the Prologue and the Book of Signs – light and darkness, the seven miracle-signs, the sacraments of baptism and the Eucharist, the seven “I Am” sayings, the contentious dialogues with the Jews, Jesus’ relationship to his Father as the Father’s incarnate Word and Son, etc. Within all of these interlocking themes one finds the importance of Jesus’ saving actions – the salvific works of his Father. The overarching theme of this book, as the title suggests, is that Jesus, being named Jesus, throughout his public ministry is enacting his name and so becoming who he is – YHWH-Saves. Weinandy offers a singular, vibrant, and luminous reading of John’s Gospel; one that reveals the Evangelist’s theological depth and doctrinal sophistication. In so doing, Weinandy makes manifest the particular beauty of the Gospel According to John.

An up-to-the-minute (and beyond) thriller setting a ruthless psychopathic Serbian female terrorist against an ex-Royal Marine and an Australian gold mining oligarch. Set in the context of the politically volatile Red Sea region and reflecting the revolutionary changes sweeping the region, political expediency with high level betrayal in Government and the Intelligence Services culminates in naval and aerial confrontation between NATO and Israel on one side, and China and the Yemen on the other. The emergence of China as a financial, industrial and military superpower is a key theme, with gritty and realistic action from Alaska to Australia, Britain to Djibouti.

Featuring more than 950 photographs and drawings—including 500 in full color—this text offers step-by-step instructions on techniques for performing common and complex sports medicine procedures in the upper and lower extremities. Noted experts who have developed or perfected these techniques guide the reader in stepwise detail through each procedure. Where appropriate, the book covers both open and arthroscopic techniques for each injury or problem. Coverage includes the most current and cutting-edge techniques as well as traditional tried and true procedures in operative sports medicine.

Enabling the Business of Agriculture 2016 provides a tool for policy makers to identify and analyze legal barriers for the business of agriculture and to quantify transaction costs of dealing with government regulations. Building on an earlier progress report published in November 2014, this volume presents the main results for 40 countries, for the first time using indicator scores to showcase good practices among countries in different stages of agricultural development. It also presents interesting results on the relationship between efficiency and quality of regulations, discriminatory practices in the laws, and whether regulatory information is accessible. Regional, income-group, and country-specific trends and data observations are presented on six topics: seed, fertilizer, machinery, finance, markets, and transport. The report also discusses the continued development of several topics that will be added in future reports: information and communication technology, land, water, livestock, gender, and environmental sustainability.