Book Outlet

Percy Jackson & the Olympians: Book 5: The Last Olympian All year the half-bloods have been preparing for battle against the Titans, knowing the odds of victory are grim. Kronos's army is stronger than ever, and with every god and half-blood he recruits, the evil Titan's power only grows. While the Olympians struggle to contain the rampaging monster Typhon, Kronos begins his advance on New York City, where Mount Olympus stands virtually unguarded. Now it's up to Percy Jackson and an army of young demigods to stop the Lord of Time. In this momentous final book in the New York Times best-selling Percy Jackson and the Olympians series, the long-awaited prophecy surrounding Percy's sixteenth birthday unfolds. And as the battle for Western civilization rages on the streets of Manhattan, Percy faces a terrifying suspicion that he may be fighting against his own fate. Price: $10.79

Dungeons & Dragons: Player's Handbook 2 by Jeremy Crawford is a book builds on the array of classes and races presented in the first Player's Handbook(R), adding both old favorites and new, never-before-seen options to the game. The book adds a new power source for 4th Edition Dungeons & Dragons; classes using the new primal power source include the barbarian and the druid. Player's Handbook 2 expands the range of options available to Dungeons & Dragons players with new classes, races, powers, and other material. Price: $ See offer at:

Joker One: A Marine Platoon's Story of Courage, Leadership, and Brotherhood Campbell decided as a junior at Princeton that attending Marine Corps Officer Candidate School would look good on his résumé. Three years later, in the spring of 2004, he was in Iraq commanding a platoon known by its radio call sign, Joker One. Campbell tells its story, and his, in an outstanding narrative of the Iraq War. Joker One counted around 40 dudes: country boys and smalltown jocks; a few Hispanics and a single black. Some were college men with futures; some had pasts they preferred to forget. The battalion was assigned to one of Iraq's worst hot spots: the city of Ramadi, where faceless enemies found shelter among 350,000 Iraqi civilians. Joker One fought from street to street, house to house and ambush to ambush for seven straight months. By the end of the tour, even the Gunny's hands had started ceaselessly shaking, Campbell writes. Faced with urgent life-and-death decisions, Campbell had

The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon John Grisham's Reviews In April of 1925, a legendary British explorer named Percy Fawcett launched his final expedition into the depths of the Amazon in Brazil. His destination was the lost city of El Dorado, the “City of Gold,” an ancient kingdom of great sophistication, architecture, and culture that, for some reason, had vanished. The idea of El Dorado had captivated anthropologists, adventurers, and scientists for 400 years, though there was no evidence it ever existed. Hundreds of expeditions had gone looking for it. Thousands of men had perished in the jungles searching for it. Fawcett himself had barely survived several previous expeditions and was more determined than ever to find the lost city with its streets and temples of gold. The world was watching. Fawcett, the last of the great Victorian adventurers, was financed by the Royal Geographical Society in London, the world’s foremost repository of research gathe

Who says great characters need to be larger than life? Meet Toby Lolness, a boy who stands one and a half millimeters tall (just smaller than the tip of a pencil). This Lilliputian hero lives in a marvelously vast complex of trunks and branches known as the Tree, an enormous oak inhabited by a tiny civilization. Toby's idyllic childhood is threatened when his scientist father figures out what keeps the Tree alive, and what will eventually cause its death: a seemingly endless supply of sap that people hope to tap and convert into a source of energy. In this thrilling eco-allegory, young Toby is in the race of his life to rescue himself, his family and the Tree from imminent destruction by powerful corporate interests that threaten them all. Timothée de Fombelle's Toby Alone takes readers on a fast-paced adventure of unusual proportions and unexpected perspectives. Now translated into nearly two dozen languages, this cleverly illustrated debut is sure to win the hearts of English

While this latest memoir from Susan Jane Gilman (former Hypocrite in a Pouffy White Dress) appears to be a saucy account of international sexcapades, it quickly reveals its whip-smarts, sucking you into a story that brilliantly captures the "ecstatic terror" of gleefully leaping from your comfort zone--and finding yourself in freefall. It's 1986, and newly minted ivy league grads Susy and her friend Claire have never left the U.S. when (inspired by a "Pancakes of Many Nations" promotion during a drunken night at IHOP) they hatch a plan to circle the world, starting in China, which has just opened to tourists. From the moment of arrival, they're out of their depth, perpetually hungry, foolish, and paranoid from relentless observation. Claire, who carries the complete works of Nietzsche "like a Gideon Bible," seems more capable than Susy until encounters with military police, hallucinatory fevers, and a frantic escape from a squalid hospital expose c

While images of athletic and Hollywood celebrity decorated the rooms of his classmates, the walls of Said Sayrafiezadeh's youth were adorned with fierce glares from heavily-bearded revolutionaries. As the son of an Iranian father and Jewish-American mother--two souls united by a commitment to an impending socialist revolution--young Said spent his childhood working to make the comrades proud. He hawked the movement's rag, embraced a moniker of "the little revolutionary," and even embarked on a confusing trip to Cuba to spark his political awareness. Despite the seriousness of his cause, When Skateboards Will Be Free describes a politically-charged childhood with an innocence that forces smiles in unexpected places and reveals the heartache of a home soaked in idealism. The arrival of a socialist state not only promised to bring skateboards in bubblegum-bright colors to the masses; it also pledged to repair the rifts within Sayrafiezadeh's own home. - Dave Callanan

Mary Gaitskill has a reputation as the chronicler of bad relationships, but that label doesn't do justice to the stories she tells. Her relationships turn bad, or turn good, or just turn (and turn and turn). In every exploitation there's an attraction, or at least an accommodation; in every hostility there's a yearning for, or at least a memory of, connection. You see the intensity of people--friends and family as well as lovers--drawn together, and the often equally intense emptiness when the magnet flips and repels. Gaitskill is one of our best short story writers (that's a label that's fully just) and the prickly, sad brilliance of her last book, Veronica, confirmed her as a master of the novel, too. Don't Cry is just her third story collection in 20 years, after the modern classics Bad Behavior and Because They Wanted To, and it reminds you immediately of why you've been longing to read her again. Once more, there are former lovers and ex-friends and par

Review John Burnside delivers a cautionary tale illustrating that greed and an indifference to suffering are the real horrors of modern life... [B]leakly beautiful.... Burnside expertly details an apocalyptic landscape where the expectation of failure is rampant....Burnside's flawless prose explores how defeat is only a state of mind. --Publishers Weekly Nobody does eerie quite like John Burnside. His exquisite and haunting new novel Glister...has an insistent force, overturning the reader s expectations and building to a truly shocking climax....I doubt I will read a more unsettling and memorable book this year. --Scotsman The Glister is wickedly good. Burnside writes with a dark and beautiful splendor, navigating the space between despair and redemption in a simply brilliant story that will linger long after the last, haunting images. Price: $13.77 Tag: The Glister, Novel, John Burnside

John Wray's newest novel, Lowboy, captivating third novel drifts between psychological realities while exploring the narrative poetics of schizophrenia. The story centers on Will Heller, a 16-year-old New Yorker who has stopped taking his antipsychotic medication and wandered away from the mental hospital into the subway tunnels believing that the world will end within a few hours and that only he can save it. Lowboy is a novel that defies easy categorization, although in one sense it's a mystery, as a detective, Lateef, is on the case, assisted by Will's troubled mother, Violet. As Lateef tracks Will and gains some startling insight into Violet, Wray deploys brilliant hallucinatory visuals, including chilling descriptions of the subway system and an imaginary river flowing beneath Manhattan. In his previous works, Wray has shown that he's not a stranger to dark themes, and with this tightly wound novel, he reaches new heights. Price: $15.00 or see the offer at: