This handy guide to the secrets of rune-reading, an ancient predictive art, teaches you how to lay out runes and interpret them instantly. Runes (meaning a secret or mystery) were words of power, once carved on amulets, rings, and weapons, and found as inscriptions on tombstones. In this insightful book, each of the runes is fully described, together with the symbolic images and celestial phenomena associated with them. Methods of laying out or casting the runes are described in order to give a full and comprehensive reading to answer any question. There are six spreads to choose from, from Odin's Rune, a simple reading with one rune stone, to using up to nine runes for deeper insight into the past, present and future.

A rural working-class New England town elects as its mayor a New York hedge fund millionaire in this inspired novel for our times--fiction in the tradition of Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan.

A WASHINGTON POST NOTABLE BOOK

Mark Firth is a contractor and home restorer in Howland, Massachusetts, who feels opportunity passing his family by. After being swindled by a financial advisor, what future can Mark promise his wife, Karen, and their young daughter, Haley? He finds himself envying the wealthy weekenders in his community whose houses sit empty all winter.

Philip Hadi used to be one of these people. But in the nervous days after 9/11 he flees New York and hires Mark to turn his Howland home into a year-round secure location from which he can manage billions of dollars of other people's money. The collision of these two men's very different worlds--rural vs. urban, middle class vs. wealthy--is the engine of Jonathan Dee's powerful new novel.

Inspired by Hadi, Mark looks around for a surefire investment: the mid-decade housing boom. Over Karen's objections, and teaming up with his troubled brother, Gerry, Mark starts buying up local property with cheap debt. Then the town's first selectman dies suddenly, and Hadi volunteers for office. He soon begins subtly transforming Howland in his image--with unexpected results for Mark and his extended family.

Here are the dramas of twenty-first-century America--rising inequality, working class decline, a new authoritarianism--played out in the classic setting of some of our greatest novels: the small town. The Locals is that rare work of fiction capable of capturing a fraught American moment in real time.

Praise for The Locals

After 9/11, New York hedge fund billionaire Philip Hadi retreats to his summer home in the Berkshires. In thrall to his new town, he runs for office to keep it sleepy, sweet and free from tax hikes. Is he benevolent, arrogant or both? No one gets off the moral hook in this propulsive, brilliantly observed study.--People (Book of the Week)

Thoughtful . . . Jonathan Dee's] prescient sensitivity has never been more unnerving. . . . Amid the heat of today's vicious political climate, The Locals is a smoke alarm. Listen up.--Ron Charles, The Washington Post

This propulsive and furious book is as fun to read as it is relentless and unsparing. Deranged and faltering America, Jonathan Dee has your number. --Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party

In Jonathan Dee's elegant and explosive new novel, Sugar Street, an unnamed male narrator has hit the road. Rid of any possible identifiers, his possessions amount to $168,548 in cash stashed in an envelope under his car seat. Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he hits a city where his past is unlikely to track him down, and finds a room to rent from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions. He seems to have escaped his former self. But can he?

In a story that moves with swift dark humor and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator's attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence. Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self - simplicity, kindness, above all invisibility - grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbors in their politically divided working-class city. With the suspense of a crime thriller and the grace of our best literary fiction, Dee unspools the details of our unlikely hero's former life and his developing new one in a drumbeat roll up to a shocking final act.

Dee has been compared by the Wall Street Journal to authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan for his expansive, contemporary, social novels; Sugar Street is a leaner, more personal, but still uncannily timely look at the volatile America of today. A risky, engrossing and surprisingly visceral story about a white man trying to escape his own troubling footprint and start his life over.

Though perhaps less well-known here than its Western counterpart, Chinese astrology is every bit as illuminating and provides an equally valuable shortcut to self-knowledge. Jonathan Dee, the well-respected author of several books on astrology, tarot, and fortune-telling, reveals all the mysteries of the art in this informative volume.

Filled with legends, charts, and history, it contains all of the essentials for working out your Chinese horoscope including the animal signs for each birthday year, month, and hour. Each sign receives a richly detailed and enlightening explanation.

Among the amusing and informative tidbits here:

• The rat is considered to be the sign of charm and is noted for its shrewdness, enterprise, and wealth. Rats are also prosperous, entrepreneurial, obsessive, anxious, bossy, and mean.
• The ox is the sign of tenacity and prosperity and a symbol of fertility and muscular strength. People born under the ox are patient, contemplative, eloquent, chauvinistic, petty, and grumpy.
• The monkey is lively, complex, charming, diplomatic, and agile. Monkeys are also dishonest, sarcastic, lacking respect, and restless.

Chinese Astrology, Plain and Simple is an accessible introduction that enlightens, entertains, and informs.

Previously published as Simply Fortune Telling with Playing Cards.

There is a certain romance attached to playing cards: from the riverboat gamblers on the Mississippi to genteel parlor games and the current popular surge in poker tournaments. How many of us while away our bored moments with a game of solitaire?

This user-friendly guide will show you how to turn an ordinary deck of cards into a fun and simple tool for telling the future. Learn the past, present, and future with a regular deck of playing cards--no trivia, no special talents, no psychic ability. If you can read this, you can learn fortune telling with a regular deck of cards.

The author explains the meaning of each of the 52 cards in the deck, plus the Joker, presents several layouts for general readings, and answers specific questions.

Smart and socially gifted, Adam and Cynthia Morey are perfect for each other.
With Adam's rising career in the world of private equity, a beautiful home in
Manhattan, gorgeous children, and plenty of money, they are, by any reasonable
standard, successful. But for the Moreys, their future of boundless privilege is not
arriving fast enough. As Cynthia begins to drift, Adam is confronted with a choice
that will test how much he is willing to risk to ensure his family's happiness and
to recapture the sense that the only acceptable life is one of infinite possibility.
The Privileges is an odyssey of a couple touched by fortune, changed by time, and
guided above all else by their epic love for each other.

BONUS: This edition contains a The Privileges discussion guide.

The face is the first thing we focus on when meeting any new person--we automatically assess a person's mood, feelings, and intentions by what we read on that person's face. We consider some people to have kind eyes or a grumpy look.

This book will introduce you to the ancient Chinese art of face reading so that you can gain insight into the personalities of your loved ones and those you meet. Discover aspects of personality you never knew existed! Chinese face reading demonstrates that faces are open books, and their individual features provide the keys to interpreting their message.

The author explores the significance of:

• Twenty-three basic eye shapes
• Twenty-three eyebrow conformations
• Thirteen ear types
• Thirteen basic nose profiles
• Nine mouth types

Along the way the author discusses the subtle distinctions within the cheekbones, the lips, the forehead, and facial creases.

Gene Trowbridge, a sixty-five-year-old successful advertising executive, fills the days before his retirement assessing his past and considering the future. A deliberate and thoughtful man, Gene lives a solid, peaceful existence with his wife in a genteel Long Island suburb, watching on television the failure of his son Jack's professional baseball career and increasingly aware of his own displacement in a field dominated by the very young. But a chance meeting with Albert Ferdinand, a reclusive neighbor who wins his regard and friendship, upsets the tenuous balance of Gene's world. From the scandal that comes to surround Ferdinand, Gene is brought face to face with the unimaginable depths of cruelty that lie well beyond his complacent suburban community. Spurred on by a persistent journalist and overwhelmed by self-doubt stemming from his instinctive liking and acceptance of a man of potentially indescribable evil, Gene is drawn into a suspenseful search for the truth about Ferdinand's past. In The Liberty Campaign, critically acclaimed author Jonathan Dee has created one of the wisest and most memorable voices in recent fiction. When Gene is ultimately presented with a stark ethical choice and forced to reevaluate his judgment and his principles, Dee captures, with extraordinary precision and power, the vulnerable time in the life of an aging man when he falters, not sure that his own life experience has provided him with the ability to act. The Liberty Campaign is a riveting, multilayered portrait of an ordinary man whose moral universe is tested by a situation that defies the parameters of his decidedly American upbringing and sensibility.

Fortune Telling Using Playing Cards teaches readers how to translate the four suits of the tarot into the more familiar hearts, diamonds, spades, and clubs found in the common playing card deck. Readers will learn the meaning of the cards, their individual symbolism, keywords, astrological associations, and the significance of their numbers. There are even suggestions on how to do a quick reading when you're short on time - so you will always know what's in the cards.

This propulsive and furious book is as fun to read as it is relentless and unsparing. Deranged and faltering America, Jonathan Dee has your number. --Joshua Ferris, author of The Dinner Party

In Jonathan Dee's elegant and explosive new novel, Sugar Street, an unnamed male narrator has hit the road. Rid of any possible identifiers, his possessions amount to $168,548 in cash stashed in an envelope under his car seat. Vigilantly avoiding security cameras, he drives until he hits a city where his past is unlikely to track him down, and finds a room to rent from a less-than-stable landlady whose need for money outweighs her desire to ask questions. He seems to have escaped his former self. But can he?

In a story that moves with swift dark humor and insight, Dee takes us through his narrator's attempt to disavow his former life of privilege and enter a blameless new existence. Having opted out of his material possessions and human connections, the pillars of his new self - simplicity, kindness, above all invisibility - grow shakier as he butts up against the daily lives of his neighbors in their politically divided working-class city. With the suspense of a crime thriller and the grace of our best literary fiction, Dee unspools the details of our unlikely hero's former life and his developing new one in a drumbeat roll up to a shocking final act.

Dee has been compared by the Wall Street Journal to authors such as Jonathan Franzen and Jennifer Egan for his expansive, contemporary, social novels; Sugar Street is a leaner, more personal, but still uncannily timely look at the volatile America of today. A risky, engrossing and surprisingly visceral story about a white man trying to escape his own troubling footprint and start his life over.