Clearance Books
Written in Red
You Bet Your Life: Your Guide to Deadly Risk
Each time you lay your head on the pillow at night or set your feet on the floor come morning, you bet your life. Exactly what odds do you face 24/7?
You Bet Your Life applies to you, the individual, the analytical approach insurance companies use to calculate risk: actuarial science. The result is a comprehensive, encyclopedic, real world assessment of more than 1,000 of the risks we take every day of our all-too-finite lives, from boarding an airplane to tempting a shark attack by dipping a toe in the ocean.
You Bet Your Life is introduced by an authoritative essay explaining how professional actuaries calculate risk and how less objective entities--in government, finance, science, technology, and religion--apply their own competing calculi of risk and reward.
Under Twin Suns
by Carol Gyzander '78
In this anthology of weird fiction, twenty-two authors share their harrowing visions of worlds shaped by the Yellow Sign, in stories and poems inspired by Robert W. Chambers's foundational works of weird horror. From the personal to the historic, from the macabre to the fantastic, the stories and poems gathered here illuminate new, unexpected realities shaped by the King in Yellow, under the sway of the Yellow Sign, or in the grip of madnesses inspired by their power.
Authors included: Marc Abbott - Linda D. Addison - Meghan Arcuri - Greg Chapman - JG Faherty - Trevor Firetog - Patrick Freivald - Carol Gyzander - Todd Keisling - John Langan - Curtis Lawson - Adrian Ludens - Lisa Morton - Joseph S. Pulver, Sr. - Sarah Read - Kathleen Scheiner - Ann K. Schwader - Darrell Schweitzer - J. Daniel Stone - Steven Van Patten - Tim Waggoner - Kaaron Warren
Robert W. Chambers's classic work of weird fiction, The King in Yellow (1895), contained two stories that have exercised wide influence in the genre. "The Repairer of Reputations" introduced the world to The King in Yellow, a play in two acts, banned for its reputed power to drive mad anyone who reads its complete text. Another story, "The Yellow Sign," used the experiences of an artist and his model to elaborate on the mythos of the Yellow King, the Yellow Sign, and their danger to all who encounter them. In those tales Chambers crafted fascinating glimpses of a cosmos populated by conspiracies, government-sanctioned suicide chambers, haunted artists, premonitions of death, unreliable narrators-and dark, enigmatic occurrences tainted by the alien world of Carcosa, where the King rules in his tattered yellow mantle. In Carcosa, black stars rise and Cassilda and Camilla speak and sing. In Carcosa, eyes peer from within pallid masks to gaze across Lake Hali at the setting of twin suns.
Adaptations
by Emily Pinkerton BMC '07