Free-floating planets — dark, isolated orbs roaming the universe unfettered to any host star — don’t just pop into existence in the middle of cosmic nowhere. They probably form the same way other planets do: within the swirling disk of gas and dust surrounding an infant star.
But unlike their planetary siblings, these worlds get violently chucked out of their celestial neighborhoods.
Astronomers had once calculated that billions of planets had gone rogue in the Milky Way. Now, scientists at NASA and Osaka University in Japan are upping the estimate to trillions.
“The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store” is a charming, smart, heart-blistering and heart-healing novel. Great love bursts through these pages via the friends and families that mobilize to protect Dodo, a child endangered by the structures he was born into and injured by. With this story, McBride brilliantly captures a rapidly changing country, as seen through the eyes of the recently arrived and the formerly enslaved people of Chicken Hill. He has reached back into our shared past when, by migration and violence, segregation and collision, America was still becoming America. And through this evocation, McBride offers us a thorough reminder: Against seemingly impossible odds, even in the midst of humanity’s most wicked designs, love, community and action can save us.
In this potpourri of a book on the Paris Métro, British author Andrew Martin is not so much writing an ode to the Métropolitain as providing rail fanatics with a literary handbook. You don’t need to be familiar with “third-rail electrification” and “the MP73s, third-generation tyred trains” to enjoy the eclectic information and funny anecdotes of this charming book – but it would sometimes help. Perhaps better assembled as a dictionary of the Métro, in the style of the Dictionnaire amoureux series published since 2000 in France by Plon, Martin’s short book will nonetheless give Paris and Métro lovers what they are looking for: the infectious enthusiasm of a passionate fan with a clear eye for details.