Search results for ""bellevue literary press""

"Intense and bravely uncompromising. An adult study of pain, thwarted affection, and guarded privacies in a world at the edge of violent public breakdown. An impressive achievement." --DAVID MALOUF, author of Ransom: A Novel and The Happy Life: The Search for Contentment in the Modern World Simone and Claude live in a house with a lush garden, surrounded by a hedge that barely protects them from the growing violence and unrest in their low-income neighborhood. Simone mourns the loss of youth and possibility as Claude, a gym teacher who has been diagnosed with cancer, edges toward death. This is an unflinching portrait of a couple ravaged by illness and locked into mutual isolation--that is, until the arrival of a young boy brings hope and upsets their delicate danse macabre to devastating effect. Pascale Kramer dissects romantic love's psychic carnage while unsentimentally revealing the unique beauty born of an adult's love for a child. As does Marguerite Duras, she wields spare language like a club and plumbs emotional depths rarely reached outside of poetry. A brilliant collision of hope and despair, The Child is a tour de force. Pascale Kramer, recipient of the 2017 Swiss Grand Prize for Literature, is the author of fourteen books, including three novels published in English: The Living, The Child, and Autopsy of a Father. Born in Geneva, she has worked in Los Angeles, and now lives in Paris, where she directs a documentary film festival about children's rights.

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"Once again, Gerald Weissmann, with a firm and easy knowledge of everyone who matters from Auden to Zola, bridges the space between science and the humanities, and particularly between medicine and the muses, with wit, erudition, and, most important, wisdom." --Adam Gopnik, author of Angels and Ages Admired by Nobel prize--winning scientists and literary tastemakers alike, Weissmann will continue to amaze and beguile new and faithful readers as both a masterful commentator on contemporary culture and a transcendent intellectual historian. By turns satirical and insightful, Mortal and Immortal DNA takes us on a nuanced exploration of the western canon, from Greek mythology through Dante to W.H. Auden and offers hilarious insights into popular culture along the way, from Paris Hilton to the true life story of Kathryn Lee Bates, the lesbian poet who penned "America the Beautiful." Gerald Weissmann is a physician, scientist, editor, and essayist whose collections include Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter: Pop Culture and Modern Science; Mortal and Immortal DNA: Science and the Lure of Myth; and Galileo's Gout: Science in an Age of Endarkenment. He is professor emeritus and research professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine. His essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications worldwide, including the London Review of Books and New York Times Book Review. The former editor-in-chief of the FASEB Journal, he is now its book reviews editor. He lives in Manhattan and Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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"[Dr. Reicher] lived through the Second World War in Poland, dodging bullets, uprisings and deportations--not to mention betrayal, starvation and airless hideouts--in a manner more reminiscent of a talented outlaw than a mild-mannered dermatologist ...It is the impressive simplicity of the good doctor's writing that makes [t]his book resemble [Victor] Klemperer's, and the detailed observations of its report that makes it emotionally memorable...William Carlos Williams once said that people who prize information are perishing daily for want of the information that can be found only in poetry. By the same token, there will never be a time when we will not need the information that an important, evocative book like Country of Ash provides." --VIVIAN GORNICK, Moment magazine Country of Ash is the starkly compelling, original chronicle of a Jewish doctor who miraculously survived near-certain death, first inside the Lodz and Warsaw ghettoes, where he was forced to treat the Gestapo, then on the Aryan side of Warsaw, where he hid under numerous disguises. He clandestinely recorded the terrible events he witnessed, but his manuscript disappeared during the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising. After the war, reunited with his wife and young daughter, he rewrote his story. Peopled with historical figures like the controversial Chaim Rumkowski, who fancied himself a king of the Jews, to infamous Nazi commanders and dozens of Jews and non-Jews who played cat and mouse with death throughout the war, Reicher's memoir is about a community faced with extinction and the chance decisions and strokes of luck that kept a few stunned souls alive. Edward Reicher (1900--1975) was born in Lodz, Poland. He graduated with a degree in medicine from the University of Warsaw, later studied dermatology in Paris and Vienna, and practiced in Lodz as a dermatologist and venereal disease specialist both before and after World War II. A Jewish survivor of Nazi-occupied Poland, Reicher appeared at a tribunal in Salzburg to identify Hermann Hofle and give an eyewitness account of Hofle's role in Operation Reinhard, which sent hundreds of thousands to their deaths in the Nazi concentration camps of Poland. Country of Ash, first published posthumously in France, was translated from the French by Magda Bogin and includes a foreword by Edward Reicher's daughter Elisabeth Bizouard-Reicher.

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"An old-fashioned novel, in the best sense of that phrase, elegantly wrought, hardheaded, and tenderhearted."-Michael Chabon on A Company of Three "A first novel that soars."-The New York Times on Like China As America emerges from the Depression, the Hatherfords build a comfortable life just outside of New York City, in rural Bergen County, New Jersey. They are a glamorous couple: Vern is the charismatic owner of a successful Ford dealership, and his flamboyant wife Maeve is beautiful even in middle age. When their three-year-old son Scott falls prey to polio, and later, another son must go to war, their marriage slowly implodes. In the midst of it all, twelve-year-old Patsy steals swallows of whiskey and tries to make sense of the world around her, which includes an unusual intimacy between her brother Scott, and Julian, a young African American boy who lives among them. Neither historical nor medical fiction, The Cure offers the pleasures of both in its richly complex portrayal of the lives and times of its characters. A beautifully written family saga about race, war, childhood illness, and romantic desire, The Cure has at its heart wounding and the struggle for hope. Varley O'Connor is the author of A Company of Three (Algonquin, 2003) and Like China (Morrow, 1991). She has taught writing at Hofstra University; Brooklyn College; University of California, Irvine; and the Squaw Valley Community of Writers. She has been an actress for television, theater, and film and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

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Los Angeles Times Bestseller “Mary Cappello[’s] inventive, associative taxonomy of discomfort . . . [is] revelatory indeed.” —MARK DOTY, author of Dog Years: A Memoir and Fire to Fire: New and Selected Poems “A wonderful, multi-layered piece of writing, with all the insight of great cultural criticism and all the emotional pull of memoir. A fascinating book.” —SARAH WATERS, author of The Night Watch and The Little Stranger Without awkwardness we would not know grace, stability, or balance. Yet no one before Mary Cappello has turned such a penetrating gaze on this misunderstood condition. Fearlessly exploring the ambiguous borders of identity, she mines her own life journeys—from Russia, to Italy, to the far corners of her heart and the depths of a literary or cinematic text—to decipher the powerful messages that awkwardness can transmit. Mary Cappello is the author of four books of literary nonfiction, including Awkward: A Detour, which was a Los Angeles Times bestseller, Called Back: My Reply to Cancer, My Return to Life, which won a ForeWord Reviews Book of the Year Award and an Independent Publishers Prize, and Swallow: Foreign Bodies, Their Ingestion, Inspiration, and the Curious Doctor Who Extracted Them. Professor of English at the University of Rhode Island, she lives in Providence, Rhode Island and Lucerne-in-Maine, Maine.

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"Jerome Charyn is one of the most important writers in American literature." —Michael Chabon"Whatever milieu [Charyn] chooses to inhabit . . . his sentences are pure vernacular music, his voice unmistakable." —Jonathan Lethem"With his customary linguistic verve and pulsing imagination, Charyn serves up here some of the tastiest essay writing available. He knows and loves New York past and present, and he draws on a lifetime of raucous experience and dedicated reading for a rich, heady, satisfying brew." —Phillip LopateIn the New York Review of Books, Joyce Carol Oates expressed her admiration for an equally prolific contemporary: "Among Charyn's writerly gifts is a dazzling energy. . . . [He is] an exuberant chronicler of the mythos of American life"; the Los Angeles Times described him as "absolutely unique among American writers." In these ten essays, Charyn shares personal stories about places steeped in history and myth, including his beloved New York, and larger-than-life personalities from the Bible and from the worlds of film, literature, politics, sports, and the author's own family. Together, writes Charyn, these essays create "my own lyrical autobiography. Several of the selections are about other writers, some celebrated, some forgotten. . . . All of [whom] scalped me in some way, left their mark."Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction. Among other honors, Charyn has been named a Commander of Arts and Letters by the French Minister of Culture and received the Rosenthal Family Foundation Award for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

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"A fascinating, well-documented biography." --New York Times Book Review "A monumental effort." --New York Review of Books "An excellent piece of science writing...Cassidy does not so much exculpate Heisenberg as explain him, with a transparency that makes this biography a pleasure to read." --Los Angeles Times "Cassidy has written the definitive biography of a great and tragic physicist." --Richard Rhodes, author of the Pulitzer Prize--winning The Making of the Atomic Bomb Since the fall of the Soviet Union, long-suppressed information has emerged on Werner Heisenberg's role in the Nazi atomic bomb project. In Beyond Uncertainty, Cassidy interprets this and other previously unknown material within the context of his vast research and tackles the vexing questions of a scientist's personal responsibility and guilt when serving an abhorrent military regime. David C. Cassidy is the author of Beyond Uncertainty: Heisenberg, Quantum Physics, and the Bomb; A Short History of Physics in the American Century; J. Robert Oppenheimer and the American Century; and Einstein and Our World. He is the recipient of the Abraham Pais Prize for History of Physics from the American Physical Society, the Science Writing Award from the American Institute of Physics, the Pfizer Award from the History of Science Society, and an honorary doctorate from Purdue University. Dr. Cassidy is Professor of Natural Sciences at Hofstra University and resides in Bay Shore, New York.

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Ralph Waldo Emerson battles dementia while debating whether to intercede in a Black soldier’s unjust arrestIn 1879, toward the end of his life, the Sage of Concord has lost his words. Beset by aphasia and grief, Ralph Waldo Emerson is scarcely recognizable as America’s foremost essayist and orator. To the dismay of his wife, he frequently entertains the specters of his fellow transcendentalists, including Whitman, Thoreau, John Muir, and Margaret Fuller, and frets about the future of humankind and the natural world. Does the present displace the past? Do ideas always precede actions? What responsibility does each of us bear for the downtrodden, the preservation of liberty, and the Earth itself? These metaphysical concerns become concrete when Emerson meets a Black soldier accused of killing a white man who abused him. The soldier’s presence demands a response from Emerson, an action outside the parlors of philosophy and beyond the realm where language and logic hold sway.The Ice Harp, the tenth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, is a poignant portrayal of a literary luminary coming to terms with the loss of memory, the cost of inaction, and the end of life.

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NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLISTThe first English-language story collection from “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” (Guardian), “a playful, whip-smart literary conjuror: a Kundera or Rushdie of post-Khomeini Iran” (Wall Street Journal)In Seasons of Purgatory, the fantastical and the visceral merge in tales of tender desire and collective violence, the boredom and brutality of war, and the clash of modern urban life and rural traditions. Mandanipour, banned from publication in his native Iran, vividly renders the individual consciousness in extremis from a variety of perspectives: young and old, man and woman, conscript and prisoner. While delivering a ferocious social critique, these stories are steeped in the poetry and stark beauty of an ancient land and culture.

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“A fascinating, totally seductive read!” —Eula Biss, author of Notes from No Man’s Land: American Essays and On Immunity: An Inoculation“A book built of brain and nerve and blood and heart. . . . Irreverent and astute. . . . Pain Studies will change how you think about living with a body.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Thunderstruck and Bowlaway“A thrilling investigation into pain, language, and Olstein’s own exile from what Woolf called ‘the army of the upright.’ On a search path through art, science, poetry, and prime-time television, Olstein aims her knife-bright compassion at the very thing we’re all running from. Pain Studies is a masterpiece.” —Leni Zumas, author of The Listeners and Red ClocksIn this extended lyric essay, a poet mines her lifelong experience with migraine to deliver a marvelously idiosyncratic cultural history of pain—how we experience, express, treat, and mistreat it. Her sources range from the trial of Joan of Arc to the essays of Virginia Woolf and Elaine Scarry to Hugh Laurie’s portrayal of Gregory House on House M.D. As she engages with science, philosophy, visual art, rock lyrics, and field notes from her own medical adventures (both mainstream and alternative), she finds a way to express the often-indescribable experience of living with pain. Eschewing simple epiphanies, Olstein instead gives us a new language to contemplate and empathize with a fundamental aspect of the human condition.Lisa Olstein teaches at the University of Texas at Austin and is the author of four poetry collections published by Copper Canyon Press. Pain Studies is her first book of creative nonfiction.

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“A singular novel.” —Lydia Davis, author of Can’t and Won’t and Essays One“An exhilarating adventure!” —Alberto Manguel, author of The Library at Night and Fabulous Monsters“Extraordinary. . . . Brings to mind the great mushroom scenes of the film Phantom Thread. How not to be aroused by this whopping treat of verbal virtuosity?” —Mary Ann Caws, author of The Modern Art CookbookAseroë, the mushroom, as object of fascination. First observed in Tasmania and South Africa, it appeared suddenly in France around 1920. It is characterized by its stench and, at maturity, its grotesque beauty.Aseroë, the word, as incantation. Can a word create a world? It does, here. François Dominique is a conjurer, who through verbal sorcery unleashes the full force of language, while evoking the essential rupture between the word and the object. An impossible endeavor, perhaps, but one at the very heart of literature.The narrator of Aseroë wanders medieval streets and dense forests, portrait galleries, and rare bookshops. As he explores the frontiers of language, the boundaries of science, art, and alchemy melt away, and the mundane is overtaken by the bizarre. Inhabited by creatures born in darkness, both terrible and alluring, Aseroë is ultimately a meditation on memory and forgetting, creation, and oblivion.François Dominique is an acclaimed novelist, essayist, poet, and translator. He has received the Burgundy Prize for Literature and is the author of eight novels, including Aseroë and Solène, winner of the Wepler Award and Prix littéraire Charles Brisset. He has translated the poetry of Louis Zukofsky and Rainer Maria Rilke and is the cofounder of the publishing house Ulysses-Fin-de-Siècle.

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A novel based on the darkest chapter in the life of genius Alan Turing.In Murmur, a hallucinatory masterwork, Will Eaves invites us into the brilliant mind of Alec Pryor, a character inspired by Alan Turing. Turing, father of artificial intelligence and pioneer of radical new techniques to break the Nazi Enigma cipher during World War II, was later persecuted by the British state for 'gross indecency with another male' and forced to undergo chemical castration. Set during the devastating period before Turing’s suicide, Murmur evokes an extraordinary life, the beauty and sorrows of love, and the nature of consciousness.'...as bracingly intelligent as it is brave...[Eaves] knows that Turing's theories of consciousness have implications for fiction, and that fiction can operate at the frontiers of what we know about the workings of our minds.' — Guardian'Murmur is a fully achieved literary experiment, digging deep into all the dimensions of human consciousness.' — Goldsmiths Prize Judge's citation'[Murmur] is masterful — compassionate, principled, and moving. It is deeply wise, with the aching loneliness of both human indignity and dignity, despair and courage.' — Anne Michaels, author of Fugitive Pieces and All We Saw'A really extraordinary book, unlike any other.' — Max Porter, author of Grief Is the Thing with Feathers

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A young woman joins Susan B. Anthony, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, and Barnum’s circus to rescue her infant from the KKKIn the seventh stand-alone book of The American Novels series, Ellen Finch, former stenographer to Henry James, recalls her time as an assistant to Susan B. Anthony and Elizabeth Cady Stanton, heroes of America’s woman suffrage movement, and her friendship with the diminutive Margaret, one of P. T. Barnum’s circus “eccentrics.” When her infant son is kidnapped by the Klan, Ellen, Margaret, and the two formidable suffragists travel aboard Barnum’s train from New York to Memphis to rescue the baby from certain death at the fiery cross.A savage yet farcical tale, American Follies explores the roots of the women’s rights movement, its relationship to the fight for racial justice, and its reverberations in the politics of today.

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“Oliver Sacks, Richard Selzer, Lewis Thomas . . . Weissmann is in this noble tradition.” —Los Angeles Times “[Weissmann] is a man of wide culture, a captivating and graceful writer.” —New Yorker “[Weissmann] bridges the space between science and the humanities, and particularly between medicine and the muses, with wit, erudition, and, most important, wisdom.” —Adam Gopnik “An absolutely first-rate writer.” —Kurt Vonnegut “Dr. Weissmann’s juggling with the balls of global politics, biology, medicine, and culture in the framework of history is breathtaking.” —Bengt Samuelsson, Nobel Laureate and former chairman of the Nobel Foundation In this diverting collection of essays, Gerald Weissmann looks back at the past few decades of his long career working at the intersection of the arts and sciences. The Fevers of Reason features some of his best and most representative works, alongside ten new essays that have never before been published in book form. Masterfully drawing from an array of subject areas and time periods, he tackles everything from Ebola to Eisenhower, Zika to Zola, Darwin to Dawkins, and once again shows that he is one of the most important voices in humanistic science writing today. Gerald Weissmann is a physician, scientist, editor, and essayist whose collections include Epigenetics in the Age of Twitter, Mortal and Immortal DNA, and Galileo’s Gout. He is professor emeritus and research professor of medicine at New York University School of Medicine, and his essays and reviews have appeared in numerous publications worldwide. He lives in Manhattan and Woods Hole, Massachusetts.

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"Lopez has the ability to give the reader whiplash with his unconventional and bewitching stories." --Los Angeles Times "Robert Lopez is the master of deadpan dread, of the elliptical koan, of the sudden turn of language that reveals life to be so wonderfully absurd. Always with Lopez, the voice is all his--enchanting, surprising, at times devastating." --JESS WALTER, author of Beautiful Ruins "Robert Lopez's strange, incantatory, visionary stories reveal the mysteries behind the ordinary world. You lift your head from this book and it's as if a third eye has been opened." --DAN CHAON, author of Await Your Reply and Stay Awake "Nothing is funnier than unhappiness," claims Samuel Beckett. To this, we add: nothing is funnier than unhappiness with a heavy dose of amorality, as we learn from Robert Lopez's unforgettable Good People. In these twenty stories, a motley cast of obsessive, self-deluded outsiders narrate their darker moments, which include kidnapping, voyeurism, and psychic masochism. As their struggles give way to the black humor of life's unreason, the bleak merges with the oddly poetic, in a style as lean and resolute as Carver or Hemingway. Treading the fine line between confession and self-justification, the absurd violence of threatened masculinity, and the perverse joy of neurosis, Lopez's stories reveal the compulsive suffering at the precarious core of our universal humanity. Robert Lopez is the author of two novels, Part of the World and Kamby Bolongo Mean River, and the story collection Asunder. He lives in Brooklyn.

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Best Translated Book Award Longlist Reader’s Digest Great New Book World Literature Today Holiday Gift Guide Recommendation “Offer[s] surprise and revelation at every turn.” —Reader’s Digest “Eduardo Halfon is a brilliant storyteller.” —DANIEL ALARCÓN, author of At Night We Walk in Circles In Monastery, the nomadic narrator of Eduardo Halfon’s critically-acclaimed The Polish Boxer returns to travel from Guatemalan cities, villages, coffee plantations, and border towns to a private jazz concert in New York’s Harlem, a former German U-Boat base on the French Breton coast, and Israel, where he escapes from his sister’s Orthodox Jewish wedding into an erotic adventure with the enigmatic Tamara. His passing encounters are unforgettable; his relationships, problematic. At once a world citizen and a writer who mistrusts the power of language, he is pursued by history’s ghosts and unanswerable questions. He is a cartographer of identity on a compelling journey to an uncertain destination. As he draws and redraws his boundaries, he confronts us with the limitations of our own. Eduardo Halfon was named one of the best young Latin American writers by the Hay Festival of Bogotá and is the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship and the prestigious José María de Pereda Prize for the Short Novel. The Polish Boxer, his first book to appear in English, was a New York Times Editors’ Choice selection and finalist for the International Latino Book Award. Halfon is currently the Harman Writer in Residence at Baruch College in New York and travels frequently between his homes in Nebraska and Guatemala.

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"Impromptu Man captures the remarkable impact of a singular genius, J.L. Moreno, whose creations--the best-known being psychodrama--have shaped our culture in myriad ways, many unrecognized. The record will be set straight for all time by this can't-put-down biography, a tribute by Jonathan D. Moreno to his father's masterly legacy." --DANIEL GOLEMAN, author of Emotional Intelligence: Why It Can Matter More Than IQ J.L. Moreno (1889-1974), the father of psychodrama, was an early critic of Sigmund Freud, wrote landmark works of Viennese expressionism, founded an experimental theater where he discovered Peter Lorre, influenced Martin Buber, and became one of the most important psychiatrists and social scientists of his time. A mystic, theater impresario and inventor in his youth, Moreno immigrated to America in 1926, where he trained famous actors, introduced group therapy, and was a forerunner of humanistic psychology. As a social reformer, he reorganized schools and prisons, and designed New Deal planned communities for workers and farmers. Moreno's methods have been adopted by improvisational theater groups, military organizations, educators, business leaders, and trial lawyers. His studies of social networks laid the groundwork for social media like Twitter and Facebook. Featuring interviews with Clay Shirky, Gloria Steinem, and Werner Erhard, among others, original documentary research, and the author's own perspective growing up as the son of an innovative genius, Impromptu Man is both the study of a great and largely unsung figure of the last century and an epic history, taking readers from the creative chaos of early twentieth-century Vienna to the wired world of Silicon Valley. Jonathan D. Moreno, called the "most interesting bioethicist of our time" by the American Journal of Bioethics, is a professor at the University of Pennsylvania and a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Progress.

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During the summer of 1969, Northern Ireland, found itself on the brink of civil war as Irish Catholic Republicans and Protestant Loyalists clashed violently in what has become known as “The Troubles.” While Forbes doesn’t elaborate on the political dimension of this historically significant conflict, she beautifully renders the emotional and psychic trauma felt by both children and adults on the periphery of the violence.Like bestselling novelists Ann-Marie MacDonald and Tana French, Forbes is also an actress who brings finely honed dramatic skills to her fiction. In this masterful debut, Forbes draws on those talents as well as her early memories of Belfast and background as a literary critic to explore the insidious nature of memory and secrets, the power of forgiveness, the ravages of illness, and the preciousness of the “here and now.”Beginning with the title, which comes from a fable Katherine passes down to her children about the souls of the dead taking the form of ghost moths just waiting to be caught, this novel masterfully couples poetic descriptions with real-world psychological tension. Shifting in time between 1949 and 1969, Forbes’ characters experience love in all its guises: the unrequited, the illicit, the maternal, the unconditional.

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"Topical, astonishing and provocative ...a masterful collection." --Shelf Awareness for Readers (starred review) "[Lock's stories] are gems, rich in imagination and language ...For all their convolutions of space and time, these stories are remarkably easy to follow and savor." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) Mr. Hyde finally reveals his secrets to an ambitious journalist, unleashing unforeseen horrors. An ancient Egyptian mummy is revived in 1935 New York to consult on his Hollywood biopic. A Brooklynite suddenly dematerializes and passes through the internet, in search of true love...Love Among the Particles is virtuosic storytelling, at once a poignant critique of our romance with technology and a love letter to language. In a whirlwind tour of space, time, and history, Norman Lock creates worlds that veer wildly from the natural to the supernatural via the pre-modern, mechanical, and digital ages. Whether reintroducing characters from the pages of Robert Louis Stevenson, Mark Twain, Franz Kafka, and Gaston Leroux, or performing dizzying displays of literary pyrotechnics, these stories are nothing less than a compendium of the marvelous. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He has won The Dactyl Foundation Literary Fiction Award, The Paris Review Aga Khan Prize for Fiction, and writing fellowships from the New Jersey Council on the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and the National Endowment for the Arts. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.

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The nomadic odyssey of Eduardo Halfon begins as he searches for his roots and information about his Polish grandfather’s imprisonment at AuschwitzNew York Times Editors’ Choice * International Latino Book Award FinalistThe Polish Boxer covers a vast landscape of human experience while enfolding a search for origins: a grandson tries to make sense of his Polish grandfather’s past and the story behind his numbered tattoo; a Serbian classical pianist longs for his forbidden heritage; a Mayan poet is torn between his studies and filial obligations; a striking young Israeli woman seeks answers in Central America; a university professor yearns for knowledge that he can’t find in books and discovers something unexpected at a Mark Twain conference. Drawn to what lies beyond the range of reason, they all reach for the beautiful and fleeting, whether through humor, music, poetry, or unspoken words. Across his encounters with each of them, the narrator—a Guatemalan literature professor and writer named Eduardo Halfon—pursues his most enigmatic subject: himself.Mapping the geography of identity in a world scarred by a legacy of violence and exile, The Polish Boxer marks the debut of a major new Latin American voice in English.

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"The Cage is a tightly written and clear-eyed narrative about one of the most disturbing human dramas of recent years. . . . A riveting, cautionary tale about the consequences of unchecked political power in a country at war. A must-read." —Jon Lee Anderson, New Yorker staff writer and author of The Fall of BaghdadIn the closing days of the thirty-year Sri Lankan civil war, tens of thousands of civilians were killed, according to United Nations estimates, as government forces hemmed in the last remaining Tamil Tiger rebels on a tiny sand spit, dubbed "The Cage." Gordon Weiss, a journalist and UN spokesperson in Sri Lanka during the final years of the war, pulls back the curtain of government misinformation to tell the full story for the first time. Tracing the role of foreign influence as it converged with a history of radical Buddhism and ethnic conflict, The Cage is a harrowing portrait of an island paradise torn apart by war and the root causes and catastrophic consequences of a revolutionary uprising caught in the crossfire of international power jockeying.Gordon Weiss has lived in New York and worked in numerous conflict and natural disaster zones including the Congo, Uganda, Darfur, Bosnia, Afghanistan, Syria, and Haiti. Employed by the United Nations for over two decades, he continues to consult on war, extremism, peace building, and human rights.

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"As we turn the page on eight years of cynical science policy in the White House, Science Next is exactly the book we need, with more provocative ideas per ounce than any volume you are likely to read this year."--Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food "Science Next addresses important topics in science policy in prose that is beautifully written, clear, and to the point."--Marion Nestle, author of Food Politics and What to Eat "Science Next illustrates the profound connections between science and many facets of our society. I have enjoyed hop-scotching through the book and others who are concerned about the need for evidence-based policies in government and industry will too."--Harold Varmus, Nobel Prize-winning author of The Art and Politics of Science "This elegant book lucidly covers an impressive amount of territory and sheds light on the current horizons of science. It links science and innovation policy. It bridges between the laboratory and the policy community. As such it will be invaluable to informed citizens, scientists and policy makers alike." --John Kao, author of Innovation Nation Emerging from the Bush era when right-wing ideology frequently trumped mainstream science in government, America needs bold new approaches to the most important issues of our time, such as global warming, stem cell research, national security, and improving communication in the digital age. This is the informed citizen's essential guide to science policy from the premier progressive think tank dedicated to improving the lives of Americans through ideas and action. With foreword by Elizabeth Edwards. Jonathan D. Moreno is editor-in-chief of the Center for American Progress' online magazine, Science Progress, and a professor of bioethics at the University of Pennsylvania. Rick Weiss came to CAP from The Washington Post, where he was a science and medical reporter for fifteen years.

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“Barash . . . brilliantly integrat[es] science, literature, and pop culture into elegant and insightful commentaries on the most interesting and important questions of our time. A delightful read.”—Michael Shermer, author of The Science of Good and Evil “Entertaining and thought-provoking.”—Steven Pinker, author of The Blank Slate If we are, in part, a product of our genes, can free will exist? Incisive and engaging, this indispensable tour of evolutionary biology runs the gamut of contemporary debates, from science and religion to our place in the universe. David Barash is the author of The Myth of Monogamy and Madame Bovary’s Ovaries. He lives in Redmond, Washington.

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Library of Science Book Club selection Discover magazine “What to Read” selection “A really great book.” —IRA FLATOW, Science Friday “One of the finest science writers I’ve ever read.” —Los Angeles Times “Ellard has a knack for distilling obscure scientific theories into practical wisdom.” —New York Times Book Review “[Ellard] mak[es] even the most mundane entomological experiment or exegesis of psychological geekspeak feel fresh and fascinating.” —NPR “Colin Ellard is one of the world’s foremost thinkers on the neuroscience of urban design. Here he offers an entirely new way to understand our cities—and ourselves.” —CHARLES MONTGOMERY, author of Happy City: Transforming Our Lives Through Urban Design Our surroundings can powerfully affect our thoughts, emotions, and physical responses, whether we’re awed by the Grand Canyon or Hagia Sophia, panicked in a crowded room, soothed by a walk in the park, or tempted in casinos and shopping malls. In Places of the Heart, Colin Ellard explores how our homes, workplaces, cities, and nature—places we escape to and can’t escape from—have influenced us throughout history, and how our brains and bodies respond to different types of real and virtual space. As he describes the insight he and other scientists have gained from new technologies, he assesses the influence these technologies will have on our evolving environment and asks what kind of world we are, and should be, creating. Colin Ellard is the author of You Are Here: Why We Can Find Our Way to the Moon, but Get Lost in the Mall. A cognitive neuroscientist at the University of Waterloo and director of its Urban Realities Laboratory, he lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

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An atmospheric debut novel about one lost young woman’s search for another“Spellbinding. . . . Wholly engrossing.” —Washington PostElena, struggling with memory loss due to a trauma that has unmoored her sense of self, deserts graduate school and a long-term relationship to accept a bizarre proposition from an estranged family friend in Paris: she will search for a young woman, Ella, who went missing six years earlier in Thailand, by rewriting her journals. As she delves deeper into Ella’s story, Elena begins to lose sight of her own identity and drift dangerously toward self-annihilation.Her Here is an existential detective story with a shocking denouement that plumbs the creative and destructive powers of narrative itself.An Iowa Writers’ Workshop graduate and Cambridge Gates Scholar, Amanda Dennis teaches at the American University of Paris. Her Here is her first novel.

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Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott meet the horrors of the Civil War as they minister to its casualtiesAfter the Union Army’s defeat at Fredericksburg in 1862, Walt Whitman and Louisa May Alcott converge on Washington to nurse the sick, wounded, and dying. Whitman was a man of many contradictions: egocentric yet compassionate, impatient with religiosity yet moved by the spiritual in all humankind, bigoted yet soon to become known as the great poet of democracy. Alcott was an intense, intellectual, independent woman, an abolitionist and suffragist, who was compelled by financial circumstance to publish saccharine magazine stories yet would go on to write the enduring and beloved Little Women. As Lock captures the musicality of their unique voices and their encounters with luminaries ranging from Lincoln to battlefield photographer Mathew Brady to reformer Dorothea Dix, he deftly renders the war’s impact on their personal and artistic development.Inspired by Whitman’s poem “The Wound-Dresser” and Alcott’s Hospital Sketches, the ninth stand-alone book in The American Novels series is a masterful dual portrait of two iconic authors who took different paths toward chronicling a country beset by prejudice and at war with itself.

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“Superb.” —Steven Pinker“An explanation, a defense, and, most heartening, a celebration. . . . McWhorter demonstrates the ‘legitimacy’ of Black English by uncovering its complexity and sophistication, as well as the still unfolding journey that has led to its creation. . . . [His] intelligent breeziness is the source of the book’s considerable charm.” —New Yorker“Talking Back, Talking Black is [McWhorter’s] case for the acceptance of black English as a legitimate American dialect. . . . He ably and enthusiastically breaks down the mechanics.” —New York Times Book ReviewLinguists have been studying Black English as a speech variety for years, arguing to the public that it is different from Standard English, not a degradation of it. Yet false assumptions and controversies still swirl around what it means to speak and sound “black.” In his first book devoted solely to the form, structure, and development of Black English, John McWhorter clearly explains its fundamentals and rich history while carefully examining the cultural, educational, and political issues that have undermined recognition of this transformative, empowering dialect.Talking Back, Talking Black takes us on a fascinating tour of a nuanced and complex language that has moved beyond America’s borders to become a dynamic force for today’s youth culture around the world.John McWhorter teaches linguistics, Western civilization, music history, and American studies at Columbia University. A New York Times best-selling author and TED speaker, he is a columnist for CNN.com, a regular contributor to the Atlantic, a frequent guest on CNN and MSNBC, and the host of Slate’s language podcast, Lexicon Valley. His books on language include The Power of Babel; Our Magnificent Bastard Tongue; Words on the Move; Talking Back, Talking Black; and The Creole Debate.

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Essays in this collection have been recently and prominently published: “Still God Helps You: Memories of a Sudanese Child Slave,” first published in Wilson Quarterly (2013), was a Byliner exclusive, recognized by The Atlantic as one of the year’s “Fantastic Pieces of Journalism,” and nominated for a Pushcart Prize. “Circle of Friends” was published in Amtrak’s Arrive magazine (July/August 2014). “A Solemn Pleasure” appeared in the David Shields/Bradford Morrow anthology The Inevitable: Contemporary Writers Confront Death. “Finding Ashton” and an excerpt from “Doxology” appeared in O, The Oprah Magazine. Melissa Pritchard is a prolific writer whose fiction and nonfiction has been anthologized in over fifteen books and appeared in over sixty literary journals. She is also an award-winning teacher of creative writing at Arizona State University, and has amassed a devoted following among her students. Pritchard’s extraordinary storytelling skills, developed as a fiction writer, lend themselves perfectly to conveying the stories of her travels, spiritual pursuits, historical research, and empathy for the people who have crossed her path. Inaugural book in Bellevue Literary Press’ new The Art of the Essay series, with a Foreword by bestselling novelist and Harvard University Director of Creative Writing Bret Anthony Johnston.

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A master storyteller’s novel of crime, corruption, and antisemitism in early 20th-century ManhattanRavage & Son reflects the lost world of Manhattan’s Lower East Side—the cradle of Jewish immigration during the first years of the twentieth century—in a dark mirror.Abraham Cahan, editor of the Jewish Daily Forward, serves as the conscience of the Jewish ghetto teeming with rogue cops and swindlers. He rescues Ben Ravage, an orphan, from a trade school and sends him off to Harvard to earn a law degree. But upon his return, Ben rejects the chance to escape his gritty origins and instead becomes a detective for the Kehilla, a quixotic gang backed by wealthy uptown patrons to help the police rid the Lower East Side of criminals. Charged with rooting out the Jewish “Mr. Hyde,” a half-mad villain who attacks the prostitutes of Allen Street, Ben discovers that his fate is irrevocably tied to that of this violent, sinister man.A lurid tale of revenge, this wildly evocative, suspenseful noir is vintage Jerome Charyn.

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As hundreds of thousands of displaced people sought refuge in Europe, the global relief system failed. This is the story of the volunteers who stepped forward to help.In 2015, increasing numbers of refugees and migrants, most of them fleeing war-torn homelands, arrived by boat on the shores of Greece, setting off the greatest human displacement in Europe since WWII. As journalists reported horrific mass drownings, an ill-prepared and seemingly indifferent world looked on. Those who reached Europe needed food, clothing, medicine, and shelter, but the international aid system broke down completely.All Else Failed is Dana Sachs’s compelling eyewitness account of the successes—and failures—of the volunteer relief network that emerged to meet the enormous need. Closely following the odysseys of seven individual men and women, and their families, it tells a story of despair and resilience, revealing the humanity within an immense humanitarian disaster.

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“One of the most provocative new books of the year, and, for me, mindblowing.” —Michael Pollan, author of The Omnivore's Dilemma and How to Change Your Mind“Kripal makes many sympathetic points about the present spiritual state of America. . . . [He] continues to believe that spirituality and science should not contradict each other.” —New York Times Book Review“Kripal prompts us to reflect on our personal assumptions, as well as the shared assumptions that create and maintain our institutions. . . . [His] work will likely become more and more relevant to more and more areas of inquiry as the century unfolds. It may even open up a new space for Americans to reevaluate the personal and cultural narratives they have inherited, and to imagine alternative futures.” —Los Angeles Review of BooksA “flip,” writes Jeffrey J. Kripal, is “a reversal of perspective,” “a new real,” often born of an extreme, life-changing experience. The Flip is Kripal’s ambitious, visionary program for unifying the sciences and the humanities to expand our minds, open our hearts, and negotiate a peaceful resolution to the culture wars. Combining accounts of rationalists’ spiritual awakenings and consciousness explorations by philosophers, neuroscientists, and mystics within a framework of the history of science and religion, Kripal compellingly signals a path to mending our fractured world.Jeffrey J. Kripal holds the J. Newton Rayzor Chair in Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University and is the associate director of the Center for Theory and Research at the Esalen Institute in Big Sur, California. He has previously taught at Harvard Divinity School and Westminster College and is the author of eight books, including The Flip. He lives in Houston, Texas.

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A beautifully told and illustrated graphic novel humanizing the urgent migrant crisis

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A shattering biographical novel of J.D. Salinger in combat“Charyn skillfully breathes life into historical icons.” —New YorkerJ.D. Salinger, mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a reclusive misanthrope. Jerome Charyn’s Salinger is a young American WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war—from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of Normandy, to the Battle of the Bulge, and finally to the first Allied entry into a Bavarian death camp, where corpses were piled like cordwood.After the war, interned in a Nuremberg psychiatric clinic, Salinger became enchanted with a suspected Nazi informant. They married, but not long after he brought her home to New York, the marriage collapsed. Maladjusted to civilian life, he lived like a “spook,” with invisible stripes on his shoulder, the ghosts of the murdered inside his head, and stories to tell.Grounded in biographical fact and reimagined as only Charyn could, Sergeant Salinger is an astonishing portrait of a devastated young man on his way to becoming the mythical figure behind a novel that has marked generations.Jerome Charyn is the author of more than fifty works of fiction and nonfiction, including Cesare: A Novel of War-Torn Berlin. He lives in New York.

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"[Norman Lock's fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights." —NPR"Lock writes some of the most deceptively beautiful sentences in contemporary fiction. Beneath their clarity are layers of cultural and literary references, profound questions about loyalty, race, the possibility of social progress, and the nature of truth . . . to create something entirely new—an American fable of ideas." —Shelf Awareness"The Wreckage of Eden, award-winning film directorsWhen U.S. Army chaplain Robert Winter first meets Emily Dickinson, he is fascinated by the brilliance of the strange girl immersed in her botany lessons. She will become his confidante, obsession, and muse over the years as he writes to her of his friendship with the aspiring politician Abraham Lincoln, his encounter with the young newspaperman Samuel Clemens, and his crisis of conscience concerning the radical abolitionist John Brown. Bearing the standard of God and country through the Mexican War and the Mormon Rebellion, Robert seeks to lessen his loneliness while his faith is eroded by the violence he observes and ultimately commits. Emily, however, remains as elusive as her verse on his rare visits to Amherst and denies him solace, a rejection that will culminate in a startling epiphany at the very heart of his despair.Powerfully evocative of Emily Dickinson's life, times, and artistry, this fifth, stand-alone volume in The American Novels series captures a nation riven by conflicts that continue to this day.Norman Lock is the author of, most recently, four previous books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, American Meteor, The Port-Wine Stain, and A Fugitive in Walden Woods.

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"[An] unusual meditation on sex, death, art, and Jewishness. . . . Weber weaves in musings on his own sexual and religious experiences, creating a freewheeling psychoanalytic document whose approach would surely delight the doctor, even if its conclusions might surprise him." —New Yorker"Freud's Trip to Orvieto is at once profound and wonderfully diverse, and as gripping as any detective story. Nicholas Fox Weber mixes psychoanalysis, art history, and the personal with an intricacy and spiritedness that Freud himself would have admired." —John Banville, author of The Sea and The Blue Guitar"This is an ingenious and fascinating reading of Freud's response to Signorelli's frescoes at Orvieto. It is also a meditation on Jewish identity, and on masculinity, memory, and the power of the image. It is filled with intelligence, wit, and clear-eyed analysis not only of the paintings themselves, but how we respond to them in all their startling sexuality and invigorating beauty." —Colm Tóibín, author of Brooklyn and Nora WebsterAfter a visit to the cathedral at Orvieto in Italy, Sigmund Freud deemed Luca Signorelli's frescoes the greatest artwork he'd ever encountered; yet, a year later, he couldn't recall the artist's name. When the name came back to him, the images he had so admired vanished from his mind's eye. This is known as the "Signorelli parapraxis" in the annals of Freudian psychoanalysis and is a famous example from Freud's own life of his principle of repressed memory. What was at the bottom of this? There have been many theories on the subject, but Nicholas Fox Weber is the first to study the actual Signorelli frescoes for clues.What Weber finds in these extraordinary Renaissance paintings provides unexpected insight into this famously confounding incident in Freud's biography. As he sounds the depths of Freud's feelings surrounding his masculinity and Jewish identity, Weber is drawn back into his own past, including his memories of an adolescent obsession with a much older woman.Freud's Trip to Orvieto is an intellectual mystery with a very personal, intimate dimension. Through rich illustrations, Weber evokes art's singular capacity to provoke, destabilize, and enchant us, as it did Freud, and awaken our deepest memories, fears, and desires.Nicholas Fox Weber is the director of the Josef and Anni Albers Foundation and author of fourteen books, including biographies of Balthus and Le Corbusier. He has written for the New Yorker, New York Times, Los Angeles Times, Wall Street Journal, Le Monde, ARTnews, Town & Country, and Vogue, among other publications.

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"A Fugitive in Walden Woods manages that special magic of making Thoreau's time in Walden Woods seem fresh and surprising and necessary right now. Norman Lock tells the story of Samuel Long, an escaped slave who encounters Thoreau, with insight and some welcome humor. This is a patient and perceptive novel, a pleasure to read even as it grapples with issues that affect the United States to this day."—Victor LaValle, author of The Ballad of Black Tom and The Changeling"Portraying the traumatic psychological aftershock not of war but of slavery provides a convincing and complex narrative of new hardships faced by escaped slave Samuel Long in Norman Lock's bold and enlightening novel A Fugitive in Walden Woods. It's an important novel that creates a vivid social context for the masterpieces of such writers as Thoreau, Emerson, and Hawthorne and also offers valuable insights about our current conscious and unconscious racism."—Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Ahab's Wife and The Fountain of St. James Court; or, Portrait of the Artist as an Old WomanSamuel Long escapes slavery in Virginia, traveling the Underground Railroad to Walden Woods where he encounters Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Lloyd Garrison, and other transcendentalists and abolitionists. While Long will experience his coming-of-age at Walden Pond, his hosts will receive a lesson in human dignity, culminating in a climactic act of civil disobedience.Against this historical backdrop, Norman Lock's powerful narrative examines issues that continue to divide the United States: racism, privilege, and what it means to be free in America. Norman Lock is the author of, most recently, the short story collection Love Among the Particles, and three previous books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, a re-envisioning of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, American Meteor, an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson, and The Port-Wine Stain, an homage to Edgar Allan Poe and Thomas Dent Mütter. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

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Publishers Weekly "Book of the Year" Firecracker Award Finalist "Sheds brilliant light along the meteoric path of American westward expansion...[A] pithy, compact beautifully conducted version of the American Dream, from its portrait of the young wounded soldier in the beginning to its powerful rendering of Crazy Horse's prophecy for life on earth at the end." --NPR "Like all Mr. Lock's books, this is an ambitious work, where ideas crowd together on the page like desperate men on a battlefield." --Wall Street Journal In this panoramic tale of Manifest Destiny, Stephen Moran comes of age with the young country that he crosses on the Union Pacific, just as the railroad unites the continent. Propelled westward from his Brooklyn neighborhood and the killing fields of the Civil War to the Battle of Little Big Horn, he befriends Walt Whitman, receives a medal from General Grant, becomes a bugler on President Lincoln's funeral train, goes to work for railroad mogul Thomas Durant, apprentices with frontier photographer William Henry Jackson, and stalks General George Custer. When he comes face-to-face with Crazy Horse, his life will be spared but his dreams haunted for the rest of his days. By turns elegiac and comic, American Meteor is a novel of adventure, ideas, and mourning: a unique vision of America's fabulous and murderous history. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. His recent works of fiction include the short story collection Love Among the Particles, a Shelf Awareness Best Book of the Year, and three books in The American Novels series: The Boy in His Winter, a re-envisioning of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; American Meteor, an homage to Walt Whitman and William Henry Jackson named a Firecracker Award finalist and Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and The Port-Wine Stain, a gothic psychological thriller featuring Edgar Allan Poe. Lock lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey.

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Julia Ward Howe Award Finalist NBC News "Top Science and Tech Books of the Year" selection Scientific American/FSG "Favorite Science Books of the Year" selection Nature.com "Top Reads of the Year" selection Kirkus Reviews "Best Books of the Year" selection Discover magazine "Top 5 Summer Read" "A masterful balance of science, history and rich narrative." --Discover magazine "Hirshfeld tells this climactic discovery of the expanding universe with great verve and sweep, as befits a story whose scope, characters and import leave most fiction far behind." --Wall Street Journal "Starlight Detectives is just the sort of richly veined book I love to read--full of scientific history and discoveries, peopled by real heroes and rogues, and told with absolute authority. Alan Hirshfeld's wide, deep knowledge of astronomy arises not only from the most careful scholarship, but also from the years he's spent at the telescope, posing his own questions to the stars." --DAVA SOBEL, author of A More Perfect Heaven: How Copernicus Revolutionized the Cosmos and Longitude In 1929, Edwin Hubble announced the greatest discovery in the history of astronomy since Galileo first turned a telescope to the heavens. The galaxies, previously believed to float serenely in the void, are in fact hurtling apart at an incredible speed: the universe is expanding. This stunning discovery was the culmination of a decades-long arc of scientific and technical advancement. In its shadow lies an untold, yet equally fascinating, backstory whose cast of characters illuminates the gritty, hard-won nature of scientific progress. The path to a broader mode of cosmic observation was blazed by a cadre of nineteenth-century amateur astronomers and inventors, galvanized by the advent of photography, spectral analysis, and innovative technology to create the entirely new field of astrophysics. From William Bond, who turned his home into a functional observatory, to John and Henry Draper, a father and son team who were trailblazers of astrophotography and spectroscopy, to geniuses of invention such as Leon Foucault, and George Hale, who founded the Mount Wilson Observatory, Hirshfeld reveals the incredible stories--and the ambitious dreamers--behind the birth of modern astronomy. Alan Hirshfeld, Professor of Physics at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth and an Associate of the Harvard College Observatory, is the author of Parallax: The Race to Measure the Cosmos, The Electric Life of Michael Faraday, and Eureka Man: The Life and Legacy of Archimedes.

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International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award Longlist Orion Book Award Finalist O, The Oprah Magazine “Title to Pick Up Now” “An amazing feat of imagination.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Invisible Beasts is a strange and beautiful meditation on love and seeing, a hybrid of fantasy and field guide, novel and essay, treatise and fable. With one hand it offers a sad commentary on environmental degradation, while with the other it presents a bright, whimsical, and funny exploration of what it means to be human. It’s wonderfully written, crazily imagined, and absolutely original.” —ANTHONY DOERR, author of All the Light We Cannot See and The Shell Collector Sophie is an amateur naturalist with a rare genetic gift: the ability to see a marvelous kingdom of invisible, sentient creatures that share a vital relationship with humankind. To record her observations, Sophie creates a personal bestiary and, as she relates the strange abilities of these endangered beings, her tales become extraordinary meditations on love, sex, evolution, extinction, truth, and self-knowledge. In the tradition of E.O. Wilson’s Anthill, Invisible Beasts is inspiring, philosophical, and richly detailed fiction grounded by scientific fact and a profound insight into nature. The fantastic creations within its pages—an ancient animal that uses natural cold fusion for energy, a species of vampire bat that can hear when their human host is lying, a continent-sized sponge living under the ice of Antarctica—illuminate the role that all living creatures play in the environment and remind us of what we stand to lose if we fail to recognize our entwined destinies. Sharona Muir is the author of The Book of Telling: Tracing the Secrets of My Father’s Lives. The recipient of a Hodder Fellowship and National Endowment for the Arts Fellowship, her writing has appeared in Granta, Orion magazine, Virginia Quarterly Review, The Paris Review, and elsewhere. She is a Professor of Creative Writing and English at Bowling Green State University. Invisible Beasts is her first novel.

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A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of the Year and Scientific American Book Club selection "Moreno pulls apart the debates on eugenics, abortion, end-of-life decisions, embryonic stem-cell research, reproductive cloning, chimeras and synthetic biology, among others, carefully reassembling what's at stake for each side. In graceful, sparkling prose, he illuminates intricate threads of history and complex philosophical arguments...Highly recommended for anyone interested in the[se] vital issues." --Kirkus Reviews (starred review) We have entered what is called the "biological century" and a new biopolitics has emerged to address the implications for America's collective value system, our well-being, and ultimately, our future. The Body Politic is the first book to recognize and assess this new force in our political landscape--one that fuels today's culture wars and has motivated politicians of all stripes to reexamine their platforms. As Moreno explains the most contentious issues, he also offers an engaging history of the intersection between science and democracy in American life, a reasoned (and often surprising) analysis of how different political ideologies view scientific controversies, and a vision for how the new biopolitics can help shape the quality of our lives. Jonathan D. Moreno is the David and Lyn Silfen University Professor at the University of Pennsylvania and the editor-in-chief for the Center for American Progress' online magazine, Science Progress. He divides his time between Philadelphia and Washington, DC.

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The Sojourn, finalist for the National Book Award and winner of both the Dayton Literary Peace Prize and inaugural Chautauqua Prize, is the story of Jozef Vinich, who was uprooted from a 19th-century mining town in Colorado by a family tragedy and returns with his father to an impoverished shepherd's life in rural Austria-Hungary. When World War One comes, Jozef joins his adopted brother as a sharpshooter in the Kaiser's army, surviving a perilous trek across the frozen Italian Alps and capture by a victorious enemy. A stirring tale of brotherhood, coming-of-age, and survival, that was inspired by the author's own family history, this novel evokes a time when Czechs, Slovaks, Austrians, and Germans fought on the same side while divided by language, ethnicity, and social class in the most brutal war to date. It is also a poignant tale of fathers and sons, addressing the great immigration to America and the desire to live the American dream amidst the unfolding tragedy in Europe. The Sojourn is Andrew Krivak's first novel. Krivak is also the author of A Long Retreat: In Search of a Religious Life, a memoir about his eight years in the Jesuit Order, and editor of The Letters of William Carlos Williams to Edgar Irving Williams, 1902-1912, which received the Louis L. Martz Prize. The grandson of Slovak immigrants, Krivak grew up in Pennsylvania, has lived in London, and now lives with his wife and three children in Massachusetts where he teaches in the Honors Program at Boston College.

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“Every passionate reader lives for that first page of a book that alerts her, straightaway, she’ll be sorry when the book ends. So it is with Michelle Latiolais’ astonishing, sparklingly intelligent new novel...The work strives, with bold zest, to arrive at the marrow of things...Latiolais triumphs, folding the work’s clinical ruminations into the story’s delicious batter. Powerfully recommended.”—Antioch Review “The novel counts—in elegant and sometimes elegiac prose—the shadowy and elusive opportunities for redemption.”—Ron Carlson, author of Five Skies “A ravishing intelligence is at work in these pages.”—Elizabeth Tallent, author of Honey, on Even Now A gifted psychiatrist, haunted by the death of his young sister, seeks to penetrate the mysteries of childhood autism in this beautifully written, insightful investigation into the misunderstood pathways of the brain—and the heart. Michelle Latiolais is associate professor and co-director of the Programs in Writing at the University of California, Irvine. Her novel Even Now won the Commonwealth Club of California Gold Medal for Fiction in 1991.

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Bill Hayes pays eloquent tribute to two masterpieces: the human body and the book detailing it. With passion and wit, Hayes explores the significance of 'Gray's Anatomy' and explains why it came to symbolize a turning point in medical history. As a master of narrative nonfiction Hayes weaves his moving personal story and anatomical experiences throughout.

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John Burroughs Medal for Distinguished Natural History BookPEN/Martha Albrand Award Finalist“[Green’s] prose rings with the elemental clarity of the ice he knows so well.” —PEN Awards Committee citationA classic of contemporary nature writing, the award-winning Water, Ice & Stone is both a scientific and poetic journey into Antarctica, addressing the ecological importance of the continent within the context of climate change. Bill Green has been traveling to this remote and primordial place at the bottom of the Earth since 1968. With this book he focuses on the McMurdo Dry Valleys—an area that is deceptively timeless as a stark landscape of rock and ice. Here, Green delves into the geochemistry of the region and discovers a wealth of data, which vividly speaks to the health and climate of the larger world.Bill Green is a geochemist and professor emeritus at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio. He first traveled to Antarctica in 1968 and began conducting research there in 1980. He is also the author of Boltzmann’s Tomb: Travels in Search of Science.

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"Evocative images, eloquent testimony-a frank and often inspiring exploration of the experience of mental illness."-Peter D. Kramer, author of Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind and Listening to Prozac A tree's bare limbs against a grey sky, a young woman's vintage slip, the view beneath a bridge's span. Charlee Brodsky's stark black-and-white photographs combine with a concise collection of moving personal narratives to form an eloquent ensemble of tragedy and hope in the struggle to cope with mental illness. Charlee Brodsky is a documentary photographer and a professor of photography at Carnegie Mellon University.

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