Search results for ""grove press / atlantic monthly press""

Buddhist teacher and anthropologists Joan Halifax delves into - the shadow side of being, found in the root truths of Native religions, the fecundity of nature, and the stillness of meditation.

Read more less

Pigeons have been worshipped as fertility goddesses and revered as symbols of peace. Domesticated since the dawn of man, they’ve been used as crucial communicators in war by every major historical superpower from ancient Egypt to the United States and are credited with saving thousands of lives. Charles Darwin relied heavily on pigeons to help formulate and support his theory of evolution. Yet today they are reviled as “rats with wings.” Author Andrew D. Blechman traveled across the United States and Europe to meet with pigeon fanciers and pigeon haters in a quest to find out how we came to misunderstand one of mankind’s most helpful and steadfast companions. Pigeons captures a Brooklyn man’s quest to win the Main Event (the pigeon world’s equivalent of the Kentucky Derby), as well as a convention dedicated to breeding the perfect bird. Blechman participates in a live pigeon shoot where entrants pay $150; he tracks down Mike Tyson, the nation’s most famous pigeon lover; he spends time with Queen Elizabeth’s Royal Pigeon Handler; and he sheds light on a radical “pro-pigeon underground’ in New York City. In Pigeons, Blechman tells for the first time the remarkable story behind this seemingly unremarkable bird.

Read more less

The seventeen pieces in Ficciones demonstrate the gargantuan powers of imagination, intelligence, and style of one of the greatest writers of this or any other century. Borges sends us on a journey into a compelling, bizarre, and profoundly resonant realm; we enter the fearful sphere of Pascal’s abyss, the surreal and literal labyrinth of books, and the iconography of eternal return. More playful and approachable than the fictions themselves are Borges’s Prologues, brief elucidations that offer the uninitiated a passageway into the whirlwind of Borges’s genius and mirror the precision and potency of his intellect and inventiveness, his piercing irony, his skepticism, and his obsession with fantasy. To enter the worlds in Ficciones is to enter the mind of Jorge Luis Borges, wherein lies Heaven, Hell, and everything in between.

Read more less

Finalist for the Man Booker Award. Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction. Winner of the GLCA New Writers Award for Fiction. One of theNew York Times' 100 Notable Books of 2017; An NPR and MPR Best Books of 2017; #1 Indie Next Pick; A New York Times Editors’ Choice; A Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection; One of USA Today’s Notable Books; An Amazon Best Book of the Month; An ABA Indies Introduce Selection “The chilly power of History of Wolves packs a wallop that’s hard to shake off . . . an elegant, troubling debut.” —Los Angeles Times “Starkly affecting . . . one of the year’s most lauded debuts.” —Entertainment Weekly Teenage Linda lives with her parents in the austere woods of northern Minnesota, where their nearly abandoned commune stands as a last vestige of a lost counter-culture world. Isolated at home and an outsider at school, Linda is drawn to the enigmatic Lily and new history teacher Mr. Grierson. When Mr. Grierson is faced with child pornography charges, his arrest deeply affects Linda as she wrestles with her own fledgling desires and craving to belong. And then the young Gardner family moves in across the lake and Linda finds herself welcomed into their home as a babysitter for their little boy. But with this new sense of belonging comes expectations and secrets she doesn’t understand and, over the course of a summer, Linda makes a set of choices that reverberate throughout her life. One of the most daring literary debuts of the year and a national bestseller, History of Wolves is an agonizing and gorgeously written novel from an urgent, new voice in American fiction. “Imagine one of those twisty ‘Girl’-titled mysteries in the hands of a great stylist. Fridlund’s debut is something like that, but better . . . an indelible story of fascination and dread.” —New York magazine “This captivating debut from a prodigious new talent injects taut suspense into a teenage girl’s awakenings as she confronts a web of mysteries in the chilly woods of Minnesota. A lavishly written novel with more than a glimmer of dread.” —O Magazine, one of 10 Titles to Pick Up Now

Read more less

On the night of December 2, 1943, the Luftwaffe bombed a critical Allied port in Bari, Italy, sinking seventeen ships and killing over a thousand servicemen and hundreds of civilians. Caught in the surprise air raid was the John Harvey,an American Liberty ship carrying a top-secret cargo of 2,000 mustard bombs to be used in retaliation if the Germans resorted to gas warfare.After young sailors began suddenly dying with mysterious symptoms, Lieutenant Colonel Stewart Alexander, a doctor and chemical weapons expert, was dispatched to investigate. He quickly diagnosed mustard gas exposure, which Churchill denied. Undaunted, Alexander defied British officials and persevered with his investigation. His final report on the Bari casualties was immediately classified, but not before his breakthrough observations about the toxic effects of mustard on white blood cells caught the attention of Colonel Cornelius P. Rhoads - a pioneering physician and research scientist as brilliant as he was arrogant and self-destructive - who recognized that the poison was both a killer and a cure, and ushered in a new era of cancer research.Deeply researched and beautifully written, The Great Secret is the remarkable story of how horrific tragedy gave birth to medical triumph.

Read more less

For reasons of language and history, the United States has prized its Anglo heritage above all others. However, as Carrie Gibson explains with great depth and clarity in El Norte, America has much older Spanish roots - ones that have long been unacknowledged or marginalized. The Hispanic past of the United States predates the arrival of the Pilgrims by a century and has been every bit as important in shaping the nation. El Norte chronicles the sweeping and dramatic history of Hispanic North America from the arrival of the Spanish to the present - from Ponce de Leon's initial landing in Florida in 1513 to Spanish control of the vast Louisiana territory in 1762 to the Mexican-American War in 1846 and up to the more recent tragedy of post-hurricane Puerto Rico and the ongoing border acrimony with Mexico. Interwoven in this stirring narrative of events and people are cultural issues that have been there from the start and remain unresolved: language, belonging, community, race and nationality. Seeing them play out over centuries provides vital perspective at a time when it is urgently needed. In 1883, Walt Whitman wrote 'to that composite American identity of the future, Spanish character will supply some of the most needed parts.' That future is here, and El Norte, an emotive and eventful history in its own right, will have a powerful impact on our perception of the United States.

Read more less

The Interior Circuit is Goldman's story of his emergence from grief five years after his wife's death, symbolized by his attempt to overcome his fear of driving in the city. Embracing the DF (Mexico City) as his home, Goldman explores and celebrates the city which stands defiantly apart from so many of the social ills and violence wracking Mexico. This is the chronicle of an awakening, both personal and political, 'interior' and 'exterior', to the meaning and responsibilities of home. Mexico's narcotics war rages on and, with the restoration of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (the PRI) to power in the 2012 elections, the DF's special apartness seems threatened. In the summer of 2013, when Mexican organized-crime violence and deaths erupt in the city in an unprecedented way, Goldman sets out to try to understand the menacing challenges the city now faces. By turns exuberant, poetic, reportorial, philosophic, and urgent, The Interior Circuit fuses a personal journey to an account of one of the world's most remarkable and often misunderstood cities.

Read more less

For Rian Malan, the blessing of living in South Africa is that every day presents him with material whose richness astounds those who live in saner places. Twenty years after the publication of his bestseller My Traitor's Heart, he is still strongly committed to the struggle against suffocating political rectitude. Malan eviscerates politicians, provokes rabid fury in Aids activists, pursues justice in the music industry, and exults in the company of an extraordinary cast of characters from truckers to tycoons.

Read more less

More than a memoir, My Crazy Century explores the ways in which the epoch and its dominating totalitarian ideologies impacted the lives, character, and morality of Klíma's generation. Klíma's story begins in the 1930s, in the Terezin concentration camp outside of Prague, where he was forced to spend almost four years of his childhood. He reveals how the postwar atmosphere supported and encouraged the spread of Communist principles over the next few decades and how an informal movement to change the system developed inside the Party. These political events form the backdrop to Klíma's personal experiences, with the arrest and trial of his father; the early revolt of young writers against socialist realism; his first literary successes; and his travels to the free part of Europe, which strengthened his awareness of living as part of a colossal lie. Klíma also captures the brief period of liberation during 1968's Prague Spring, in which he played an active role; the Soviet invasion that crushed its political reforms; the rise of the dissident movement; and the collapse of the Communist regime in the middle of the Velvet Revolution of 1989. Including insightful essays on topics related to social history, political thinking, love, and freedom, My Crazy Century provides a profoundly rich and moving personal history of national evolution. Ivan Klíma's first autobiography and perhaps his most significant work, it encapsulates a remarkable life largely lived under occupation.

Read more less

A hilarious look at the aging baby boomer generation from the author the Spectator labelled 'what happens when America does Grumpy Old Men'.The Baby Boom - over-sized, overwrought, overbearing, and all over the place, from Donovan to Obama. The generation that said with a straight face, 'We are the world.'What's so funny about peace, love and understanding? Ask the generation responsible for the fall of the Berlin Wall and their knickers. Who put their faith in the Kyoto Accord and disco. Who dropped out of the capitalist system and popped back again in time to cause a global financial crisis.How did the Baby Boom become what it is and who let them get away with it?

Read more less

A re-issue of John O'Brien's debut novel, a masterpiece of modern realism about the perils of addiction and love in a city of loneliness.Leaving Las Vegas, the first novel by John O'Brien, is the disturbing and emotionally wrenching story of a woman who embraces life and a man who rejects it. Sera is a prostitute, content with the independence and routine she has carved out for herself in a city defined by recklessness. But she is haunted by a spectre in a yellow Mercedes, a man from her past who is committed to taking control of her life again. Ben is an alcoholic intent on drinking his way towards an early death. Newly arrived from Los Angeles, he survived the four-hour intoxicated drive across the desert with his entire savings in his wallet and nothing else left to lose. Looking to satisfy hungers both material and existential, Ben and Sera stumble together on the strip and discover in each other a respite from their unforgiving lives. A testimony to the raw talent of its young author, Leaving Las Vegas is a compelling story of unconditional love between two disenfranchised and lost souls - an overlooked American classic.

Read more less

A newest novel in the Inspector Troy series, a tale of Cold War spy dealings centred around Guy Burgess. For readers of John le Carré, Philip Kerr and Alan Furst.It is 1958. Chief Superintendent Frederick Troy of Scotland Yard, newly promoted after good service during Nikita Khrushchev's visit to Britain, is not looking forward to a Continental trip with his older brother, Rod. Rod was too vain to celebrate being fifty so instead takes his entire family on 'the Grand Tour' for his fifty-first birthday: Paris, Siena, Florence, Vienna, Amsterdam. Restaurants, galleries and concert halls. But Frederick Troy never gets to Amsterdam. After a concert in Vienna he is approached by an old friend whom he has not seen for years - Guy Burgess, a spy for the Soviets, who says something extraordinary: 'I want to come home.' Troy dumps the problem on MI5 who send an agent to debrief Burgess - but when the man is gunned down only yards from the embassy, the whole plan unravels with alarming speed and Troy finds himself a suspect.As he fights to prove his innocence, Troy discovers that Burgess is not the only ghost who has returned to haunt him...

Read more less

In prose that is darkly humorous and alive with detail, Valiant Gentlemen reimagines the lives and intimate friendships of humanitarian and Irish patriot Roger Casement; his closest friend, Herbert Ward; and Ward's extraordinary wife, the Argentinian-American heiress Sarita Sanford.Valiant Gentlemen takes the reader on an intimate journey, from Ward and Casement's misadventurous youth in the Congo - where, among other things, they bore witness to an Irish whiskey heir's taste for cannibalism - to Ward's marriage to Sarita and their flourishing family life in France, to Casement's covert homosexuality and enduring nomadic lifestyle floating between his work across the African continent and involvement in Irish politics. When World War I breaks out, Casement and Ward's longstanding political differences finally come to a head and when Ward and his teenage sons leave to fight on the frontlines for England, Casement begins to work alongside the Germans to help free Ireland from British rule. What results is tragic and riveting, as both men are forced to confront notions of love and betrayal in the face of the vastly different tracks their lives have taken.

Read more less

SHORTLISTED PETRONA AWARD 2018Karin knew what she was getting herself into when she fell for John, the high-flying criminal and love of her life. But she never imagined things would turn out like this: John is now gone and the coke-filled parties, seemingly endless flow of money and high social status she previously enjoyed have been replaced by cut telephone lines, cut heat and cut cash. All that remains of Karin's former life is the big house he bought for her - and his daughter, the child Karin once swore she would never bring into their dangerous world. Now Karin is alone with the baby, and the old promise of 'the family' has proved alarmingly empty. With the authorities zeroing in on organized crime, John's shady legacy is catching up with her, and the house is about to be seized. Over the course of a few nerve-wracking days, Karin is forced to take drastic measures in order to claim what she considers rightfully hers. A slow-burning psychological thriller with a sophisticated, dreamlike atmosphere, The White City is both the portrayal of one woman's struggle to pull herself up from the paralyzing depths of despair, and an unflinching examination of what it means to lose control - over your body, your life and your fate.

Read more less

Skinny's Book of the Year, 2018In 1990, Myles chose Rosie from a litter on the street, and their connection instantly made an indelible impact on the writer's way of being. Over the course of sixteen years together, Myles was devoted to the pit bull and their linked quality of life. And starting from the emptiness following Rosie's death, Afterglow launches a playful and incisive investigation into the mostly mutually beneficial, sometimes reprehensible power dynamics between pet and pet-owner. At the same time, it reimagines Myles's experiences with alcoholism and recovery, intimacy and mourning, celebrity and politics, spirituality and family history, while joyously transcending the parameters of memoir.Moving from an imaginary talk show where Rosie is interviewed by Myles's childhood puppet, to a critical reenactment of the night Rosie mated with another pit bull; from shimmering poetic transcriptions of video footage taken during their walks, to Rosie's final enlightened narration from the afterlife, this totally singular text combines elements of science fiction, screenplay, monologue, and lucid memory to get to the heart of how and why we dedicate our existence to our dogs.

Read more less

After decades covering war and disaster, bestselling author and acclaimed satirist P. J. O'Rourke takes on his scariest subjects yet: business, investment, finance and the political chicanery behind them.Want to get rich overnight for free in 3 easy steps with no risk? Then don't buy this book. (Actually, if you believe there's a book that can do that, you shouldn't buy any books because you probably can't read.) P.J.'s approach to business, investment and finance is different. He takes the risks for you in his chapter 'How I Learned Economics by Watching People Try to Kill Each Other.' He proposes 'A Way to Raise Taxes That We'll All Love' - a 200% tax on celebrities. He offers a brief history of economic transitions before exploring the world of high-tech innovation with a chapter on 'Unnovations,' which asks, 'The Internet - whose idea was it to put all the idiots on earth in touch with each other?' He pokes fun at bitcoin, and closes with a fanciful short story about the morning that he wakes up and finds that all the world's goods and services are free! This is P.J. at his finest, a book not to be missed.

Read more less

The H LYW OD sign presides over a Los Angeles devastated by a weaponized microbe that has been accidentally spread around the globe, deleting human identity. In post-NK3 Los Angeles, a sixty-foot-tall fence surrounds the hills where the rich used to live, but the mansions have been taken over by those with the only power that matters: the power of memory. Inside the Fence, life for the new aristocracy, a society of the partially rehabilitated who call themselves the Verified, is a perpetual party. Outside the Fence, in downtown Los Angeles, the Verified use an invented mythology to keep control over the mindless Drifters, Shamblers and Bottle Bangers who serve the gift economy until no longer needed. The ruler, Chief, takes his guidance from gigantic effigies of a man and a woman in the heart of the Fence. In deliciously dark prose, Tolkin winds a noose-like plot around this melee of despots, prophets and rebels as they struggle for command and survival in a town that still manages to exert a magnetic force, even as a ruined husk.

Read more less

Pages of a weathered original sonata manuscript - the gift of a Czech immigrant living in Queens - come into the hands of Meta Taverner, a young musicologist whose concert piano career was cut short by an injury. The gift comes with the request that Meta find the manuscript's true owner - a Prague friend the old woman has not heard from since the Second World War forced them apart - and to make the three-part sonata whole again. Leaving New York behind for the land of Dvorák and Kafka, Meta sets out on an unforgettable search to locate the remaining movements of the sonata and uncover a story that has influenced the course of many lives, even as it becomes clear that she isn't the only one seeking the music's secrets.

Read more less

Country & Townhouse's Best Book for Christmas, 2018A delectable anthology celebrating the finest writing on wine.In this richly literary anthology, Jay McInerney - bestselling novelist and acclaimed wine columnist for Town & Country, the Wall Street Journal and House and Garden - selects over twenty pieces of memorable fiction and nonfiction about the making, selling and, of course, drinking of fine wine.Including excerpts from novels, short fiction, memoir and narrative nonfiction, Wine Reads features big names in the trade and literary heavyweights alike. We follow Kermit Lynch to the Northern Rhône, while long-time New Yorker writer A. J. Liebling raises feeding and imbibing on a budget in Paris into something of an art form. Michael Dibdin's fictional Venetian detective Aurelio Zen gets a lesson in Barolo, Barbaresco and Brunello vintages from an eccentric celebrity, and writer and gourmet Joseph Wechsberg visits the medieval Château d'Yquem to sample different years of the roi des vins. Also showcasing an iconic scene from Rex Pickett's Sideways and work by Jancis Robinson, Roald Dahl, Auberon Waugh and McInerney himself, this is an essential volume for any disciple of Bacchus.

Read more less

WINNER OF THE 2019 JCB PRIZE FOR LITERATURESHORTLISTED FOR THE 2019 DSC PRIZE FOR SOUTH ASIAN LITERATUREAn elegant, epic debut novel that follows one young woman's search for a lost figure from her childhood, a journey that takes her from Southern India to Kashmir and to the brink of a devastating political and personal reckoning.In the wake of her mother's death, Shalini, a privileged and restless young woman from Bangalore, sets out for a remote Himalayan village in the troubled northern region of Kashmir. Certain that the loss of her mother is somehow connected to the decade-old disappearance of Bashir Ahmed, a charming Kashmiri salesman who frequented her childhood home, she is determined to confront him. But upon her arrival, Shalini is brought face to face with Kashmir's politics, as well as the tangled history of the local family that takes her in. And when life in the village turns volatile and old hatreds threaten to erupt into violence, Shalini finds herself forced to make a series of choices that could hold dangerous repercussions for the very people she has come to love. With rare acumen and evocative prose, in The Far Field Madhuri Vijay masterfully examines Indian politics, class prejudice, and sexuality through the lens of an outsider, offering a profound meditation on grief, guilt and the limits of compassion.Cosmo's one of the best books by BAME writers to get excited about in 2019Longlisted for the 2019 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction

Read more less

A blistering, timely and gripping novel set at Cambridge University, centring around an all-male dining club for the privileged and wealthy.Hans Stichler's uncomplicated German childhood ends abruptly when his aunt invites him to study at Cambridge, where she teaches. She will ensure his application is accepted, but in return he must help her investigate an elite university society, the Pitt Club, which has existed for centuries, its long legacy of tradition and privilege largely unquestioned. But there are secrets in the club's history, as well as in its present, and Hans soon finds himself in the inner sanctum of an increasingly dangerous institution, forced to grapple with the notion that sometimes one must do wrong to do right.

Read more less

When Ada Calhoun found herself in the throes of a midlife crisis, she thought that she had no right to complain. She was married with children and a good career. So why did she feel miserable? And why did it seem that other Generation X women were miserable, too? Calhoun decided to find some answers. She looked into housing costs, HR trends, credit card debt averages and divorce data. At every turn, she saw a pattern: sandwiched between the Boomers and the Millennials, Gen X women were facing new problems as they entered middle age, problems that were being largely overlooked. Speaking with women across America about their experiences as the generation raised to 'have it all,' Calhoun found that most were exhausted, terrified about money, under-employed, and overwhelmed. Instead of their issues being heard, they were told instead to lean in, take 'me-time' or make a chore chart to get their lives and homes in order. In Why We Can't Sleep, Calhoun opens up the cultural and political contexts of Gen X's predicament and offers solutions for how to pull oneself out of the abyss - and keep the next generation of women from falling in. The result is reassuring, empowering and essential reading for all middle-aged women, and anyone who hopes to understand them.

Read more less

The Covid-19 pandemic forced many of us to reimagine our homes, work, relationships and adapt to a new way of life - one with far fewer possibilities for interaction. And yet, in this period of intense isolation, we've faced dilemmas which are nearly universal. How to love, to care for aging parents, to find a home, attend to a planet in flux, fight for justice. This vast range of experiences is captured by our greatest storytellers, essayists and poets in Freeman's: Change.Some pieces explore the small moments that serve as new routines in a life lived at home, as in Joshua Bennett's essay, where a Coltrane playlist sets the stage for early morning dances with his newborn son. Sometimes, it's the absence of change that drives us to the edge. In Lina Mounzer's 'The Gamble,' a father's incessant hope for a better life festers and sinks the whole family after they leave Lebanon during the Civil War. And in 'Final Days,' Sayaka Murata imagines a future without aging, where people must choose how and when they want to die, consulting guidebooks like Let's Die Naturally! Super Deaths for Adults & The Best Spots.With new writing from Julia Alvarez, Sandra Cisneros, Zahia Rahman, Yoko Ogawa, Yasmine El Rashidi, Lina Meruane and Aleksandar Hemon, and featuring work from never-before-published writers like Elizabeth Ayre, Freeman's: Change opens a window into the many-sided ways we adapt.

Read more less

Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience - and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In Rock Concert, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there.Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock's stratospheric rise.Rock Concert provides a fascinating, immediate look at the evolution of rock 'n' roll through the lens of live performances, spanning the rise of R&B in the 1950s, through the hippie gatherings of the '60s, to the growing arena tours of the '70s and '80s. Elvis Presley's gyrating hips, the British Invasion that brought the Beatles in the '60s, the Grateful Dead's free flowing jams and Pink Floyd's The Wall are just a few of the defining musical acts that drive this rich narrative. Featuring dozens of key players in the history of rock and filled with colourful anecdotes, Rock Concert will speak to anyone who has experienced the transcendence of live rock.

Read more less

From her home on the California coast, Dalva hears the broad silence of the Nebraska prairie where she was born and longs for the son she gave up for adoption years before. Beautiful, fearless, tormented, at forty-five she has lived a life of lovers and adventures. Now, Dalva begins a journey that will take her back to the bosom of her family, to the half-Sioux lover of her youth and to a pioneering great-grandfather whose journals recount the bloody annihilation of the Plains Indians. On the way, she discovers a story that stretches from East to West, from the Civil War to Wounded Knee and Vietnam, and finds the balm to heal her wild and wounded soul.One of Harrison's most ambitious novels, Dalva explores an extraordinary family through the strong, engaging voice of an unforgettable woman, confirming Harrison as one of America's most memorable writers.

Read more less

'A brilliant and beautifully written book about capitalism and the patriarchy, about Dalit India and digital America, about power and family and love' Alex Preston, Observer, 'Fiction to look out for in 2022'Vauhini Vara's lyrical and thought-provoking debut novel begins in India in the 1950s, following a young man born into a Dalit family of coconut farmers in a remote village in Andhra Pradesh. King Rao, as he comes to be known, later moves to the US, where he studies in Seattle, meeting the love of his life and his business partner, the smart and self-assured Margie. King Rao ultimately rises up through Silicon Valley to become the most famous tech CEO in the world and the leader of a powerful, corporate-owned global government. Yet he ultimately ends up living on a remote island off the coast of Washington state, an exile from the world which he has helped build.There, in a beautiful home on an otherwise deserted island, he brings up his brilliant daughter, Athena. Shielded from the world's glances, in many ways she has an idyllic childhood, but she will be forced to reexamine her father's past and take steps to try to decide her own future. She is unlike other girls, and she will find the outside world much more hostile than her father did when he left the coconut grove he called home.A profound and moving novel about technology, consciousness and revolution, The Immortal King Rao asks how we build the worlds in which we live, and whether we ever have the power to leave them?

Read more less

In the sixty-four days between November 3 and January 6, President Donald Trump and his allies fought to reverse the outcome of the vote. Focusing on six states - Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin - Trump''s supporters claimed widespread voter fraud.Caught up in this effort were scores of activists, lawyers, judges and state and local officials, among them Rohn Bishop, enthusiastic chairman of the Fond Du Lac, Wisconsin, Republican Party, who would be branded a traitor for refusing to say his state''s election was tainted, and Ruby Freeman, a part-time ballot counter in Atlanta who found herself accused of being a ''professional vote scammer'' by the President. Working with a team of researchers and reporters, Mark Bowden and Matthew Teague uncover never-before-told accounts from the election officials fighting to do their jobs amid outlandish claims and threats to themselves, their colleagues and their families. The Steal

Read more less

Centered around the 1986 attempt on the life of Augusto Pinochet, an event that changed Chile forever, My Tender Matador is one of the most explosive, controversial, and popular novels to have been published in that country in decades. It is spring 1986 in the city of Santiago, and Augusto Pinochet is losing his grip on power. In one of the city's many poor neighborhoods works the Queen of the Corner, a hopeless and lonely romantic who embroiders linens for the wealthy and listens to boleros to drown out the gunshots and rioting in the streets. Along comes Carlos, a young, handsome man who befriends the aging homosexual and uses his house to store mysterious boxes and hold clandestine meetings. My Tender Matador is an extraordinary novel of revolution and forbidden love, and a stirring portrait of Chile at an historical crossroads. By turns funny and profoundly moving, Pedro Lemebel's lyrical prose offers an intimate window into the mind of Pinochet himself as the world of Carlos and the Queen prepares to collide with the dictator's own in a fantastic and unexpected way.

Read more less

Sherman Alexie's stature as a writer of stories, poems, and novels has soared over the course of his twenty-book, twenty-year career. His wide-ranging, acclaimed stories from the last two decades, from The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven to his most recent PEN/Faulkner award-winning War Dances, have established him as a star in modern literature. A bold and irreverent observer of life among Native Americans in the Pacific Northwest, the daring, versatile, funny, and outrageous Alexie showcases all his talents in his newest collection, Blasphemy, where he unites fifteen beloved classics with fifteen new stories in one sweeping anthology for devoted fans and first-time readers. Included here are some of his most esteemed tales, including "What You Pawn I Will Redeem," "This is What it Means to Say Phoenix, Arizona," "The Toughest Indian in the World," and "War Dances." Alexie's new stories are fresh and quintessential-about donkey basketball leagues, lethal wind turbines, the reservation, marriage, and all species of contemporary American warriors.An indispensable collection of new and classic stories, Blasphemy reminds us, on every thrilling page, why Sherman Alexie is one of our greatest contemporary writers and a true master of the short story.

Read more less

Songs that sell the most copies become hits, but some of those hits become something more - iconic recordings that not only inspire a generation but also alter the direction of music. In this follow-up to his classic Anatomy of a Song, writer and music historian Marc Myers tells the stories behind fifty-five more rock, pop, R&B, country and reggae hits through intimate interviews with the artists who wrote and recorded them.Part oral history, part musical analysis, Anatomy of 55 More Songs ranges from Creedence Clearwater Revival's 'Bad Moon Rising' to Dionne Warwick's 'Walk On By', The Beach Boys' 'Good Vibrations' and Black Sabbath's 'Paranoid'. Bernie Taupin recalls how he wrote the lyrics to Elton John's 'Rocket Man'; Joan Jett remembers channeling her rage against how she had been unfairly labeled and treated into 'Bad Reputation' and Ozzy Osbourne, Elvis Costello, Bob Weir, Sheryl Crow, Alice Cooper, Roberta Flack, John Mellencamp, Keith Richards, Carly Simon and many others reveal the emotions and technique behind their major works.

Read more less

'Will Self may not be the last modernist at work but at the moment he's the most fascinating of the tradition's torch bearers.' New YorkFrom one of the most unusual and distinctive writers working today, dubbed 'the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation' by the Guardian, Will Self's Why Read is a cornucopia of thoughtful and brilliantly witty essays on writing and literature.Self takes us with him: from the foibles of his typewriter repairman to the irradiated exclusion zone of Chernobyl, to the Australian outback and to literary forms past and future. With his characteristic intellectual brio, Self aims his inimitable eye at titans of literature like Woolf, Kafka, Orwell and Conrad. He writes movingly on W.G. Sebald's childhood in Germany and provocatively describes the elevation of William S. Burroughs's Junky from shocking pulp novel to beloved cult classic. Self also expands on his regular column in Literary Hub to ask readers how, what and ultimately why we should read in an ever-changing world. Whether he is writing on the rise of the bookshelf as an item of furniture in the nineteenth century or on the impossibility of Googling his own name in a world lived online, Self's trademark intoxicating prose and mordant, energetic humour infuse every piece.

Read more less

Dark, disturbing and deliciously twisty, Reptile Memoirs is a biting and brilliant exploration of the cold-bloodedness of humanity - perfect for fans of Gillian Flynn, Jo Nesbø and Tana French.What readers are saying about Reptile Memoirs'Truly unusual and terrifying' 'Dark, heart-wrenching and creepy''Graphic''Dark, challenging and unforgettable''Chilling''Not for the faint hearted''Unique, dark and disturbing, gripping and very, very clever'Liv has a lot of secrets. Late one night, in the aftermath of a party in the apartment she shares with two friends in Ålesund, she sees a python on a TV nature show and becomes obsessed with the idea of buying a snake as a pet. Soon Nero, a baby Burmese python, becomes the apartment's fourth roommate. As Liv bonds with Nero, she is struck by a desire that surprises her with its intensity. Finally she is safe.Thirteen years later, in the nearby town of Kristiansund, Mariam Lind goes on a shopping trip with her eleven-year-old daughter, Iben. Following an argument Mariam storms off, expecting her young daughter to make her own way home . . . but she never does. Detective Roe Olsvik, new to the Kristiansund police department, is assigned to the case of Iben's disappearance. As he interrogates Mariam, he instantly suspects her - but there is much more to this case and these characters than their outer appearances would suggest.A biting and constantly shifting tale of family secrets, rebirth and the legacy of trauma, Reptile Memoirs is a brilliant exploration of the cold-bloodedness of humanity.

Read more less

Decades after the rise of rock music in the 1950s, the rock concert retains its allure and its power as a unifying experience - and as an influential multi-billion-dollar industry. In Rock Concert, acclaimed interviewer Marc Myers sets out to uncover the history of this compelling phenomenon, weaving together ground-breaking accounts from the people who were there.Myers combines the tales of icons like Joan Baez, Ian Anderson, Alice Cooper, Steve Miller, Roger Waters and Angus Young with figures such as the disc jockeys who first began playing rock on the radio; the audio engineers that developed new technologies to accommodate ever-growing rock audiences; music journalists, like Rolling Stone's Cameron Crowe; and the promoters who organized it all, like Michael Lang, co-founder of Woodstock, to create a rounded and vivid account of live rock's stratospheric rise.Rock Concert provides a fascinating, immediate look at the evolution of rock 'n' roll through the lens of live performances, spanning the rise of R&B in the 1950s, through the hippie gatherings of the '60s, to the growing arena tours of the '70s and '80s. Elvis Presley's gyrating hips, the British Invasion that brought the Beatles in the '60s, the Grateful Dead's free flowing jams and Pink Floyd's The Wall are just a few of the defining musical acts that drive this rich narrative. Featuring dozens of key players in the history of rock and filled with colourful anecdotes, Rock Concert will speak to anyone who has experienced the transcendence of live rock.

Read more less

'Remarkable lives in extraordinary times - a gripping and exceptional literary journey.' Philippe Sands'Alexander Wolff is keen, after a generation of silence, to follow the untold stories wherever they might lead.' Claire Messud, Harpers Magazine'As riveting as the fiction the Wolffs themselves have published, and deeply affecting.' NewsweekIn 2017, acclaimed journalist Alexander Wolff moved to Berlin to take up a long-deferred task: learning his family's history. His grandfather Kurt Wolff set up his own publishing firm in 1910 at the age of twenty-three, publishing Franz Kafka, Émile Zola, Anton Chekhov and others whose books would be burned by the Nazis. In 1933, Kurt and his wife Helen fled to France and Italy, and later to New York, where they would bring books including Doctor Zhivago, The Leopard and The Tin Drum to English-speaking readers.Meanwhile, Kurt's son Niko, born from an earlier marriage, was left behind in Germany. Despite his Jewish heritage, he served in the German army and ended up in an prisoner of war camp before emigrating to the US in 1948. As Alexander gains a better understanding of his taciturn father's life, he finds secrets that never made it to America and is forced to confront his family's complex relationship with the Nazis.This stunning account of a family navigating wartime and its aftershocks brilliantly evokes the perils, triumphs and secrets of history and exile.

Read more less

The New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. In Farmer, he tells the story of Joseph, a forty-three-year-old farmer-schoolteacher who suddenly finds himself at a crossroads. Forced to choose between two lovers—one a younger woman, the other his beautiful childhood friend—he must also decide whether or not to stay on the farm or finally seek the wider, more broader horizons he has avoided all his life. Returning Harrison fans will be ecstatic to find this in print once again, and for new readers, this work serves as the perfect introduction to Harrison’s remarkable insight, storytelling, and evocation of the natural world.

Read more less

From the DSC award-winning author of Home Boy comes the exuberantly told, fresh tale of one gloriously unaccomplished man, his impending death, and the history and life of his bustling, shape-shifting city, Karachi

Read more less

From the Los Angeles Times Book Prize–winning historian, the colorful, dramatic story of Charles Darwin’s journey on HMS Beagle that inspired the evolutionary theories in his path-breaking books On the Origin of Species and The Descent of ManWhen twenty-two-year-old aspiring geologist Charles Darwin boarded HMS Beagle in 1831 with his microscopes and specimen bottles—invited by ship’s captain Robert FitzRoy who wanted a travel companion at least as much as a ship’s naturalist—he hardly thought he was embarking on what would become perhaps the most important and epoch-changing voyage in scientific history. Nonetheless, over the course of the five-year journey around the globe in often hard and hazardous conditions, Darwin would make observations and gather samples that would form the basis of his revolutionary theories about the origin of species and natural selection.Drawing on a rich range of revealing letters, diary entries, recollections of those who encountered him, and Darwin’s and FitzRoy’s own accounts of what transpired, Diana Preston chronicles the epic voyage as it unfolded, tracing Darwin’s growth from untested young man to accomplished adventurer and natural scientist in his own right. Darwin often left the ship to climb mountains, navigate rivers, or ride hundreds of miles, accompanied by local guides whose languages he barely understood, across pampas and through rainforests in search of further unique specimens. From the wilds of Patagonia to the Galápagos and other Atlantic and Pacific islands, as Preston vibrantly relates, Darwin collected and contrasted volcanic rocks and fossils large and small, witnessed an earthquake, and encountered the Argentinian rhea, Falklands fox, and Galápagos finch, through which he began to discern connections between deep past and present.Darwin never left Britain again after his return in 1836, though his mind journeyed far and wide to develop the theories that were first revealed, after great delay and with trepidation about their reception, in 1859 with the publication of his epochal book On the Origin of Species. Offering a unique portrait of one of history’s most consequential figures, The Evolution of Charles Darwin is a vital contribution to our understanding of life on Earth.

Read more less