Search results for ""Overlook Press""

If you want to understand how our world works, the periodic table holds the answers. When the seventh row of the periodic table of elements was completed in June 2016 with the addition of four final elements—nihonium, moscovium, tennessine, and oganesson—we at last could identify all the ingredients necessary to construct our world.In Elemental, chemist and science educator Tim James provides an informative, entertaining, and quirkily illustrated guide to the table that shows clearly how this abstract and seemingly jumbled graphic is relevant to our day-to-day lives.James tells the story of the periodic table from its ancient Greek roots, when you could count the number of elements humans were aware of on one hand, to the modern alchemists of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries who have used nuclear chemistry and physics to generate new elements and complete the periodic table. In addition to this, he answers questions such as: What is the chemical symbol for a human? What would happen if all of the elements were mixed together? Which liquid can teleport through walls? Why is the medieval dream of transmuting lead into gold now a reality?Whether you're studying the periodic table for the first time or are simply interested in the fundamental building blocks of the universe—from the core of the sun to the networks in your brain—Elemental is the perfect guide.

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In the years between Germany's defeat in World War I and the reign of the Nazis, the underground clubs and cabarets of Berlin pulsed with the frenetic energy of rebellion. Suspended on the precipice of global catastrophe, a young counterculture emerged in the Weimar capital, where—if only for a moment—races and religions mixed, jazz music resounded, and liquor flowed in abundance. In Harold Nebenzal's daring, suspenseful novel Café Berlin, this high-flying scene forms the backdrop for a thrilling tale of love and the universal human yearning to be free, even under the yoke of totalitarianism. Daniel Saporta is a young Jewish immigrant from Damascus, who comes to Berlin in search of fame, fortune, or at least a good party. He begins a tumultuous love affair with Samira, an exotic dancer secretly under the employ of British Intelligence. When Samira uncovers a conspiracy involving Adolf Hitler and the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, Daniel is drawn inexorably into an underground world of espionage, sex, and dire political stakes. Presented as a series of diary entries written years later, while Daniel is in hiding during the war, Café Berlin recounts his fleeting memory of the club and the German society now laid waste by the war. First published by Overlook to great acclaim in 1991, Café Berlin is available once again, offering an incredible story of decadence and defiance during Nazi Germany's rise to power.

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From ancient Malay settlements to Spanish colonization, the American occupation and beyond, A History of the Philippines recasts various Philippine narratives with an eye for the layers of colonial and post-colonial history that have created this diverse and fascinating population. A History of the Philippines begins with the pre-Westernized Philippines in the 16th century and continues through the 1899 Philippine-American War, the nation's relationship with the United States’ controlling presence, culminating with its independence in 1946 and two ongoing insurgencies, one Islamic and one Communist. Luis H. Francia creates an illuminating portrait that offers the reader valuable insights into the heart and soul of the modern Filipino, laying bare the multicultural, multiracial society of contemporary times.

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But Elizabeth is forced to confront a new reality as her carefree eldest son comes to terms with his impending deployment overseas and her younger son discovers the father they all revered left them deeply in debt. Together, the family must let go of the life they’ve always known as the world around them changes forever. The Snow Geese had its world premiere in October 2013 a joint production of Manhattan Theatre Club with MCC Theater, starring Mary-Louise Parker and directed by Daniel Sullivan.

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Neil LaBute burst onto the American theater scene with the premiere of BASH at NYC’s Douglas Fairbanks Theater in 1999 in a wildly praised production that featured Calista Flockhart, Paul Rudd, and Ron Eldard. It went on to play at the Almeida Theatre in London and since then has seen hundreds of productions across the U.S. and around the world. These three provocative one-act plays examine the complexities of evil in everyday life and thrillingly exhibit LaBute’s signature raw lyrical intensity. Ablaze with the muscular dialogue and searing artistry that immediately established him as a major playwright, BASH is enduringly brilliant—classic and essential Neil LaBute. In Medea Redux, a young woman relates her complex and ultimately tragic relationship with her high school English teacher; in Iphigenia in Orem, a businessman confides to a stranger in a Las Vegal hotel room about a chilling crime; and in A Gaggle of Saints, a young couple separately recounts the violent events of an anniversary weekend in New York City.

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Every encounter begins with a greeting, and different cultures have developed innumerable ways of showing pleasure at someone’s arrival. Humans have been greeting each other for thousands of years, so it should be the most straightforward thing in the world, but this seemingly simple act is fraught with complications, leading to awkward misunderstandings, intercultural fumblings, and social gaffes that can potentially fracture relationships forever. Why is that? Why are greetings so important? Is there a right and wrong way to say hello? In his illuminating book One Kiss or Two?, Andy Scott—a well-traveled former diplomat and no stranger to botched first contacts himself—takes a closer look at what greetings are all about. In examining how they have developed over human history, he uncovers a kaleidoscopic world of etiquette, body-language, evolution, neuroscience, anthropology, and history. Through in-depth research and his personal experience, and with the help of experts ranging from the world-famous primatologist Jane Goodall to top sociologist Erving Goffman, Scott takes readers on a captivating journey through a subject far richer than we might have expected. By the end of it, we are able to make more sense of what lies behind greetings—and what it means to be human in the modern, cross-cultural age.

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Before Call of Duty, before World of Warcraft, before even Super Mario Bros., the video game industry exploded in the late 1970s with the advent of the video arcade. Leading the charge was Atari Inc., the creator of, among others, the iconic game Missile Command. The first game to double as a commentary on culture, Missile Command put the players’ fingers on “the button,” making them responsible for the fate of civilization in a no-win scenario, all for the price of a quarter. The game was marvel of modern culture, helping usher in both the age of the video game and the video game lifestyle. Its groundbreaking implications inspired a fanatical culture that persists to this day.As fascinating as the cultural reaction to Missile Command were the programmers behind it. Before the era of massive development teams and worship of figures like Steve Jobs, Atari was manufacturing arcade machines designed, written, and coded by individual designers. As earnings from their games entered the millions, these creators were celebrated as geniuses in their time; once dismissed as nerds and fanatics, they were now being interviewed for major publications, and partied like Wall Street traders. However, the toll on these programmers was high: developers worked 120-hour weeks, often opting to stay in the office for days on end while under a deadline. Missile Command creator David Theurer threw himself particularly fervently into his work, prompting not only declining health and a suffering relationship with his family, but frequent nightmares about nuclear annihilation. To truly tell the story from the inside, tech insider and writer Alex Rubens has interviewed numerous major figures from this time: Nolan Bushnell, founder of Atari; David Theurer, the creator of Missile Command; and Phil Klemmer, writer for the NBC series Chuck, who wrote an entire episode for the show about Missile Command and its mythical “kill screen.” Taking readers back to the days of TaB cola, dot matrix printers, and digging through the couch for just one more quarter, Alex Rubens combines his knowledge of the tech industry and experience as a gaming journalist to conjure the wild silicon frontier of the 8-bit ’80s. 8-Bit Apocalypse: The Untold Story of Atari's Missile Command offers the first in-depth, personal history of an era for which fans have a lot of nostalgia.

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Things We Said Today features the scripts for Neil LaBute’s groundbreaking Directv project 10x10—a series of short films written and directed by LaBute based on ten compelling original monologues, five each for men and women. Also included are five short plays displaying the power and scope of Neil LaBute’s creative vision. In Pick One, three white guys come up with a way to solve America’s problems; in The Possible one young woman seduces another’s boyfriend for an unexpected reason. Call Back features an actress and actor who spar about a past encounter that she, unnervingly, remembers much better than he does. Good Luck (In Farsi), “a pleasingly astringent study in competitiveness and vanity” (The New York Times) has two actresses pulling out all the stops in a preaudition psych out; and in Squeeze Play a father and his son’s baseball coach strike a mutually beneficial deal. Rounding out the collection are two monologues commissioned as part of Centerstage’s “My America” project.

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When star sex blogger and memoirist Ethan, 24, tracks down his idol, the gifted but obscure 40ish novelist Olivia, he finds they each crave what the other possesses. As attraction turns to sex, and they inch closer to getting what they want, both must confront the dark side of ambition and the near impossibility of reinventing oneself when the past is only a click away. Sex with Strangers had its world premiere at Steppenwolf Theatre Company; it will have its New York premiere at Second Stage Theatre in June 2014, directed by David Schwimmer.

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The title play, which had its American premiere at La MaMa in 2012, rivetingly explores the relationship between a nervous older man and a glib young prostitute, as their evening together drives toward a startling conclusion. Also included is the one-act play The Great War, which looks at a divorcing couple and the ground they need to cross to reach their own end of hostilities; In the Beginning, which was written as a response to the Occupy movement and produced around the world in 2012-13 as part of Theatre Uncut; The Wager, the stage version of the film Double or Nothing starring Adam Brody; the two-handers A Guy Walks Into a Bar, Over the River and Through the Woods, and Strange Fruit; and two powerful new monologues, Bad Girl and The Pony of Love.

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The first biography of the glamorous and scandalous Miriam Leslie—a titan of publishing and an unsung hero of women’s suffrage—connecting Gilded Age opulence with present-day social justiceAmong the fabled tycoons of the Gilded Age—Carnegie, Rockefeller, Vanderbilt—is a forgotten figure: Mrs. Frank Leslie. For 20 years she ran the country’s largest publishing company, Frank Leslie Enterprises, which chronicled the postbellum United States in dozens of weeklies and monthlies. A pioneer in an all-male industry, she made a fortune and became a national celebrity in the process. But Miriam Leslie was also a byword for scandal: She flouted feminine convention, took lovers, married four times, and harbored unsavory secrets which she concealed through a skein of lies and multiple personas. Both before and after her death, glimpses of the truth emerged, including an illegitimate birth and a checkered youth. At the end, Leslie, a staunch royalist and member of the ultra-elite, willed her multimillion-dollar estate to women’s suffrage, providing enough funding to guarantee the passage of the 19th Amendment. A dazzling biography, Diamonds & Deadlines reveals the unknown, sensational life of the brilliant and brazen “Empress of Journalism” who presaged the feminist future and reflected, in bold relief, the Gilded Age, one of the most momentous, seismic, and vivid epochs in American history.

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The poster art from the noir era has a bold look and an iconography all its own. During noir's golden age, studios commissioned these arresting illustrations for even the lowliest "B" thriller. The Art of Noir is the first book to present this striking artwork in a lavishly produced, large-format, full-color volume. The more than 300 dazzling posters and other promotional material range from the classics to rare archive films such as The Devil Thumbs a Ride and Blonde Kiss. With rare offerings from around the world and background information on the illustrators, The Art of Noir is the ultimate companion for movie buffs and collectors, as well as artists and designers.

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It's the 21st-century and everything about the space industry is changing, and leading that charge are private sector companies including Elon Musk's SpaceX and Jeff Bezos's Blue Origin, which are building a dizzying array of new spacecraft and rockets, not just for government use, but for any paying customer. At the heart of this space revolution are spaceports, the center and literal launching pads of spaceflight. Spaceports cost hundreds of millions of dollars, face extreme competition, and host operations that do not tolerate failures—which can often be fatal. Aerospace journalist Joe Pappalardo has witnessed space rocket launches around the world, from the jungle of French Guiana to the coastline of California. In his comprehensive work Spaceport Earth, Pappalardo describes the rise of private companies and how they are reshaping the way the world is using space for industry and science. Spaceport Earth is a travelogue through modern space history as it is being made, offering space enthusiasts, futurists, and technology buffs a close perspective of rockets and launch sites, and chronicling the stories of industrial titans, engineers, government officials, billionaires, schemers, and politicians who are redefining what it means for humans to be a spacefaring species.

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In Legends of the Samurai, Hiroaki Sato confronts both the history and the legend of the samurai, untangling the two to present an authentic picture of these legendary warriors. Through his masterful translations of original samurai tales, laws, dicta, reports, and arguments accompanied by insightful commentary, Sato chronicles the changing ethos of the Japanese warrior from the samurai's historical origins to his rise to political power. A fascinating look at Japanese history as seen through the evolution of the samurai, Legends of the Samurai stands as the ultimate authority on its subject.

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Daumal's symbolic mountain represents a way to truth that "cannot not exist," and his classic allegory of man's search for himself embraces the certainty that one can know and conquer one's own reality. In this novel/allegory the narrator/author sets sail in the yacht Impossible to search for Mount Analogue, the geographically located, albeit hidden, peak that reaches inexorably toward heaven. Daumal's symbolic mountain represents a way to truth that "cannot not exist," and his classic allegory of man's search for himself embraces the certainty that one can know and conquer one's own reality.

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Whiteshift: the turbulent journey from a world of racially homogeneous white majorities to one of racially hybrid majorities This is the century of whiteshift. As Western societies are becoming increasingly mixed-race, demographic change is transforming politics. Over half of American babies are non-white, and by the end of the century, minorities and those of mixed race are projected to form the majority in the UK and other countries. The early stages of this transformation have led to a populist disruption, tearing a path through the usual politics of left and right. Ethnic transformation will continue, but conservative whites are unlikely to exit quietly; their feelings of alienation are already redrawing political lines and convulsing societies across the West. One of the most crucial challenges of our time is to enable conservatives as well as cosmopolitans to view whiteshift as a positive development. In this groundbreaking book, political scientist Eric Kaufmann examines the evidence to explore ethnic change in North American and Western Europe. Tracing four ways of dealing with this transformation—fight, repress, flight, and join—he charts different scenarios and calls for us to move beyond empty talk about national identity. If we want to avoid more radical political divisions, he argues, we have to open up debate about the future of white majorities. Deeply thought provoking, enriched with illustrative stories, and drawing on detailed and extraordinary survey, demographic, and electoral data, Whiteshift will redefine the way we discuss race in the twenty-first century.

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Before acclaimed playwright and filmmaker Neil LaBute became the creator and showrunner of Syfy's new hit series Van Helsing, he had already adapted Bram Stoker's Dracula for the stage—with a fierce female Van Helsing as the vampire hunter. In this masterful adaptation, Neil LaBute brings a rich theatricality and his powerful and provocative way with language and story to the world of Count Dracula, Van Helsing, Jonathan Harker, and his beloved Mina—this time, with a mind of her own—infusing the classic gothic tale of terror, obsession, and pathos with a modern edge. Chilling yet stylish in its atmosphere, dark yet deeply human in its emotional impact, Neil LaBute's Dracula: A Thriller in Two Acts is a tribute to both Neil LaBute's dramatic vision and the timelessness of Stoker's novel.

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Spring 1941 was a high point for the Axis war machine. Western Europe was conquered; southeastern Europe was falling, Great Britain on its heels; and Rommel’s Afrika Korps was freshly arrived to drive on the all-important Suez Canal. In Blood, Oil and the Axis, historian John Broich tells the story of Iraq and the Levant during this most pivotal time of the war. The browbeaten Allied forces had one last remaining hope for turning the war in their favor: the Axis running through its fuel supply. But when the Golden Square—four Iraqi generals allegiant to the Axis cause—staged a coup in Iraq, elevating a pro-German junta and prompting military cooperation between Vichy French–occupied Syria and Lebanon and the Axis, disaster loomed. Blood, Oil and the Axis follows those who participated in the Allies’ frantic, improvised, and unlikely response to this dire threat: Palestinian and Jordanian Arabs, Australians, American and British soldiers, Free French Foreign Legionnaires, and Jewish Palestinians, all who shared a desperate, bloody purpose in quashing the formation of an Axis state in the Middle East. Memorable figures of this makeshift alliance include Jack Hasey, a young American who ran off to fight with the Free French Foreign Legion before his own country entered the war; Freya Stark, a famous travel-writer-turned-government-agent; and even Roald Dahl, a twenty-three-year-old Royal Air Force recruit (and future author of beloved children’s books). Taking the reader on a tour of cities and landscapes grimly familiar to today’s reader—from a bombed-out Fallujah, to Baghdad, to Damascus—Blood, Oil and the Axis is poised to become the definitive chronicle of the Axis’s menacing play for Iraq and the Levant in 1941 and the extraordinary alliance that confronted it.

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When morning-after gossip about privileged Davis and ambitious Leigh turns ugly, self-interest collides with the truth and the resulting storm of ambiguity makes it hard to discern just who’s a victim, who’s a predator, and who’s a Future Leader of America. All that’s certain is when the veneer of loyalty and friendship is stripped back, what’s revealed is a vicious jungle of sexual politics, raw ambition, and class warfare where only the strong could possibly survive.

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Titus is expected to rule this extraordinary kingdom and his eccentric and wayward subjects. But with the arrival of an ambitious kitchen boy, Steerpike, the established order is thrown into disarray. Over the course of these three novels—Titus Groan, Gormenghast, and Titus Alone— Titus must contend with a kingdom about to implode beneath the weight of centuries of intrigue, treachery, manipulation, and murder.Intoxicating, rich, and unique, The Gormenghast Trilogy is a tour de force that ranks as one of the twentieth century's most remarkable feats of imaginative writing. This special edition, published for the centenary of Mervyn Peake's birth, is accompanied by over one hundred of Peake's dazzling drawings.

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The remarkable play of a young girl’s personal and emotional Holocaust journey Sala Garncarz, daughter of a rabbi and the youngest of 11 children, was 16 in 1940 when she volunteered to take her sister’s place in a Nazi work camp. Over the next ?ve years, she endured seven camps and collected, at great risk to herself, a cache of more than 350 letters, postcards, photographs, and other documents sent to her and others during that time. Sala survived the war and moved to America, where, more than 50 years later, she and her family donated her remarkable collection of letters and documents to the New York Public Library, where it went on to earn wide attention. Through these letters that Sala managed to hide and keep safe, Letters to Sala tells the story of her experiences and those of others in the web of Nazi labor camps in occupied Europe, a less-documented and less-familiar aspect of the Holocaust. Adapted by award-winning playwright Arlene Hutton from the book Sala’s Gift by Ann Kirschner, Letters to Sala has been produced off-Broadway at The Barrow Group and with more than 100 productions.

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Available again, the enduring, iconic volume showcasing the key early-career work and process of the godfather of modern graphic design Milton Glaser: Graphic Design, perhaps the most famous book of its kind, explores the early decades of America’s pre-eminent graphic artist. Glaser’s work ranges from the psychedelic Bob Dylan poster to book and record covers; from store and restaurant design to toy creations; and magazine formats including New York magazine and logotypes, all of which define the look of our time. Here Glaser undertakes not only a remarkably wide-ranging representation of his oeuvre from the incredibly fertile early years, but, in a new introduction, speaks of the influences on his work, the responsibilities of the artist, the hierarchies of the traditional art world, and the role of graphic design in the area of his creative growth. First published in 1973, Milton Glaser: Graphic Design is an extraordinary achievement and indisputably a classic in the field.

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