Search results for ""Picador""

Jonathan Raban's Soft City is a compelling exploration of urban life: a classic in the literature of the city. First published in the 1970s, it is now more relevant to today’s overcrowded planet than ever.With an introduction by Iain Sinclair.In the city we can live deliberately: inventing and renewing ourselves, carving out journeys, creating private spaces. But in the city we are also afraid of being alone, clinging to the structures of daily life to ward off the chaos around us.How is it that the noisy, jostling, overwhelming metropolis leaves us at once so energized and so fragile? In Soft City, Jonathan Raban, one of our most acclaimed novelists and travel writers seeks to find out.'A psychological handbook for urban survival' – Sunday Telegraph

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A ruthless satire of academic life, The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury is a witty campus novel and one of the most influential books of the 1970s.With an introduction by James Naughtie.Take a Valium. Have a party. Go on a demo. Shoot a soldier. Make a bang. Bed a friend. That’s your problem-solving system . . . But haven’t we tried all that?Howard Kirk, product of the Swinging Sixties, radical university lecturer, and one half of a very modern marriage, is throwing a party. The night will have all sorts of repercussions: for Henry Beamish, Howard’s desperate and easily neglected friend, and for Howard’s wife, promiscuous ’70s liberal and exhausted victim of motherhood.Funny, disconcerting and provocative, Bradbury's classic novel brilliantly satirizes a world of academic power struggles as his anti-hero seduces his away around campus. But is also reveals a marriage in crisis and demonstrates the fragility of the human heart.

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With an introduction by Evie WyldThe Idea of Perfection by Kate Grenville is a funny and touching romance between two people who've given up on love. Set in the eccentric little backwater of Karakarook, New South Wales, pop. 1374, it tells the story of Douglas Cheeseman, a gawky engineer with jug-handle ears, and Harley Savage, a woman altogether too big and too abrupt for comfort. Harley is in Karakarook to foster 'Heritage', and Douglas is there to pull down the quaint old Bent Bridge. From day one, they're on a collision course. But out of this unpromising conjunction of opposites, something unexpected happens: sometimes even better than perfection.

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Kate Clanchy was born and grew up in Scotland but now lives in England. She is a popular poet: her collections, Slattern, Samarkand and Newborn have brought her many literary awards and an unusually wide audience. She has also written extensively for Radio 4 and reviews and writes comment for the Guardian.

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With an introduction by Jonathan LethemIt is 1913, and Viennese high society is determined to find an appropriate way of celebrating the seventieth jubilee of the accession of Emperor Franz Josef. But as the aristocracy tries to salvage something illustrious out of the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the ordinary Viennese world is beginning to show signs of more serious rebellion. Caught in the middle of this social labyrinth is Ulrich: youngish, rich, an ex-soldier, seducer and scientist.Unable to deceive himself that the jumble of attributes and values that his world has bestowed on him amounts to anything so innate as a 'character', he is effectively a man 'without qualities', a brilliant, detached observer of the spinning, racing society around him. Part satire, part visionary epic, part intellectual tour de force, The Man Without Qualities by Robert Musil is a work of immeasurable importance.

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Beautiful and brutal, two young cowboys come of age in The Border Trilogy – Cormac McCarthy's award-winning requiem for the American frontier.'A landmark in American literature' – GuardianWith an introduction from Rachel Kushner, author of The Mars Room.During the middle of the twentieth century, two teenage boys leave their childhoods behind across the US-Mexico border.John Grady Cole will search for his future to the south, a friend by his side, finding adventure and barbarism in the vanishing world of the Old West. Billy Parnham, after deciding not to kill her, will be drawn to the mountains of Mexico accompanied by a lone, pregnant wolf. When the two boys come together as men, in the trilogy's final volume, a dangerous chain of events will bring this story to its savage, inevitable conclusion.A stunning saga of loyalty and love, filled equally with sorrow and humour, The Border Trilogy is a powerful story of two friends growing up in a world where blood and violence are conditions of life.'In these three fierce, desolate, beautiful novels, McCarthy has created a masterpiece' – Sunday TimesThis edition collects all three novels in the Border Trilogy: All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing and Cities of the Plain.Praise for Cormac McCarthy‘McCarthy worked close to some religious impulse, his books were terrifying and absolute’ – Anne Enright, author of The Green Road and The Wren, The Wren'His prose takes on an almost biblical quality, hallucinatory in its effect and evangelical in its power' – Stephen King, author of The Shining and the Dark Tower series'[I]n presenting the darker human impulses in his rich prose, [McCarthy] showed readers the necessity of facing up to existence' – Annie Proulx, author of Brokeback Mountain

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With an introduction by Anne EnrightBefore the real city could be seen it had to be imagined, the way rumours and tall tales were a kind of charting.It is the 1920s, and Patrick Lewis has arrived in the bustling city of Toronto, leaving behind his Canadian wilderness home. Immersed in the lives of the people who surround him – the immigrants building the city, as well as those who dreamed it into being – Patrick begins to learn, from their stories, the history of the city itself. And he has his own adventures: searching for a missing millionaire, tunnelling beneath Lake Ontario, falling in love.In the Skin of a Lion is Michael Ondaatje's sparkling predecessor to his Booker Prize-winning The English Patient. Here we encounter Hana the orphaned girl and Caravaggio the thief for the first time, as well as a large cast of other characters, all lovingly and intimately portrayed. Exquisite and musical, In the Skin of a Lion is a novel that challenges the boundary between history and myth. It is a stunning modern classic.

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A collection of the New Yorker critic's finest essays, which examine the books that reveal and record our world.Joan Acocella was one of our finest cultural critics (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it-its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the final decade and a half of Acocella's career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: life and art. In agile, inspired prose, she moves from J. R. R. Tolkie

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Tom Wolfe at his very best (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar-winning film of the same name and the eight-part Disney+ miniseries.Reissued for today's reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast and an introduction by the New York Times bestselling author Robin Sloan.What does it take to be an astronaut?First published in 1979, Tom Wolfe's astounding book The Right Stuff answers this question and more, exploring both the mental and the physical sacrifices that must be made by individuals entering space. Wolfe tells the stories of the pilots, engineers, and astronauts involved in Project Mercury (19581963), the United States' first human spaceflight program.A breathtaking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the heroism and courage of the first American astronauts to conquer space, The Right Stuff is a true Amer

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NOW COLLECTED INTO ONE VOLUME FOR THE FIRST TIME, ALL FIVE INSTALLMENTS OF EDWARD ST. AUBYN''S CELEBRATED PATRICK MELROSE NOVELSNow a Showtime TV series starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Blythe DannerEdward St. Aubyn has penned one of the most acclaimed series of the decade with the Patrick Melrose Novels. Now you can read all five novels in one volume: Never Mind, Bad News, Mother''s Milk, Some Hope, and At Last.By turns harrowing and hilarious, this ambitious novel cycle dissects the English upper class. Edward St. Aubyn offers his reader the often darkly funny and self-loathing world of privilege as we follow Patrick Melrose''s story of abuse, addiction, and recovery from the age of five into early middle age.The Patrick Melrose Novels are a memorable tour de force (The New York Times Book Review) by one of the most brilliant English novelists of his generation (Alan Hollinghurst).

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A Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year Long-listed for the Plutarch AwardA bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited. A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themesand on nude drawings of male models that he kept

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Winner of the Bancroft Prize The Minutemen and Their World, first published in 1976, is reissued now in a revised and expanded edition with a new preface and afterword by the author.On April 19, 1775, the American Revolution began at the Old North Bridge in Concord, Massachusetts. The shot heard round the world catapulted this sleepy New England town into the midst of revolutionary fervor, and Concord went on to become the intellectual capital of the new republic. The townfuture home to Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthornesoon came to symbolize devotion to liberty, intellectual freedom, and the stubborn integrity of rural life. In The Minutemen and Their World, Robert A. Gross has written a remarkably subtle and detailed reconstruction of the lives and community of this special place, and a compelling interpretation of the American Revolution as a social movement.

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Finalist for the Story Prize and the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for FictionLong-listed for the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature AwardNamed a Best Book of the Year by Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus ReviewsA new collection-about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life-by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday's Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces-death, violence, estrangement-come to light. Even before such momen

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A hair-raising, head-banging, meet-the-Devil epic tale of love, youth, and rock 'n' roll. Andrew Sean Greer, Pulitzer Prizewinning author of Less Is LostKip, Leslie, and Kira are outlierseven in the metal scene they love. In arch-conservative Gulf Coast Florida in the late 1980s, just listening to metal can get you arrested, but for the three of them the risk is well worth it, because metal is what leads them to one another.Different as they are, Kip, Leslie, and Kira form a family of sorts that proves far safer, and more loving, than the families they come from. Together, they make the pilgrimage from Florida''s swamp country to the fabled Sunset Strip in Hollywood. But in time, the delicate equilibrium they''ve found begins to crumble. Leslie moves home to live with his elderly parents; Kip struggles to find his footing in the sordid world of LA music journalism; and Kira, the most troubled of the three, finds herself drawn to ever darke

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INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLERA Best Book of the Year: The New York Times Book Review, NPR, The New Yorker, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Time, Financial Times, Slate, The Chicago Public Library, Kirkus, The TelegraphA Barack Obama Summer Reading Pick[A] savagely satirical thriller. -PeopleThe Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries brings us Birnam Wood, a gripping thriller of high drama and kaleidoscopic insight into what drives us to survive.Birnam Wood is on the move . . . A landslide has closed the Korowai Pass on New Zealand's South Island, cutting o? the town of Thorndike and leaving a sizable farm abandoned. The disaster presents an opportunity for Birnam Wood, an undeclared, unregulated, sometimes-criminal, sometimes-philanthropic guerrilla gardening collective that plants crops wherever no one will notice.

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From the great storyteller of modern Russian historians (Financial Times) comes the definitive account of the forgotten war that shaped the modern age.The Charge of the Light Brigade, Florence Nightingalethese are the enduring icons of the Crimean War. Less well-known is that this savage war (1853-1856) killed almost a million soldiers and countless civilians; that it enmeshed four great empiresthe British, French, Turkish, and Russianin a battle over religion as well as territory; that it fixed the fault lines between Russia and the West; that it set in motion the conflicts that would dominate the century to come.In this masterly history, Orlando Figes reconstructs the first full conflagration of modernity, a global industrialized struggle fought with unusual ferocity and incompetence. Drawing on untapped Russian and Ottoman as well as European sources, Figes vividly depicts the world at war, from the palaces of St. Petersburg to the holy sites of Jeru

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These pocket-sized titles are stunning....They make the perfect stocking stuffers! - MetroBought together or separately, these fiction titles are ideal stocking stuffers for the literature lover. - USA TodayThe national bestseller from Jeffrey Eugenides, the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Middlesex and The Marriage Plot. Adapted into a critically acclaimed film by Sofia Coppola, The Virgin Suicides is a modern classic, a lyrical and timeless tale of sex and suicide that transforms and mythologizes suburban middle-American life. First published in 1993, The Virgin Suicides announced the arrival of a major new American novelist. In a quiet suburb of Detroit, the five Lisbon sisters--beautiful, eccentric, and obsessively watched by the neighborhood boys--commit suicide one by one over the course of a single year. As the boys observe them from afar, transfixed, they piece together the mys

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The highly acclaimed graphic novel adaptation of Paul Auster's classic City of Glass, featuring a new introduction by Art Spiegelman.Quinn writes mysteries. The Washington Post has described him as a post-existentialist private eye. An unknown voice on the telephone is now begging for his help, drawing him into a world and a mystery far stranger than any he ever created in print.Adapted by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli, with graphics by David Mazzucchelli, Paul Auster's groundbreaking, Edgar Award-nominated masterwork, the first in the New York Trilogy, has been astonishingly transformed into a new visual language.[This graphic novel] is, surprisingly, not just a worthy supplement to the novel, but a work of art that fully justifies its existence on its own terms.--The Guardian

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Reissued for today's reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast, In Our Time exemplifies Tom Wolfe's writing on 1970s America.In Our Time is a biting collection of Tom Wolfe's essays and illustrations cataloging and critiquing the state of 1970s American society. In this slim but unsparing collection of razor-sharp observations and mordant caricatures, Wolfe reaffirms his role as the great chronicler, debunker, and exuberant plain speaker of American letters. Wolfe's joyriding satirical tour through the emerging American archetypes of the 1970s is an essential portrait of the delirious, maddening decade.

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THE BASIS FOR THE INTERNATIONAL TV SENSATION BABYLON BERLIN [Kutscher''s] trick is ingenious...He''s created a portrait of an era through the lens of genre fiction.The New York Times Volker Kutscher, author of the international bestseller Babylon Berlin, continues his Gereon Rath Mystery series with The Silent Death as a police inspector investigates the crime and corruption of a decadent 1930s Berlin in the shadows of the growing Nazi movement.March 1930: The film business is in a process of change. Talking films are taking over the silver screen and many a producer, cinema owner, and silent movie star is falling by the wayside.Celebrated actress Betty Winter is hit by a spotlight while filming a talkie. At first it looks like an accident, but Superintendent Gereon Rath finds clues that point to murder. While his colleagues suspect the absconded lighting tech

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A complete collection of Robert Lowell's autobiographical prose, from unpublished writings about his youth to reflections on the triumphs and confusions of his adult life.Robert Lowell's Memoirs is an unprecedented literary discovery: the manuscript of Lowell's lyrical evocation of his childhood, which was written in the 1950s and has remained unpublished until now. Meticulously edited by Steven Gould Axelrod and Grzegorz Kosc, it serves as a precursor or companion to his groundbreaking book of poems Life Studies, which signaled a radically new prose-inflected direction in his work, and indeed in American poetry. Memoirs also includes intense depictions of Lowell's mental illness and his determined efforts to recover. It concludes with Lowell's reminiscences of other writers, among them T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, John Berryman, Anne Sexton, Hannah Arendt, and Sylvia Plath. Memoirs demonstrates Lowell's expansive gifts as

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[Laura van den Berg is] a master of the short story form. Hers are deliciously unnerving, moving, and monstrous tales. Karen Russell, author of Orange World and other storiesA smart, fun, noir-y treasure map . . . Van den Berg somehow packs a duffel bag of plot into carry-on-size stories. She also has the right kind of range: from brutal to moving to funny, South America to Paris to Antarctica, really great to freaking outstanding. Kathryn Schulz, New YorkThe surreal, compulsively readable collection that established Laura van den Berg as a singular stylist, reissued for its tenth anniversary. The Isle of Youth, Laura van den Berg's breakout second story collection, explores the lives of women who are mired in secrecy and deception. Ranging from the inscrutability of a marriage, to private eyes working a baffling case in South Florida, to a teenager who assists her magician mother and steals from the audience, these s

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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERA memoir of coming of age in a conservative Southern family in postwar America.To grow up in the 1950s was to enter a world of polarized national alliances, nuclear threat, and destabilized social hierarchies. Two world wars and the depression that connected them had unleashed a torrent of expectations and dissatisfactionsnot only in global affairs but in American society and Americans' lives.A privileged white girl in conservative, segregated Virginia was expected to adopt a willful blindness to the inequities of race and the constraints of gender. For Drew Gilpin, the acceptance of both female subordination and racial hierarchy proved intolerable and galvanizing. Urged to become well adjusted and to fill the role of a poised young lady that her upbringing imposed, she found resistance was necessary for her survival. During the 1960s, through her love of learning and her active engagement in the civil

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Mislabeled boxes, problems with visiting nurses, confusing notes, an outing to the county fairsuch are the obstacles in the way of the unnamed narrator of The End of the Story as she attempts to organize her memories of a love affair into a novel. With compassion, wit, and what appears to be candor she seeks to determine what she actually knows about herself and her past, but we begin to suspect, along with her, that given the elusiveness of memory and understanding, any tale retrieved from the past must be fiction.

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The never-thought-we'd-see-it memoir from the legendary Sly Stone.Sly Stone created some of the most memorable anthems of the 1960s and 1970s (Everyday People, Family Affair). He electrified audiences at Woodstock and all over the world. His influence on modern music and culture is indisputable. But after a rapid rise to superstardom, Sly spent decades in the gripsof addiction.Having finally achieved a lasting sobriety, he is finally ready and able to relate the ups and downs and ins and outs of his amazing life. The book moves from Sly's early career as a radio DJ and record producer through the dizzying heights of the San Francisco music scene in the late 1960s and into the darker, denser life (and music) of 1970s and 1980s Los Angeles.Thank You (Falettinme Be Mice Elf Agin) is a vivid, gripping, sometimes terrifying, and ultimately affirming tour through Sly's life and career. Like Sly, it's honest and playful, sharp and blunt, emotional

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As she builds her own life anew, an Italian writer embarks on an all-consuming search for the true story of the mysterious princess H. H. Amrit Kaur of Mandi.On a sweltering day in 2007, having just lost her brother to illness, Livia Manera Sambuy finds herself at a museum in Mumbai, enthralled by a 1924 photograph of a stunningly elegant Indian princess. What she reads in the picture's caption will change her life forever. This alluring Punjabi royal had supposedly sold her jewels in occupied wartime Paris to save Jewish lives, only to be arrested by the Gestapo and sent to a concentration camp, where she died within a year. Could it be true? And if so, how could such a sensational story have gone unreported? Almost against her will, Manera becomes drawn into the mystery of Amrit Kaur. Delving into the history of the British Raj, its durbars and society balls and jubilees, she shows us the precipitous decline of India's royal caste through the lives of extrao

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Winner of the National Book AwardWinner of the California Book AwardWinner of Tournament of BooksOut in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly but who has haunted the edges of his life: Juan Gay. Playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized, Juan has a project to pass along, one built around a true artifact of a bookSex Variants: A Study of Homosexual Patternsand its devastating history. This book contains accounts collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried. The voices of these subjects have been filtered, muted, but it is possible to hear them from within and beyond the text, which, in Juan's tattered volumes, has been redacted with black marker on nearly every page. As Juan waits for his end, he and the narrato

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The World and All That It Holdsin all its hilarious, heartbreaking, erotic, philosophical gloryshowcases Aleksandar Hemon's celebrated talent at its pinnacle. It is a grand, tender, sweeping story that spans decades and continents. It cements Hemon as one of the boldest voices in fiction.As Archduke Franz Ferdinand arrives in Sarajevo one June day in 1914, Rafael Pinto is busy crushing herbs and grinding tablets behind the counter at the pharmacy he inherited from his estimable father. It's not quite the life he had expected during his poetry-filled student days in libertine Vienna, but it's nothing a dash of laudanum from the high shelf, a summer stroll, and idle fantasies about passersby can't put in perspective.And then the world explodes. In the trenches in Galicia, fantasies fall flat. Heroism gets a man killed quickly. War devours all that they have known, and the only thing Pinto has to live for are the attentions of Osman, a fellow soldier, a ma

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Winner of the National Book Critics'' Circle Award for Criticism.One of the most highly regarded books of its kind, Susan Sontag''s On Photography first appeared in 1977 and is described by its author as a progress of essays about the meaning and career of photographs. It begins with the famous In Plato''s Caveessay, then offers five other prose meditations on this topic, and concludes with a fascinating and far-reaching Brief Anthology of Quotations.

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Barbara Ehrenreich''s New York Times bestselling Bright-sided is a sharp-witted knockdown of America''s love affair with positive thinking and an urgent call for a new commitment to realism Americans are a positive people -- cheerful, optimistic, and upbeat: This is our reputation as well as our self-image. But more than a temperament, being positive is the key to getting success and prosperity. Or so we are told.In this utterly original debunking, Barbara Ehrenreich confronts the false promises of positive thinking and shows its reach into every corner of American life, from Evangelical megachurches to the medical establishment, and, worst of all, to the business community, where the refusal to consider negative outcomes--like mortgage defaults--contributed directly to the current economic disaster. With the myth-busting powers for which she is acclaimed, Ehrenreich exposes the downside of positive thinking: personal self-blame and national den

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Haunting, a book of ghosts and a book of this moment. Parul Sehgal, The New York TimesA comic experiment in sociology and self-absorption, the award-winning author Thomas Clerc's autobiographical Interior is a unique invitation into a professor's preoccupations and possessions within the rooms of a small Parisian apartment. Composed of bite-size vignettes, remembrances, and digressions, and filled with lighthearted transitions from pure description to quirky reminiscence and back, this meticulous tour through the rooms of Clerc's home reveals fascinating insights into the author's obsessions, desires, and frustrations. Each space is described in painstaking detail, sometimes down to the centimeter, and the history of every object and appliance is fully excavated with self-deprecating wit. From the ideal varieties of bathroom reading material to the color of his dish rack to the chaos of his sock drawer, Clerc happily and shamelessly guides us thr

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The revelatory (The New York Review of Books) story of an ordinary man, his century, and his home. Jamaica Kincaid's first obsession, the island of Antigua, comes vibrantly to life under the gaze of Mr. Potter, an illiterate chauffeur who makes his living along the wide, open roads that pass the only towns he has ever seen. The sun shines squarely overhead, the ocean lies on every side, and suppressed passion fills the air.As Mr. Potter's narrative unfolds in linked vignettes, his story becomes the story of a vital, damaged community. Amid his surroundings, he struggles to live at ease: to purchase a car, to have girlfriends, and to shake off the encumbrance of his daughtersone of whom will return to Antigua after he dies and tell his story with equal measures of distance and sympathy.In Mr. Potter, Kincaid breathes life into a figure unlike any other in contemporary fiction, an individual consciousness emerging gloriously out of an unex

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Jamaica Kincaid's collected writings for The New Yorker's Talk of the Town record her first impressions of snobbish, mobbish New York.Talk Stories is a collection of Jamaica Kincaid's original writing for The New Yorker's Talk of the Town, composed during the time when she first arrived in the United States from Antigua, from 1978 to 1983. Kincaid developed a unique voice, both in sync with William Shawn's tone for the quintessential elite magazine and (though unsigned) all her ownwonderingly alive to the ironies and screwball details that characterized her adopted city. The book also reflects Kincaid's development as a young writerthe newcomer who sensitively records her impressions here takes root to become one of our most respected authors.

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The final posthumous work by the coauthor of the major New York Times bestseller The Dawn of Everything.Pirates have long lived in the realm of romance and fantasy, symbolizing risk, lawlessness, and radical visions of freedom. But at the root of this mythology is a rich history of pirate societiesvibrant, imaginative experiments in self-governance and alternative social formations at the edges of the European empire.In graduate school, David Graeber conducted ethnographic field research in Madagascar for his doctoral thesis on the island's politics and history of slavery and magic. During this time, he encountered the Zana-Malata, an ethnic group of mixed descendants of the many pirates who settled on the island at the beginning of the eighteenth century. Pirate Enlightenment, or the Real Libertalia, Graeber's final posthumous book, is the outgrowth of this early research and the culmination of ideas that he developed in his classic, best

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Kincaid gathers a sparkling selection of new and beloved poetry and prose about each author's favorite flora. The passion for gardening and the passion for words come together in this inspired anthology, a collection of essays and poems on topics as diverse as beans and roses, by writers who garden and gardeners who write.Among the contributors are Daniel Hinkley on hellebores; Marina Warner, who remembers the Guinée rose; and Henri Cole, with the poems Bearded Irises and Peonies. Ian Frazier pulls weeds in Memories of a Press-Gang Gardener, and Michael Pollan defends a gothic cousin of the sunflower in Consider the Castor Bean; Ken Druse stalks the sexy jack-in-the-pulpit, and Elaine Scarry contemplates steep slopes of columbine. Most of the pieces are new, but Colette, Katharine S. White, William Carlos Williams, and several other old favorites also make appearances.Jamaica Kincaid, the much admired writer and a passionate gardener herself, has asse

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From the eminent and award-winning historian Robert A. Gross comes his long-awaited, immersive journey through Concord in the age of Emerson and Thoreau, The Transcendentalists and Their World.One of The Wall Street Journal's 10 Best Books of 2021Why Concord? How did a small and seemingly quiet village in the hinterlands of Boston become, by popular reckoning, the birthplace of two revolutionsthe American War of Independence that began with shots fired by the local Minutemen, and the American Renaissance of literature and thought that began with the Transcendentalists' challenge to established pieties? In The Transcendentalists and Their World, the distinguished historian Robert A. Gross gives a rich and beautifully detailed account of the town that Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the Alcotts called home. Their Concord, he shows, was primed for revolt, and was hardly a sleepy, bucolic place fit onl

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A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle AwardWinner of the Women''s Prize for NonfictionNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER National Indie BestsellerA New York Times notable book of 2023 Vulture's #1 book of 2023One of Slate's ten best books of 2023 A Guardian best ideas book of 2023 One of Time's ten best books of 2023 Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book AwardI've been raving about Naomi Klein's Doppelganger . . . I can't think of another text that better captures the berserk period we're living through. Michelle Goldberg, The New York TimesIf I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark years, it would be this one. Katie Roiphe, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another selfa double who was almost you and yet not yo

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AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLERNamed a Best Book of the Year by Time, Esquire, Good Housekeeping, Kirkus Reviews, Los Angeles Times, NPR, Oprah Daily, Real Simple, and VogueA riveting account of women's lives on the margins of the Vietnam War, from the renowned winner of the National Book Award.American women-American wives-have been mostly minor characters in the literature of the Vietnam War, but in Absolution they take center stage. Tricia is a shy newlywed, married to a rising attorney on loan to navy intelligence. Charlene is a practiced corporate spouse and mother of three, a beauty and a bully. In Saigon in 1963, the two women form a wary alliance as they balance the era's mandate to be helpmeets to their ambitious husbands with their own inchoate impulse to do good for the people of Vietnam.Sixty years later, Charlene's daughter, spurred by an encou

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WINNER OF THE KIRKUS PRIZE FOR NONFICTIONNAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORK TIMES' 100 NOTABLE BOOKS OF 2023ONE OF TIME'S 100 MUST-READ BOOKS OF 2023 A TOP TEN BOOK OF 2023 AT CHICAGO PUBLIC LIBRARYA new book by the Pulitzer Prizewinning writer about the twenty-first-century Latino experience and identity.In Our Migrant Souls, the Pulitzer Prizewinning writer Héctor Tobar delivers a definitive and personal exploration of what it means to be Latino in the United States right now. Latino is the most open-ended and loosely defined of the major race categories in the United States, and also one of the most rapidly growing. Composed as a direct address to the young people who identify or have been classified as Latino, Our Migrant Souls is the first account of the historical and social forces that define Latino identity.Taking on the impacts of colonialism, public policy, immigration, media, an

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Named a best book of the year by The New Yorker A Smithsonian top ten science book of 2023 One of AARP magazine''s favorite books of 2023Blending the humor, compassion, and absorbing family drama of first-rate memoir with expert science writing, [Sandeep Jauhar] has composed a can't-miss introduction to what has been called the Age of Alzheimer's. Sanjay Gupta, author of Keep Sharp and World War CA deeply affecting memoir of a father's descent into dementia, and a revelatory inquiry into why the human brain degenerates with age and what we can do about it.Almost six million Americansabout one in every ten people over the age of sixty-fivehave Alzheimer's disease or a related dementia, and this number is projected to more than double by 2050. What is it like to live with and amid this increasingly prevalent condition, an affliction that some fear more than death? In My Father's Brain, the disting

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Now a Major Motion Picture Starring Annette Bening, Jamie Bell, Julie Walters, and Vanessa RedgraveThe Golden Age of Hollywood, a young British actor, a love affair, and a tragedy, Film Stars Don't Die In Liverpool is Peter Turner's touching memoir of the last days of Hollywood icon Gloria Grahame, the Oscar-winner best known for her portrayal of irresistible femme fatales in films such as The Big Heat, Oklahoma and The Bad and the Beautiful.The Hollywood Reporter calls the film adaptation a tender, affecting romantic drama.On September 29, 1981, Peter Turner received a phone call that would change his life. His former lover, Hollywood actress Gloria Grahame, had collapsed in a Lancaster hotel and was refusing medical attention. He took her into his chaotic and often eccentric family's home in Liverpool to see her through her last days. Though their affair had ended years before, it was to him tha

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