NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST
SHORT-LISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE
Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement--and a great gift for its readers.
When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome--but that will define his life forever.
In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.
From the Hardcover edition.
Winner of the Crime Writers Association Gold Dagger Award, this chilling police procedural is a masterpiece of psychological suspense.
Italian Police Commissioner Aurelio Zen is dispatched to investigate the kidnapping of Ruggiero Miletti, a powerful Perugian industrialist. But nobody much wants Zen to succeed: not the local authorities, who view him as an interloper, and certainly not Miletti's children, who seem content to let the head of the family languish in the hands of his abductors--if he's still alive. Was Miletti truly the victim of professionals? Or might his kidnapper be someone closer to home: his preening son Daniele, with his million-lire wardrobe and his profitable drug business? His daughter, Cinzia, whose vapid beauty conceals a devastating secret? The perverse Silvio, or the eldest son Pietro, the unscrupulous fixer who manipulates the plots of others for his own ends? As Zen tries to unravel this rat's nest of family intrigue and official complicity, Michael Dibdin gives us one of his most accomplished thrillers.
From the author of The Last Mughal ("A compulsively readable masterpiece" --The New York Review of Books), an exquisite, mesmerizing book that illuminates the remarkable ways in which traditional forms of religious life in India have been transformed in the vortex of the region's rapid change--a book that distills the author's twenty-five years of travel in India, taking us deep into ways of life that we might otherwise never have known exist.
A Buddhist monk takes up arms to resist the Chinese invasion of Tibet--and spends the rest of his life atoning for the violence by hand printing the finest prayer flags in India . . . A Jain nun tests her powers of detachment as she watches her closest friend ritually starve herself to death . . . A woman leaves her middle-class life in Calcutta and finds unexpected fulfillment living as a Tantric in an isolated, skull-filled cremation ground . . . A prison warder from Kerala is worshipped as an incarnate deity for three months of every year . . . An idol carver, the twenty-third in a long line of sculptors, must reconcile himself to his son's desire to study computer engineering . . . An illiterate goatherd from Rajasthan keeps alive in his memory an ancient four-thousand-stanza sacred epic . . . A temple prostitute, who initially resisted her own initiation into sex work, pushes both her daughters into a trade she nonetheless regards as a sacred calling.
William Dalrymple chronicles these lives with expansive insight and a spellbinding evocation of circumstance. And while the stories reveal the vigorous resilience of individuals in the face of the relentless onslaught of modernity, they reveal as well the continuity of ancient traditions that endure to this day. A dazzling travelogue of both place and spirit.
The history of the birth of Australia which came out of the suffereing and brutality of England's infamous convict transportation system. With 16 pages of illustrations and 3 maps.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Zoology is the story of Henry Elinsky, a college flunk-out who takes a job at the Central Park Zoo and discovers that becoming an adult takes a lot more than just a weekly paycheck.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, @18@Beautiful Losers@19@ is Leonard Cohen@12@ s most defiant and uninhibited work. As imagined by Cohen, hell is an apartment in Montreal, where a bereaved and lust-tormented narrator reconstructs his relations with the dead. In that hell two men and a woman twine impossibly and betray one another again and again. Memory blurs into blasphemous sexual fantasy--and redemption takes the form of an Iroquois saint and virgin who has been dead for 300 years but still has the power to save even the most degraded of her suitors. @16@@16@First published in 1966, @18@Beautiful Losers @19@demonstrates that its author is not only a superb songwriter but also a novelist of visionary power. Funny, harrowing, and fiercely moving, it is a classic erotic tragedy, incandescent in its prose and exhilarating for its risky union of sexuality and faith.
Julia Child became a household name when she entered the lives of millions of Americans through our hearts and kitchens. Yet few know the richly varied private life that lies behind this icon, whose statuesque height and warmly enthused warble have become synonymous with the art of cooking.
In this biography we meet the earthy and outrageous Julia, who, at age eighty-five, remains a complex role model. Fitch, who had access to all of Julia's private letters and diaries, takes us through her life, from her exuberant youth as a high-spirited California girl to her years at Smith College, where she was at the center of every prank and party. When most of her girlfriends married, Julia volunteered with the OSS in India and China during World War II, and was an integral part of this elite corps. There she met her future husband, the cosmopolitan Paul Child, who introduced her to the glories of art, fine French cuisine, and love. Theirs was a deeply passionate romance and a modern marriage of equals.
Julia began her culinary training only at the age of thirty-seven at the Cordon Bleu. Later she roamed the food markets of Marseilles, Bonn, and Oslo. She invested ten years of learning and experimentation in what would become her first bestselling classic, Mastering the Art of French Cooking. Now, her career is legend, spanning nearly forty years and still going strong. Generations love the humor and trademark aplomb that have made Julia a household name. Resisting fads and narrow, fanatical conventions of health-consciousness, Julia is the quintessential teacher. The perfect gift for food lovers and a romantic biography of a woman modern before her time, this is a truly American life.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
One of the sinuous and subtly crafted stories in Tobias Wolff's new collection--his first in eleven years--begins with a man biting a dog. The fact that Wolff is reversing familiar expectations is only half the point. The other half is that Wolff makes the reversal seem inevitable: the dog has attacked his protagonist's young daughter. And everywhere in The Night in Question, we are reminded that truth is deceptive, volatile, and often the last thing we want to know.
A young reporter writes an obituary only to be fired when its subject walks into his office, very much alive. A soldier in Vietnam goads his lieutenant into sending him on increasingly dangerous missions. An impecunious mother and son go window-shopping for a domesticity that is forever beyond their grasp. Seamless, ironic, dizzying in their emotional aptness, these fifteen stories deliver small, exquisite shocks that leave us feeling invigorated and intensely alive.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
From a true American master of the short story, comes a collection of disturbing, comic, and moving takes that find deeper meanings in ordinary domestic life. Here with unforgetable characters, places and events--a young divorcee, a shared summer home, a troubled family, a wedding, the death of a pet--Williams takes her readers on journey after journey, as only she can.
Willie and Liberty are drifters. They break into Florida vacation homes while the owners are away, stay a while, and then move on. They have been lovers since they were teenagers, yet Liberty now senses that Willie is drifting away from her@95@mdash;that their search, so relentless and mysterious, is becoming increasingly dangerous. An exhilarating cast of characters reflects this search, which is not just for home, but for self.
Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award Finalist
Young Martin Dressler begins his career as an industrious helper in his father's cigar store. In the course of his restless young manhood, he makes a swift and eventful rise to the top, accompanied by two sisters--one a dreamlike shadow, the other a worldly business partner. As the eponymous Martin's vision becomes bolder and bolder he walks a haunted line between fantasy and reality, madness and ambition, art and industry, a sense of doom builds piece-by-hypnotic piece until this mesmerizing journey into the heart of an American dreamer reaches its bitter-sweet conclusion.
Included in this short story collection is "The Sisterhood of the Night", now a major motion picture. From the bestselling author of Martin Dressler, this volume explores the magnificent obsessions of the unfettered imagination, as well as the darker, subterranean currents that fuel them.
With the panache of an old-fashioned magician, Steven Millhauser conducts his readers from the dark corners beneath the sunlit world to a balloonist's tour of the heavens. He transforms department stores and amusement parks into alternate universes of infinite plentitude and menace. He unveils the secrets of a maker of automatons and a coven of teenage girls. And on every page of The Knife Thrower and Other Stories, Millhauser confirms his stature as a narrative enchanter in the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Borges.
Cartoons that draw their creator into another world; demonic paintings that exert a sinister influence on our own. Fairy tales that express the secret losses and anxieties of their tellers. These are the elements that Steven Millhauser employs to such marvelous--and often disquieting--effect in Little Kingdoms, a collection whose three novellas suggest magical companion pieces to his acclaimed longer fictions.
In "The Little Kingdom of J. Franklin Payne," a gentle eccentric constructs an elaborate alternate universe that is all the more appealing for being transparently unreal. "The Princess, the Dwarf, and the Dungeon" is at once a gothic tale of nightmarish jealousy and a meditation on the human need for exaltation and horror. And "Catalogue of the Exhibition" introduces us to the oeuvre of Edmund Moorash, a Romantic painter who might have been imagined by Nabokov or Poe. Exuberantly inventive, as mysterious as dreams, these novellas will delight, mesmerize, and transport anyone who reads them.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
A luminous quartet, five years in the writing, reveals even more fully the breathtaking range of "a storyteller in the grand tradition" (New York Times).
Allan Gurganus's voice--by turn bawdy and serene, folkloric and profane--deepens as it soars into this quiet masterwork. Four new fables--rich in event, comedy, experience--surge with the force of history's headlines versus sidestreet human fortitude. Improbable heroes and heroines spiral outward from Gurganus's familiar Carolina terrain. Each fires into a wild and differing direction, all in quest of some fantasy that's practically impossible:
--An impoverished immigrant has her portrait painted (or not) by John Singer Sargent.
--A young man's devotion to saving eighteenth-century homes--and their odd lingering ghosts--helps him find unlikely ways to renovate his own mortality.
--A pillar of the community becomes, over the course of one cartoon matinee, its pariah.
--A beloved, transfixingly homely father shows his village and his only son a decency stronger than race,
humiliation, or even death itself.
These characters' quixotic missions prove mysterious, often even to themselves. Their legacies are not easily deciphered. And yet, their most impractical wishes soon become the heartiest facts about each. They manage to wrest battle-courage from everyday indecision. Out of superstition and convention, they lift certainty. They each find a wealth of consoling truths banked--immortal--in the all-too-human heart.
Allan Gurganus's great powers--announced more than a decade ago by Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All--here achieve a yearning exuberance worthy of a new Whitman. These leaps of sexual longing, empathy, and faith become a major new gift from this essential fablemaker.
From the Hardcover edition.
In French caracole means "prancing"; in English, "caper." Both words perfectly describe this high-spirited erotic adventure. In Caracole, White invents an entire world where country gentry languish in decaying mansions and foppish intellectuals exchange lovers and gossip in an occupied city that resembles both Paris under the Nazis and 1980s New York. To that city comes Gabriel, an awkward boy from the provinces whose social naïveté and sexual ardor make him endlessly attractive to a variety of patrons and paramours.
"A seduction through language, a masque without masks, Caracole brings back to startling life a dormant strain in serious American writing: the idea of the romantic."--Cynthia Ozick
Tom Peters--brilliant, original, and perhaps the most inspiring and listened-to business thinker of our time--has a lot on his mind these days. And he wants to share it in The Circle of Innovation.
The world of business is in a permanent state of flux, he argues, a state of chaos in which constant innovation is the only survival strategy--for the individual and for the organization. And he presents here a lifesaving handbook--both provocative and practical--designed to turn any organization into a perpetual innovation machine.
In 400 seminars in 47 states and 22 countries in the last five years, Peters has reexamined, refined, and reinvented his views on innovation. Now he brings those seminars--and his passion--to the reader in a landmark book. It is meant, he writes, to both "terrify" and "enlighten." These are "times of matchless peril for those who fail to grasp the nettle...and times of matchless opportunity for those who do."
To keep us alert, limber, and ready for action, he provokes and cajoles in chapter after chapter. Among his institutions and revelations:
We Are All Michelangelos. He shows how to transform every "jobholder" into a full-fledged businessperson.
All Value Comes from the Professional Services. How to convert sluggish staff units into Vital Centers of Intellectual Capital Accumulation.
The System is the Solution. How to build great systems--which go far beyond nuts and bolts.
Create Waves of Lust. Quality is not the automatic advantage it recently was. There is a pressing need to reverse the rising tide of product and service "commoditization."
Tommy Hilfiger Knows. In a crowded marketplace, branding is far more important than ever before.
It's a Woman's World. How to capitalize on the fact that women purchase/are purchasing agents for well over half of U.S. commercial and consumer goods.
Little Things Are the Only Things. As the Blight of Sameness encroaches on market after market, design is often the best tool in services or manufacturing for sustainable differentiation.
We're Here to Live Life Out Loud. Why transformational leaders of the future must have laser-like focus, tell the truth, and live on the lunatic fringe.
The hallmarks of Tom Peters legend are an insatiable curiosity, an agile intellect, a pragmatic perspective, and an uncanny ability to gauge the global zeitgeist. These qualities are all brought to bear as Peters sets out to engage, enrage, and ultimately empower his readers, amid forces that are reshaping not only business but every aspect of human experience.
This volume brings together the best of the Tom Peters seminars, complete with visual materials. The Tom Peters Seminar demonstrates Peters' unconventional analysis that challenges outdated corporate structures and demonstrates that in the 1990s, "imagination is the source of value in the economy." Peters' bold ideas vault business thinking beyond change--toward invention and revolution.
Here is the first book all the great sauces of practical, workable system. Raymond Sokolov, the widely admired former Food Editor of The first to point out that the hitherto mysterious saucier's art, as practiced by the best restaurant chefs, is based on what amounts to an elegant "fast food" technique. And this is what he demonstrates in his unique, useful, and witty book:
-- How to prepare, at your leisure, the three fundamental classic sauces (the "mother" sauces from which all others evolve: Brown, White, and Fish Veloute)...
-- How to freeze them in one-meal-size containers, ready for use at a moment's notice...
-- How to transform any of these basic put-away sauces, quickly and easily, into the exact ones that French chefs are famous for and serve in the finest restaurants...
-- How to prepare the classic dish for which each sauce is traditionally used, with suggestions for enhancing simpler fare (the recipes run the gamut from Duckling a la Bigarade to Poached Eggs Petit-Duc -- that is, with Chateaubriand Sauce).
Mr. Sokolov has conceived, then, a comprehensive collection of recipes -- authoritative, clear, and easy to follow -- as well as an inventive method of cooking for the average kitchen. Peppered with culinary lore and with reassuring accounts of the author's own experiences as a modern-day Saucier's Apprentice, here is a book that will appeal to every good amateur cook who wants to produce sumptuous fare at home for occasions great and small.
From the Hardcover edition.
In this fascinating book about our struggle to forgive, psychologist and award-winning author Robert Karen uses movies, people in the news, and sessions from his practice to illuminate the conflict between our wish to repair our relationships on one side and our tendency to see ourselves as victims who want revenge on the other.
Why do we harden our hearts, even against those we want to love? Why do we find it so hard to admit being wrong? Why are the worst grudges the ones we hold against ourselves? When we nurse our resentments, Karen says, we are acting from an insecure aspect of the self that harbors unresolved pain from childhood. But we also have a forgiving self which is not compliant or fake, but rather the strongest, most loving part of who we are. Through it, we are able to voice anger without doing damage, to acknowledge our own part in what has gone wrong, to see the flaws in ourselves and others as part of our humanity.
Karen demonstrates how we can move beyond our feelings of being wronged without betraying our legitimate anger and need for repair. The forgiving self, when we are able to locate it, brings relief from compulsive self-hatred and bitterness, and allows for a re-emergence of love.
Can the police strip-search a woman who has been arrested for a minor traffic violation? Can a magazine publish an embarrassing photo of you without your permission? Does your boss have the right to read your email? Can a company monitor its employees' off-the-job lifestyles--and fire those who drink, smoke, or live with a partner of the same sex? Although the word privacy does not appear in the Constitution, most of us believe that we have an inalienable right to be left alone. Yet in arenas that range from the battlefield of abortion to the information highway, privacy is under siege. In this eye-opening and sometimes hair-raising book, Alderman and Kennedy survey hundreds of recent cases in which ordinary citizens have come up against the intrusions of government, businesses, the news media, and their own neighbors. At once shocking and instructive, up-to-date and rich in historical perspective, The Right to Private is an invaluable guide to one of the most charged issues of our time.
"Anyone hoping to understand the sometimes precarious state of privacy in modern America should start by reading this book."--Washington Post Book World
"Skillfully weaves together unfamiliar, dramatic case histories...a book with impressive breadth."--Time
From the Trade Paperback edition.
Among the provocative social phenomena of our time, few have caught the public fancy as profoundly as that quintessentially American species known as Bubba. The conventional notion of Bubba is a Southern redneck who thinks a rented movie and a six-pack are quality entertainment. According to Dan Jenkins, this historical view has been advanced largely by "effete Easterners and West Coast ponytails who claim to like trout pizza and fat novels written by some kind of Ecuadorian". Granted, says Jenkins, there is more than one Bubba from Georgia who has spray-painted his girl's name on an overpass. But there is also more than one Bubba from Chicago who will do his Christmas shopping at Graceland. Bubba, Jenkins concludes, is a state of mind, and he proceeds to let Bubba define himself by speaking on topics ranging from beer to ballet, from haircuts to the homeless.
"A rich and readable introduction to the whole sweep of Russian cultural and intellectual history from Kievan times to the post-Khruschev era." - Library Journal. Illustrations, references, index.
From the Trade Paperback edition.
A national bestseller--adapted into a movie starring Natalie Portman and Susan Sarandon--Anywhere But Here is the heart-rending tale of a mother and daughter. A moving, often comic portrait of wise child Ann August and her mother, Adele, a larger-than-life American dreamer, the novel follows the two women as they travel through the landscape of their often conflicting ambitions. A brilliant exploration of the perennial urge to keep moving, even at the risk of profound disorientation, Anywhere But Here is a story about the things we do for love, and a powerful study of familial bonds.
Anywhere But Here and The Lost Father have established Mona Simpson as one of our most accomplished writers. In her new novel--the portrait of a legendary, quintessentially American entrepreneur trapped by the age he helped to define--she brilliantly extends her achievement. More powerfully than ever before, Simpson uncovers the nature of longing and belonging, of blood relations and the human heart.
From the Hardcover edition.
