Bøger udgivet af Harper Perennial

When she was very young, Baby Halder was abandoned by her mother and left with a cruel, abusive father. She was married off at twelve to a man twice her age who beat her. At fourteen, she was a mother herself. Her early life was marked by overwhelming challenges and heartbreak until, exhausted and desperate, she fled with her three children to Delhi, to work as a maid in some of the city's wealthiest homes. Expected to serve her employers' every demand, she faced a staggering workload that often left her no time to care for her own children. But she never complained, for such is the lot of the poor in modern-day India.Written without a trace of self-pity, A Life Less Ordinary is a shocking look deep inside a world of poverty and subjugation that few outsiders know about--and an inspiring true story of one remarkable woman's strength, courage, and determination to soar above her circumstances.

From the critically acclaimed author of I Am Not Myself These Days comes the very odd adventures of a starry-eyed young man from the Midwest seeking fame and fortune in the flamboyant surreality of New York, Los Angeles . . . and everywhere in between.Jayson Blocher is tired of worshiping pop culture; he wants to be part of it. So he's off, accompanied by an ever-changing cast of quirky extended family members, on an extremely bumpy journey from rural Wisconsin to a New York escort agency for Broadway chorus boys, to a Hollywood sitcom set. Somewhere out there his destiny awaits—along with the discovery of first love, some unusual coincidences, a kidnapping mystery . . . and the sobering truth that being America's sweetheart can leave a very sour aftertaste.

“Bad Monkeys has wit and imagination by the bucketload. . . . Buy it, read it, memorize then destroy it. There are eyes everywhere.¿ --Chris Moore, bestselling author of A Dirty Job and Lamb Jane Charlotte has been arrested for murder. She tells police that she is a member of a secret organization devoted to fighting evil; her division is called the Department for the Final Disposition of Irredeemable Persons--“Bad Monkeys¿ for short. This confession earns Jane a trip to the jail's psychiatric wing, where a doctor attempts to determine whether she is lying, crazy, or playing a different game altogether. Clever and gripping, full of unexpected twists and turns, teasing existential musings, and captivating prose, Bad Monkeys unfolds at lightning speed, taking readers to another realm of imagination.

"Brilliant. . . . A shimmering meditation on the ebb and flow of love." -- New York Times"In her elegant, sophisticated prose, Dillard tells a tale of intimacy, loss and extraordinary friendship and maturity against a background of nature in its glorious color and caprice. The Maytrees is an intelligent, exquisite novel." -- The Washington TimesToby Maytree first sees Lou Bigelow on her bicycle in postwar Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her laughter and loveliness catch his breath. Maytree is a Provincetown native, an educated poet of thirty. As he courts Lou, just out of college, her stillness draws him. He hides his serious wooing, and idly shows her his poems. In spare, elegant prose, Dillard traces the Maytrees' decades of loving and longing. They live cheaply among the nonconformist artists and writers that the bare tip of Cape Cod attracts. When their son Petie appears, their innocent Bohemian friend Deary helps care for him. But years later it is Deary who causes the town to talk.In this moving novel, Dillard intimately depicts willed bonds of loyalty, friendship, and abiding love. She presents nature's vastness and nearness. Warm and hopeful, The Maytrees is the surprising capstone of Dillard's original body of work.

Aching to expand from a couple to a family, Jeff Gammage--a reporter for the Philadelphia Inquirer--and his wife, Christine, embarked upon a journey that would carry them across a shifting landscape of emotion and through miles of red tape and bureaucratic protocol. On the other side of the world--in the smog-choked city of Changsha in Hunan Province--a silent, stoic little girl was waiting for them: Jin Yu, their new daughter. Now they would have to learn how to fully embrace a life altered beyond recognition by new concerns and responsibilities--and by a love unlike any they'd ever felt before.Alive with insight and feeling, China Ghosts is an eye-opening depiction of the foreign adoption process and a remarkable glimpse into a different culture. Most important, it is a poignant, heartfelt, and intensely intimate chronicle of the making of a family.

"A brave, powerful book from one of freedom's most courageous defenders. These stories remind us how real -- how personal -- the threats to our Constitutional rights really are -- and of the duty that we all have to protect them in times of trouble. Woven through these riveting chapters is a strong reminder: democracy is the best security." -- Eli Pariser, Founder and Executive Director, MOVEON.ORGExecutive Director of the ACLU Anthony D. Romero and award-winning journalist Dina Temple-Raston present stories of real Americans at the front lines of the fight for civil liberties at a time when our most basic rights are being challenged. From the story of "American Taliban" John Walker Lindh to the battle against the National Security Agency's warrantless spying program, and from a movement in Pennsylvania to force religion into the public school science curriculum to the case of Matthew Limon, a gay teenager sentenced to seventeen years in prison for having consensual oral sex with another teenage boy in Kansas, In Defense of Our America offers readers an eye-opening look at the dangerous erosion of rights in the post-9/11 age of terror and chronicles the courageous ongoing struggle of ordinary Americans to preserve our hard-won constitutional freedoms.

From Doris Lessing, "one of the most important writers of the past hundred years" (Times of London), comes a brilliant, darkly provocative alternative history of humankind's beginnings.In this fascinating and beguiling novel, Lessing confronts the themes that inspired much of her early writing: how men and women manage to live side by side in the world and how the troublesome particulars of gender affect every aspect of our existence.In the last years of his life, a Roman senator retells the history of human creation and reveals the little-known story of the Clefts, an ancient community of women living in an Edenic coastal wilderness. The Clefts have neither need nor knowledge of men; childbirth is controlled through the cycles of the moon, and they bear only female children. But with the unheralded birth of a strange new child--a boy--the harmony of their community is suddenly thrown into jeopardy.

In 1917, the notorious Oriental dancer Mata Hari was arrested on the charge of espionage; less than one year later, she was tried and executed, charged with the deaths of at least 50,000 gallant French soldiers. The mistress of many senior Allied officers and government officials, even the French minister of war, she had a sharp intellect and a golden tongue fluent in several languages; she also traveled widely throughout war-torn Europe, with seeming disregard for the political and strategic alliances and borders. But was she actually a spy? In this persuasive new biography, Pat Shipman explores the life and times of the mythic and deeply misunderstood dark-eyed siren to find the truth.

The ideals of the French Revolution inflamed a longing for liberty and equality within courageous, freethinking women of the era--women who played vital roles in the momentous events that reshaped their nation and the world. In Liberty, Lucy Moore paints a vivid portrait of six extraordinary Frenchwomen from vastly different social and economic backgrounds who helped stoke the fervor and idealism of those years, and who risked everything to make their mark on history.Germaine de Staël was a wealthy, passionate Parisian intellectual--as consumed by love affairs as she was by politics--who helped write the 1791 Constitution. Théroigne de Méricourt was an unhappy courtesan who fell in love with revolutionary ideals. Exuberant, decadent Thérésia Tallien was a ruthless manipulator instrumental in engineering Robespierre's downfall. Their stories and others provide a fascinating new perspective on one of history's most turbulent epochs.

Inspiration for the Netflix Limited Series, Tales of the CityThe seventh novel in the beloved Tales of the City series, Armistead Maupin's best-selling San Francisco saga.Nearly two decades after ending his groundbreaking Tales of the City saga of San Francisco life, Armistead Maupin revisits his all-too-human hero Michael Tolliver--the fifty-five-year-old sweet-spirited gardener and survivor of the plague that took so many of his friends and lovers--for a single day at once mundane and extraordinary... and filled with the everyday miracles of living.

In this breathtaking debut novel, Ami McKay has created an unforgettable portrait of the struggles that women have faced to control their own bodies and to keep the best parts of tradition alive in the world of modern medicine.The Birth House is the story of Dora Rare--the first daughter in five generations of Rares. As apprentice to the outspoken Acadian midwife Miss Babineau, Dora learns to assist the women of an isolated Nova Scotian village through infertility, difficult labors, breech births, unwanted pregnancies, and even unfulfilling sex lives. During the turbulent World War I era, uncertainty and upheaval accompany the arrival of a brash new medical doctor and his promises of progress and fast, painless childbirth. Dora soon finds herself fighting to protect the rights of women as well as the wisdom that has been put into her care.A tale of tradition and science, matriarchy and paternalism, past and future, The Birth House is "a dazzling first novel." (Library Journal), and a story more timely than ever.

Being sane has long been defined simply as that bland and nebulous state of not being mentally ill. While writings on madness fill entire libraries, until now no one has thought to engage exclusively with the idea of sanity.In a society governed by indulgence and excess, madness is the state of mind we identify with most keenly. Though ultimately destructive, it is often credited as the wellspring of genius, individuality, and self-expression. Sanity, on the other hand, confounds us. One of the world's most respected psychoanalysts and original thinkers, Adam Phillips redresses this historical imbalance. He strips our lives back to essentials, focusing on how we--as human beings, parents, lovers, as people to whom work matters--can make space for a sane and well-balanced attitude to living. In a world saturated by tales of dysfunction and suffering, he offers a way forward that is as down-to-earth and realistic as it is uplifting and hopeful.

For more than 150 years, academics have questioned how William Shakespeare of Stratford--a man with limited schooling who apparently never traveled abroad--wrote such a rich body of work said to draw on the largest vocabulary of any writer in the English language. Motivated by scholarship, Shakespeare historian Brenda James set out to uncover the truth behind literature's greatest mystery.The Truth Will Out is the culmination of James's search, a book five years in the making that details the intensive research, painstaking deciphering, and remarkable historical detection into the true identity of William Shakespeare. Coauthors James and respected history professor William D. Rubinstein explore these monumental findings and demonstrate how studying the dedication to Shakespeare's sonnets led them to the real author behind the English language's most enduring works. Offering eye-opening and definitive evidence, this groundbreaking work points to Sir Henry Neville, a prominent Elizabethan diplomat and member of Parliament, whose position in society forced him to allow an actor to take credit for his literary genius. Captivating, elucidating, and certain to provoke lively debate, The Truth Will Out is a revelatory exploration of two men and their time that will forever change the landscape of Shakespearean scholarship.

Water from the Well is a journey four thousand years back to the time of Sarah, Rebekah, Rachel, and Leah. The graceful prose of renowned author Anne Roiphe brilliantly captures these biblical women and makes their fascinating stories come alive. As each story unfolds, we find that the matriarchs had to overcome the same devastating obstacles women face today?infertility, lust, abandonment, and uncertainty?yet they managed to cope with betrayal, death, sacrifice, and jealousy while dealing with the emerging reality of a new faith. This remarkable volume demonstrates how their lives helped to lay the foundation of womanhood in the Western world. Combining the deep insight of Bruce Feiler with the narrative skill of Antonia Fraser, Anne Roiphe delivers a fascinating work that deftly brings these four biblical matriarchs into our own age.

In Have a Nice Doomsday, Nicholas Guyatt searches for the truth behind a startling statistic: 50 million Americans have come to believe that the apocalypse will take place in their lifetime. They're convinced that, any day now, Jesus will snatch up his followers and spirit them to heaven. The rest of us will be left behind to endure massive earthquakes, devastating wars, and the terrifying rise of the Antichrist. But true believers aren't sitting around waiting for the Rapture. They're getting involved in debates over abortion, gay rights, and even foreign policy. Are they devout or deranged? Does their influence stretch beyond America's religious heartland--perhaps even to the White House?Journeying from Texas megachurches to the southern California deserts--and stopping off for a chat with prophecy superstar Tim LaHaye--Guyatt looks for answers to some burning questions: When will Russia attack Israel and ignite the Tribulation? Does the president of Iran appear in Bible prophecy? And is the Antichrist a homosexual?Bizarre, funny, and unsettling in equal measure, Have a Nice Doomsday uncovers the apocalyptic obsessions at the heart of the world's only superpower.

Five years after escaping into the mountains of North Carolina, Eric Rudolph was becoming a figure of folk legend. The FBI had long since abandoned its manhunt--the largest ever on U.S. soil--for the fugitive accused of bombing the Atlanta Olympics, two abortion clinics, and a gay bar. Then, one night, Rudolph got careless; he was arrested and put in jail--possibly forever. But even in custody, he remained unrepentant . . . and an enigma.In Lone Wolf, Maryanne Vollers brings the reader deep inside one of the most sensational cases of domestic terrorism in American history. At the same time, without losing sight of the hideous nature of Rudolph's violent crimes, she successfully puts a human face on an iconic killer while exploring the painful mysteries of the heart.

A heartbreaking and powerful story of personal demons and the hard journey back from an abyss of betrayal in the aftermath of World War IJournalist Alex Dyer made his name covering the bloody horrors of the European trenches. Yet even after the Great War is over, he cannot shake the guilt he feels for not serving on the front lines like his dearest childhood friend, Ted Eden. Worse still, Alex cannot put to rest the emotions that gnaw at him from the inside: his feelings for Clare, Ted's wife--a woman they both have loved more than life itself.A masterful debut novel from the acclaimed author of The Hidden Life of Otto Frank, Carol Ann Lee's Winter of the World combines fascinating historical detail and color with breathtaking invention. Recalling the fire of the battlefield and the nightmare of the trenches, it brilliantly evokes a volatile time when life was frozen in the present tense and looking forward was the only thing more painful than looking back.

In this epic dual biography, one of our most distinguished scholars--the bestselling author of An Unfinished Life--probes the lives and times of two unlikely leaders whose partnership dominated American and world affairs and changed the course of history Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger were two of the most compelling, contradictory, and important leaders in America in the second half of the 20th century. Both were largely self-made men, brimming with ambition, driven by their own inner demons, and often ruthless in pursuit of their goals. Tapping into a wealth of recently declassified documents and tapes, Robert Dallek uncovers fascinating details about Nixon and Kissinger's tumultuous personal relationship--their collaboration and rivalry--and the extent to which they struggled to outdo each other in the reach of foreign policy achievements. He also brilliantly analyzes their dealings with power brokers at home and abroad, including the nightmare of Vietnam, the brilliant opening to China, détente with the Soviet Union, the Yom Kippur War in the Middle East, the disastrous overthrow of Allende in Chile, and growing tensions between India and Pakistan, while recognizing how both men were continually plotting to distract the American public's attention from the growing scandal of Watergate. Authoritative, illuminating, and deeply engrossing, Nixon and Kissinger provides a shocking new understanding of the immense power and sway these two men held in affecting world history.

Vishnu, the odd-job man in a Bombay apartment block, lies dying on the staircase landing. Around him the lives of the apartment dwellers unfold: the warring housewives on the first floor, lovesick teenagers on the second, and the quietly grieving widower on the top floor of the building. In a fevered state Vishnu looks back on his love affair with the seductive Padmini and wonders if he might actually be the god Vishnu, guardian of the entire universe. Blending incisive comedy with Hindu mythology and a dash of Bollywood sparkle, The Death of Vishnu is an intimate and compelling view of an unforgettable world.

"Belongs on your must-read list. This novel is a gem." --Omaha World-HeraldNancy E. Turner's unforgettable These Is My Words melds the sweeping adventures and dramatic landscapes of Lonesome Dove with the heartfelt emotional saga of Oldest Living Confederate Widow Tells All. A moving, exciting, and heartfelt American saga inspired by the author's own family memoirs, these words belong to Sarah Prine, a woman of spirit and fire who forges a full and remarkable existence in a harsh, unfamiliar frontier. Scrupulously recording her steps down the path Providence has set her upon--from child to determined young adult to loving mother--she shares the turbulent events, both joyous and tragic, that molded her, and recalls the enduring love with cavalry officer Captain Jack Elliot that gave her strength and purpose. Rich in authentic everyday details and alive with truly unforgettable characters, These Is My Words brilliantly brings a vanished world to breathtaking life again.

Bob Berkowitz is not afraid to ask frank, intimate questions. Now he gets honest answers from that most perplexing, emotionally guarded, and enigmatic of species, the American male. A veteran journalist and renowned relationship expert, he has interviewed men of all ages and backgrounds about their innermost secrets--and he reports all in this unique, no-holds-barred volume.What Men Won't Tell You but Women Need to Know is straight talk on what men say, what men mean, and what men think from America's #1 expert.

From Booker and Orange Prize-nominated author Sarah Hall comes the tale of an imaginary England, a future dystopian society where the right to bear a child is determined by a state lottery system.In this stunning novel Sarah Hall draws on the work of Margaret Atwood and George Orwell to imagine a dystopic England where terrifying new systems of control are in place and reproduction has become a lottery. When a girl known only as "Sister" escapes the confines of her increasingly repressive marriage to find an isolated group of women living on a remote northern farm, she must find out whether she has it in herself to become an active insurgent.This fascinating novel considers what lengths women will go to in a brutalized world in order to resist their oppressors, what tactics they must employ to survive and remain free. But the story asks a wider and more difficult question: under what circumstances might an ordinary person become a terrorist?

Volume 1 of the classic anthology of political thought: a comprehensive selection of the crucial ideas in political philosophy from Plato and Aristotle to Locke and MontesquieuAs an introduction to political theory and science, this standout collection of writings by the great philosophers is a must for readers of philosophy. It also forms a basic textbook for students of government and political theory. Such fundamental concepts as Democracy, the Rule of Law, Justice, Natural Rights, Sovereignty, Citizenship, Power, the State, Revolution, Liberty, Reason, Materialism, Toleration, and the Place of Religion in Society are traced from their origins, through their development and changing patterns, to show how they guide political thinking and institutions today.Among the authors in this volume: Sophocles, Plato, Artistotle, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Cicero, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Martin Luther, Calvin, Hobbes, Spinoza, Locke, and Montesquieu.

This carefully selected compilation of the significant writings of the great political philosophers, scientists, and thinkers has long been an invaluable guide to the general reader as well as to the serious student of history, political science, and government. Such essential forces as Revolution, Idealism, and Nationalism are examined in detail and expounded by their leading exponents. Professor Curtis has written running commentary that places the extracts and their authors in the sequence of modern history.

"An intense, provocative, and vital crime story that excavates paradoxical dimensions of race, class, sexism, family bonds, and social obligation while seeking the deepest meaning of the law." -- BooklistOriginally published posthumously by his daughter and literary executor Julia Wright, A Father's Law is the novel Richard Wright, acclaimed author of Black Boy and Native Son, never completed. Written during a six-week period prior to his death in Paris in 1960, it offers a fascinating glimpse into the writer's process as well as providing an important addition to Wright's body of work.In rough form, Wright expands the style of a crime thriller to grapple with themes of race, class, and generational conflicts as newly appointed police chief Ruddy Turner begins to suspect his own son, Tommy, a student at the University of Chicago, of a series of murders in Brentwood Park. Under pressure to solve the killings and prove himself, Turner spirals into an obsession that forces him to confront his ambivalent relationship with a son he struggles to understand.Prescient, raw, and powerful, A Father's Law is the final gift from a literary giant.

The Espejo family of El Paso, Texas, is like so many others in America in 1967, trying to make sense of a rapidly escalating war they feel does not concern them. But when the eldest son, Gustavo, a complex and errant rebel, receives a certified letter ordering him to report to basic training, he chooses to flee instead to Mexico. Retreating back to the land of his grandfather—a foreign country to which he is no longer culturally connected—Gustavo sets into motion a series of events that will have catastrophic consequences on the fragile bonds holding the family together. Told with raw power and searing bluntness, and filled with important themes as immediate as today’s headlines, Names on a Map is arguably the most important work to date of a major American literary artist.

In Bartlett's Familiar Quotations, the premier collection of noted sayings, Mark Twain is the only American with more citations under his name than Franklin Delano Roosevelt. FDR was the greatest raconteur to occupy the White House between the presidencies of Abraham Lincoln and Ronald Reagan. A superb mimic with a professional comic's sense of timing, he had an ear for a ringing phrase and could laugh at himself, relishing the opportunity to tell stories at his own expense.The anecdotes, sayings, and witticisms collected in this hugely entertaining and edifying volume are a testament to the high humor and insouciant, infectious personality of one of our greatest presidents.