Bøger udgivet af Harper Perennial

Mukund Joshi is fourteen and newly in love. He attends the same private tuitions as his classmate, Shirodkar, just for a glimpse of her, and follows her back home every day. Sadly, she has not a clue that he is pining away for her, because in their society, boys and girls don't interact freely, much less talk about love. When he's not negotiating the tricky alleys of love, Mukund sits around the school field or loafs about town with his close friends, Surya, Chitre and Phawdya, railing against the education system, and debating ideas such as discipline and Bohemianism. Set in a small Maharashtrian town during the Emergency of 1975, Shala is a heartwarming, nuanced novel about the adolescent struggles that are as tortuous in real time as they are amusing in retrospect.

Arranged in a dynamic question-and-answer format, this engaging reference addresses the most asked and least understood questions about Black history, ranging through such topics as African culture, slavery and the Black resistance, important Black inventors, the origins of jazz and rap music and more. Written with wit and candor, using the most up-to-date scholarship and research available, and featuring timelines and a bibliography for further reading, America Is Me explodes the myths and misconceptions to reveal the human side of the Black experience in America. It is a vitally important resource for the many individuals, parents and teachers who want to know more about Black history.

In 1992, Martin L. Gross shocked the nation with his New York Times bestseller, The Government Racket: Washington Waste A to Z, after whcih he testified before Congress five times on hidden catastrophic waste. Now he has returned to the scene of the crime and found that things have gotten even worse.He shows how the claim that the "era of a big government is over" is a blatant lie. With 2 percent inflation, federal spending rose 7 percent and is now more than $2 trillion annually. The Social Security fund is empty and $1.2 trillion in debt, while its FCA surplus is squandered on everything except the aged.In this provacative follow-up volume, the author outlines an encylcopedia of new wastem shows what happened to his previous suggestions to cut costs, and lays out a blueprint for governent reform that could stop Washington's dysfunstional behavoir . In thirty-six chapters he gives scores of examples of giant new waste and abuse, including: Duplication and overlap cost us billions in 154 different failing job-training programs and 127 different teenage bureaucracies, nine alone in Department of Justice. Billions are rountinely wasted on ludicrious Washinton projects, from golf courses for congressman to large cash pensions for hyperactive children.While the taxpayer pays, Washinton subsizes General Motors, Intel, Pillsbury, and scores of gaint firms to the tune of $75 billion a year.The Defense Department regualry flies members of Congress around the world, with spouses, for freebie holidays on liquor-loaded planes.

No writer in America has a better feel for the country's rythms, richness, and rewards than bestselling author and syndicated columnist Bob Greene. With the color and depth of a novel, this treasury of best-loved columns captures America's small triumphs and all-too-human tragedies as Greene travels across the country to tell the stories that don't make the headlines. A small-town cop saves a child's life by double-checking, on a hunch, a closed case of suspected abuse. Frank Sinatra, on his last concert tour, shares off-the-cuff wisdom about fame, craft, and shifting fortunes. An impoverished father gives his son the best trip he can -- on the free trains out to the Atlanta airport's boarding gates. Funny, gripping, heartrending, and exhilarating, these unforgettable stories are guaranteed to lift the spirit and stir the soul.

"With the advent of the internet, any topic we want to know about is instantly available with the touch of a smartphone button. With so much knowledge at our fingertips, what is there left for our brains to do? At a time when we seem to be stripping all value from the idea of knowing things--no need for math, no need for map-reading, no need for memorization--are we risking our ability to think? As we empty our minds, will we one day be incapable of thoughtfulness? Addressing these questions, Simon Winchester explores how humans have attained, stored, and disseminated knowledge. Examining such disciplines as education, journalism, encyclopedia creation, museum curation, photography, and broadcasting, he looks at a whole range of knowledge diffusion--from the cuneiform writings of Babylon to the machine-made genius of artificial intelligence, by way of Gutenberg, Google, and Wikipedia to the huge Victorian assemblage of the Mundanaeum, the collection of everything ever known, currently stored in a damp basement in northern Belgium. Studded with strange and fascinating details, Knowing What We Know is a deep dive into learning and the human mind. Throughout this fascinating tour, Winchester forces us to ponder what rational humans are becoming. What good is all this knowledge if it leads to lack of thought? What is information withoutwisdom? Does Rene Descartes's Cogito, ergo sum--"I think therefore I am," the foundation for human knowledge widely accepted since the Enlightenment--still hold? And what will the world be like if no one in it is wise?"--

"Funny, touching and infused with wonder, as all love stories should be." --San Francisco ExaminerThe iconic tale of love and loss that has touched the hearts of millions, Love Story has become one of the most adored novels of our time. It has sold more than twenty-one million copies worldwide and became a blockbuster film starring Ryan O'Neal and Ali McGraw. It is the story that told the world, "Love means never having to say you're sorry." This special anniversary edition includes an introduction by the author's daughter, Francesca Segal.This is the story of Oliver Barrett IV, a rich jock from a stuffy WASP family on his way to a Harvard degree and a career in law, and Jenny Cavilleri, a wisecracking working-class beauty studying music at Radcliffe.Opposites in nearly every way, Oliver and Jenny are kindred spirits from vastly different worlds. Their attraction to each other is immediate and powerful, and together they share a love that defies everything.This is their story--a story of two young people and a love so uncompromising it will bring joy to your heart and tears to your eyes.

Based on a true story, this gorgeous novel follows the fortunes of three Berliners caught up in an art scandal--involving newly discovered van Goghs--that rocks Germany amid the Nazis' rise to power.In the turbulent years between the wars, nothing in Berlin is quite what it seems. Not for Emmeline, a wayward young artist freewheeling wildly through the city in search of meaning. Not for Julius, an eminent art connoisseur who finds it easier to love paintings than people. And most definitely not for Frank, a Jewish lawyer who must find a way to protect his family and his principles as the Nazis begin their rise to power. But the greatest enigma of them all is Matthias, the mercurial art dealer who connects them all. Charming and ambitious, he will provoke a scandal--involving newly discovered paintings by Vincent van Gogh--that turns all of their lives upside down. Inspired by true events, this brilliant, humane novel peels back the cherished illusions that sustain us to reveal the truths beneath. A book about beauty and justice, vanity and self-delusion, it asks: Do we see only what we want to see? Even in the full light of the sun?

From a member of Parliament and best-selling author of The Places in Between, an exploration of the Marches--the borderland between England and Scotland--and the political turmoil and vivid lives that created it.In The Places in Between, Rory Stewart walked some of the most dangerous borderlands in the world. Now he travels with his eighty-nine-year-old father--a comical, wily, courageous, and infuriating former British intelligence officer--along the border they call home.On Stewart's four-hundred-mile walk across a magnificent natural landscape, he sleeps on mountain ridges and in housing projects, in hostels and farmhouses. With every fresh encounter--from an Afghanistan veteran based on Hadrian's Wall to a shepherd who still counts his flock in sixth-century words--Stewart uncovers more about the forgotten peoples and languages of a vanished country, now crushed between England and Scotland.Stewart and his father are drawn into unsettling reflections on landscape, their parallel careers in the bygone British Empire and Iraq, and the past, present, and uncertain future of the United Kingdom. This is a profound reflection on family, landscape, and history by a powerful and original writer.“An unforgettable tale.¿ -- National Geographic¿The miracle of The Marches is not so much the treks Stewart describes, pulling in all possible relevant history, as the monument that emerges to his beloved father.¿ -- New York Times Book Review

In ways both glaringly obvious and deeply hidden, thousands, even millions, of miles are embedded in everything we eat, sell, buy, drive, and touch. The capacity to transport a big-screen TV, a vital medicine, or a coffee cup from a factory in Shanghai to a port in California, then on to your local store or front door may be humanity's most towering achievement. Yet the same system delivers grinding commutes, a death every fifteen minutes, an ER trip every thirteen seconds, and crumbling, overloaded roads, rails, and bridges we can no longer afford to make or fix.Acclaimed journalist Edward Humes unpacks the epic amount of transportation included in a day in the life of a modern American family as he constructs a transportation detective story that reveals the surprising triumphs behind every trip we take and every click we make. Door to Door offers a glimpse of a possible future transformed by such new efficiencies as ride-sharing and robots, while examining a very real present where transportation is one of the few big things individuals can change?where personal choices can have a profound impact as that fork in the road fast approaches.

A #1 UK bestseller, The Versions of Us is a dazzling novel about the ways the smallest decisions give shape to our lives, charting a single relationship through three possible futures.What if you had said yes? Some moments can change your life forever. Have you ever wondered, what if . . .?A man is walking down a country lane. A woman, cycling toward him, swerves to avoid a dog. On that moment, their future hinges. There are three possible outcomes, three small decisions that could determine the rest of their life.Eva and Jim are nineteen and students at Cambridge when their paths first cross in 1958. And then there is David, Eva's then-lover, an ambitious actor who loves Eva deeply. The Versions of Us follows the three different courses their lives could take following this first meeting. Lives filled with love, betrayal, ambition--but through it all is a deep connection that endures whatever fate might throw at them.The Versions of Us explores the idea that there are moments when our lives might have turned out differently, the tiny factors or decisions that could determine our fate, and the precarious nature of the foundations upon which we build our lives. It is also a story about the nature of love and how it grows, changes, and evolves as we go through the vagaries of life.

In 1788 three men converge in the southern woods of what is now Alabama: Cat, an emotionally scarred white man; Bob, a talkative black man fleeing slavery; and Istillicha, who seeks retribution after being edged out of his Creek town's leadership.In the few days they spend together, the makeshift trio commits a shocking murder that soon has the forces of the law bearing down upon them. Sent to pick up their trail, a probing French tracker named Le Clerc must decide which has a greater claim: swift justice or his own curiosity about how three such disparate, desperate men could act in unison.A captivating exploration of how four men grapple with the importance of family, the stain of guilt, and the competing forces of power, love, race, and freedom.

In this remarkable memoir, Svetlana Alliluyeva reveals her struggle to break completely from the world of Communism and the legacy of her notorious father ?Joseph Stalin? by defecting from the USSR to the United States.Only One Year begins on December 19, 1966, as Alliluyeva leaves Russia for India, on a one-month visa, in the custody of a staff member of the Soviet Ministry of Foreign Affairs. It ends on December 19, 1967, in Princeton, New Jersey, as she and two American friends toast to her new life.Why would a woman flee the only world she has ever known? Brutally honest and moving, Only One Year is the personal story of a dictator's daughter who, trapped behind the Iron Curtain, made the drastic decision to defect. And now?nearly fifty years after its initial publication?Alliluyeva's compelling narrative of suffering, sacrifice, and subterfuge becomes all the more poignant becauseher escape ultimately did not bring her the freedom she so desperately sought.

Long-listed for the Center for Fiction First Novel PrizeAn Amazon Best Book of the MonthA Buzzfeed Most Exciting Book of the YearA The Millions Most Anticipated Book of the Year & BestsellerSelected as a Skimm ReadA Refinery 29 Best Book of the YearChosen as a Rumpus Book Club SelectionChosen as a Bustle Best Literary Debut Novel Written By Women in the Last 5 YearsAn enthralling literary debut that tells the story of a young girl's coming of age in the cutthroat world of New York City ballet--a story of obsession and the quest for perfection, trust and betrayal, beauty and lost innocence.In the roiling summer of 1977, eleven-year-old Mira is an aspiring ballerina in the romantic, highly competitive world of New York City ballet. Enduring the mess of her parent's divorce, she finds escape in dance--the rigorous hours of practice, the exquisite beauty, the precision of movement, the obsessive perfectionism. Ballet offers her control, power, and the promise of glory. It also introduces her to forty-seven-year-old Maurice DuPont, a reclusive, charismatic balletomane who becomes her mentor.Over the course of three years, Mira is accepted into the prestigious School of American Ballet run by the legendary George Balanchine, and eventually becomes one of "Mr. B's girls"--a dancer of rare talent chosen for greatness. As she ascends higher in the ballet world, her relationship with Maurice intensifies, touching dark places within herself and sparking unexpected desires that will upend both their lives.In the present day, Kate, a professor of dance at a Midwestern college, embarks on a risky affair with a student that threatens to obliterate her career and capsizes the new life she has painstakingly created for her reinvented self. When she receives a letter from a man she's long thought dead, Kate is hurled back into the dramas of a past she thought she had left behind.Told in interweaving narratives that move between past and present, Girl Through Glass illuminates the costs of ambition, secrets, and the desire for beauty, and reveals how the sacrifices we make for an ideal can destroy--or save--us.

The essays in The Other Serious examine the signature phenomena of our moment: the way our lives contradict themselves, how exaggeration and excess seep into our collective subconscious, why gender is becoming more complicated rather than less, and how we interact with the material things that surround us. It is a book about the delicacy and bluntness of American life, about how pop culture sticks its finger deep into the ethical dilemmas of our time, and how to negotiate between the old and the new, the high and the low, the global and the local, the sacred and the profane. At the heart of these reflections lies a central question: What should you do when you don't know what to do?Taken together, these essays comprise a guide for the overhaul of ?the administrativersity? of contemporary American life, a bureaucratic prison where the brain needn't work anymore. These pieces investigate the writer's own way of thinking?putting forth new ideas, questioning them, and urging the reader to adopt the same spirit of critical reexamination.

The acclaimed author of Time Warped tackles the very latest research in the fields of neuroscience, psychology, and biology to provide a fresh, fascinating, and thought-provoking look at our relationship with money.A day doesn't go by without money coming into our interactions. But how much do we really understand it? We know we need money. We tend to want more of it. But why do we behave so strangely with it? And why does it have such a hold on us?Claudia Hammond delves into the surprising psychology of money to show us that our relationship with the stuff is more complex than we might think. Exploring the latest research in psychology, neuroscience, biology, and behavioral economics, she also reveals some simple and effective tricks that will help you think about, use, and save money better?from how being grumpy helps if you don't want to be ripped off to why you should opt for the more expensive pain relief, from how to shop for a new laptop to why you should never offer to pay your friends for favors.An eye-opening and entertaining investigation into the power money holds over us, Mind Over Money will change the way you view the cash in your wallet and the figures in your bank account forever.

A literary exploration that asks seeks to answer the question: Have I lived the life I intended?Jesse Browner, a novelist with a full-time job at the United Nations, has written a book reminiscent of the Talking Heads classic song "Once in a Lifetime." Based on an essay he wrote for Poets and Writers Magazine, Browner asks hard questions about life choices, about the tendency to believe there is a parallel life that might have been more fulfilling or more free. He wonders: Is the true artist made by single-minded devotion to his craft? Do we compromise our dreams in service to responsibilities to family and jobs?These questions prompted Browner to take a hard look at himself and the evolution that brought him to this moment of existential doubt. In How Did I Get Here? he divides his adult life into five distinct phases--ambition, love, work, fulfillment, and serenity. Sketching portraits of himself at every stage, he looks for idiosyncrasies, commonalities, and clues--signposts that lead him to today. He also draws on the lives of others, from Franz Kafka to his sister to indie rocker Elliott Smith, in search of understanding. What he finds in his courageous quest is bravely honest and inspiring, touching on what it means to live a life with intention and meaning.

A seductive novel about a privileged but damaged Manhattan wife whose main source of stability -- her marriage -- comes under threat, from forces both without and within. For most of their marriage, Althea has fluctuated between extreme depressive and manic states -- what she calls "the Tombs" and "the Visions" -- and Oliver has been the steady hand that guided her to safety. This summer, Althea decides that she will be different from here on. She will be the loving, sexy wife Oliver wants, and the reliable, affectionate mother their nine year-old daughter Clem deserves. Her plan: to bring Clem to their Easthampton home once school is out -- with no "summer girl" to care for her this time -- and become "normal." But Oliver is distant and controlling, and his relationship with their interior decorator seems a bit too close; Clem has learned to be self-sufficient, and getting to know her now feels like very hard work for Althea. Into this scene enters the much younger, David Foster Wallace-reading house painter, who reaches something in Althea that has been long buried. Fearless, darkly funny, and compulsively readable, If You Left explores the complex dance that is the bipolar marriage, and the possibility that to move forward, we might have to destroy the very things we've worked hardest to build.

In print for the first time in the United States, acclaimed novelist Benjamin Markovits's Playing Days is a mostly autobiographical narrative concerning the author's season playing minor league professional basketball in Germany and the love affair with another player's estranged wife that ushers him into adulthood.Growing up in Texas, Ben experienced basketball as a mostly solitary pursuit, one he gave up after riding the bench in high school. But as his college classmates prepare for the real world, Ben is seized by an idea. All he needs is a video camera, an empty court, and his mother's German citizenship.Improbably, he lands a roster spot on a lower division pro team in Landshut, forty-five minutes outside of Munich. It's Ben's first taste of competition in years, not to mention his first job. And like most jobs, it's defined by repetition, boredom, and gossip. There's Charlie, the trash-talking mercenary from Chicago; the coach, Herr Henkel, a recently retired player anxious to justify his paycheck; and Karl (based on the author's real life relationship with Dirk Nowitski), a gangly teenage prodigy flashing the raw talent that will make him an NBA star. As a group of men learn how to navigate one another, Ben falls in love with the young mother of a teammate's child, and begins an affair that will change his life.Wry, poignant, and tenderly observed, Playing Days is an evocative meditation on the joys of youth, the triumphs and terrors of post-college life, and one of the best books ever written about what basketball can mean to an American man.

Set in a logging town on the lawless Pacific coast of Washington State at the turn of the twentieth century, a spellbinding novel of fate and redemption--told with a muscular lyricism and filled with a cast of characters Shakespearean in scope--in which the lives of an ill-fated family are at the mercy of violent social and historical forces that tear them apart.Keen to make his fortune, Jacob Ellstrom, armed with his medical kit and new wife, Nell, lands in The Harbor--a mud-filled, raucous coastal town teeming with rough trade pioneers, sawmill laborers, sailors, and prostitutes. But Jacob is not a doctor, and a botched delivery exposes his ruse, driving him onto the streets in a plunge towards alcoholism. Alone, Nell scrambles to keep herself and their young son, Duncan, safe in this dangerous world. When a tentative reunion between the couple--in the company of Duncan and Jacob's malicious brother, Matius--results in tragedy, Jacob must flee town to elude being charged with murder.Years later, the wild and reckless Duncan seems to be yet another of The Harbor's hoodlums. His only salvation is his overwhelming love for Teresa Boyerton, the daughter of the town's largest mill owner. But disaster will befall the lovers with heartbreaking consequences.And across town, Bellhouse, a union boss and criminal rabble-rouser, sits at the helm of The Harbor's seedy underbelly, perpetuating a cycle of greed and violence. His thug Tartan directs his pack of thieves, pimps, and murderers, and conceals an incendiary secret involving Duncan's mother. As time passes, a string of calamitous events sends these characters hurtling towards each other in an epic collision that will shake the town to its core.

Acclaimed journalist Rachel Cooke goes back in time to offer an entertaining and iconoclastic look at ten women in the 1950s?pioneers whose professional careers and complicated private lives helped to create the opportunities available to today's women. These intrepid and ambitious individuals?among them a film director, a cook, an architect, an editor, an archaeologist, and a race car driver?left the house, discovered the bliss of a career, and ushered in the era of the working woman. Daring and independent, they loved passionately, challenged men's control, made their own mistakes, and took life on their own terms, breaking new ground and offering inspiration. Before there could be a Danica Patrick, there had to be a Sheila van Damm; before there was Barbara Walters, there was Nancy Spain; before Kathryn Bigelow came Muriel Box. The unsung heroines of Her Brilliant Career forever changed the fabric of culture, society, and the workforce. This is the Fifties retold: vivid, surprising, and, most of all, modern.

In this powerful memoir, bestselling author Alison Pick (nominated for the Man Booker Prize) channels Karen Armstrong and Anne Lamott as she explains the shocking family secret that eventually led to her mid-life conversion to Judaism--exploring powerful, provocative questions about family, faith, and the burdens of inheritance.Alison Pick grew up in a tight-knit Christian family who went to church regularly and ate pork chops on Christmas Eve. But as a teenager, she stumbled into a remarkable family secret: her paternal grandparents, with whom she was very close, fled to Canada from the Czech Republic at the start of WWII because they were Jewish. But other members of her family hesitated to emigrate, and they paid the ultimate price for their choice when they were sent to Auschwitz.Haunted by the Holocaust, Alison's grandparents established themselves in their new lives as Christians. Not even Alison's father knew of his parents' past until he visited the Jewish cemetery in Prague as an adult. This atmosphere of shame and secrecy dogged Alison's journey into adulthood, and by her early thirties she had fallen into a crippling depression.Drowning in a sense of emptiness, she felt drawn to the Jewish community, and found inspiration for her international bestseller Far to Go in her family's harrowing past. Eventually she came to realize that her true path forward lay in reclaiming her history and identity as a Jew. Alison began attending classes about the conversion process and found a rabbi who would sponsor her participation. But the process was far from easy as old wounds were opened, and all of her relationships were tested.Profound, insightful, honest--and masterfully written--Between Gods forces us to reexamine our beliefs and the extent to which they define us.

Winner of the Shakti Bhatt First Book Prizeshort-listed for the DSC Prize for South Asian LiteratureA fascinating and intricate novel-in-stories, this stunning debut explores the complicated lives of ordinary people whose fates unexpectedly converge after a deadly bomb blast at a train station in Karachi, Pakistan's largest city.Comrade Sukhansaz, an old communist poet, is harassed on a bus full of college students minutes before a fatal bomb blast. His son, a wealthy, middle-aged businessman, yearns for his own estranged child. A young man, Sadeq, has a dead-end job snatching cars from people who have defaulted on their bank loans, while his girlfriend spins tales for her young brother to conceal her own heartbreak. An ambulance driver picking up the bodies after the blast has a shocking encounter with two strange-looking men whom nobody else seems to notice. And in the midst of it all, a solitary writer, tormented with grief for his dead father and his decimated city, struggles to find words.Elegantly weaving together these voices into a striking portrait of a city and its people, The Scatter Here Is Too Great is a tale as vibrant and varied in its characters, passions, and idiosyncrasies as the city itself.

Winner of the VCU Cabell First Novelist AwardWinner of the American Library Association's Sophie Brody MedalFinalist for the National Jewish Book AwardA singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, ?didn't suffer in the exact way? he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has?as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn't his grandson a ?writer??High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him?Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American?but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.Slava's turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family.A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.

A man's life and his capacity for love mysteriously changes after a heart transplant in this dramatic and affecting novel--as provocative and poignant as the works of Jodi Picoult, Jojo Moyes, and Alice Sebold--from the acclaimed Orange Prize nominee and author of Lucky Bunny.After years of excessive drink and sex, Patrick's heart has collapsed. Only fifty, he has been given six months to live. But a tragic accident involving a teenager and a motorcycle gives the university professor a second chance. He receives the boy's heart in a transplant, and by this miracle of science, two strangers are forever linked.Though Patrick's body accepts his new heart, his old life seems to reject him. Bored by the things that once enticed him, he begins to look for meaning in his experience. Discovering that his donor was a local boy named Drew Beamish, he becomes intensely curious about Drew's life and the influences that shaped him-from the eighteenth-century ancestor involved in a labor riot to the bleak beauty of the Cambridgeshire countryside in which he was raised. Patrick longs to know the story of this heart that is now his own.In this intriguing and deeply absorbing story, Jill Dawson weaves together the lives and loves of three vibrant characters connected by fate to explore questions of life after death, the nature of the soul, the unseen forces that connect us, and the symbolic power of the heart.

"These essays gather up Rome and hold it before us, bristling and dense and dreamlike, with every scene drenched in the sound of fountains, of leaping and falling water." -- The New Yorker"Perhaps the finest book ever to be written about a city." -- New York TimesBringing to life the legendary city's beauty and magic in all its many facets, Eleanor Clark's masterful collection of vignettes, Rome and a Villa, has transported readers for generations.In 1947 a young American woman named Eleanor Clark went to Rome on a Guggenheim fellowship to write a novel. But instead of a novel, Clark created a series of sketches of Roman life written mostly between 1948 and 1951. Wandering the streets of this legendary city, Eleanor fell under Rome's spell--its pace of life, the wry outlook of its men and women, its magnificent history and breathtaking contribution to world culture. Rome is life itself--a sensuous, hectic, chaotic, and utterly fascinating blend of the comic and the tragic. Clark highlights Roman art and architecture, including Hadrian's Villa--an enormous, unfinished palace--as a prism to view the city and its history, and offers a lovely portrait of the Cimitero acattolico--long known as the Protestant cemetery--where Keats, Shelley, and other foreign notables rest.

From Yossi Klein Halevi?the critically acclaimed author of Like Dreamers, winner of the Jewish Book Council's Everett Family Foundation Jewish Book of the Year Award?comes a memoir, published in paperback for the first time with a new introduction, about his journey from Jewish extremism to interfaith reconciliation.The child of a Holocaust survivor, Yossi Klein Halevi grew up in 1960s Brooklyn perceiving reality through the lens of his family's brutal past. Determined to take action?and seek retribution?he became a disciple of the late Rabbi Meir Kahane and a member of the radical fringe of the American Jewish community.In this wry and moving account, Halevi explores the deep-rooted anger of his adolescence and early adulthood that fueled his militant politics. He reveals how he began to question his beliefs and see the world from his own clear perspective, freeing himself from being a hostage to rage.Speaking to a new generation struggling to understand what it means to be Jewish in America, Memoirs of a Jewish Extremist explains how such a transform-ation can happen?giving hope that peaceful coexistence among faiths is possible.

Olivia Reed was fifteen when she left her hometown of Ocean Vista on the Jersey Shore. Two decades later, divorced and unstrung, she returns with her teenage daughter, Carrie, and nine-year-old son, Daniel, recently diagnosed with bipolar disorder. Distracted by thoughts of the past, Olivia fails to notice when Daniel disappears from her side. Her frantic search for him sparks memories of the summer of 1987, when she exploded out of the cocoon of her mother's fierce, smothering love and into a sudden, full-throttle adolescence, complete with dangerous new friends, first love, and a rebellion so intense that it utterly recharted the course of her life.Olivia's mother, Myla, was a practicing psychic whose powers waxed and waned along with her mercurial moods. Myla raised Olivia to be a guarded child, and also to believe in the ever-present infant ghosts of her twin sisters, whom Myla took care of as if they were alive. At fifteen, Olivia saw her sisters for the first time, not as ghostly infants but as teenagers on the beach. But when Myla denied her vision, Olivia set out to learn the truth?a journey that led to shattering discoveries about herself and her family. Sarah Cornwell seamlessly weaves together the past and the present in this riveting debut novel, as she examines the relationships between mothers and daughters and the powerful forces of loss, family history, and magical thinking.