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In this imaginative book, Maya Jasanoff uncovers the extraordinary stories of collectors who lived on the frontiers of the British Empire in India and Egypt, tracing their exploits to tell an intimate history of imperialism. Jasanoff delves beneath the grand narratives of power, exploitation, and resistance to look at the British Empire through the eyes of the people caught up in it. Written and researched on four continents, Edge of Empire enters a world where people lived, loved, mingled, and identified with one another in ways richer and more complex than previous accounts have led us to believe were possible. And as this book demonstrates, traces of that world remain tangible—and topical—today. An innovative, persuasive, and provocative work of history.

Having outlined a theory of bullshit and falsehood, Harry G. Frankfurt turns to what lies beyond them: the truth, a concept not as obvious as some might expect.Our culture's devotion to bullshit may seem much stronger than our apparently halfhearted attachment to truth. Some people (professional thinkers) won't even acknowledge "true" and "false" as meaningful categories, and even those who claim to love truth cause the rest of us to wonder whether they, too, aren't simply full of it. Practically speaking, many of us deploy the truth only when absolutely necessary, often finding alternatives to be more saleable, and yet somehow civilization seems to be muddling along. But where are we headed? Is our fast and easy way with the facts actually crippling us? Or is it "all good"? Really, what's the use of truth, anyway?With the same leavening wit and commonsense wisdom that animates his pathbreaking work On Bullshit, Frankfurt encourages us to take another look at the truth: there may be something there that is perhaps too plain to notice but for which we have a mostly unacknowledged yet deep-seated passion. His book will have sentient beings across America asking, "The truth—why didn't I think of that?"

In 1942, Hitler's Nazi regime trained eight operatives for a mission to infiltrate America and do devastating damage to its infrastructure. It was a plot that proved historically remarkable for two reasons: the surprising extent of its success and the astounding nature of its failure. Soon after two U-Boats packed with explosives arrived on America's shores-one on Long Island, one in Florida-it became clear that the incompetence of the eight saboteurs was matched only by that of American authorities. In fact, had one of the saboteurs not tipped them off, the FBI might never have caught the plot's perpetrators-though a dozen witnesses saw a submarine moored on Long Island. As told by Michael Dobbs, the story of the botched mission and a subsequent trial by military tribunal, resulting in the swift execution of six saboteurs, offers great insight into the tenor of the country--and the state of American intelligence--during World War II and becomes what is perhaps a cautionary tale for our times.

With his characteristic enthusiasm and erudition, Peter Ackroyd follows his acclaimed London: A Biography with an inspired look into the heart and the history of the English imagination. To tell the story of its evolution, Ackroyd ranges across literature and painting, philosophy and science, architecture and music, from Anglo-Saxon times to the twentieth-century. Considering what is most English about artists as diverse as Chaucer, William Hogarth, Benjamin Britten and Viriginia Woolf, Ackroyd identifies a host of sometimes contradictory elements: pragmatism and whimsy, blood and gore, a passion for the past, a delight in eccentricity, and much more. A brilliant, engaging and often surprising narrative, Albion reveals the manifold nature of English genius.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson was a more complex writer than his status as Queen Victoria's favorite poet might suggest. Though capable of rendering rapture and delight in the most exquisite verse, in another mode Tennyson is brother in spirit to Poe and Baudelaire, the author of dark, passionate reveries. And though he treasured poetic tradition, his work nevertheless engaged directly with the great issues of his time, from industrialization and the crisis of faith to scientific progress and women's rights. A master of the short, intense lyric, he can also be sardonic, humorous, voluptuous, earthy, and satirical.This collection includes, of course, such famous poems as "The Lady of Shalott” and "The Charge of the Light Brigade.” There are extracts from all the major masterpieces—"Idylls of the King,” "The Princess,” "In Memoriam”—and several complete long poems, such as "Ulysses” and "Demeter and Persephone,” that demonstrate his narrative grace. Finally, there are many of the short lyrical poems, such as "Come into the Garden, Maud” and "Break, Break, Break,” for which he is justly celebrated.

A splendid new translation of the classic Arthurian tale of enchantment, adventure, and romance, presented alongside the original Middle English text.It is the height of Christmas and New Year's revelry when an enormous knight with brilliant green clothes and skin descends upon King Arthur's court. He presents a sinister challenge: he will endure a blow of the axe to his neck without offering any resistance, but whoever gives the blow must promise to take the same in exactly a year and a day's time. The young Sir Gawain quickly rises to the challenge, and the poem tells of the adventures he finds—an almost irresistible seduction, shockingly brutal hunts, and terrifyingly powerful villains—as he endeavors to fulfill his promise.Capturing the pace, impact, and richly alliterative language of the original text, W. S. Merwin has imparted a new immediacy to a spellbinding narrative, written centuries ago by a poet whose name is now unknown, lost to time. Of the Green Knight, Merwin notes in his foreword: "We seem to recognize him—his splendor, the awe that surrounds him, his menace and his grace—without being able to place him . . . We will never know who the Green Knight is except in our own response to him.”

Simple yet capable of great complexity, the haiku is a tightly structured verse form that has a remarkable power to distill the essence of a moment keenly perceived. For centuries confined to a small literary elite in Japan, the writing of haiku is now practiced all over the world by those who are fascinated by its combination of technical challenge, expressive means, and extreme concentration. This anthology brings together hundreds of haiku by the Japanese masters--Basho, Issa, Buson, Shiki--with superb examples from nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. The pioneering translator R. H. Blyth believed that the spirit of haiku is present in all great poetry; inspired by him, the editor of this volume has included lines from such poets as Wordsworth, Keats, Tennyson, Thoreau, and Hopkins, presented here in haiku form. Following them are haiku and haiku-influenced poems of the twentieth century--from Ezra Pound's "In a Station of the Metro" to William Carlos Williams's "Prelude to Winter," and from the irreverence of Jack Kerouac to the lyricism of Richard Wright. The result is a collection as compact, dynamic, and scintillating as the form itself.

After publishing her first novel in 1977 at the age of sixty-one, Penelope Fitzgerald (1916-2000) went on to become one of the most remarkable and highly acclaimed English writers of the last century. Each of the three novels gathered here vividly and unforgettably conjures up an entire world. The Booker Prize-winning novel Offshore" limns the marginal existance of an eccentric assortment of barge-dwellers on the Thames in the early 1960s, a group of misfits who are drawn to life on the muddy river in exile from the world of the landlocked. Human Voices takes us behind the scenes at the BBC during World War II, as world-weary directors and nubile young assistants attempt to save Britain's heritage and keep Britons calm in the face of a feared German invasion. In The Beginning of Spring, a struggling English printer living in Moscow in 1913 is abandoned by his wife and left alone to care for his three young children in the face of the impending revolution. Fitzgerald is a genius of the relevant detail and the deftly sketched context, and these narrative gems are marvels of compassion, wit, and piercing insight.

Edna Lewis--whose The Taste of Country Cooking has become an American classic--and Alabama-born chef Scott Peacock pool their unusual cooking talents to give us this unique cookbook. What makes it so special is that it represents different styles of Southern cooking--Miss Lewis's Virginia country cooking and Scott Peacock's inventive and sensitive blending of new tastes with the Alabama foods he grew up on, liberally seasoned with Native American, Caribbean, and African influences. Together they have taken neglected traditional recipes unearthed in their years of research together on Southern food and worked out new versions that they have made their own.Together they share their secrets for such Southern basics as pan-fried chicken, creamy grits, and genuine Southern biscuits. Scott Peacock describes how Miss Lewis makes soup by coaxing the essence of flavor from vegetables, and he applies the same principle to his intensely flavored, scrumptious dish of Garlic Braised Shoulder Lamb Chops with Butter Beans and Tomatoes. You'll find all these treasures and more before you even get to the superb cakes (potential "Cakewalk Winners" all), the hand-cranked ice creams, the flaky pies, and homey custards and puddings. Lewis and Peacock include twenty-two seasonal menus, from A Spring Country Breakfast for a Late Sunday Morning and A Summer Dinner of Big Flavors to An Alabama Thanksgiving and A Hearty Dinner for a Cold Winter Night, to show you how to mix and match dishes for a true Southern table. Interwoven throughout the book are warm memories of the people and the traditions that shaped these pure-tasting, genuinely American recipes. The result is a joyful coming together of two extraordinary cooks, sharing their gifts. And they invite you to join them.

Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barrett Browning are without parallel in the nineteenth century: celebrated poets, they became equally famous for their marriage. Still popular more than a century after their deaths, their poetry vividly reflects the unique nature of their relationship.This collection presents the Brownings' work in the context of their lives: the early years and their initial friendship, their courtship and marriage, the fifteen happy years they spent living in Italy until Elizabeth's death. Whether in short poems such as Elizabeth's "Hector in the Garden” and Robert's "Natural Magic,” or in extracts from longer works such as Aurora Leigh and Pauline, the great themes they shared are all represented: love, marriage, illicit passion, England and Italy, childhood, religion, poetry, and nature. Elizabeth's famous Sonnets from the Portuguese, based on their love affair, is included in its entirety. The poems are augmented with a generous selection of the marvelous letters the Brownings wrote to each other.

Throughout history, poets have felt the ancient pull of the sea, exploring the full range of mankind's nautical fears, dreams, and longings. The colorful legends of the sea-pirates and mermaids, phantom ships and the sunken city of Atlantis-have inspired as many imaginations as have the realities of lighthouses and shipwrecks, of icebergs and frothing foam and seaweed.This marvelous collection includes classics old and new, from Homer and Milton to Plath and Merwin. Here are Tennyson's seductive sea-fairies next to Poe's beloved Annabel Lee. Here is Coleridge's darkly brooding "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” alongside the grandeur of Shakespeare's "Full Fathom Five.” And here is Masefield's "I must go down to the seas again” alongside Cavafy's "Ithaka” and Stevens's "The Idea of Order at Key West.” In the wide variety of lyrics collected here-sonnets and sea chanteys, ballads and hymns and prayers-we feel the encompassing power of our planet's restless waters as metaphor, mystery, and muse.

From Sappho to Shakespeare to Cole Porter-a marvelous and wide-ranging collection of classic gay and lesbian love poetry.The poets represented here include Walt Whitman, Hart Crane, Gertrude Stein, Federico García Lorca, Djuna Barnes, Constantine Cavafy, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, and James Merrill. Their poems of love are among the most perceptive, the most passionate, the wittiest, and the most moving we have. From Michelangelo's "Love Misinterpreted” to Noël Coward's "Mad About the Boy,” from May Swenson's "Symmetrical Companion” to Muriel Rukeyser's "Looking at Each Other,” these poems take on both desire and its higher power: love in all its tender or taunting variety.

From the bestselling, National Book Award-nominated author of Genius and Chaos, a bracing new work about the accelerating pace of change in today's world.Most of us suffer some degree of "hurry sickness." a malady that has launched us into the "epoch of the nanosecond," a need-everything-yesterday sphere dominated by cell phones, computers, faxes, and remote controls. Yet for all the hours, minutes, and even seconds being saved, we're still filling our days to the point that we have no time for such basic human activities as eating, sex, and relating to our families. Written with fresh insight and thorough research, Faster is a wise and witty look at a harried world not likely to slow down anytime soon.

This suspenseful novel portrays a community--and a family--under siege, during the shocking string of murders of black children in Atlanta in the early 1980s. Written over a span of twelve years, and edited by Toni Morrison, who calls Those Bones Are Not My Child the author's magnum opus, Toni Cade Bambara's last novel leaves us with an enduring and revelatory chronicle of an American nightmare. Having elected its first black mayor in 1980, Atlanta projected an image of political progressiveness and prosperity. But between September 1979 and June 1981, more than forty black children were kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and brutally murdered throughout "The City Too Busy to Hate." Zala Spencer, a mother of three, is barely surviving on the margins of a flourishing economy when she awakens on July 20, 1980 to find her teenage son Sonny missing. As hours turn into days, Zala realizes that Sonny is among the many cases of missing children just beginning to attract national attention. Growing increasingly disillusioned with the authorities, who respond to Sonny's disappearance with cold indifference, Zala and her estranged husband embark on a desperate search. Through the eyes of a family seized by anguish and terror, we watch a city roiling with political, racial, and class tensions.

"A meaningful panoramic view of what it means to be human...Cause for celebration." --Times-PicayuneFrom the author of the National Book Critics Circle Award finalist Let the Dead Bury Their Dead comes a moving, cliché-shattering group portrait of African Americans at the turn of the twenty-first century.In a hypnotic blend of oral history and travel writing, Randall Kenan sets out to answer a question that has has long fascinated him: What does it mean to be black in America today? To find the answers, Kenan traveled America--from Alaska to Louisiana, from Maine to Las Vegas--over the course of six years, interviewing nearly two hundred African Americans from every conceivable walk of life. We meet a Republican congressman and an AIDS activist; a Baptist minister in Mormon Utah and an ambitious public-relations major in North Dakota; militant activists in Atlanta and movie folks in Los Angeles. The result is a marvellously sharp, full picture of contemporary African American lives and experiences.

Few journalists have staked a territory as definitively and passionately as Mikal Gilmore in his twenty-year career writing about rock and roll. Now, for the first time, this collection gathers his cultural criticism, interviews, reviews, and assorted musings. Beginning with Elvis and the birth of rock and roll, Gilmore traces the seismic changes in America as its youth responded to the postwar economic and political climate. He hears in the lyrics of Bob Dylan and Jim Morrison the voices of unrest and fervor, and charts the rise and fall of punk in brilliant essays on Lou Reed, The Sex Pistols, and The Clash. Mikal Gilmore describes Bruce Springsteen's America and the problem of Michael Jackson. And like no one else, Gilmore listens to the lone voices: Al Green, Marianne Faithfull, Sinead O'Connor, Frank Sinatra.Four decades of American life are observed through the inimitable lens of rock and roll, and through the provocative and intelligent voice of one of the most committed chroniclers of American music, and its powerful expressions of love, soul, politics, and redemption.

Unparalleled in scope and quality and designed for reading aloud and sharing, this splendid anthology brings together some of the most memorable and beloved children's books of our time. Here are classics such as Madeline and Curious George; contemporary bestsellers such as Guess How Much I Love You and The Stinky Cheese Man; Caldecott Medal winners such as Make Way for Ducklings and Where the Wild Things Are; and family favorites such as Goodnight Moon, The Sneetches, Winnie-the-Pooh, and Alexander & The Terrible, No Good Very Bad Day, soon to be a motion picture. The selections range from concept books and wordless books to picture books and short read-aloud stories, and represent the complete array of childhood themes and reading needs: ABCs, number and color books, stories about going to bed and going to school; tales about growing up, siblings, parents, and grandparents; animal stories, fantasies; fables; magical stories; stories about everyday life--and more. This beautiful edition includes a recommended list of books published in the time since this anthology's original compilation, including Caldecott Honors Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus! and Olivia, with descriptive annotations intended to guide parents to these new books and new voices of the 21st century. Also included are an introduction from editor Janet Schulman, capsule biographies of the 62 writers and artists represented in the collection, color-coded running heads indicating age levels, and indexes. As a gift, a keepsake, and a companion in a child's first steps toward a lifelong love of reading, The 20th Century Children's Book Treasury belongs in every family's bookcase.