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Named a Best Book of the Year by Vox and AutostraddleMaking a much-anticipated return to the world of Hild, Nicola Griffith's Menewood transports readers back to seventh-century Britain, a land of rival kings and religions poised for epochal change. Hild is no longer the bright child who made a place in Edwin Overking's court with her seemingly supernatural insight. She is eighteen, honed and tested, the formidable lady of Elmet, now building her personal stronghold in the valley of Menewood.But old alliances are fraying. Younger rivals are snapping at Edwin's heels. War is brewing-bitter war, winter war. Not knowing whom to trust, Edwin becomes volatile and recalls his young advisor to court. There Hild begins to understand the true extent of the chaos ahead-and realizes she must find a way to navigate the turbulence and fight to protect both the kingdom and her own people.She will face the losses and devastation of total war, and then must summon the determination to forge a radically different path for herself and her people. In the valley, her last redoubt, Hild draws strength from the fierce joy she finds in the natural world, as, slowly, her community takes root. She trains herself and her unexpected allies in new ways of thinking, learning what it means to gather and wield true power. And she prepares for one last wager: risking all on a single throw for a better future.In the last decade, Hild has become a beloved classic of epic storytelling. Menewood exceeds it in every way.

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, the Story Prize, the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction, and the Mark Twain American Voice in Literature AwardNamed a Best Book of the Year by Los Angeles Times, Vulture, Esquire, NPR, and Kirkus ReviewsA new collection-about loss, alienation, aging, and the strangeness of contemporary life-by the award-winning, and inimitable, author of The Book of Goose.A grieving mother makes a spreadsheet of everyone she's lost. Elsewhere, a professor develops a troubled intimacy with her hairdresser. And every year, a restless woman receives an email from a strange man twice her age and several states away. In the stories of Wednesday's Child, people strive for an ordinary existence until doing so becomes unsustainable, until the surface cracks and the grand mysterious forces-death, violence, estrangement-come to light. Even before such moments, everyday life is laden with meaning, studded with indelible details: a filched jar of honey, a mound of wounded ants, a photograph kept hidden for many years, until it must be seen. Yiyun Li is a truly original writer, an alchemist of opposites: tender and unsentimental, metaphysical and blunt, funny and horrifying, omniscient and unusually aware of just how much we cannot know. Beloved for her novels and her memoir, she returns here to her earliest form, gathering pieces that have appeared in The New Yorker, Zoetrope, and other publications. Taken together, these stories, written over the span of a decade, articulate the cost, both material and emotional, of living-exile, assimilation, loss, love-with Li's trademark unnerving beauty and wisdom.

Christian Wiman braids poetry, memoir, and criticism to create an inspired, career-defining work. Few contemporary writers ask the questions about faith, morality, and God that Christian Wiman does, and even fewer-perhaps none-do so with his urgency and eloquence. Wiman, an award-winning poet and the author of My Bright Abyss, lays the motion of his mind on the page in this genre-defying work, an indivisible blend of poetry, criticism, theology, and searing memoir. As Marilynne Robinson wrote, "[Wiman's] poetry and his scholarship have a purifying urgency that is rare in this world . . . [It] enables him to say new things in timeless language, so that the reader's surprise and assent are one and the same."Zero at the Bone begins with Wiman's preoccupation with despair, and through fifty brief pieces, he unravels its seductive appeal. The book is studded with the poetry and prose of writers who inhabit Wiman's thoughts, and the voices of Wallace Stevens, Lucille Clifton, Emily Dickinson, and others join his own. At its heart and Wiman's, however, are his family-his young children (who ask their own invaluable questions, like "Why are you a poet? I mean why?"), his wife, and those he grew up with in West Texas. Wiman is the rare thinker who takes on the mantle of our greatest mystics and does so with an honest, profound, and contemporary sensibility. Zero at the Bone is a revelation.

"A novel following a priest and a literary critic through Chile's 1973 coup d'etat and consequent military dictatorship"--

"This is a delightful account of one of the deepest and most fascinating explorations going on today at the frontier of our knowledge." -Carlo Rovelli, bestselling author of The Order of Time and Seven Brief Lessons on Physics"Musser knows that the point of popular science is [. . .] to get a sense of what's at stake, what kinds of answers are being offered to difficult questions, and why it all matters. One could not ask more of Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation-on all three counts it delivers." -Julian Baggini, The Wall Street JournalA revelatory exploration of how a "theory of everything" depends upon our understanding of the human mind.The whole goal of physics is to explain what we observe. For centuries, physicists believed that observations yielded faithful representations of what is out there. But when they began to study the subatomic realm, they found that observation often interferes with what is being observed-that the act of seeing changes what we see. The same is true of cosmology: our view of the universe is inevitably distorted by observation bias. And so whether they're studying subatomic particles or galaxies, physicists must first explain consciousness-and for that they must turn to neuroscientists and philosophers of mind.Neuroscientists have painstakingly built up an understanding of the structure of the brain. Could this help physicists understand the levels of self-organization they observe in other systems? These same physicists, meanwhile, are trying to explain how particles organize themselves into the objects around us. Could their discoveries help explain how neurons produce our conscious experience?Exploring these questions and more, George Musser tackles the extraordinary interconnections between quantum mechanics, cosmology, human consciousness, and artificial intelligence. Combining vivid descriptive writing with portraits of scientists working on the cutting edge, Putting Ourselves Back in the Equation shows how theories of everything depend on theories of mind-and how they might be one and the same.

A new reissue of Leanne Shapton's Guestbook, which "elevates the traditional ghost story into an art form" (Interview), collaging the verbal and non-verbal into brief, eerie narratives.A house stands empty. Family photographs, wrapping paper, and watercolor portraits act as windows into other lives. Little sculptures relay the story of an estranged couple. Photographs of a tennis prodigy document his exhaustive fits.Guestbook: Ghost Stories arranges artifacts and illustrations alongside meditative dispatches from a familiar, yet new reality. Her stories invite both visual and literal readings of forgotten objects, dark interiors, memento, laid carefully before us. Shapton's beautiful and haunting pieces last long after the page has turned and the book has closed-making one wonder, ultimately, who has visited whom.

A Finalist for the 2023 National Book Award for Translated LiteratureOne of The Atlantic's 10 Best Books of 2023 A Financial Times Best Book of 2023 | Named a best book of the year by Publishers Weekly and Kirkus Reviews"A hypnotic, powerful historical novel in which stories nest within one another like dolls . . . It all coheres mesmerizingly." -Clémence Michallon, The New York Times Book Review"Stunningly realized . . . Exquisite . . . A spellbinding novel." -Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow KingThe thrilling and deeply moving new novel by David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize.Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman's name: Maram.The key to this mysterious woman's identity is Adanson's unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée-a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade-to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart.Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop's Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal's oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.

Garner gathers a literary chorus to capture the joys of reading and eating in this comic, personal classic. Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, simply gone together. The book you're holding is a product of these combined gluttonies.Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner's Quotations, serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading is a charming, emotional memoir, one that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and of this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner.Through his lifelong infatuation with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (and about his father's famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family ("Cree grew up taking leftover frog legs to school in her lunch box"), and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more.

Reissued for today's reader with a redesigned cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast, Tom Wolfe trains his satirical eye on Modern Art in this "masterpiece" (The Washington Post).What has become of art?In his dazzling and controversial book The Painted Word, Tom Wolfe explores this question and more as he investigates early trends in Modern Art and critiques the critics who dominated the art world during the 1960s and '70s. Wolfe addresses the scope of Modern Art, from its founding days as Abstract Expressionism through its transformations to Pop, Op, Minimal, and Conceptual. He bring into question the work of famous avant-garde artists like Andy Warhol, Jackson Pollock, and others. With gorgeous, pointed prose, Wolfe investigates what has become of Modern Art and examines the control that art critics have over the art world at large.Elegant, hilarious, and devastating, The Painted Word presents a sharp critique of the modern state of art.

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers."When telling one's life story to someone else one manufactures not chronicles but legends for oneself," Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories. Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details, the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling.Taking his firmly embedded memories-the "shimmering details" that give this work its title-as his starting point, Nádas dissects them using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings-all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. To avoid conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too-moving in concentric circles toward cause and effect, until their meaning and significance come to light.In Shimmering Details, Volume I, Nádas probes the history of his family from the late nineteenth century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.

Named a Best Book of 2023 by The New YorkerA virtuoso journey into networks of power, our embroilment with new technologies, and the dangers of corruption, by an electrifying debut novelist. When the investigative reporter Quentin Jones's story about covert military interrogation practices is buried, he is spurred to dig deeper and unravels a trail that leads to VIRTUE: cutting-edge technology that simulates reality during interrogation. As the shadowy labyrinths of governmental corruption unfurl and tighten around him, unnerving links to his protégé Bruce-who, like Joseph Conrad's Kurtz, disappeared into the war several years earlier-keep emerging. Greg Jackson's The Dimensions of a Cave explores our drive toward war, violence, and venality, placing humanity and idealism under the spotlight.

A Must-Read: The New York Times, Elle, Literary Hub, The Millions, The Globe and Mail, and CBCA Finalist for the Carol Shields Prize for Fiction"[A] darkly glittering tale . . . Beautiful and piercing." -The New York Times Book ReviewIn Claudia Dey's Daughter, a woman long caught in her father's web strives to make a life-and art-of her own.To be loved by your father is to be loved by God.So says Mona Dean-playwright, actress, and daughter of a man famous for one great novel, a man whose needs and insecurities exert an inescapable pull and exact an immeasurable toll on the women of his family: Mona, her sister, her half sister, their mothers. His infidelity destroyed Mona's childhood, setting her in opposition to a stepmother who, though equally damaged, disdains her for being broken. Then, just as Mona is settling into her life as an adult and a fledgling artist, her father begins a new affair and takes her into his confidence. Mona delights-painfully, parasitically-in this attention. When he inevitably confesses to his wife, Mona is cast as the agent of disruption, punished for her father's crimes and ejected from the family.Mona's tenuous stability is thrown into chaos. Only when she suffers an incalculable loss-one far deeper and more defining than family entanglements-can she begin supplanting absent love with real love. Pushed to the precipice, she must decide how she wants to live, what she most needs to say, and the risks she will take to say it.Claudia Dey chronicles our most intimate lives with penetrating insight and devilish humor. Daughter is an obsessive, blazing examination of the forces that drive us to become, to create, and to break free.

An Economist Best Book of 2023 | One of The New York Times' 33 Nonfiction Books to Read This Fall | Named a most anticipated fall book by the Chicago Tribune and Bloomberg | Finalist for the 2024 Hayek Book Prize"Wherever you sit on the political spectrum, there's a lot to learn from this book. More than a biography of one controversial person, it's an intellectual history of twentieth-century economic thought." -Greg Rosalesky, NPR's Planet Money The first full biography of America's most renowned economist.Milton Friedman was, alongside John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. His work was instrumental in the turn toward free markets that defined the 1980s, and his full-throated defenses of capitalism and freedom resonated with audiences around the world. It's no wonder the last decades of the twentieth century have been called "the Age of Friedman"-or that analysts have sought to hold him responsible for both the rising prosperity and the social ills of recent times.In Milton Friedman, the first full biography to employ archival sources, the historian Jennifer Burns tells Friedman's extraordinary story with the nuance it deserves. She provides lucid and lively context for his groundbreaking work on everything from why dentists earn less than doctors, to the vital importance of the money supply, to inflation and the limits of government planning and stimulus. She traces Friedman's long-standing collaborations with women, including the economist Anna Schwartz; his complex relationships with powerful figures such as the Federal Reserve chairman Arthur Burns and the Treasury secretary George Shultz; and his direct interventions in policymaking at the highest levels. Most of all, Burns explores Friedman's key role in creating a new economic vision and a modern American conservatism. The result is a revelatory biography of America's first neoliberal-and perhaps its last great conservative.

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

The first Picador edition of Rebecca Miller's debut book "remind[s] us that good material is everywhere" (The Washington Post).The vibrantly fresh and lustrous stories in Miller's collection explore the multifaceted lives of women in seven arresting portraits. Modern and diverse, these women of different classes and ages struggle with sexuality, fate, motherhood, infidelity, desperation, and an overriding will to survive.We meet Greta, a cookbook editor who is chosen by Tavi, the hottest writer of his generation, to edit his new book. The book becomes a best-seller and Greta is propelled out of her marriage by her own ambition and success. Other characters include Paula, a pregnant twenty-one-year-old, who is on the run from the horror of a man who was hit by a car and died while walking her home from a nightclub; Delia, an abused working-class wife who goes into hiding with her children; and Louisa, a painter who moves rapidly from one lover to the next, acting out a self-perpetuating drama over which she has no control.Rebecca Miller, who also adapted Personal Velocity for the screen, has crafted an edgy, fearless, and beautifully spare collection of short fiction.

"In the 1950s, an obsessive firearms designer named Eugene Stoner invented the AR-15 rifle in a California garage. High-minded and patriotic, Stoner sought to devise a lightweight, easy-to-use weapon that could replace the M1s touted by soldiers in World War II. What he did create was a lethal handheld icon of the American century. [In this book, the authors] track the AR-15 from inception to ubiquity. How did the same gun represent the essence of freedom to millions of Americans and the essence of evil to millions more?"--

Named a Best Book of the Year by NPR and The New YorkerThe Boy from Kyiv is the life story of Alexei Ratmansky, the most celebrated ballet choreographer of our time."A revelatory book about how [Ratmansky] evolved into the internationally sought-after choreographer of the moment . . . A must-read." - Martha Anne Toll, NPRAlexei Ratmansky is transforming ballet for the twenty-first century. An artist of daring imagination, the choreographer has created breathtakingly original works for the world's most revered companies. He has fashioned a singular approach to balletic storytelling that bridges the space between narrative and abstraction and heightens ambiguity and surprise on the stage. He has boldly restored great centuries-old ballets to their former glory, combining archival research with his own choreographic genius to retrieve detail and color once lost to the ages. And above all, he is renowned for fusing the Western and Eastern ballet traditions, and for drawing on the visual arts, literature, music, film, and beyond with inspired vim, to forge a style that is vibrant, eclectic, and utterly new: one that promises to leave an indelible mark on this venerable art form.But before Ratmansky was the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, the resident choreographer at American Ballet Theatre, the artist in residence at New York City Ballet, and generally, as The New Yorker has it, "the most sought-after man in ballet," he was just a boy from Kyiv, sneaking into the ballet at night, concocting his own juvenile adaptations of novels and stories, and dreaming up new possibilities for bodies in motion.In The Boy from Kyiv, the first biography of this groundbreaking artist, the celebrated dance writer Marina Harss takes us behind the curtain to reveal Ratmansky's fascinating life, from his Soviet boyhood through his globe-spanning career. Over a decade in the making, this biography arrives at a pivotal moment in Ratmansky's journey, one that has seen him painfully and publicly break ties with Russia, the country in which he made his name, in solidarity with his native Ukraine, and take on a new challenge at the storied New York City Ballet. Told with the lyricism, drama, and verve that befit its subject, The Boy from Kyiv is a riveting account of this major artist's ascent to the peaks of his field, a mesmerizing study of creativity in action, and a triumphant testament to ballet's enduring vitality.

"The only Lou Reed bio you need to read." -The Washington PostA Rolling Stone best music book of 2023 | One of Pitchfork's ten best music books of 2023 | A Variety best music book of the year | A Kirkus Reviews best nonfiction book of 2023"There have been many biographies of Lou Reed, but Will Hermes has written the definitive life . . . He has brought to the assignment a sharp eye, a clear head, a lucid prose style, and a determination to let Lou be Lou, without judgment." -Lucy Sante, author of Low LifeThe most complete and penetrating biography of the rock master, whose stature grows every year.Since his death in 2013, Lou Reed's living presence has only grown. The great rock poet presided over the marriage of Brill Building pop and the European avant-garde, and left American culture transfigured. In Lou Reed: The King of New York, Will Hermes offers the definitive narrative of Reed's life and legacy, dramatizing his long, brilliant, and contentious dialogue with fans, critics, fellow artists, and assorted habitués of the demimonde. We witness Reed's complex partnerships with David Bowie, Andy Warhol, John Cale, and Laurie Anderson; track the deadpan wit, street-smart edge, and poetic flights that defined his craft as a singer and songwriter with the Velvet Underground and beyond; and explore the artistic ambition and gift for self-sabotage that he took from his mentor the poet Delmore Schwartz. As Hermes follows Reed from Lower East Side cold-water flats to the eminent status he later achieved, he also tells the story of New York City as a cultural capital. The first biographer to draw on the New York Public Library's much-publicized Reed archive, Hermes employs the library collections, the release of previously unheard recordings, and a wealth of recent interviews with Reed's contemporaries to give us a new Lou Reed-a pioneer in writing about nonbinary sexuality and gender identity, a committed artist who pursued beauty and noise with equal fervor, and a turbulent and sometimes truculent man whose emotional imprint endures.

"A collection of short stories by Roberto Bolaäno"--

A finalist for the 2023 National Book Critics Circle AwardWinner of the Women's Prize for NonfictionNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | National Indie BestsellerA New York Times notable book of 2023 | Vulture's #1 book of 2023One of Slate's ten best books of 2023 | A Guardian best ideas book of 2023 | One of Time's ten best books of 2023 | Winner of the Pacific Northwest Book Award"I've been raving about Naomi Klein's Doppelganger . . . I can't think of another text that better captures the berserk period we're living through." -Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times"If I had to name a single book that makes sense of these last few dark years, it would be this one." -Katie Roiphe, The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice)What if you woke up one morning and found you'd acquired another self-a double who was almost you and yet not you at all? What if that double shared many of your preoccupations but, in a twisted, upside-down way, furthered the very causes you'd devoted your life to fighting against?Not long ago, the celebrated activist and public intellectual Naomi Klein had just such an experience-she was confronted with a doppelganger whose views she found abhorrent but whose name and public persona were sufficiently similar to her own that many people got confused about who was who. Destabilized, she lost her bearings, until she began to understand the experience as one manifestation of a strangeness many of us have come to know but struggle to define: AI-generated text is blurring the line between genuine and spurious communication; New Age wellness entrepreneurs turned anti-vaxxers are scrambling familiar political allegiances of left and right; and liberal democracies are teetering on the edge of absurdist authoritarianism, even as the oceans rise. Under such conditions, reality itself seems to have become unmoored. Is there a cure for our moment of collective vertigo?Naomi Klein is one of our most trenchant and influential social critics, an essential analyst of what branding, austerity, and climate profiteering have done to our societies and souls. Here she turns her gaze inward to our psychic landscapes, and outward to the possibilities for building hope amid intersecting economic, medical, and political crises. With the assistance of Sigmund Freud, Jordan Peele, Alfred Hitchcock, and bell hooks, among other accomplices, Klein uses wry humor and a keen sense of the ridiculous to face the strange doubles that haunt us-and that have come to feel as intimate and proximate as a warped reflection in the mirror.Combining comic memoir with chilling reportage and cobweb-clearing analysis, Klein seeks to smash that mirror and chart a path beyond despair. Doppelganger asks: What do we neglect as we polish and perfect our digital reflections? Is it possible to dispose of our doubles and overcome the pathologies of a culture of multiplication? Can we create a politics of collective care and undertake a true reckoning with historical crimes? The result is a revelatory treatment of the way many of us think and feel now-and an intellectual adventure story for our times.

The 25th anniversary edition of the much-beloved true adventure tale of Nathaniel Courthope; "A magnificent piece of popular history" (The Independent on Sunday).The tiny island of Run is an insignificant speck in the Indonesian archipelago. Just two miles long and half a mile wide, it is remote, tranquil, and largely ignored.Yet four hundred years ago, Run's bountiful harvest of a then-priceless spice, nutmeg, turned it into the most lucrative of the Spice Islands, precipitating a battle between the all-powerful Dutch East India Company and the British Crown. Out of the fighting came one of the most spectacular deals in history: Britain ceded Run to Holland, and in return was given Manhattan. This led not only to the birth of New York but also to the beginning of the British Empire.The man who made it all possible? Nathaniel Courthope and his small band of adventurers, who were sent to Run in 1616, and for four years held off the massive Dutch navy.Nathaniel's Nutmeg centers on the remarkable showdown between Courthope and the Dutch Governor General Jan Coen, and the brutal fate of the mariners racing to Run to reap the limitless profits of the spice trade. Written with the flair of a historical sea novel but based on rigorous research, Giles Milton's Nathaniel's Nutmeg is a brilliant, true tale of high adventure in the South Seas.

"Tom Wolfe at his very best" (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar-winning film of the same name and the eight-part Disney+ miniseries.Reissued for today's reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour Chwast and an introduction by the New York Times bestselling author Robin Sloan.What does it take to be an astronaut?First published in 1979, Tom Wolfe's astounding book The Right Stuff answers this question and more, exploring both the mental and the physical sacrifices that must be made by individuals entering space. Wolfe tells the stories of the pilots, engineers, and astronauts involved in Project Mercury (1958-1963), the United States' first human spaceflight program.A breathtaking epic, a magnificent adventure story, and an investigation into the heroism and courage of the first American astronauts to conquer space, The Right Stuff is a true American classic.

A startlingly beautiful novel about marriage by "one of our most scouringly vivid writers" (The New York Times Book Review).In See Now Then, Jamaica Kincaid's brilliant and evocative novel, a marriage is revealed in all its joys and agonies. This piercing examination of the manifold ways in which the passing of time operates on the human consciousness unfolds gracefully, and Kincaid inhabits each of her characters-a mother, a father, and their two children, living in a small village in New England-as they move, in their own minds, between the present, the past, and the future: for, as she writes, "the present will be now then and the past is now then and the future will be a now then." Her characters, constrained by the world, despair in their domestic situations. But their minds wander, trying to make linear sense of what is, in fact, nonlinear.See Now Then is Kincaid's attempt to make clear what is unclear, and to make unclear what we assumed was clear: that is, the beginning, the middle, and the end.Over the past forty years of her career, Kincaid has demonstrated a unique talent for seeing beyond and through the surface of things. In See Now Then, she envelops the reader in a world that is both familiar and startling-creating her most emotionally and thematically daring work yet.

"Now in its first American edition, Dionne Brand's groundbreaking A Map to the Door of No Return has emerged as a modern classic, a highly influential exploration of "being" in the Black diaspora"--

A candid, intensely funny memoir of ambition, gender, and a grueling decade inside Amazon.com, from the author of Nothing Good Can Come from This."A unique and brilliant book." -Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand WeeksWhat would you sacrifice for your career? All your free time? Your sense of self-worth? Your sanity?In 2006, Kristi Coulter left her cozy but dull job for a promising new position at the fast-growing Amazon.com, but she never expected the soul-crushing pressure that would come with it.In no time she found the challenge and excitement she'd been craving-along with seven-day workweeks, lifeboat exercises, widespread burnout, and a culture driven largely by fear. But the chase, the visibility, and, let's face it, the stock options proved intoxicating, and so, for twelve years, she stayed-until she no longer recognized the face in the mirror or the mission she'd signed up for.Unsparing, absurd, and wickedly funny, Exit Interview is a rare journey inside the crucible that is Amazon. It is an intimate, surprisingly relatable look at the work life of a driven woman in a world that loves the idea of female ambition but balks at the reality.

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers.In Shimmering Details, Volume II, Péter Nádas delves deeper into his and his parents' lives during the tumultuous years spanning the rise of Hungarian communism in 1948 to the brutal suppression of the 1956 uprising. Zeroing in on this critical period-which overlapped with the formative years of his childhood-Nádas concludes his monumental history of a family whose own experiences and fortunes are deeply intertwined with two centuries of Hungarian history.This second volume is a composite portrait of life lived at the nexus of world-historical forces-a jewel-like study that holds up different facets of the human experience to the light of Nádas's singular prose style. What emerges is a memoir of unusual insight and exceptional power. Hailed by Deborah Eisenberg as an "extraordinary writer," Nádas has confirmed his place among Europe's greatest living authors.

A sprawling collection of essays about the subcultures of the 1960s by Tom Wolfe, the revolutionary journalist and novelistWhen Tom Wolfe smashed his way onto the literary scene in 1965 with The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby, he transformed reporting in American popular culture. For his next project, Wolfe traveled from La Jolla to London in search of new lifestyles. The result is The Pump House Gang (published simultaneously with The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test in 1968): a collection of essays that chronicles life at the end of the 1960s, written with all the panache and perceptiveness that made Wolfe one of our greatest American journalists.Running throughout The Pump House Gang is a central theme of Wolfe's writing: status. In pieces about Hugh Hefner, Natalie Wood, and a gang of affluent teenage surfers, among others, Wolfe discusses the 1960s phenomenon of retreating from conventional social hierarchies, which he calls "starting your own league." Dancers, motorcyclists, lumpen-dandies, and stay-at-homes-everybody's doing it. Except for die-hards in the crumbling old social worlds of New York and London, where the confusion is so great that nobody can tell whether this is really the path to the top they've taken or just the service elevator.Dazzlingly brilliant as a stylist, daringly provocative as a commentator, and always entertaining, in The Pump House Gang, Wolfe is thoroughly, completely himself.

"Gorgeous . . . Lush, elegiac [and] Márquezian . . . A novel of abundance and generosity." -Sarah Cypher, The Washington Post"Richly embroidered . . . [Khalifa's] galloping narration restores life and soul to a city that has become a byword for devastation." -The EconomistFrom the National Book Award finalist Khaled Khalifa, the story of two friends whose lives are altered by a flood that devastates their Syrian village.On a December morning in 1907, two close friends, Hanna and Zakariya, return to their village near Aleppo after a night of drunken carousing in the city, only to discover that there has been a massive flood. Their neighbors, families, children-nearly all of them are dead. Their homes, shops, and places of worship are leveled. Their lives will never be the same.Hanna was once a wealthy libertine, a landowner who built a famed citadel devoted to the pursuit of pleasure and excess. But with the loss of his home, wife, and community, he transforms, becoming an ascetic mystic obsessed with death and the meaning of life. In No One Prayed Over Their Graves, we follow Hanna's life before and after the flood, tracing friendships, loves and lusts, family and business, until he is just one thread in the rich tapestry of Aleppo.Khaled Khalifa weaves a sweeping tale of life and death in the hubbub of Aleppine society at the turn of the twentieth century. No One Prayed Over Their Graves is a portrait of a people on the verge of great change-from provincial villages to the burgeoning modernity of the city, where Christians, Muslims, and Jews live and work together, united in their love for Aleppo and their dreams for the future.