• new this month
• coming soon
• arts
• biographies
• classics
• classic poetry
• cookbooks
• fiction
• food writing
• history
• poetry
• nature guides
• travel guides
• travel writing
|
 |
|
The Boat
“A remarkable collection…his sympathy for his characters and his ability to write with both lyricism and emotional urgency lend his portraits enormous visceral power. … Mr. Le not only writes with an authority and poise rare even among longtime authors, but he also demonstrates an intuitive, gut-level ability to convey the psychological conflicts people experience when they find their own hopes and ambitions slamming up against familial expectations or the brute facts of history.” —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times
A stunningly inventive, deeply moving fiction debut: stories that take us from the slums of Colombia to the streets of Tehran; from New York City to Iowa City; from a tiny fishing village in Australia to a foundering vessel in the South China Sea, in a masterly display of literary virtuosity and feeling.
In the magnificent opening story, “Love and Honor and Pity and Pride and Compassion and Sacrifice,” a young writer is urged by his friends to mine his father’s experiences in Vietnam—and what seems at first a satire of turning one’s life into literary commerce becomes a transcendent exploration of homeland, and the ties between father and son. “Cartagena” provides a visceral glimpse of life in Colombia as it enters the mind of a fourteen-year-old hit man facing the ultimate test. In “Meeting Elise,” an aging New York painter mourns his body’s decline as he prepares to meet his daughter on the eve of her Carnegie Hall debut. And with graceful symmetry, the final, title story returns to Vietnam, to a fishing trawler crowded with refugees, where a young woman’s bond with a mother and her small son forces both women to a shattering decision.
Brilliant, daring, and demonstrating a jaw-dropping versatility of voice and point of view, The Boat is an extraordinary work of fiction that takes us to the heart of what it means to be human, and announces a writer of astonishing gifts.
Read the first story
Meet Nam Le
Read an interview with Nam Le
Buy the Book
(link to this item)
Audition
“Young people starting out in television sometimes say to me: “I want to be you.” My stock reply is always: “Then you have to take the whole package.”
And now, at last, the most important woman in the history of television journalism gives us that “whole package,” in her inspiring and riveting memoir. After more than forty years of interviewing heads of state, world leaders, movie stars, criminals, murderers, inspirational figures, and celebrities of all kinds, Barbara Walters has turned her gift for examination onto herself to reveal the forces that shaped her extraordinary life.
Barbara Walters has spent a lifetime auditioning: for her bosses at the TV networks, for millions of viewers, for the most famous people in the world, and even for her own daughter, with whom she has had a difficult but ultimately quite wonderful and moving relationship. This book, in some ways, is her final audition, as she fully opens up both her private and public lives. In doing so, she has given us a story that is heartbreaking and honest, surprising and fun, sometimes startling, and always fascinating.
Listen to Barbara Walters reading from Audition
Meet Barbara Walters
Buy the Book
(link to this item)
Right is Wrong
“When the Right calls progress in Iraq a mixed bag, that’s like a doctor saying that your acne has cleared up but you have a brain tumor—and calling the diagnosis a mixed bag.”
With her trademark passion, intelligence, and devastating wit, Huffington Post editor in chief Arianna Huffington tackles the issues that are crucial to this year’s presidential election and, even more so, to the fate of the country.
Huffington makes the case that America has been hijacked from within by a radical element—the “lunatic fringe” of the Right that has taken over the Republican Party. Despite holding views at odds with the majority of Americans, these zealots have given us an endless war in Iraq, a sputtering economy, a health care system on life support, a war on science and reason, and an immoral embrace of torture.
But they haven’t done it on their own: they have been enabled by a compliant media that act as if there is no such thing as truth and are more interested in cozying up to those in power than in holding them accountable, and by feckless Democrats who have allowed themselves to be intimidated into backing down again and again.
Both a withering indictment and a hopeful call to arms, Right Is Wrong is an explosive, boldly incisive work that will help set the national agenda.
Meet Arianna Huffington
Read an Excerpt
Buy the Book
(link to this item)
The Hakawati
“Here is absolute beauty. One of the finest novels I’ve read in years.” —Junot Diaz
In 2003, Osama al-Kharrat returns to Beirut after many years in America to stand vigil at his father’s deathbed. The city is a shell of the Beirut Osama remembers, but he and his friends and family take solace in the things that have always sustained them: gossip, laughter, and, above all, stories.
Osama’s grandfather was a hakawati, or storyteller, and his bewitching stories—of his arrival in Lebanon, an orphan of the Turkish wars, and of how he earned the name al-Kharrat, the fibster—are interwoven with classic tales of the Middle East, stunningly reimagined. Here are Abraham and Isaac; Ishmael, father of the Arab tribes; the ancient, fabled Fatima; and Baybars, the slave prince who vanquished the Crusaders. Here, too, are contemporary Lebanese whose stories tell a larger, heartbreaking tale of seemingly endless war—and of survival.
Like a true hakawati, Rabih Alameddine has given us an Arabian Nights for this century—a funny, captivating novel that enchants and dazzles from its very first lines: “Listen. Let me take you on a journey beyond imagining. Let me tell you a story.”
Read an Excerpt
Meet Rabih Alameddine
Visit Rabih Alameddine’s web site
Buy the Book
(link to this item)
World Science Festival 2008
Join authors Brian Greene, Oliver Sacks, and Alan Lightman and many others at the 2008 World Science Festival.
The World Science Festival is an unprecedented celebration of science that brings together many of the world’s greatest minds in science, business, public policy, and the arts to transform public perceptions of science. Over 40 events will take place at venues around New York City from May 28th-June 1st, 2008. Learn more at http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/
More about Brian Greene
More about Oliver Sacks
More about Alan Lightman
(link to this item)
|
|
The Downhill Lie
In the summer of 2005, I returned to golf after a much needed layoff of thirty-two years.
Attempting a comeback in my fifties wouldn't have been so absurd if I'd been a decent player when I was young, but unfortunately that wasn't the case. At my best, I'd shown occasional flashes of competence. At my worst, I'd been a menace to all carbon-based life-forms on the golf course.
On the day I gave up golfing, I stood six-feet even, weighed a stringy 145 pounds and was in relatively sound physical shape. When I returned to the game, I was half an inch taller, twenty-one pounds heavier and nagged by the following age-related ailments:
• elevated cholesterol;
• a bone spur deep in the right rotator cuff;
• an aching right hip;
• a permanently weakened right knee, due to a badly torn medial
meniscus that was scraped and repaired in February 2003 by the
same orthopedic surgeon who'd once worked on a young professional
quarterback named Dan Marino. (The doctor had assured me that
my injury was no worse than Marino's, then he'd added with a hearty
chuckle, "But you're also not twenty-two years old.")
Other factors besides my knee joint and HDL had changed during my long absence. When I'd abandoned golf in 1973, I had been a happily married father of a two-year-old son. When I returned to the sport in 2005, I was a happily remarried father of a five-year-old son, a fourteen-year-old stepson and a thirty-four-year-old son with three kids of his own. In other words, I was a grandpa.
Over those three busy and productive decades, a normal, well-centered person would have mellowed in the loving glow of the family hearth. Not me. I was just as restless, consumed, unreflective, fatalistic and emotionally unequipped to play golf in my fifties as I was in my teens.
What possesses a man to return in midlife to a game at which he'd never excelled in his prime, and which in fact had dealt him mostly failure, angst and exasperation?
Here’s why I did it: I'm one sick bastard.
Continue reading this excerpt
Excerpted from The Downhill Lie by Carl Hiassen Copyright © 2008 by Carl Hiassen. Excerpted by permission of Knopf, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
|
|
|
|
 |
The Boat
Written by Nam Le
The Pixar Touch
Written by David A. Price
Audition
Written by Barbara Walters
The Downhill Lie
Written by Carl Hiaasen
My Father's Country
Written by Wibke Bruhns, Translated by Shaun Whiteside
The Prince of Frogtown
Written by Rick Bragg
View all
new releases
May 2008
April 2008
March 2008
February 2008
September 2007
Explore the complete catalog of classics.
Get information and view sample pages here.
|