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Set in Paris, a love triangle involving Dan and two women who are in love with each other, follows the young medical student on an odyssey into the subtle entanglements of love. By the author of Home Again. Tour.

Reeve thinks his life is over: his career is at a dead end, his face is a mess, and his landlord is evicting him from his apartment because he made too much noise when a hustler beat him up. As he lies in his hospital bed, he broods about the parallel ruin of his comrade and mentor Tom Slater, a famous American literary scholar (a composite portrait of the critics F.O. Matthiessen and Newton Arwin) who dabbled in Communism and was driven to suicide during the McCarthry era. There is further distraction in the patient in the next bed, a silent youth who arouses in Reeve dangerous longings for the sweetness and menace of straight men. Never at a loss for the telling detail or bitchy aside, the author offers a sweeping view of gay life in this century. Dark humor and decadent prose infuse this first novel of desire, betrayal and healing.

This story of a South African childhood won the "Los Angeles Times" Book Prize for First Fiction.

Short stories by an African American woman who writes about the South Bronx.

Samar, a reclusive and bookish college student in Benares, becomes involved with a group of wealthy Europeans, particularly the seductive Catherine, whose dalliance with Samar threatens her romance with a local sitar player. Samar also witnesses the excesses of political activism with its inevitable violence. When his father becomes ill and he must return to his provincial town, he finds that the life he once lived, that of a lonely scholar, is the one that makes the best sense for him. A New York Times Notable Book for the year 2000.

Three linked tales comprise this debut novel that explores Germany's Nazi past and conflicted present.

An overweight Palestinian outcast in Saudi Arabia and an educated Muslim woman investigate the death of a teenage bride in this psychologically and culturally fascinating literary mystery.

Noted historian McCullough examines the formative years of Theodore Roosevelt, providing a portrait of his family and a social history of a time period. Winner of the National Book Award for Biography.

Depicts the life of the distinguished Austrian author, Franz Kafka, examines his personality, and traces the development of his literary career.

The noted Yale scholar and critic offers a complete biography of the great eighteenth-century poet, elucidating his skills as a doubly disadvantaged individual and his triumphs as a poet and spokesman for his times.

Recounts the life of the longest-serving U.S. Interior Secretary, chronicling his role in the New Deal.

When Gary Gilmore was convicted for a double homicide in 1977, his execution--by firing squad--was the first in the United States in over a decade, and particularly noteworthy because Gilmore refused his right to appeal. Here Gary Gilmore's brother recollects his visits to death row and the meditations on his family life that they inspired.

Doris Lessing offers her autobiography up to the year 1949, from her childhood and adolescence in Rhodesia, to her first marriage and abandonment of her two children, her jettisoning of religion and adopting of political activism. Though autobiographical elements have always found a way into her fiction, here are the facts themselves.

Chambers, a former Communist Party member and "Time" magazine senior editor, earned a place in history for his testimony in the 1950 Alger Hiss trial, which heralded the age of McCarthyism and the rise to power of then-senator Richard Nixon. Chambers eventually became an aggressive anti-communist.

A biography of Charles Augustus Lindbergh, who on May 31, 1927, landed in Paris from New York after completing the first solo transatlantic flight. Upon returning to the U.S., Lindbergh became a national hero. The media's incessant pursuit of Lindbergh was something of a watershed episode in America's obsession with celebrity, an obsession which has permeated the culture throughout the 20th century. Anne Morrow Lindbergh provided Berg with access to both her and her husband's private papers. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.

This biography of Jefferson Davis, President of the Confederate States of America, reviews his life and achievements, and seeks to illuminate his character and his thought. Davis is seen as being grounded in the principles espoused by many of the Founding Fathers and as an advocate of states' rights.

This is the second volume of Edmund Morris's biography of Theodore Roosevelt. Here, he covers Roosevelt's presidency and its achievements in conservation, international relations, and domestic issues such as big business and labor. A New York Times Notable Book for 2002.

This prison memoir is by the outspoken Argentine newspaper editor who, because of his politics and because he was a Jew, was imprisoned and tortured following a coup by that country's military. It was originally published in 1981 and became a bestseller.

Describes the effects of a full-scale nuclear war, traces the history of the development of nuclear energy, and discusses what can be done to prevent self-extinction of humankind.

A satirical book illustrating Percy's unique humorous, ironical, and Christian attitudes. Contents include a mock self-help quiz, a script for "The Last Donahue Show", letters to "Dear Abby", essays, and other pieces of humor and criticism.

Drawing on his tours in South Africa as a correspondent for the "New York Times," the author details the absurdities, rationalizations, inequities, and cruelties of apartheid, showing what it means to suffer and survive under the restrictions of racial separation.

This title identifies those aspects of the theory of evolution that people find hard to believe.

Reveals how the Federal Reserve under Paul Volcker engineered changes in America's economy.

Offers a discursive account of modern man's progressive separation from nature and its impact on science and technology, art, music, history, and language.

Analyzes apathy in American politics, arguing that name-calling and rhetoric have clouded the issues.

Both influential and controversial, Francis Fukuyama’s 1992 analysis of the political and economic prospects following the fall of Communism is an essential text for debates on globalization and the post-9/11 world order. Fukuyama champions liberal democracy as the end result of the long march of history, and, borrowing from Hegel, says it addresses man’s essential longing "to be recognized."

A study of the two large communities in San Antonio and Los Angeles shows how Mexican-Americans are beginning to use the coalition-building strategies embraced by Jews, Italians, and black Americans to gain political clout and economic success.

Growing up in segregated Virginia during the Korean War era, Gregory Howard Williams attended "whites only" schools, went to "whites only" movie theaters, and lived a life of middle-class comfort. But when he was nine, after his parents' separation, Greg and his brother were forced to return to their father's family in Muncie, Indiana, where they discovered that their relatives were poor and black. Overnight, Greg Williams became a black boy. It became clear that Williams and his brother would now encounter prejudice from both sides of their mixed heritage as Williams strugggled to fight the racism that was so rampant in his world. Passed over for academic commendations reserved for white students, told by a school counselor not to date white girls, and often lacking even the basic necessities of food and clothing, Williams found support in caring for a family friend who sheltered him and his bother.

Peter Maass reports from the land that was Yugoslavia. His vivid descriptions of a place destroyed by war are highlighted by encounters with people on all sides who have been transformed into combatants. Maass grapples not just with the reality of Bosnia but with the question of why people make wars.

A history of the 1994 Rwanda genocide, in which longstanding enmity between the Tutsi and Hutu tribes resulted in the murder of hundreds of thousands of Tutsis and moderate Hutus by the extremist Hutu majority. Gourevitch contrasts horrific eyewitness accounts told by Rwandans with the muted responses of the rest of the world. He also assesses Rwanda's prospects for the future and contemplates what lessons humanity can learn from this hellish chapter in history.

Through this study of President Ronald Reagan's Strategic Defense Initiative, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Frances FitzGerald dissects the special qualities that lead to Reagan's success with the American people. She sees him as aloof from his own administration and from Washington politics, yet skilled in sensing the mood of the American people and for articulating a path that was to eventually bring about the end of the Cold War. A New York Times Editors' Choice for 2000.

In this comprehensive and incisive portrait of Dick Cheney and his tenure as Vice-President, journalist Barton Gellman tells how Cheney grabbed the reins of power, assumed control of the decision-making processes at the White House, suppressed dissenting views, and extended not only the power of the president but also, covertly, the power of the vice-president. Gellman portrays Cheney as a veteran Washington insider who learned to play the game and mastered it through decades of public service. Cheney, says Gellman, was the prime architect of the Bush war strategy in Iraq, and was a consummate stonewaller who frustrated the Congress and the press in a side-run around the Constitution. Selected by the New York Times Book Review as a Notable Book of 2008.

A sequel to Percy's earlier novel, "The Last Gentleman".

Frank Holliwell, formerly employed by the C.I.A., is lecturing at a Central American university. He is approached by a former colleague to investigate goings-on in nearby Tecan. Holliwell, while reluctant, is curious and agrees to go. The site is a mission run by the elderly Father Egan and the idealistic Sister Justin. The mission is about to be closed down. In need of a purpose for her life, Sister Justin offers the mission as a rebel sanctuary. Once Holliwell arrives there, however, he is caught up in revolution, torture, and horror.

Based on a true incident, this is the story of Oscar Schindler, a German industrialist who saved over 1000 Jews from the Nazis. Keneally's account is taken from the testimonies of dozens of Holocaust survivors.

The year is 1870, and Fool's Crow, so called after he killed the chief of the Crows during a raid, has a vision at the annual Sun Dance ceremony. The young warrior sees the end of the Indian way of life and the choice that must be made: resistance or humiliating accommodation. "A major contibution to Native American literature".--Wallace Stegner.

Set in a small Somerset town--Jane Austen country-- Weldon's novel is about a marriage gone awry.

In this collection of poetic stories set in Ireland, many are about love, and many about children. It won the Los Angeles times Book Prize for fiction.

Turtle Greer, daughter of Taylor Greer of Kingsolver's previous novel THE BEAN TREES, witnesses a freak accident at the Hoover Dam. With a moment of celebrity, Turtle's life changes, and so do the lives of everyone she loves.

In mid-1970s India, a "State of Internal Emergency" has been declared. Four disparate people find their lives connected in ways that are as inextricable as they are unexpected. A housing shortage brings them together as roommates in an apartment: they are a widow determined not to remarry, a student from the Himalayas, and a man and his nephew fleeing the violence of their village. The novel itself portrays India during a period of upheaval and tumult and explores the way the human spirit survives under such circumstances.

Brothers John and Edward Little flee their abusive Florida home for the wilds of Texas. There they confront bloodshed and savagery as they've never seen before. The brothers become separated, only to be reunited across the battle lines of the Mexican-American War.

This novel, which has secured W. G. Sebald a reputation as one of the most original literary figures of his time, combines historical fact with fiction as the narrator, who has recently suffered a mysterious and paralyzing breakdown, travels backward in time while he wanders through Suffolk, England. It includes photographs of people and places mentioned in the text. A New York Times Notable Book for 1998.

These poetic short stories, many of which meditate on death, involve fates that cross in the night but pause long enough to influence one another.

Money Breton tells her story in diary form, and it's a harrowing one: basically, her life is falling apart. But in the face of faithless husbands, desperately troubled children, a precarious job, and a fear that even her brain is out of control, Money perseveres by means of her wits and the wicked humor with which she observes her life. A New York Times Notable Book for 2001.

Michael Koryta opens ENVY THE NIGHT with 24-year-old Frank Temple III leaving jail after a sleepless night in the detox cell with other drunks. Frank seems oddly self-aware about his destructive tendencies, but, haunted by this father's death, he is a troubled young man. His father supposedly committed suicide after his double life as a hitman was revealed--and now the past bubbles up again when a military pal of his father's contacts Frank with some disturbing information. Koryta tells a good story, and his characters pull the reader in, making this a hard one to put down.

This modern history of China is told through the eyes of a few Chinese intellectuals. A scholar, a doctor, and a writer/political activist are the three major figures whose "lives will serve to introduce the reader to the extraordinary sequence of events that are often loosely dumped together as constituting the 'Chinese revolution.'" (from the Introduction)

Describes the changes brought about by the Civil War, discusses the impact of slavery's end, and looks at the political, economic, and social aspects of Reconstruction.

On encountering what he called "the Indies", the Jesuit Jose de Acosta wrote, "Having read what poets and philosophers write of the Torrid Zone, I persuaded myself that when I came to the Equator, I would not be able to endure the violent heat, but it turned out otherwise... What could I do then but laugh at Aristotle's Meteorology and his philosophy?" Acosta's experience echoes that of his fellow travelers to the New World, and it is this experience, with its profound effect on Western culture, that Anthony Grafton charts. Describing an era of exploration that went far beyond geographic bounds, this book shows how the evidence of the New World shook the foundations of the old, upsetting the authority of the ancient texts that had guided Europeans so far afield. The intellectual shift mapped out here, a movement from book learning to empirical knowledge, did not take place easily or quickly, and Grafton presents it in all its drama and complexity. What he recounts is in effect a war of ideas fought, sometimes unwittingly by mariners, scientists, publishers, scholars, and rulers over one hundred fifty years. He shows us explorers from Cortes and Columbus to Scaliger and Munster, laden with ideas gathered from ancient and medieval texts, in their encounters with the world at large. In colorful vignettes, firsthand accounts, published debates, and copious illustrations, we see these men and their contemporaries trying to make sense of their discoveries as they sometimes confirm, sometimes contest, and finally displace traditional images and notions of the world beyond Europe. The fundamental cultural revolution that Grafton documents still reverberates in our time. By taking us into thisbattle of books versus facts, a conflict that has shaped global views for centuries, Grafton allows us to re-experience and understand the Renaissance as it continues to this day.

A look at the gay world of pre-war New York City, which was, in fact, not a hidden subculture, but was very out and very proud.

A "highly illuminating" (Publishers Weekly, starred review) book that fundamentally transforms the whole debate about the cultural significance of advertising.

This strikingly original book is about place and history - about the universe of the Black Sea, from Jason and the Golden Fleece to the fall of Communism and the new world disorder. As Neal Ascherson shows in a colorful, learned, and surprising chronicle, the Black Sea has been a decisive "personality" in the history of Europe and Asia; his exploration of the myths and realities surrounding it reveals why it is still so alluring - and important - today.

An account of the Russian Revolution, written by a distinguished historian and Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge. Figes emphasizes the real cost of the Bolshevik coup d'etat--in lives, material progress, and moral decency--for the people of the former Soviet Union. In direct opposition to more than half a century of communist propaganda skillfully deployed throughout the West, he maintains that the party set Russia back economically as well as politically, in ways that will not likely be overcome for generations.

At the close of World War II, the French government put writer and editor Robert Brasillach to death for the anti-Semitic and antidemocratic positions he'd taken during the war. The justification for his execution has been subjected to extensive scrutiny over the years, both by right-wingers and revisionists who see Brasillach as a martyr, and by thinkers like this book's author, who questions whether Brasillach wasn't singled out as much for his homosexuality as for his political positions.

This study of Senator Barry Goldwater examines his defeat in 1964 and reads it as the beginning of the new conservative movement that was to eventually achieve its goals with the election of Ronald Reagan. Perlstein argues that Goldwater's stance on government's role in American life and his articulation of key issues established an agenda that influenced--and was even adopted by--both Republicans and Democrats. A New York Times Notable Book for 2001.

This comprehensive, in-depth analysis examines how Adolph Hitler attempted to change the map of Europe, and to put into reality what he wrote in MEIN KAMPF. Mark Mazower recounts the stunning military success of the German army, as well as the far less successful administration of the acquired territories. Hitler's plan failed to take accurately into account the many ethnic minorities across Europe, and this contributed to his undoing.

Themes from the ancient world combine with images of modern life in this collection of more than one hundred poems.

Three plays include a magical minstrel show, the personal relationship between a photographer and a dancer, and the dreams and memories of a young Black woman.

A complete edition that brings together the three sections of this long poem published in 1960, 1968, and 1975.

Poems deal with dreams, suffering, nature, travel, death, the sea, shipwrecks, poetry, mythology, decisions, the seasons, children, language, and music.

Hall celebrates his sixtieth birthday with the most powerful poem he has ever written, a book-length work that evokes the kind of public power associated with Hall's teacher Archibald MacLeish.

Winner of the third annual T. S. Eliot Prize.

Carolyn Forché is known as one of the most important contemporary poets. Her first book, Gathering the Tribes won the Yale Younger Poets Award. Her second, The Country Between Us, won both the Lamont Poetry Award and an award from the Poetry Society of America. Although The Angel of History is a departure form her previous books, it contains echoes of both earlier volumes. Placed in the context of twentieth-century moral disaster--war, genocide, the Holocaust, the atomic bomb--Forché's third collection of poems is a mediation on memory, specifically on how memory survives the unimaginable. The poems reflect the effects of such experience: the lines, and often the images within them, are fragmented, discordant. But read together, these lines become a haunting mosaic of grief, evoking the necessary accommodations human beings make to survive what is unsurvivable. These are personal poems, poems startling in their honesty and humility, poems that bear witness rather than explain or resolve. Carolyn Forché describes her book in a note to the reader. "The Angel of History is now about experiences. It is for me the opening of a wound, the muffling and silence of a decade, and it is also a gathering of utterances that have lifted away from the earth and wrapped it in a weather of risen words. These utterances issue from my own encounter with the events of this century but do not represent 'it.' The First-person, free-verse, lyric-narrative poem of my earlier years has given way to a work which has desired its own bodying forth: polyphonic, broken, haunted, and in ruins, with no possibility of restoration." An ambitious and compelling collection, The Angel of History may also be groundbreaking. As poets have always done, Carolyn Forché attempts to gibe voice to the unutterable, using language to keep memory alive, relive history, make tracks in an empty field, and link the past with the future.

A new collection of poetry from the author of COUNTRY MUSIC and THE WORLD OF TEN THOUSAND THINGS.

Poems by Alice Notley exploring her own past--her growth from her California girlhood to the life of an artist in Paris.

Schnackenberg, a prize-winning American poet, retells the story of Oedipus through the eyes of the god Apollo, who has been given the task of setting Sophocles's play to music.

This book-length lyric essay by MacArthur Grant-recipient Anne Carson, written in 29 small chapters which the poet calls "Tangos," emotionally chronicles the history of a marriage gone bad. Carson's fragmentary style is joined by excerpts from love letters and classical texts. A 2001 New York Times Notable Book.

Poet Frank Bidart uses the icons of American popular culture--Marilyn Monroe, The Great American Songbook, Hollywood--as lyrical entry points into timeless poetic themes of death, desire, and loss. WATCHING THE SPRING FESTIVAL was nominated for the National Book Award in 2008 and was a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for poetry.

This title identifies those aspects of the theory of evolution that people find hard to believe.

Explores instances of aggression and peacemaking among primates, examining how five different species of simians cope with aggression and how they make peace following fights.

The chief engineer at the construction of the Chernobyl plant and an investigator after the accident, gives an account of the accident and its aftermath.

A renowned scientist examines the less than two percent of human genes that distinguish us from chimpanzees and that link human behaviors--such as genocide, drug addiction, and the extermination of other species--to our animal predecessors.

Inspired by Darwin's observations of the Galapagos finches, the author reveals how the incremental changes that occur between generations of finches demonstrate natural selection. Through the author's discussions with many prominent ornithologists, the reader learns the differences among these finches and the effects the environment and sexual pressures have had on these birds.

As a child, Edward O. Wilson was fascinated with insects, particularly ants ("Most children have a bug period," he says. "I never grew out of mine"). He doggedly pursed this interest until he became one of the most important entomologists of our age. This captivating autobiography describes his journey from a shy and troubled childhood in which nature provided a sanctuary, to his position as professor of entomology at Harvard.

The legendary scientist shares his views of how scientific thinking is necessary to safeguard our democratic institutions and our technical civilization.

A chronological history of the essence of life, blood; from transfusions to clotting, bloodletting to the tragic spread of AIDS.

This scientific paean resurrects a forgotten hero of modern meteorology: Luke Howard. Howard named and classified the clouds, codifying a lasting landscape of the sky, contributing to the 19th-century scientific ethos, and sparking a Romantic frenzy among poets.

Stanford physicist Leonard Susskind challenges Stephen Hawking's "information paradox"--the theory that all information and matter that falls into a black hole is irrevocably lost--with a controversial "holographic theory" that claims that black holes store the information of everything that enters them on their event horizon. Even more shocking, Susskind contends that reality itself may be merely a kind of holographic projection of this vanished information, and that our known universe is actually a representation of matter that has already fallen into a black hole.

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