The author of The Death and Life of Great American Cities looks at business fraud and criminal enterprise, overextended government farm subsidies and zealous transit police, to show what happens when
The Nobel Prize-winning physicist and bestselling author of The First Three Minutes describes the grand quest for a unifying theory of nature--one that can explain events as disparate as the cohesion
The six-week New York Times bestselling history of the legendary six wives of Henry VIII--from an acclaimed biographer. "Admirably succeed(s) in bringing to life the six women who married Eng
Here are the most enduring works of six great American poets, collected in a single authoritative volume. From the overflowing pantheism of Walt Whitman to the exquisite precision of Emily Dickinson;
In the late 1970s Ondaatje returned to his native island of Sri Lanka. As he records his journey through the drug-like heat and intoxicating fragrances of that "pendant off the ear of India, " Ondaatj
In these mordant, elegant, and often disquieting essays, the internationally acclaimed dramatist creates a sort of autobiography by strobe light, one that is both mysterious and starkly revealing.The
The most readable and comprehensive guide to enjoying over five hundred years of classical music -- from Gregorian chants, Johann Sebastian Bach, and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart to Johannes Brahms, Igor S
The award-winning correspondent for the MacNeil/Lehrer NewsHour gives a moment-by-moment account of her walk into history when, as a 19-year-old, she challenged Southern law--and Southern violence--to
One of the best-known experimental novels of the 1960s, Beautiful Losers is Cohen’ s most defiant and uninhibited work. The novel centres upon the hapless members of a love triangle united by their s
What Makes Sammy Run?Everyone of us knows someone who runs. He is one of the symp-toms of our times—from the little man who shoves you out of the way on the street to the go-getter who shoves you out
Historical study of the functions of the relief system in America reveals that its policies are cyclical, expanding in times of civil disorder and contracting once political stability is restored
A collection of travelogues by distinguished women authors includes the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Vita Sackville-West, Annie Dillard, Isak Dinesen, Rebecca West, Willa Cather, Margaret Mead, an
A debut novel by the 1987 winner of the Pulitzer Prize for poetry. When a woman returns to her Midwestern hometown as an artist-in-residence to teach puppetry to schoolchildren, her homecoming also me
By piecing the lives of selected individuals into a grand mosaic, Pulitzer Prize-winning historian Daniel J. Boorstin explores the development of artistic innovation over 3,000 years. A hugely ambitio
In this seductive, wistful masterpiece, Truman Capote created a woman whose name has entered the American idiom and whose style is a part of the literary landscape. Holly Golightly knows that nothing
This lively and authoritative volume makes clear that the quest for taste and manners in America has been essential to the serious pursuit of a democratic culture. Spanning the material world from man
Six Memos for the Millennium is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. Here is his legacy to us: the universal values he pinpoints become the watchw
A movie tie-in edition of Carver's critically acclaimed short stories interweaves nine tales to create an incisive portrait of American life, institutions, and psyche, accompanied by an introduction b
Lively, poignant, and utterly winning, The Diary of Latoya Hunter is a timely portrait of adolescence--about the universal challenges of youth and about the ways it is shaped by the inner city. It is
He was short, foul-mouthed, and so constitutionally pugnacious that he once thrashed a Southern train conductor who treated him rudely. He rose from the undistinguished rank of quartermaster to comman
In this taut, chilling novel, Lester Ballard--a violent, dispossessed man falsely accused of rape--haunts the hill country of East Tennessee when he is released from jail.??While telling his story, Co
A roman a clef of the Saudi government--featuring Awali, Sultan Khureybit, Sultan Khazael, and Prince Fanar--indicts Arab monarchies and pleads for the Arab masses
The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Beloved and Jazz now gives us a learned, stylish, and immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that promises to change the way we read American literature e
If you are among the 10 percent of people who happen to be left-handed, you've had to endure such derisive terms as "gauche" and "a left-handed compliment." At school you may have been forced to write
From the extravagant use of pepper in the Middle Ages to the Protestant bourgeoisie's love of coffee to the reason why fashionable Europeans stopped sniffing tobacco and starting smoking it, Schivelbu
A groundbreaking anthology that demolishes the myths -- and reveals the true significance -- of the greatest archaeological discovery of our time.Ever since their initial discovery in 1947, the Dead S
Forty years after his Hitler: A Study in Tyranny set a standard for scholarship of the Nazi era, Lord Alan Bullock gives readers a breathtakingly accomplished dual biography that places Adolf Hitler's
Outer Dark is a novel at once fabular and starkly evocative, set is an unspecified place in Appalachia, sometime around the turn of the century.??A woman bears her brother's child, a boy; he leaves th
In a book written while he was president of Czechoslovakia, Vaclav Havel combines the same powerful eloquence, moral passion, and abiding wisdom that informed his writing as a dissident and playwright
An American Iliad in the guise of contemporary political reportage, What It Takes penetrates the mystery at the heart of all presidential campaigns: How do presumably ordinary people acquire that mixt
In David Mamet’s latest play, a male college instructor and his female student sit down to discuss her grades and in a terrifyingly short time become the participants in a modern reprise of the Inquis
In her latest forays into the American scene, Joan Didion covers ground from Washington to Los Angeles, from a TV producer's gargantuan "manor" to the racial battlefields of New York's criminal courts
Whether she is writing about George Eliot or Sylvia Plath; Victorian spiritual malaise or Toni Morrison; mythic strands in the novels of Iris Murdoch and Saul Bellow; politics behind the popularity of
By the author of A Lesson Before Dying and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman, Catherine Carmier is a compelling love story set in a deceptively bucolic Louisiana countryside, where blacks, Cajuns
