What does everyone in the modern world need to know? Renowned psychologist Jordan B. Peterson’s answer to this most difficult of questions uniquely combines the hard-won truths of ancient tradition with the stunning revelations of cutting-edge scientific research.

Humorous, surprising, and informative, Dr. Peterson tells us why skateboarding boys and girls must be left alone, what terrible fate awaits those who criticize too easily, and why you should always pet a cat when you meet one on the street.

What does the nervous system of the lowly lobster have to tell us about standing up straight (with our shoulders back) and about success in life? Why did ancient Egyptians worship the capacity to pay careful attention as the highest of gods? What dreadful paths do people tread when they become resentful, arrogant, and vengeful? Dr. Peterson journeys broadly, discussing discipline, freedom, adventure, and responsibility, distilling the world’s wisdom into 12 practical and profound rules for life. 12 Rules for Life shatters the modern commonplaces of science, faith, and human nature while transforming and ennobling the mind and spirit of its listeners.

"In each little life we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe."

DEAN KOONTZ thought he had everything he needed. A successful novelist with more than twenty #1 New York Times bestsellers to his credit, Dean had forged a career out of industry and imagination. He had been married to his high school sweetheart, Gerda, since the age of twenty, and together they had made a happy life for themselves in their Southern California home. It was the picture of peace and contentment. Then along came Trixie.

Dean had always wanted a dog-had even written several books in which dogs were featured. But not until Trixie was he truly open to the change that such a beautiful creature could bring about in him. Trixie had intelligence, a lack of vanity, and an uncanny knack for living in the present. And because she was joyful and direct as all dogs are, she put her heart into everything-from chasing tennis balls, to playing practical jokes, to protecting those she loved.

A retired service dog with Canine Companions for Independence, Trixie became an assistance dog of another kind. She taught Dean to trust his instincts, persuaded him to cut down to a fifty-hour work week, and, perhaps most important, renewed in him a sense of wonder that will remain with him for the rest of his life. She mended him in many ways.

Trixie weighed only sixty-something pounds, Dean occasionally called her Short Stuff, and she lived less than twelve years. In this big world, she was a little thing, but in all the ways that mattered, including the effect she had on those who loved her, she lived a big life.

As a child during the Depression and World War II, Pete Hamill learned early that drinking was an essential part of being a man, inseparable from the rituals of celebration, mourning, friendship, romance, and religion. Only later did he discover its ability to destroy any writer's most valuable tools: clarity, consciousness, memory. In *A Drinking Life*, Hamill explains how alcohol slowly became a part of his life, and how he ultimately left it behind. Along the way, he summons the mood of an America that is gone forever, with the bittersweet fondness of a lifelong New Yorker.

From Publishers Weekly

Ha Jin, who emigrated from China in the aftermath of Tiananmen Square, had only been writing in English for 12 years when he won the National Book Award for Waiting in 1999. His latest novel sheds light on an émigré writer's woodshedding period. It follows the fortunes of Nan Wu, who drops out of a U.S. grad school after the repression of the democracy movement in China, hoping to find his voice as a poet while supporting his wife, Pingping, and son, Taotao. After several years of spartan living, Nan and Pingping save enough to buy a Chinese restaurant in suburban Atlanta, setting up double tensions: between Nan's literary hopes and his career, and between Nan and Pingping, who, at the novel's opening, are staying together for the sake of their young boy. While Pingping grows more independent, Nan -amid the dulling minutiae of running a restaurant and worries about mortgage payments, insurance and schooling-slowly snuffs the torch he carries for his first love. That Nan at one point reads Dr. Zhivago isn't coincidental: while Ha Jin's novel lacks Zhivago's epic grandeur, his biggest feat may be making the reader wonder whether the trivialities of American life are not, in some ways, as strange and barbaric as the upheavals of revolution.

***

From the award-winning author of Waiting, a new novel about a family's struggle for the American Dream.

Meet the Wu family-father Nan, mother Pingping, and son Taotao. They are arranging to fully sever ties with China in the aftermath of the 1989 massacre at Tiananmen Square, and to begin a new, free life in the United States. At first, their future seems well-assured. But after the fallout from Tiananmen, Nan 's disillusionment turns him toward his first love, poetry. Leaving his studies, he takes on a variety of menial jobs as Pingping works for a wealthy widow as a cook and housekeeper. As Pingping and Taotao slowly adjust to American life, Nan still feels a strange attachment to his homeland, though he violently disagrees with Communist policy. But severing all ties-including his love for a woman who rejected him in his youth-proves to be more difficult than he could have ever imagined.

A Lady's Life in the Rocky Mountains" by Isabella L Bird (1831 — 1904) represents a series of the author’s letters to her sister, written during her journey to Colorado. In a six-month period of time she covered over a thousand miles alone, riding a horse, often without any appointed destination. The book is actually a detailed record of this fascinating experience filled with beautiful, vivid descriptions of the scenery, the people she met, their way of life. Among others was "Rocky Mountain Jim" Nugent, a rough man, whom she portrayed as an "awful looking a ruffian as one could see”, but who became her guide and companion, and appears in the book in a romantic outlook. A well brought-up young lady, she rode through the American West, wearing Hawaiian riding dress, climbed mountains and helped with grazing.

Ritwik Ghosh, twenty-two and recently orphaned, finds the chance to start a new life when he arrives in England from Calcutta. But to do so, he must not only relive his entire past but also make sense of his relationship with his mother — scarred, abusive and all-consuming. But Oxford holds little of the salvation Ritwik is looking for. Instead he moves to London, where he drops out of official existence into a shadowy hinterland of illegal immigrants. However, the story that Ritwik writes to stave off his loneliness — a Miss Gilby who teaches English, music and Western manners to the wife of a liberal zamindar — begins to find ghostly echoes in his life with his aged landlady, Anne Cameron. But then, one night, in the badlands of King's Cross, Ritwik runs into the suave, unfathomable Zafar bin Hashm. As present and past of several lives collide, Ritwik's own goes into free fall.

A poignant, intimate, funny, inspiring memoir—both a coming-of-age story and a meditation on creativity, devotion, and craft—from Bryan Cranston, beloved and acclaimed star of one of history’s most successful TV shows, Breaking Bad.

Bryan Cranston landed his first role at seven, when his father cast him in a United Way commercial. Acting was clearly the boy’s destiny, until one day his father disappeared. Destiny suddenly took a backseat to survival.

Now, in his riveting memoir, Cranston maps his zigzag journey from abandoned son to beloved star by recalling the many odd parts he’s played in real life—paperboy, farmhand, security guard, dating consultant, murder suspect, dock loader, lover, husband, father. Cranston also chronicles his evolution on camera, from soap opera player trying to master the rules of show business to legendary character actor turning in classic performances as Seinfeld dentist Tim Whatley, “a sadist with newer magazines,” and Malcolm in the Middle dad Hal Wilkerson, a lovable bumbler in tighty-whities. He also gives an inspiring account of how he prepared, physically and mentally, for the challenging role of President Lyndon Johnson, a tour de force that won him a Tony to go along with his four Emmys.

Of course, Cranston dives deep into the grittiest details of his greatest role, explaining how he searched inward for the personal darkness that would help him create one of the most memorable performances ever captured on screen: Walter White, chemistry teacher turned drug kingpin.

Discussing his life as few men do, describing his art as few actors can, Cranston has much to say about creativity, devotion, and craft, as well as innate talent and its challenges and benefits and proper maintenance. But ultimately A Life in Parts is a story about the joy, the necessity, and the transformative power of simple hard work.

We all come to a point in our lives where we finally ask the ever-looming question, “Is this all there is?” And most of us coast along afterwards, just accepting that the answer to that question is probably, “Yes, this is it.” Sometimes, though, we’re lucky. Sometimes we run into the right people at the right time.

Ryan and Jennifer are at that point in their marriage, asking that question. Luckily, tonight at a friend’s holiday party, they’re about to run into those very right people at exactly the right time. Bruce and Paige have successfully crossed the Rubicon into the realm of “what else there is.” They’ve discovered delights and a way of living that Ryan and Jennifer have only ever dreamed about.

Their secret? Bruce and Paige are swingers. And very soon now, thanks to a chance meeting and a new friendship, Ryan and Jennifer will close their eyes, clasp hands, and jump into the deep end of life, exploring the untold wonders of sexuality. Hedonistic pleasures that they can’t even fathom yet, threesomes and sex parties and a deep connection with friends and with each other. The swinging lifestyle.

Today is the day they proclaim: “There is more.” Today is the day they change their lives.

Be careful what you wish for—and how you wish for it!

Brace yourself for the most astonishing, challenging, upsetting, and profoundly moving book in many a season. An epic about love and friendship in the twenty-first century that goes into some of the darkest places fiction has ever traveled and yet somehow improbably breaks through into the light. Truly an amazement — and a great gift for its publisher.

When four classmates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, they're broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. There is kind, handsome Willem, an aspiring actor; JB, a quick-witted, sometimes cruel Brooklyn-born painter seeking entry to the art world; Malcolm, a frustrated architect at a prominent firm; and withdrawn, brilliant, enigmatic Jude, who serves as their center of gravity. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. Yet their greatest challenge, each comes to realize, is Jude himself, by midlife a terrifyingly talented litigator yet an increasingly broken man, his mind and body scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome — but that will define his life forever.

In rich and resplendent prose, Yanagihara has fashioned a tragic and transcendent hymn to brotherly love, a masterful depiction of heartbreak, and a dark examination of the tyranny of memory and the limits of human endurance.

From Publishers Weekly

"Sexuality has never been a problem with me. My problem is different. I am a fragment in a fragmented age." Despite this claim, the protagonist of Ran's unusual coming-of-age novel is defined by her precocious beauty and her struggle to define her sexual identity. Ran, one of China's most acclaimed contemporary women writers, tells how lovely Ni Niuniu is seduced before she enters puberty by an older woman, the sly, wise Widow Ho, then falls into an unwanted affair with her male teacher, Ti. In college, she meets the love of her life, a fellow student named Yin Nan, but their brief, passionate affair ends abruptly when Yin Nan becomes involved in the student protests in Tiananmen Square. Traumatized by the loss of Yin Nan and the deaths of her mother and Widow Ho, Niuniu retreats into her own mind, becoming Miss Nothing ("I no longer exist… I have disappeared…"). Niuniu's flaws, foibles and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study. Even the more conventional scenes are narrated with lyrical intensity, and hallucinatory dream sequences and passages describing Niuniu's alienation range from the revelatory to the overwrought. The result is an uneven but intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space.

From Booklist

The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen. As a child, sensitive and gawky Ni Niuniu never quite fit in. Teased by her classmates and neglected by her cold, distant father, she engaged in quiet forms of rebellion (she once stole her father's woolen trousers and cut them off at the knees). While her father scarcely acknowledged her, other adults paid Ni Niuniu too much mind: her middle-school teacher, Ti, and an eccentric widower who lived next door each took sexual advantage of the impressionable young girl. Haunted by the past and despondent over the recent death of her mother and departure of her first love, Ni Niuniu retreats from the realities of politically charged Beijing, writing and drawing and endlessly soaking in her tub. Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world.

***

"Chen Ran's strikingly introspective, subjective, and individualized writing sets her work distinctively apart for the traditional and mainstream realism of the majority of contemporary Chinese writers… In his translation, Howard-Gibbon adeptly conveys the exquisiteness, richness, and slight eccentricity of Chen's prose." – China Daily

"The turbulent decades spanning the Chinese Cultural Revolution and the deadly demonstrations at Tiananmen Square provide the backdrop for this sensuous, coming-of-age tale by Chinese essayist and short-story writer Chen… Chen's first work to be translated into English provides an eloquent examination of the quest for calm in a chaotic world." – Booklist

"An intriguing exploration of the contemporary consciousness of an alienated, urban Chinese woman for whom current history matters less than the reliable comforts of love, nature, and solitude." – Kirkus Reviews

"Niuniu's flaws, foibles, and idiosyncrasies represent fertile ground for Chen's wide-ranging psychological character study… [an] intriguing novel that captures the heightened sensibility of a woman who flees the bustling contemporary world for the sensual pleasures of inner space." – Publishers Weekly

"In the novel A Private Life, Ran Chen immerses us in the troubled life of Ni Niuniu… Chen weaves together these evaluations with Niuniu's manic writings in order to create an ultra postmodern tale of a young woman's psychosocial evolution… an important portrait of a young woman trying to survive in a complicated world." – Bust Magazine

"A Private Life is not an overtly political book; rather, it has the timeless quality of most dreams. Still, [narrator] Ni Niuniu's refusal to connect with the world outside her door becomes a kind of political statement." – Elizabeth Gold, Washington Post

"An atmospheric story of sexual awakening and ennui that enlarges our understanding of modern China." – Vancouver Sun

"Niuniu's hatred of the few powerful males in her life and her sexual confusion and manipulations are clearly depicted." – Sofia A. Tangalos, Library Journal

"This polished and readable translation of the inaugural novel of Chen Ran stands as an example of the quasi-autobiographical Sino-Japanese shishosetsu" – Choice

"A riveting tale… a lyrical meditation on memory, sexuality, femininity, and the often arbitrary distinctions between madness and sanity." – Translation Review

"A Private Life shows Chen Ran at her best: weaving together the female bildungsroman and social and political satire, she effortlessly flits from outbursts of rage to ecstasy to rarefied emotions. Her philosophical musings on the difficulty of achieving individual freedom are as critical of the collective pursuit of wealth and sensorial pleasures in China after socialism as of the authoritarianism and ideological conformity during the heyday of the Cultural Revolution. The poignant, tragic-comic tale is ultimately about bondage and transcendence." – Tze-Lan D. Sang, author of The Emerging Lesbian: Female Same-Sex Desire in Modern China

"The novel daringly depicts a woman's emotional journey towards the maturation of her sexuality. It is a provocative reflection of the new sensibility of a young generation of Chinese women in the post-Deng era. Chen Ran's sensuous style easily breathes through the translator's English rendition of her language." – Lingchei Letty Chen, Washington University, St. Louis

"One of the most acclaimed women writers in contemporary China, Chen Ran in this novel explores the complex emotional territory of the female body, sexuality, homoeroticism, and fantasy. The author’s personal voice triumphs in the novel as a most conscious presence, dissolving the public and collective model of socialist literature. Daringly written and excellently translated, A Private Life not only entertains, but also leaves the reader pondering Chen’s disturbing and deeply personal message." – Lingzhen Wang, Brown University

A singularly talented writer makes his literary debut with this provocative, soulful, and sometimes hilarious story of a failed journalist asked to do the unthinkable: Forge Holocaust-restitution claims for old Russian Jews in Brooklyn, New York.

Yevgeny Gelman, grandfather of Slava Gelman, "didn't suffer in the exact way" he needs to have suffered to qualify for the restitution the German government has been paying out to Holocaust survivors. But suffer he has-as a Jew in the war; as a second-class citizen in the USSR; as an immigrant to America. So? Isn't his grandson a "writer"?

High-minded Slava wants to put all this immigrant scraping behind him. Only the American Dream is not panning out for him-Century, the legendary magazine where he works as a researcher, wants nothing greater from him. Slava wants to be a correct, blameless American-but he wants to be a lionized writer even more.

Slava's turn as the Forger of South Brooklyn teaches him that not every fact is the truth, and not every lie a falsehood. It takes more than law-abiding to become an American; it takes the same self-reinvention in which his people excel. Intoxicated and unmoored by his inventions, Slava risks exposure. Cornered, he commits an irrevocable act that finally grants him a sense of home in America, but not before collecting a price from his family.

A Replacement Life is a dark, moving, and beautifully written novel about family, honor, and justice.

As far as Joan Bateman is concerned, life as she's known it is over. For years she's lived with a dual identity. The people of Indigo know her simply as their neighbor, but to crime-mystery readers, she's the bestselling author Jules Burrell. But once her secret is leaked, the media, her fans and Anthony Verdun, her New York agent, all descend on the sleepy little town.

Anthony is bent on using the publicity to promote Joan's latest book, but it's when the plot turns out to be more fact than fiction and the murderer sets his sights on Joan that the relationship between author and agent becomes much more personal.

When a body of a middle-aged woman is found under a hedge, Inspector Wexford finds he has very little information to pursue the case. From the author of AN UNKINDNESS OF RAVENS and THE VEILED ONE.

BONUS: This edition contains an excerpt from Anne Tyler's The Beginner's Goodbye.

"Without Anne Tyler, American fiction would be an immeasurably bleaker place."

— NEWSDAY

Evie Decker is a shy, slightly plump teenager, lonely and silent. But her quiet life is shattered when she hears the voice of Drumstrings Casey on the radio and becomes instantly attracted to him. She manages to meet him, bursting out of her lonely shell-and into the attentive gaze of the intangible man who becomes all too real….

An outrageously funny novel of adventure, sex, corruption, and crime from one of the greatest British authors of the twentieth century.

Michael Cullen is proud to be a bastard. His first memories are of the war, when his mother welcomed every soldier in Britain into her house, and young Michael hid beneath her bed to let the rocking of the springs lull him to sleep. By the time he’s eighteen, he’s got a pregnant girlfriend, and is staring down a long life of working-class respectability that simply makes him sick. So Michael says goodbye to his girlfriend and his home in Nottingham, and hits the road for London, where he will make his fortune — or die trying.

From the nightclubs of Soho to the depths of London’s underworld, Michael can’t help but get into trouble. But whether he’s chauffeuring a vicious gangster or smuggling gold bullion across the channel, he never stops having a wonderful time. Indeed, Michael is something else entirely: a happy…

Andreas Egger knows every path and peak of his mountain valley, the source of his sustenance, his livelihood — his home.

Set in the mid-twentieth century and told with beauty and tenderness, his story is one of man's relationship with an ancient landscape, of the value of solitude, the arrival of the modern world, and above all, of the moments, great and small, that make us who we are.

Morning rush hour on the Golden Gate Bridge. Amidst the river of metal and glass a shocking event occurs, leaving those who witnessed it desperately looking for answers, most notably one man and his son Jake, who captured the event and uploaded it to the internet for all the world to experience. As the media swarms over the story, Jake will face the ramifications of his actions as he learns the perils of our modern disconnect between the real world and the world we create on line.

In land-locked Arizona, as the entire country learns of the event, Sara views Jake’s video just before witnessing a horrible event of her own: her boyfriend’s posting of their intimate sex tape. As word of the tape leaks out, making her an instant pariah, Sara needs to escape the small town’s persecution of her careless action. Along with Rodney, an old boyfriend injured long ago in a freak accident that destroyed his parents’ marriage, she must run faster than the internet trolls seeking to punish her for her indiscretions. Sara and Rodney will reunite with his estranged mother, Kat, now in danger from a new man in her life who may not be who he — or his online profiles — claim to be, a dangerous avatar in human form.

With a wide cast of characters and an exciting pace that mimics the speed of our modern, all-too-connected lives, All This Life examines the dangerous intersection of reality and the imaginary, where coding and technology seek to highlight and augment our already flawed human connections. Using his trademark talent for creating memorable characters, with a deep insight into language and how it can be twisted to alter reality, Joshua Mohr returns with his most contemporary and insightful novel yet.

In 1975, Angola was tumbling into pandemonium; everyone who could was packing crates, desperate to abandon the beleaguered colony. With his trademark bravura, Ryszard Kapuscinski went the other way, begging his was from Lisbon and comfort to Luanda — once famed as Africa's Rio de Janeiro — and chaos.

Angola, a slave colony later given over to mining and plantations, was a promised land for generations of poor Portuguese. It had belonged to Portugal since before there were English-speakers in North America. After the collapse of the fascist dictatorship in Portugal in 1974, Angola was brusquely cut loose, spurring the catastrophe of a still-ongoing civil war. Kapuscinski plunged right into the middle of the drama, driving past thousands of haphazardly placed check-points, where using the wrong shibboleth was a matter of life and death; recording his imporessions of the young soldiers — from Cuba, Angola, South Africa, Portugal — fighting a nebulous war with global repercussions; and examining the peculiar brutality of a country surprised and divided by its newfound freedom.

In 1975, six young people stormed the West German embassy in Stockholm, taking the entire staff hostage. They demanded the immediate release of members of the Baader- Meinhof group being held as prisoners in West Germany, but twelve hours into the siege, the embassy was blown up, two hostages were dead, and many others were injured, including the captors. Thus begins Leif GW Persson's Another Time, Another Life.

The story, based on real events linked to the still-unsolved assassination of Swedish prime minister Olof Palme, p icks up in 1989, as the seemingly unrelated stabbing death of a civil servant is investigated by officers Bo Jarnebring and Anna Holt. Under the supervision of their cantankerous, prejudiced, and corrupt superior, Evert Bäckström, the case gets surreptitiously swept under the rug, and the victim is tied to a string of sex-related crimes, despite evidence to the contrary.

Another ten years pass before the confounding truth about the murder victim is unearthed. Just as Lars Martin Johansson, a friend of Jarnebring's, begins his tenure as the head of the Swedish Security Police, he inherits two files from his predecessor, one of which is on the murder victim – who turns out to have been a collaborator in the 1975 embassy takeover. Revealed now are not only the identities of the other collaborators but also the identity of the murderer: an intelligent, capable lawyer a heartbeat away from the top position in Sweden's Ministry of Defense. With masterfully interlaced plotlines pulled from the darkest corners of political power and corruption, Another Time, Another Life bristles with wit, insight, and intensity.

A pair of lectures from one of the twentieth century’s most mesmerizing speakers.

Lawrence Durrell was in his early twenties when, tired of the stiffness of London life, he took his family to live in Corfu. Interwar Greece, whose hard beds and mosquito swarms Durrell documented so tenderly in Prospero’s Cell, was no more. In the first of this pair of lectures, given during a 1970s visit to California, Durrell recalls those days, talking of family, poetry, and the joy of the islands as no other writer can.

When war came to the Mediterranean, Durrell was swept into diplomatic service, an adventure he recounts in his second lecture. Though a diplomat of the modern world, he served under men whose experience stretched back to the days before the telephone, when solutions for crises had to be devised by the ambassador, and not phoned in from London. These two lectures on long-vanished worlds are an elegant demonstration of the evocative power of Durrell’s unmatched storytelling.

The controversial story of Chanel, the twentieth century's foremost fashion icon.

Revolutionizing women's dress, Gabrielle "Coco'' Chanel was the twentieth century's most influential designer. Her extraordinary and unconventional journey-from abject poverty to a new kind of glamour- helped forge the idea of modern woman.

Unearthing an astonishing life, this remarkable biography shows how, more than any previous designer, Chanel became synonymous with a rebellious and progressive style. Her numerous liaisons, whose poignant and tragic details have eluded all previous biographers, were the very stuff of legend. Witty and mesmerizing, she became muse, patron, or mistress to the century's most celebrated artists, including Picasso, Dalí, and Stravinsky.

Drawing on newly discovered love letters and other records, Chaney's controversial book reveals the truth about Chanel's drug habit and lesbian affairs. And the question about Chanel's German lover during World War II (was he a spy for the Nazis?) is definitively answered.

While uniquely highlighting the designer's far-reaching influence on the modern arts, Chaney's fascinating biography paints a deeper and darker picture of Coco Chanel than any so far. Movingly, it explores the origins, the creative power, and the secret suffering of this exceptional and often misread woman.

**By the author of the acclaimed bestseller *Benjamin Franklin*, this is the first full biography of Albert Einstein since all of his papers have become available.**

How did his mind work? What made him a genius? Isaacson's biography shows how his scientific imagination sprang from the rebellious nature of his personality. His fascinating story is a testament to the connection between creativity and freedom.

Based on newly released personal letters of Einstein, this book explores how an imaginative, impertinent patent clerk -- a struggling father in a difficult marriage who couldn't get a teaching job or a doctorate -- became the mind reader of the creator of the cosmos, the locksmith of the mysteries of the atom and the universe. His success came from questioning conventional wisdom and marveling at mysteries that struck others as mundane. This led him to embrace a morality and politics based on respect for free minds, free spirits, and free individuals.

These traits are just as vital for this new century of globalization, in which our success will depend on our creativity, as they were for the beginning of the last century, when Einstein helped usher in the modern age.

### Amazon.com Review

As a scientist, Albert Einstein is undoubtedly the most epic among 20th-century thinkers. Albert Einstein as a man, however, has been a much harder portrait to paint, and what we know of him as a husband, father, and friend is fragmentary at best. With *Einstein: His Life and Universe*, Walter Isaacson (author of the bestselling biographies *Benjamin Franklin* and *Kissinger*) brings Einstein's experience of life, love, and intellectual discovery into brilliant focus. The book is the first biography to tackle Einstein's enormous volume of personal correspondence that heretofore had been sealed from the public, and it's hard to imagine another book that could do such a richly textured and complicated life as Einstein's the same thoughtful justice. Isaacson is a master of the form and this latest opus is at once arresting and wonderfully revelatory. *--Anne Bartholomew*

**Read "The Light-Beam Rider," the first chapter of Walter Isaacson's *Einstein: His Life and Universe*.**

* * *

**Five Questions for Walter Isaacson**

**Amazon.com:** What kind of scientific education did you have to give yourself to be able to understand and explain Einstein's ideas?

**Isaacson:** I've always loved science, and I had a group of great physicists--such as Brian Greene, Lawrence Krauss, and Murray Gell-Mann--who tutored me, helped me learn the physics, and checked various versions of my book. I also learned the tensor calculus underlying general relativity, but tried to avoid spending too much time on it in the book. I wanted to capture the imaginative beauty of Einstein's scientific leaps, but I hope folks who want to delve more deeply into the science will read Einstein books by such scientists as Abraham Pais, Jeremy Bernstein, Brian Greene, and others.

**Amazon.com:** That Einstein was a clerk in the Swiss Patent Office when he revolutionized our understanding of the physical world has often been treated as ironic or even absurd. But you argue that in many ways his time there fostered his discoveries. Could you explain?

**Isaacson:** I think he was lucky to be at the patent office rather than serving as an acolyte in the academy trying to please senior professors and teach the conventional wisdom. As a patent examiner, he got to visualize the physical realities underlying scientific concepts. He had a boss who told him to question every premise and assumption. And as Peter Galison shows in *Einstein's Clocks, Poincare's Maps*, many of the patent applications involved synchronizing clocks using signals that traveled at the speed of light. So with his office-mate Michele Besso as a sounding board, he was primed to make the leap to special relativity.

**Amazon.com:** That time in the patent office makes him sound far more like a practical scientist and tinkerer than the usual image of the wild-haired professor, and more like your previous biographical subject, the multitalented but eminently earthly Benjamin Franklin. Did you see connections between them?

**Isaacson:** I like writing about creativity, and that's what Franklin and Einstein shared. They also had great curiosity and imagination. But Franklin was a more practical man who was not very theoretical, and Einstein was the opposite in that regard.

**Amazon.com:** Of the many legends that have accumulated around Einstein, what did you find to be least true? Most true?

**Isaacson:** The least true legend is that he failed math as a schoolboy. He was actually great in math, because he could visualize equations. He knew they were nature's brushstrokes for painting her wonders. For example, he could look at Maxwell's equations and marvel at what it would be like to ride alongside a light wave, and he could look at Max Planck's equations about radiation and realize that Planck's constant meant that light was a particle as well as a wave. The most true legend is how rebellious and defiant of authority he was. You see it in his politics, his personal life, and his science.

**Amazon.com:** At *Time* and CNN and the Aspen Institute, you've worked with many of the leading thinkers and leaders of the day. Now that you've had the chance to get to know Einstein so well, did he remind you of anyone from our day who shares at least some of his remarkable qualities?

**Isaacson:** There are many creative scientists, most notably Stephen Hawking, who wrote the essay on Einstein as "Person of the Century" when I was editor of *Time*. In the world of technology, Steve Jobs has the same creative imagination and ability to think differently that distinguished Einstein, and Bill Gates has the same intellectual intensity. I wish I knew politicians who had the creativity and human instincts of Einstein, or for that matter the wise feel for our common values of Benjamin Franklin.

* * *

**More to Explore**

*Benjamin Franklin: An American Life*

*Kissinger: A Biography* **

**The Wise Men: Six Friends and the World They Made* ***

* * *

### **From Publishers Weekly**

**Acclaimed biographer Isaacson examines the remarkable life of "science's preeminent poster boy" in this lucid account (after 2003's *Benjamin Franklin* and 1992's *Kissinger*). Contrary to popular myth, the German-Jewish schoolboy Albert Einstein not only excelled in math, he mastered calculus before he was 15. Young Albert's dislike for rote learning, however, led him to compare his teachers to "drill sergeants." That antipathy was symptomatic of Einstein's love of individual and intellectual freedom, beliefs the author revisits as he relates his subject's life and work in the context of world and political events that shaped both, from WWI and II and their aftermath through the Cold War. Isaacson presents Einstein's research—his efforts to understand space and time, resulting in four extraordinary papers in 1905 that introduced the world to special relativity, and his later work on unified field theory—without equations and for the general reader. Isaacson focuses more on Einstein the man: charismatic and passionate, often careless about personal affairs; outspoken and unapologetic about his belief that no one should have to give up personal freedoms to support a state. Fifty years after his death, Isaacson reminds us why Einstein (1879–1955) remains one of the most celebrated figures of the 20th century. *500,000 firsr printing, 20-city author tour, first serial to *Time*; confirmed appearance on *Good Morning America*. (Apr.)*

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved. **

Winner of the 2012 Philip K. Dick Award

Samuil Petrovitch is a survivor.

He survived the nuclear fallout in St. Petersburg and hid in the London Metrozone—the last city in England. He’s lived this long because he’s a man of rules and logic.

For example, getting involved = a bad idea.

But when he stumbles into a kidnapping in progress, he acts without even thinking. Before he can stop himself, he’s saved the daughter of the most dangerous man in London.

And clearly saving the girl = getting involved.

Now, the equation of Petrovitch’s life is looking increasingly complex.

Russian mobsters + Yakuza + something called the New Machine Jihad = one dead Petrovitch.

But Petrovitch has a plan—he always has a plan—he’s just not sure it’s a good one.

Eleven charming, delicate sketches of diplomatic life in service of the crown.

After decades spent representing Britain around the globe, Antrobus has earned a shirtful of medals and the right to pass afternoons in his London club, musing over old times. His memory is long, and every old embarrassment still rankles — no matter how ridiculous. The incident with the Yugoslav ghost train, for instance, still causes him to clench his fists in fear. When he speaks of Sir Claud Polk-Mowbray, he takes pains to lower his voice — lest an American hear. And his stomach has never recovered from the incident involving the fried flag.

Based on Lawrence Durrell’s own experience in the diplomatic corps, Antrobus’s cutting observation is drawn from the strange and humorous truth. Few are those with a better sense of place than Durrell, and even fewer with wit to match.

The first biography of the most influential writer of his generation, David Foster Wallace.

David Foster Wallace was the leading literary light of his era, a man who not only captivated readers with his prose but also mesmerized them with his brilliant mind. In this, the first biography of the writer, D. T. Max sets out to chart Wallace’s tormented, anguished and often triumphant battle to succeed as a novelist as he fights off depression and addiction to emerge with his masterpiece, Infinite Jest.

Since his untimely death by suicide at the age of forty-six in 2008, Wallace has become more than the quintessential writer for his time — he has become a symbol of sincerity and honesty in an inauthentic age. In the end, as Max shows us, what is most interesting about Wallace is not just what he wrote but how he taught us all to live. Written with the cooperation of Wallace’s family and friends and with access to hundreds of his unpublished letters, manuscripts, and audio tapes, this portrait of an extraordinarily gifted writer is as fresh as news, as intimate as a love note, as painful as a goodbye.

Known for his "cunning, dismaying and beautifully conceived" fiction (New York Times), Akhil Sharma delivers a story of astonishing intensity and emotional precision.

Growing up in Delhi in 1978, eight-year-old Ajay Mishra and his older brother Birju play cricket on the streets, eagerly waiting for the day they can join their father in America. America to the Mishras is, indeed, everything they could have imagined and more until tragedy strikes. Young Ajay prays to a God he envisions as Superman, searching for direction amid the ruins of his family's new life. Heart-wrenching and darkly funny, Family Life is a universal story of a boy torn between duty and his own survival."

Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell née Stevenson (1810-1865), often referred to simply as Mrs. Gaskell, was an English novelist and short story writer during the Victorian era. She is perhaps best known for her biography of Charlotte Brontë. Her novels offer a detailed portrait of the lives of many strata of society, including the very poor, and as such are of interest to social historians as well as lovers of literature. She married William Gaskell, the minister at Cross Street Unitarian Chapel in Manchester. They settled in Manchester, where the industrial surroundings would offer inspiration for her novels. Her first novel, Mary Barton: A Tale of Manchester Life, was published anonymously in 1848. The best known of her remaining novels are Cranford (1853), North and South (1855), and Wives and Daughters (1866). She became popular for her writing, especially her ghost story writing, aided by her friend Charles Dickens, who published her work in his magazine Household Words. Her other works include: The Grey Woman (1865), Lois the Witch (1861) and The Old Nurse's Story (1852).

Get a Life begins with Paul Bannerman, a South African ecologist, being treated for thyroid cancer with radioactive iodine. To spare his wife and child any peril from the radioactivity, he returns to his parents' home to recuperate. He's returned to his childhood state, being cared for by his mother, a civil rights lawyer, and the black housekeeper who's been with the family his whole life. Paul's wife, an advertising executive, realizes that her clients are facilitating the foreign corporations who want to take advantage of liberal land use laws for their own interests. Paul's illness forces them all the re-evaluate both their lives and the new challenges facing their country. Nadine Gordimer's has received mostly positive reviews with the Philadelphia Inquirer saying, "At first whiff, Get a Life feels an odd title for this novel. But as the action progresses, and Gordimer masterfully grinds her yarn to a quivering conclusion, no answers have been provided, and the moniker she has given this provocative book seems perfect."

Книга, написанная по сюжету игры Half-Life 2. Продолжает сюжет книги серии HL1

Анна пыталась честно трудиться в рекламном агентстве, но из-за собственной беспечности и досадных недоразумений с шефом потеряла престижную работу. Увы, жизнь домохозяйки полна забот и проблем, о которых офисные барышни и не догадываются. За неделю Анна умудряется вывести из строя всю технику, испортить отношения с соседями и свекровью, устроить на кухне пожар и понять: домоседки из нее не получится… И тут – счастливый случай! Анна знакомится с импозантным президентом крупной компании и мгновенно попадает под гипнотическое обаяние этого человека. Он предлагает заняться любимым делом за не реальные деньги! Какая же мышь откажется от бесплатного сыра, даже зная, где обычно его выдают?

Анна соглашается, не раздумывая…

The story of an epic life on a grand scale, Michael Korda’s Hero is a gripping, in-depth biography of the extraordinary, mysterious, and dynamic Englishman still famous the world over as “Lawrence of Arabia.” An Oxford scholar and archaeologist sent to Cairo as a young intelligence officer in 1916, Lawrence was a born leader, utterly fearless and seemingly impervious to pain and fatigue. A bold and ruthless warrior, he was the virtual inventor of modern insurgency and guerrilla warfare; a writer of genius who alternately sought and fled the limelight.    Korda digs deeper than anyone before him to expose the flesh-and-blood man and his contradictory nature—farsighted visionary; diplomat and kingmaker; shy, sensitive, and private man; genius military strategist; arguably the first modern “media celebrity” . . . and one of its first victims. Hero is the magisterial story of one of the most unique and fascinating figures of modern times—the arch-hero whose life was, at once, a triumph and a sacrifice.

There's more than one way to save a life...

After her best friend is brutally murdered by a stranger she met in a country bar one night, Marli McKinnon feels grief-stricken and horribly responsible. Driven by guilt, she returns to Cactus Jack's Saloon, hoping to encounter the man she knows as Ron, not sure what she's going to do if she sees him. Instead she meets another stranger - a big, gorgeous man with whom she shares a surprising connection, to whom she's unwillingly attracted.

Six months ago, FBI Special Agent Trey Nicholson's life was ripped apart by betrayal, which sent his life spiraling into the biggest screw-up of his career. He's intrigued by the pretty, sad-eyed blonde he meets at Cactus Jack's, and curious about what she's doing there all alone. When Marli learns he's an FBI agent, she asks for his help. She tells him the story of her friend's murder and Trey realizes with horror that the serial killer he let get away has killed again. He urges Marli to let the police deal with it, but guilt weighs heavy on him too, and he returns to the bar the next night – just in time to save Marli from someone attacking her in the parking garage.

Each motivated by guilt, Trey and Marli work together to try to find the killer before he kills again... before he kills Marli. As they do, attraction deepens into love... but can they overcome the shadows in their pasts and allow themselves to go on with life

Mark Dunn returns for his third novel with MacAdam/Cage with Ibid, a novel written entirely in footnotes. "Being one of those rare birds who actually reads footnotes," comments Dunn, "I often find myself rewarded by my time spent in the margins. Many authors give themselves wonderful license in their footnotes to let their guard down, even get a little frisky and mischievous." And so the idea for Ibid was born. Dunn pushes this propensity to the limit, and has created a full-length hilarious novel entirely upon the margins of a fictitious text. Ibid tells the fictional story of Jonathan Blashette, great American entrepreneur and humanitarian, illuminating his life, 1888–1962, offering, along the way, glimpses into the lives of many of those who populated his expansive world. A comedic Typhoid Mary, Jonathan's life makes us both wince and laugh at those misplaced intentioned and the ideals of a century that perhaps took itself just a little too seriously. Dunn holds up a funhouse mirror at the pedestaled residents of the age and asks why so many of the more famous ones did so many stupid things and rarely got called for them.

Giving voice to the dispossessed and crafting stories of lives held in the balance, James Kelman reaches us all. Penetrating deeply into the hearts, minds, and desperation of characters who find themselves in everyday situations-in the hospital, at a bus stop, in a living room with the endless roar of the vacuum cleaner and a distant wife-Kelman follows their streams of consciousness and brings their worries to life. With honesty and dark humor, he confronts the issues of language, class, politics, gender, and age-identity in all its forms.

Who would have thought that seventy-three years after Joseph Roth’s lonely death in Paris, new editions of his translations would be appearing regularly? Roth, a transcendent novelist who also produced some of the most breathtakingly lyrical journalism ever written, is now being discovered by a new generation. Nine years in the making, this life through letters provides us with our most extensive portrait of Roth’s calamitous life — his father’s madness, his wife’s schizophrenia, his parade of mistresses (each more exotic than the next), and his classic westward journey from a virtual Hapsburg shtetl to Vienna, Berlin, Frankfurt, and finally Paris.

Containing 457 newly translated letters, along with eloquent introductions that richly frame Roth’s life, this book brilliantly evokes the crumbling specters of the Weimar Republic and 1930s France. Displaying Roth’s ceaselessly inventive powers, it finally charts his descent into despair at a time when “the word had died, [and] men bark like dogs.”

His future is disastrous, his present indecent, his past divine. He is Darcy Dancer, youthful squire of Andromeda Park, the great gray stone mansion inhabited by Crooks, the cross eyed butler, and the sexy, aristocratic Miss Von B. This sequel to The Destinies of Darcy Dancer, Gentleman finds our hero falling in with decidedly low company — like the dissolute Dublin poet, Foxy Slattery, and Ronald Rashers, who absconds with the family silver — before falling head over heels in love with the lissome Leila.

The sequel Life after a Balla begins with Skye doing whatever it takes to obtain the riches she whole heartedly thinks she deserves. Between lavish gifts and million-dollar promises she tries hard to forget her past turmoil with Sandingo, her abusive no-good husband. Skye becomes helpless with Sandingo's tricky business proposition, and soon life takes a turn for the worse as she has to sleep next to the enemy. Will this shattered woman be able to rebuild her life now that the tables are turned? They say payback is a bitch…or is it?

A book judged so dangerous in the Soviet Union that not only the manuscript but the ribbons on which it had been typed were confiscated by the state, Life and Fate is an epic tale of World War II and a profound reckoning with the dark forces that dominated the twentieth century. Interweaving a transfixing account of the battle of Stalingrad with the story of a single middle-class family, the Shaposhnikovs, scattered by fortune from Germany to Siberia, Vasily Grossman fashions an immense, intricately detailed tapestry depicting a time of almost unimaginable horror and even stranger hope. Life and Fate juxtaposes bedrooms and snipers' nests, scientific laboratories and the Gulag, taking us deep into the hearts and minds of characters ranging from a boy on his way to the gas chambers to Hitler and Stalin themselves. This novel of unsparing realism and visionary moral intensity is one of the supreme achievements of modern Russian literature.

Alfred Edersheim (March 7, 1825 – March 16, 1889) was a Jewish convert to Christianity and a Biblical scholar known especially for his book The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah (Longmans, Green, 1883, 800 pages).

Alfred Edersheim believed that some knowledge of ancient Jewish society was necessary for the general reader of the New Testament to fully understand Jesus' life and works. Edersheim's The Life and Times of Jesus the Messiah is an informal commentary on the Four Gospels, which highlights the intellectual and religious perspectives of the people who lived during the time of Jesus. By consulting both Rabbinic Law and Talmudic writings, Edersheim paints a vivid picture of the various locations where Jesus would have walked, prayed, and preached. Not only does Edersheim provide useful geographical and political clarifications, he also offers insight into the emotional and psychological experiences of individual Biblical characters as well. From Jesus' birth in Bethlehem, to His death, resurrection, and ascension into heaven--Edersheim reports the stages of Jesus' life in exceptional detail, bringing animation and color into a set of stories that may seem distant to readers today.

This is an updated and corrected edition which includes all Hebrew and Greek references. Most browsers come with the capability to view Greek fonts but for you to be able to read Hebrew, you will need to upload and install an appropriate font. Within the text in brackets are many references to different sources. An explanation of the abbreviations used regarding material in the Talmud can be found in the file entitled "List of Abbreviations Used in Reference to Rabbinic Writings."   The books of the Apocrypha (1&2 Maccabees, etc.) can be found at The Bible, KJV.

When a meteor hits the moon and knocks it closer in orbit to the earth, nothing will ever be the same.

Worldwide tidal waves.

Earthquakes.

Volcanic Eruptions.

And that’s just the beginning

A young man is found lying unconscious on the outskirts of Bucharest. No one knows who he is and everyone has a different theory about how he got there. The stories of the various characters unfold, each closely interwoven with the next, and outlining the features of what ultimately turns out to be the most important and most powerful character of all: the city of Bucharest itself. The novel covers the last 13 days of 1897 and culminates in a beautiful tableau of the future as imagined by the different characters. We might, in fact, say that it is we who inhabit their future. And so too does Dan Creţu, alias Dan Kretzu, the present-day journalist hurled back in time by some mysterious process for just long enough to allow us a wonderful glimpse into a remote, almost forgotten world.

Parvulescus' book is a magical tale full of enchanting characters who can carry the reader to another time…

Winner of the EUROPEAN UNION PRIZE FOR LITERATURE

Originally published in 1960, this compact book tells the true story of a German soldier: from his early childhood during the First World War, through to his harrowing experiences on the frontline during the Word War II, culminating in his capture by the Red Army on 20 December 1942…

An astonishing first-hand account.

In the spring of 1914, a group of students at the Slade School of Art have gathered for a life-drawing class. Paul Tarrant is easily distracted by an intriguing fellow student, Elinor Brooke, but watches from afar when a well-known painter catches her eye. After World War I begins, Paul tends to the dying soldiers from the front line as a Belgian Red Cross volunteer, but the longer he remains, the greater the distance between him and home becomes. By the time he returns, Paul must confront not only the overwhelming, perhaps impossible challenge of how to express all that he has seen and experienced, but also the fact that life, and love, will never be the same for him again.

From Robert Silverberg’s, “Earthmen and Strangers” anthology, 1966:

Earthly life has developed many methods of reproducing itself. The amoeba is content to split in half; the hydra produces a bud that develops into a new hydra; the small crustacean known as daphnia lays eggs that do not need to be fertilized in order to bring forth young daphnias. Most animals, though, rely on two sexes, female and male, one to produce eggs and the other to fertilize them.

The variations within this scheme are great—take, for example, the case of the oyster, which is male at one time of the year and female at another. Given such biological variations, it was inevitable that science-fiction writers would begin to speculate about the unearthly aspects reproduction might take among alien beings. Poul Anderson, a lanky chap of Viking descent who lives in California, is better qualified to make scientific speculations than most of his colleagues. He took a degree in physics at the University of Minnesota before turning to science fiction, and keeps abreast of the latest technical developments in a way that gives his stories the solid ring of authenticity.

In this example, he provides a convincing blend of science and imagination that yields insight into a wholly alien race. But because recent scientific research has given us a view of conditions on Mercury different from the one that was accepted in 1957, when this story was written, Anderson has added his own introduction to the story in the interest of maintaining accuracy.

From the author of If I Loved You, I Would Tell You This, Life Drawing is a fierce, honest and moving story of married life-its betrayals, intimacies, and secrets.

Augusta and Owen have taken the leap. Leaving the city and its troubling memories behind, they have moved to the country for a solitary life where they can devote their days to each other and their art, where Gus can paint and Owen can write.

But the facts of a past betrayal prove harder to escape than urban life. Ancient jealousies and resentments haunt their marriage and their rural paradise.

When Alison Hemmings moves into the empty house next door, Gus is drawn out of isolation, despite her own qualms and Owen’s suspicions. As the new relationship deepens, the lives of the two households grow more and more tightly intertwined. It will take only one new arrival to intensify emotions to breaking point.

Fierce, honest and astonishingly gripping, Life Drawing is a novel as beautiful and unsparing as the human heart.

‘Richly peopled, highly literate, and brilliantly drawn… [Lucius Shepard is] one of the finest science fiction writers of all time’.

Science Fiction Chronicle.

In the jungles of Guatemala, David Mingolla is struggling to survive amongst the rotting vegetation and his despairing fellow foot soldiers. He knows he is nothing but an expendable pawn in an endless war. On R & R a few miles away from the warzone he meets Debora—an enigmatic young woman who may be working for the enemy—and stumbles into a deadly psychic conflict where the mind is the greatest weapon.

A book of stories, or "narrations," by the finest Catalan writer of his generation. In this beautiful work, translated into English for the first time, Pla transcribes his witnessings of basic truths: the waves of the sea, the hardness of rolled tobacco. The reader feels tangibly the pleasure with which Pla puts the sensual and real on paper.

This tour de force by a master of experimental novels finds the author reflecting on her old age and its effects on her writing. As she reflects on her own career, her experiments with narrative, and on the narrative she writes here, she ultimately reasserts herself and accepts the life behind her.

A laugh-out-loud adventure novel starring bestselling author Alan Sillitoe’s most outrageous character: the happy bastard Michael Cullen.

For most of his life, Michael Cullen was a twenty-two-carat no-good bastard, and he was quite proud of it. But after a series of outlandish criminal adventures revealed the true identity of his father, Michael made the mistake of introducing him to dear old ma. His parents wed, and Michael was a bastard no more. But he was still a rake, with a devilish sense of humor and a refreshing lack of scruples.

After a disastrous escapade smuggling gold for the ruthless gangster Claude Moggerhanger, Michael resolves to go straight. But when he learns his father is writing Lord Moggerhanger’s memoirs, he falls into old habits, if only for a chance to get behind the wheel of the gangster’s Rolls Royce. With the open road in front of him, the police behind him, and randy waitresses at every lay-by, Michael will be a happy bastard once again.

From the bestselling author of The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner, Life Goes On continues the legend of one of Britain’s most unlikely heroes, which began in the classic picaresque A Start in Life. Whether chasing love, money, sex, or even peace and quiet, there is nothing Michael Cullen can’t make into an adventure.

Life Goes On is the 2nd book in the Michael Cullen Novels, but you may enjoy reading the series in any order.

Life is a Dream (1931) is Gyula Krudy's magical collection of ten short stories. Creating a world where editors shoot themselves after a hard day's brunching, men attend duels incognito and lovers fall out over salad dressing, Life is a Dream is a comic, nostalgic, romantic and erotic glimpse into the Hungary of the early twentieth century. Focussing on the poor and dispossessed, these tales of love, food, death and sex are ironic and wise about the human condition and the futility of life, and display fully Krudy's wit and mastery of the form.

Shepard disgorges ideas like a drunk or a junkie, streams of images described in visceral prose that essentially numb you to their force. An anaesthetic effect is present in stories like "Life of Buddha" (1988), in which a heroin addict provokes the transmutation of a male transsexual into a perfect woman. Shepard's characters crave freedom and transformation; the narratives over-reach and become baroque in their pursuit of it, and so lose some of their power. They express the central paradox of Shepard's work: his acceptance and celebration of claustrophobia and the "feeling of stricture" (as in "Griaule"), and his desperate raging against it.

The man who gave it all away

At age 50, when some people start planning for retirement, John Lefebvre hit the digital motherlode. Neteller, a tiny Canadian internet start-up that processed payments between players and online gambling arenas, rocketed into the stock market. In its early years, Neteller had been a cowboy operation, narrowly averting disaster in creative ways. Co-founder Lefebvre, a gregarious hippie lawyer from Calgary, Alberta, had toked his way through his practice for decades, aspiring all the while to be a professional musician. With the profit from Neteller and his stock holdings, he became a multi-millionaire. He started buying Malibu beach houses, limited edition cars, complete wardrobes, and a jet to fly to rock shows with pals. When that got boring he shipped his fine suits to charity, donned his beloved t-shirt and jeans, and started giving away millions to the Dalai Lama, David Suzuki and other eco-conscious people, as well as anyone else who might…

This international bestseller is the third installment (of five) in the zany space opera known as the Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Ford Prefect and Arthur Dent have been stranded for five years on prehistoric Earth. They escape from this predicament via a Chesterfield sofa and arrive at a cricket match, where they are immediately faced with their next challenge: preventing the release of an imprisoned race of xenophobic aliens bent on exterminating all other life forms in the universe. Fans of the BBC TV show Doctor Who will be interested to note that the novel is a reworked treatment for a proposed film based on the series. And more detail-oriented types may want to know that the American version of the book has some additional text concerning the galactic rudeness of the word Belgium, which allows Belgium to be used throughout as profanity instead of a four-letter word beginning with F that's used in the British edition.

One of the two books that J. M. Coetzee won the Booker Prize for (he was also awarded the 2003 Nobel Prize for Literature), The Life and Times of Michael K. is the story of a simple man attempting to survive (from without) in a society that has seen its humanity perverted by war into horror. He is trying only to live in quiet absence and is senselessly thwarted at every turn. Like all of the rest of Coetzee's work, Life and Times is something more than shattering, more than moving.

In a south Africa turned by war, Michael K. sets out to take his ailing mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies. Imprisoned, Michael is unable to bear confinement and escapes, determined to live with dignity. This life affirming novel goes to the center of human experience-the need for an interior, spiritual life; for some connections to the world in which we live; and for purity of vision.

A candid and surprising memoir of the early life of one of England’s most acclaimed and enduring post-WWII writers.

Born in 1928 into a poverty-stricken family in working-class Nottingham, bestselling British novelist Alan Sillitoe’s childhood was marked by his father’s unpredictable and violent rage, as well as a near-certain condemnation to a life of labor on an assembly line. His family relocated frequently to avoid rent collectors, trading in one bug-infested hovel for another. Though intelligent and curious, the young author-to-be failed his grammar school entrance exams, and it seemed he was destined for work in a factory. The onset of Sillitoe’s teenage years, however, coincided with the advance of Hitler into Russia, and the war offered a chance for the boy to seek out a different fate.

At the age of fourteen, Sillitoe used a fake ID to enroll in the Air Training Corps and went on to join the Ministry of Aircraft Production as an air traffic control assistant. He dreamed of becoming a pilot, but the war ended just after he qualified for training and he was instead shipped off to the Malayan jungle during the Communist insurgency as a radio operator for the Royal Air Force (RAF). After two years of living from one wireless watch to the next — taking in bearings and atmospherics though the radio, and exploring dangerous and primal landscapes by foot — Sillitoe finally returned to a prospectless postwar England and was diagnosed with tuberculosis. But this curse soon became a blessing: In the RAF hospital, Sillitoe began to read — everything from Kant to Descartes to Bernard Shaw — and he decided to become a writer.

Already a veteran on an RAF disability pension at the age of twenty-one, Sillitoe began writing full-time, neither his physical challenges nor his numerous rejections from publishers deterring him in the least. He joined the Nottingham Writers’ Club, and his short stories began to achieve some minor local success. Soon after, a chance meeting with the American poet Ruth Fainlight led to full-blown love, and the two set off for France eager to live in a bucolic setting where they could dedicate all of their time to writing.

Circumstance and favorable exchange rates then led the couple to Spain where Sillitoe continued his literary pursuits, met many artists and writers, had run-ins with gypsies, and even underwent police interrogations. Four unpublished novels later — and after nearly a decade of honing his craft — Sillitoe finally found staggering success in his working-class novel Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and his collection of short stories The Loneliness of the Long-Distance Runner.

Written with Sillitoe’s signature simplicity, this in-depth autobiography not only gives insight into the formative years and mental maturation of one of Britain’s most influential writers, but also tells a great story of an underprivileged man who, with perseverance, made the most of his particular fate.

Тридцатилетняя Оливия Феликоне обожала своего мужа, купалась в его любви, но внезапно овдовела. Пытаясь справиться с отчаянием, героиня углубляется в воспоминания своей юности, где у нее есть свои «скелеты в шкафу», анализирует долгие и непростые отношения с родственниками мужа и короткую любовную связь с его братом-близнецом. Все это в конечном итоге приводит ее к пониманию нехитрых житейских истин и приносит успокоение измученной душе.

When Simon Johnson is attacked in his crummy LA apartment, he knows he must defend himself or die. Turning on the lights after the scuffle, Simon realises two things: one, he has killed his attacker; two, the resemblance of the man to himself is uncanny. Over the coming days, Simon’s lonely life will spiral out of control. With his pet goldfish Francine in tow, he embarks on a gripping existential investigation, into his own murky past, and that of Jeremy Shackleford, the (apparently) happily married math teacher whose body is now lying in Simon’s bathtub under forty gallons of ice. But Simon has a plan. Gradually, he begins to assume the dead man’s identity, fooling Shackleford’s colleagues, and even his beautiful wife. However, when mysterious messages appear on the walls around Simon’s apartment, he realises that losing his old self will be more difficult than he’d imagined. Everything points to a long forgotten date the previous spring, when his life and Shackleford’s first collided. As the contradictions mount, and the ice begins to melt, the events of the past year will resolve themselves in the most catastrophic way.

Combining gritty noir, psychological drama and dazzling plotting, Low Life is a shocking novel that announces Jahn as a brilliant new voice of modern America.

Review

“Armed with a seat-of-the-pants plot that takes some audacious risks and prose that proves gritty and gruelling, Jahn has produced a thriller with a steely death-grip. I walked into a tree reading it; no greater recommendation needed.”

— Financial Times

“Well-written, fast-paced … along the order of Quentin Tarantino and with a long and bloody trail to the end.”

—Charlaine Harris, author, the Sookie Stackhouse series

A dazzling story told for the love of story by the greatest of storytellers gives us a novel of wisdom and pleasure for all ages, in which a young boy must battle his way through a dangerous world in order to save his father.

On a beautiful starry night in the city of Kahani in the land of Alifbay, a terrible thing happened: twelve-year-old Luka's storyteller father, Rashid, fell suddenly and inexplicably into a sleep so deep that nothing and no one could rouse him. To save him from slipping away entirely, Luka must embark on a journey through The Magic World, encountering a slew of phantasmagorical obstacles along the way, to steal the Fire of Life, a seemingly impossible and exceedingly dangerous task.

Rushdie proved that he is one of the best contemporary writers with Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990). While Haroun was written as a gift for his first son, Luka and the Fire of Life, the story of Haroun's younger brother, is a gift for Salman's second son on the occasion of his twelfth birthday. Lyrically crafted and filled with frolicking wordplay, this is Salman Rushdie at his best.

Jamie Waterman discovered the cliff dwelling on Mars, and the fact that an intelligent race lived on the red planet sixty-five million years ago, only to be driven into extinction by the crash of a giant meteor. Now the exploration of Mars is itself under threat of extinction, as the ultraconservative New Morality movement gains control of the U.S. government and cuts off all funding for the Mars program.Meanwhile, Carter Carleton, an anthropologist who was driven from his university post by unproven charges of rape, has started to dig up the remains of a Martian village. Science and politics clash on two worlds as Jamie desperately tries to save the Mars program and uncover who the vanished Martians were.

Global overcrowding, a new immortality serum and an unfriendly alien ambassador are only a few of the problems confronting Roy Walton, government's new Master of Life and Death in Robert Silverberg's early and accomplished novel. Praised by a distinguished critic, Anthony Boucher, for "its complete clarity and narrative drive" the novel retains its power today.

Первая книга о сверхпопулярной британской группе Muse на русском языке. Марк Бомон несколько лет ездил на гастроли вместе с участниками коллектива, что позволило ему создать действительно захватывающую биографию группы: честную, эмоциональную, пристальную, вызывающую. Эта книга ваш единственный шанс оказаться в сумасшедшей вселенной Muse.

A superb new novel by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summersand Requiem for a Lost Empire,set in the period just before, and two decades after, World War II.

“Makine is without doubt one of the greatest living writers. Music of a Life proves it.” -Le Figaro( France)

A brief but extraordinarily powerful novel by the author of Dreams of My Russian Summersand Requiem for a Lost Empire, Music of a Lifeis set in the period just before, and two decades after, World War II.

Alexeï Berg’s father is a well-known dramatist, his mother a famous opera singer. But during Stalin’s reign of terror in the 1930s they, like millions of other Russians, come under attack for their presumed lack of political purity. Harassed and proscribed, they have nonetheless, on the eve of Hitler’s war, not yet been arrested. And young Alexeï himself, a budding classical pianist, has been allowed to continue his musical studies. His first solo concert is scheduled for May 24, 1941.

Two days before the concert, on his way home from his final rehearsal, he espies his parents being arrested, taken from their Moscow apartment. Knowing his own arrest will not be far behind, Alexeï flees to the country house of his fiancée, where again betrayal awaits him. He flees, one step ahead of the dreaded secret police until, taking on the identity of a dead soldier, he enlists in the Soviet army. Thus begins his seemingly endless journey, through war and peace, until he lands, two decades later, in a snowbound train station in the Urals, where he relates his harrowing saga to the novel’s narrator.

Music of a Lifehas been Andreï Makine’s biggest bestselling novel internationally since Dreams of My Russian Summers.It is, in the words of France’s most distinguished daily newspaper Le Monde,“extremely powerful… a gem.”

"A wise and beautiful book about what it feels like to be alive-I really loved it."-Zadie Smith

"Maggie Gee's account of her life as a writer cuts to the bone as she relives triumphs, rejections, despair and renewal. It's a wonderful book, for its boldness and vigour, and for its piercing honesty."-Claire Tomalin

How do you become a writer, and why?

Maggie Gee's journey starts in a small family in post-war Britain, a long way from the literary world. At seventeen, Maggie goes, a lamb to the slaughter, to university. From the 1960s onwards she lives the defining events of her generation: the coming of the Pill and sexual freedom, tremors in the British layer-cake of class and race. In the 1980s, Maggie finally gets published, falls in love, marries, and has a daughter-but for the next three decades and beyond, she survives, and sometimes thrives, by writing. This frank, bold memoir dares to explore the big questions: success and failure, sex, death, and parenthood-our animal life.

Maggie Gee was chosen as one of Granta's original Best Young British Novelists. She has published many novels to great acclaim, including "The White Family," shortlisted for the Orange and IMPAC prizes; "My Cleaner"; "The Flood," longlisted for the Orange Prize; and "The Ice People." She was the first female chair of the Royal Society of Literature from 2004–2008 and is now one of its vice presidents.

In this raucous collection of true-life stories, actress and comedian Chelsea Handler recounts her time spent in the social trenches with that wild, strange, irresistible, and often gratifying beast: the one-night stand.

You’ve either done it or know someone who has: the one-night stand, the familiar outcome of a night spent at a bar, sometimes the sole payoff for your friend’s irritating wedding, or the only relief from a disastrous vacation. Often embarrassing and uncomfortable, occasionally outlandish, but most times just a necessary and irresistible evil, the one-night stand is a social rite as old as sex itself and as common as a bar stool.

Enter Chelsea Handler. Gorgeous, sharp, and anything but shy, Chelsea loves men and lots of them. “My Horizontal Life” chronicles her romp through the different bedrooms of a variety of suitors, a no-holds-barred account of what can happen between a man and a sometimes very intoxicated, outgoing woman during one night of passion. From her short fling with a Vegas stripper to her even shorter dalliance with a well-endowed little person, from her uncomfortable tryst with a cruise ship performer to her misguided rebound with a man who likes to play leather dress-up, Chelsea recalls the highs and lows of her one-night stands with hilarious honesty. Encouraged by her motley collection of friends (aka: her partners in crime) but challenged by her family members (who at times find themselves a surprise part of the encounter), Chelsea hits bottom and bounces back, unafraid to share the gritty details. “My Horizontal Life” is one guilty pleasure you won’t be ashamed to talk about in the morning.

Jerome K Jerome struggled against poverty and obscurity, not to mention his improbable name, for many years before “Three Men in a Boat” made him a celebrity and the friend of other celebrities. A man of deep human sympathies and principles, he lived through and engaged with, a time — like our own — of unprecedented changes and inventions, most of which are commonplace now. Much of his writing, especially for the theatre, has now been forgotten, but a year before his death in 1927, he published his autobiography in the popular style he pioneered — still in daily use by journalists.

A young novelist's obsession with proving his manhood is transferred to his fiction and echoed in his tempestuous marriage.

Living with her alcoholic deadbeat dad in the swamps of southern Louisiana, she's a high school dropout with a pill habit and a criminal record who's been fired from more crap jobs than she can count. Now on probation for a felony, it seems that Angel will never pull herself out of the downward spiral her life has taken.

That is, until the day she wakes up in the ER after overdosing on painkillers, Angel remembers being in a horrible car crash, but she doesn't have a mark on her. To add to the weirdness, she receives an anonymous letter telling her there's a job waiting for her at a county morgue—and that's it's an offer she doesn't dare refuse.

Before she knows it she's dealing with with a huge crush on a certain hunky deputy and a brand new addiction: an overpowering craving for brains. Plus, her morgue is filling up with the victims of a serial killer who decapitates his prey—just when she's hungriest!

Angel's going to have to grow up fast if she wants to keep this job and stay in on piece. Because if she doesn't, she's dead meat.

Literally.

Тайная книга английской классики

Самая интересная книга на иностранном языке – непереведенная книга. Изюминкой английской классики в этом смысле является «My secret life» («Моя тайная жизнь»), написанная неизвестным автором в последней трети XIX века.

Впервые книга была напечатана анонимно в 1888 году. Кто ее написал – до сих пор идут споры. Значительная часть исследователей полагают, что автор – Генри Спенсер Эшби, торговец текстилем, путешественник, страстный букинист и коллекционер эротики, умерший в 1900 году. Он входил в кружок викторианских вольнодумцев – писателей (например, поэт Суинберн) и людей искусства, которые задыхались в атмосфере ханжества и фарисейства. После смерти от него осталось (помимо капиталов) грандиозное собрание порнографии и изданий Сервантеса, которое он завещал Британскому музею при условии принятия на хранение и эротической части его коллекции.

Как бы там ни было, «My secret life» вошла в историю мировой литературы именно как анонимная книга, отражающая нравы викторианской Англии, которые были в известных кругах совсем не викторианскими. Точнее, это 11-томный эпос, повествующий о поиске сексуального счастья на протяжении всей своей жизни мужчиной из среднего класса. Мужчиной, которому выпало родиться в ту эпоху, когда все связанное с полом загонялось либо под запрет, либо в самые тесные рамки. Мало на свете книг, в которых с подобной тщательностью описывались все интимные переживания человека от почти младенческого возраста до старости, причем литературно талантливо.

«My secret life» – уникальный документ как эпохи, так и человеческого существования вообще. Книга является существенными и необходимым дополнением к романам Диккенса и Теккерея, поскольку без нее представление о нравах Англии того времени будет либо неполным, либо неверным.

Джейн Остин писала гениальные книги о любви, ни разу никого не поцеловав и прожив жизнь стареющей девой на содержании у родственников. Психологию полов она постигала из косвенных свидетельств и собственных невинных наблюдений. Природная одаренность сделала свое дело, «Гордость и предубеждение», как и другие ее книги, стали классикой. Автор «My secret life» далеко не гений, но честность, абсолютная свобода от каких бы то ни было условностей, пунктуальность описаний делают его эпопею столь же значимой для изучающих ту эпоху, как и романы Остин.

Любопытен язык книги – бесхитростно-физиологический, называющий без стеснения вещи своими именами, при этом не показушно-вульгарный. Автор не знает эвфемизмов для обозначения известных частей человеческого тела и специфических глаголов, используя повседневные обороты мужчин его круга – даже по сегодняшним меркам чрезвычайно грубые. Тут нельзя не вспомнить удивление и возмущение Горького, обиженного тем, что граф Толстой, беседуя с ним о женщинах, употреблял подобные же «мужицкие» слова. Горький подумал было, что великий писатель земли русской подделывается под его «невежество», и лишь потом понял, что для Толстого это было вполне органично.

Так и автор «My secret life» показывает нам, что в Викторианскую эпоху ханжество касалось лишь известной части публики, тогда как большая часть народонаселения Британии выражалась весьма прямолинейно. Хотя нравы человечества во все времена и во всех странах, в общем-то, одинаковы. В «My secret life» рисуется типичное становление мужчины, которое могло бы иметь место и в Японии, и в России, и где угодно. Викторианские нравы лишь откладывали некий отпечаток на личность, но не могли задавить присущих ей стремлений. В Англии XIX века герой книги мог «охотиться» лишь на горничных и дочек батраков, «приличные» женщины были для него почти недоступны (за некоторыми исключениями). В этом – специфика эпохи. Сегодня бы автор «My secret life» не знал подобных препятствий и мог вести «большую игру». С другой стороны, в XIX веке для него считалось допустимым то, что сегодня бы моментально было бы зачислено под статью «педофилия» или «изнасилование». Сексуальная инициация героя воспоминаний произошла именно в результате настойчивого и совсем непристойного преследования барчуком невинной малолетней няньки своего братца. Служанка как объект первой интимной связи – сюжет достаточно обыденный для того времени, стоит только почитать Чехова, Бунина или Кафку. Сегодня ее заменяет одноклассница или однокурсница, или просто девушка из соседнего двора. В XIX столетии ровесницы из соседнего благополучного семейства были абсолютно недоступны.

Думается, современным феминисткам эта книга придется не по вкусу, несмотря на любовь на Западе ко всяким аутеничным картинкам нравов. Женщина для автора «My secret life» – не равноправный партнер, а объект наслаждения. Он порой видит в них личность, но слишком увлечен иным, чтобы вдаваться в этические переживания. К тому же для преуспевающего представителя среднего класса проститутки и горничные не слишком интересные собеседницы, они не люди его круга, а в то время социальная иерархия была куда жестче, чем сегодня, культурные различия между господами и слугами являлись почти непреодолимыми. Барин взаимодействовал со служанкой только в парадигме «хозяин–слуга» или в постели, где джентльмен мог позволить себе немного забыть о принадлежности к разным классам, не теряя, однако, из виду свое превосходство. Никаких нежностей вроде букетов цветов или стишков в таких мезальянсах не существовало. Господин считал, что и так оказал служанке много чести самим фактом, что обратил на нее внимание.

Любопытно сравнить «My secret life» с известным романом Джона Фаулза «Женщина французского лейтенанта» – как раз о том же самом времени. Тогда как герой Фаулза полон экзистенциальных томлений, а роман насыщен философскими размышлениями, герой «My secret life» ломает голову только над алгоритмом соблазнения очередной жертвы и чужд всякой философии, равно как и морали. Но он – реален, он человек из крови и плоти, а герой Фаулза – выдуманный и слишком книжный, как и остальные персонажи его романа. Можно полагать, что нынешним читателям покажется более интересным и волнующим рассказ анонима о своем времени, чем наукообразные домыслы писателя, жившего сто лет спустя.

В год своего первого издания «My secret life» шла по разряду утонченной порнографии. Сегодня историки английской литературы признают ее художественные достоинства, и книга изучается в университетах, по ней защищают диссертации. O tempore, o mores!

2008-09-18 / Максим Артемьев

Рецензия взята отсюда: http://exlibris.ng.ru/history/2008-09-18/6_classica.html

Word Statistics

Word — Occurences

Cunt — 5357

Fuck — 4032

Prick — 3756

Frig — 1299

Hair — 1569

Bum — 937

Sperm — 718

Cock — 741

Arse — 526

Clitoris — 434

Gay — 398

Quim — 389

Buttocks — 369

Spunk — 362

Virgin — 360

Breast — 316

Lick — 304

Piss — 305

Gamahuche — 227

Erotic — 187

Bugger — 106

Vagina — 68

Glossary

frig — to masturbate

gamahuche — to practise fellatio or cunnilingus, hence gamahucher.

gambols — frisky, frolicsome movements

lapunar — A brothel

motte — Mound. Pubic area. Mons pubis.

nymphae — The labia minora (inner lips) of the vulva.

onanism — Masturbation

Paphian — pertaining to love, or unlawful sexual indulgence, or belonging to the class of prostitutes

pudenda — The external genital organs of a woman.

quim — The external female genitals; the vagina.

spunk — Seminal fluid

“After my wife, Elizabeth Church, was murdered by the bellman Alfonse Padgett in the Essex Hotel, she did not leave me.”

Sam Lattimore meets Elizabeth Church in 1970s Halifax, in an art gallery. The sparks are immediate, leading quickly to a marriage that is dear, erotically charged, and brief. In Howard Norman’s spellbinding and moving novel, the gleam of the marriage and the circumstances of Elizabeth’s murder are revealed in heart-stopping increments. Sam’s life afterward is complicated. For one thing, in a moment of desperate confusion, he sells his life story to a Norwegian filmmaker named Istvakson, known for the stylized violence of his films, whose artistic drive sets in motion an increasingly intense cat-and-mouse game between the two men. For another, Sam has begun “seeing” Elizabeth — not only seeing but holding conversations with her, almost every evening, and watching her line up books on a small beach. What at first seems simply hallucination born of terrible grief reveals itself, evening by evening, as something else entirely.

Next Life Might Be Kinder is a story of murder, desperate faith, the afterlife, and of love as absolute redemption — from one of our most compelling storytellers at the height of his talents.

This book channels the rage, filth, anguish, and the bust-a-gut hilarity of pre-gentrified New York.

The New York of Lynne Tillman’s hilarious, audacious fourth novel is a boiling point of urban decay. The East Village streets are overrun with crooked cops, drug addicts, pimps, and prostitutes. Garbage piles up along the sidewalks amid the blaring soundtrack of car stereos. Confrontations are supercharged by the summer heat wave. This merciless noise has left Elizabeth Hall an insomniac. Junkies roam her building and overturn trashcans, but the landlord refuses to help clean or repair the decrepit conditions. Live-in boyfriend Roy is good-natured but too avoidant to soothe the sores of city life. Though Elizabeth fights for sanity in this apathetic metropolis, violent fantasies threaten to push her over the edge. In vivid detail, she begins to imagine murders: those of the “morons” she despises, and, most obsessively, her own. Frightening, hilarious, and wholly addictive, No Lease on Life is an avant-garde sucker-punch, a plea for humanity propelled by dark wit and unflinching honesty. Tillman’s spare prose, frank, poignant and always illuminating, captures all the raving absurdity of a very bad day in America's toughest, hottest melting pot.

Norman Mailer was one of the giants of American letters and one of the most celebrated public figures of his time. He was a novelist, journalist, biographer, and filmmaker; a provocateur and passionate observer of his times; and a husband, father, and serial philanderer.

Perhaps nothing characterized Mailer more than his unbounded ambition. He wanted not merely to be the greatest writer of his generation, but a writer great enough to be compared to Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. As Michael Lennon describes, he even had presidential ambitions, although he settled for running for mayor of New York City. He championed personal freedom and civil liberties, calling himself a “left conservative,” and yet he was Enemy #1 of the Women’s Movement. He was as pugnacious in real life as in print, engaging in famous feuds and fights. Although he considered himself first and foremost a novelist, his greatest literary contribution may have been in journalism, where he used his novelistic gifts in tandem with self-revelation to explore the American psyche. In that regard, the subtitle of his Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winning Armies of the Night is telling: “History as a Novel, the Novel as History.” He would return to certain subjects obsessively: John F. Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, sex, technology, and the intricate relationship of fame and identity. Michael Lennon’s definitive biography captures Mailer in all his sharp complexities and shows us how he self-consciously invented and reinvented himself throughout his lifetime.

Michael Lennon knew Mailer for thirty-five years, and in writing this biography, he has had the cooperation of Mailer’s late widow, Norris Church, his ex-wives, and all of his children, as well as his sister, Barbara. He also had access to Mailer’s vast, unpublished correspondence and papers, and he interviewed dozens of people who knew Mailer. Norman Mailer: A Double Life gives us the man in full, a remarkable and unique figure in the context of his times.

Qian Xiaohong is born into a sleepy Hunan village, where the new China rush towards development is a mere distant rumour. A buxom, naïve sixteen-year-old, she yearns to leave behind hometown scandal, and joins the mass migration to the bustling boomtown of Shenzhen. There, she must navigate dangerous encounters with ruthless bosses, jealous wives, sympathetic hookers and corrupt policemen as she tries to find her place in the ever-evolving society.

Hardship and tragedy are in no short supply as her journey takes her through a grinding succession of dead end jobs. To help her through this confusing maze, Xiaohong finds solace in the close ties she makes with the other migrant girls — the community of her fellow 'northern girls' — who quickly learn to rely on each other for humour and the enjoyment of life's simple pleasures.

A beautiful coming-of-age novel, Northern Girls explores the inner lives of a generation of young, rural Chinese women who embark on life-changing journeys in search of something better.

Zou Lei, orphan of the desert, migrates to work in America and finds herself slaving in New York's kitchens. She falls in love with a young man whose heart has been broken in another desert. A new life may be possible if together they can survive homelessness, lockup, and the young man's nightmares, which may be more prophecy than madness.

Praise for Preparation for the Next Life

So much of American fiction has become playful, cynical and evasive. "Preparation for the Next Life" is the strong antidote to such inconsequentialities. Powerfully realistic, with a solemn, muscular lyricism, this is a very, very good book. — Joy Williams

The “next life” of Atticus Lish’s novel is the one you have to die to know. It’s also the next civilian life of a soldier ravaged by three tours in Iraq, and the dodgy life of an immigrant in the city’s sleepless boroughs. The work is violent, swift, and gloriously descriptive. It is love story and lament, a haunting record of unraveling lives. Lish says starkly and with enormous power: the spirit prevails until it doesn’t. A stunning debut.

— Noy Holland, author of Swim for the Little One First

An illegal Chinese immigrant meets a broken American warrior, and the great love story of the 21st century begins. The intersection of their paths seems inevitable, irrevocable. Their story: tender, violent, terrible, and beautiful. Atticus Lish's prose, lyrical and taut, sentences as exact and indisputable as chemical formulas, is trance-like, evangelical in its ability to convert and convince its reader. Preparation for the Next Life is that rare novel that grabs you by the shirt and slaps you hard in the face. Look, it says. It isn't pretty. Turn away at your own risk. In case you haven't noticed, the American Dream has become a nightmare. Atticus Lish has your wake up call. He has created a new prototype of the hero, and her journey provides us with a devastating perspective on the "promised land" of the post 9/11 U.S., where being detained is a rite of passage and the banality of violence is simply part of the pre-apocalyptic landscape.

— Christopher Kennedy, author of Ennui Prophet

Atticus Lish has written the most relevant, and beautiful, novel of the year.

— Scott McClanahan, author of Crapalachia and Hill William

Private Life holds up a mirror to the moral corruption in the interstices of the Barcelona high society Sagarra was born into. Boudoirs of demimonde tramps, card games dilapidating the fortunes of milquetoast aristocrats — and how they scheme to conceal them — fading manors of selfish scions, and back rooms provided by social-climbing seamstresses are portrayed in vivid, sordid, and literary detail.

The novel, practically a roman-à-clef for its contemporaries, was a scandal in 1932. The 1960's edition was bowdlerized by Franco's censors. Part Lampedusa, part Genet, this translation will bring an essential piece of 20th-century European literature to the English-speaking public.

It was the supreme irony. Humanity, apparently, feared being Recalled To Life more than it deared death itself. When Harker joined the little group of scientists, he didn’t realize the problems he would face. Their discovery made it possible to revive corpses to full, healthy life. They thought the world would welcome it as the greatest boon of all time. Instead, the world fought them, bitterly and savagely. Bewildered, they could find no way to fight back. The problem was Harker’s to solve, and there seemed to be only one answer: Harker himself had to die!

13

Reeling Through Life: How I Learned to Live, Love, and Die at the Movies looks at how film shapes identity. Through ten cleverly constructed essays, Ison explores how a lifetime of movie-watching has, for better or worse, taught her how to navigate the world and how to grapple with issues of career, family, faith, illness, sex, and love.

Cinema is a universal cultural experience, one that floods our senses with images and sounds, a powerful force that influences our perspective on the world around us. Ison discusses the universal aspects of film as she makes them personal, looking at how certain films across time shaped and molded who she has become. Drawing on a wide ranging catalog of films, both cult and classic, popular and art-house, Reeling Through Life examines how cinema shapes our views on how to make love, how to deal with mental illness, how to be Jewish, how to be a woman, how to be a drunk, and how to die with style.

Rather than being a means of escape or object of mere entertainment, Ison posits that cinema is a more engaging form of art, a way to slip into other identities and inhabit other realities. A way to orient oneself into the world. Reeling Though Life is a compelling look at one popular art form and how it has influenced our identities in provocative and important ways.

Our last story, “The Gallery of His Dreams” (September 1991), by the Hugo-award-winning former editor of F&SF, Kristine Kathryn Rusch, won the 1991 Locus Award for best short fiction. Ms. Rusch has had fifteen novels published under her own name. Her latest books include: Hitler’s Angel, a mainstream hardcover written under the name Kris Rusch; Star Wars: The New Rebellion, a mass market paperback; Star Trek: Day of Honor, written with Dean Wesley Smith; and Alien Influences, a Science Fiction novel that was a finalist for England’s prestigious Arthur C. Clarke Award.

Unlike Jack Ketchum’s earlier novel, LADIES NIGHT, his newest one, RIGHT TO LIFE, definitely has the shoe on the other foot as a pregnant woman becomes the victim of a deranged married couple that kidnap her right off the street and hold her captive for several months while she’s forced to endure their bizarre SM games.

The 139-page novella starts off with Sara Foster on her way to an abortion clinic to do away with the unwanted child that she’s now carrying. Before Sara can even enter the clinic, she’s grabbed and sedated by Stephen and Katherine Teach—a couple who’s unable to have children—and taken to their home where she’s held as a prisoner. The couple intends to hold Sara until the baby is born and then kill her. Stephen, however, has other plans for his beautiful captive as well. He’s going to get the most out Sara’s luscious body by using her to fulfill his own perverted desires. Forcing her to submit in whatever sexual manner he chooses, she’s mentally and physically tortured on almost a daily basis. Even Stephen’s wife decides to get in on the action by making the prisoner her sex slave when the hubby begins to lose interest after a few months have past.

Sara instinctively knows that she has to find a way out before it’s too late, but time is her worse enemy as she grows bigger and more powerless with her pregnancy. She also understands that if she does manage to escape, the couple may very well come after her. This leaves her with just one option—to kill them first!

RIGHT TO LIFE will shock you to the core as it depicts one’s person’s attempt to survive unimaginable torture and humiliation in order to keep from being killed. Mr. Ketchum never pulls his punches with the violence and craziness. His prose is fast moving and creates stark images that are mind numbing. The reader is quickly carried into this dark world of depravity and made to realize that anyone can be a potential victim when least expected. The characters are well drawn, but it’s the Techs that really steal the show. This is one psychotic couple you wouldn’t want to have as next-door neighbors! All in all, RIGHT TO LIFE delivers in full form. Strong in sexual content, it’s not for the faint-hearted or those with a queasy stomach.

One final note, this edition also contains two extra short stories. The first is “Brave Girl” and it deals with a four-year-old child whose mother has fallen in the bathtub and is now unconscious. The second short story is “Returns” which is slightly different from the author’s normal subject matter. It centers on the spirit of a recently deceased man who returns home to his hateful wife, hoping to stop her from killing his loving cat. These two short stories are a nice bonus for the fans of Jack Ketchum.

Unlike Jack Ketchum's earlier novel, LADIES NIGHT, his newest one, RIGHT TO LIFE, definitely has the shoe on the other foot as a pregnant woman becomes the victim of a deranged married couple that kidnap her right off the street and hold her captive for several months while she's forced to endure their bizarre SM games. The 139-page novella starts off with Sara Foster on her way to an abortion clinic to do away with the unwanted child that she's now carrying. Before Sara can even enter the clinic, she's grabbed and sedated by Stephen and Katherine Teach-a couple who's unable to have children-and taken to their home where she's held as a prisoner. The couple intends to hold Sara until the baby is born and then kill her. Stephen, however, has other plans for his beautiful captive as well. He's going to get the most out Sara's luscious body by using her to fulfill his own perverted desires. Forcing her to submit in whatever sexual manner he chooses, she's mentally and physically tortured on almost a daily basis. Even Stephen's wife decides to get in on the action by making the prisoner her sex slave when the hubby begins to lose interest after a few months have past. Sara instinctively knows that she has to find a way out before it's too late, but time is her worse enemy as she grows bigger and more powerless with her pregnancy. She also understands that if she does manage to escape, the couple may very well come after her. This leaves her with just one option-to kill them first! RIGHT TO LIFE will shock you to the core as it depicts one's person's attempt to survive unimaginable torture and humiliation in order to keep from being killed. Mr. Ketchum never pulls his punches with the violence and craziness. His prose is fast moving and creates stark images that are mind numbing. The reader is quickly carried into this dark world of depravity and made to realize that anyone can be a potential victim when least expected. The characters are well drawn, but it's the Techs that really steal the show. This is one psychotic couple you wouldn't want to have as next-door neighbors! All in all, RIGHT TO LIFE delivers in full form. Strong in sexual content, it's not for the faint-hearted or those with a queasy stomach. One final note, this edition also contains two extra short stories. The first is "Brave Girl" and it deals with a four-year-old child whose mother has fallen in the bathtub and is now unconscious. The second short story is "Returns" which is slightly different from the author's normal subject matter. It centers on the spirit of a recently deceased man who returns home to his hateful wife, hoping to stop her from killing his loving cat. These two short stories are a nice bonus for the fans of Jack Ketchum.

A calculating killer who calls himself The Teacher is taking on New York City, killing the powerful and the arrogant. His message is clear: remember your manners or suffer the consequences! For some, it seems that the rich are finally getting what they deserve. For New York 's elite, it is a call to terror.

Only one man can tackle such a high-profile case: Detective Mike Bennett. The pressure is enough for anyone, but Mike also has to care for his 10 children-all of whom have come down with virulent flu at once!

Discovering a secret pattern in The Teacher's lessons, Detective Bennett realizes he has just hours to save New York from the greatest disaster in its history. From the #1 bestselling author comes BE AFRAID, the continuation of his newest, electrifying series.

Создатель и бессменный гитарист легендарной рок-группы «Scorpions» вспоминает о начале своего пути, о том, как «Скорпы» пробивались к вершине музыкального Олимпа, откровенно рассказывает о своей личной жизни, о встречах с самыми разными людьми — как известными всему миру: Михаил Горбачев, Пауло Коэльо, так и самыми обычными, но оставившими свой след в его судьбе. В этой книге любители рока найдут множество интересных фактов и уникальных подробностей, знакомых имен… Но книга адресована гораздо более широкому кругу читателей. На ее страницах Руди Шенкер увлекательно излагает свою жизненную философию, благодаря которой он и добился столь головокружительного успеха. Занятия йогой, упорные медитации, чтение книг восточных мудрецов позволили ему заглянуть в глубины человеческого Эго, увидеть путь к истинным ценностям, познать, из чего складывается человеческое счастье и как его добиться. Это раздумья о сути нашего бытия немало повидавшего и передумавшего человека, испытавшего множество самых разнообразных трудностей и соблазнов и все же оставшегося верным самому себе. Он убежден, что любому человеку независимо от его возраста и положения никогда не поздно сломать господствующие в современном обществе стереотипы, вырваться из осточертевшей колеи, сделать решительный шаг к новой жизни. Его девиз — жить здесь и сейчас! Не надо бояться встряхнуть свою жизнь, и тогда твои мечты, далее самые смелые, непременно сбудутся.

The sensational new psychological thriller from the bestselling author of Before I Go To Sleep…

She loves her husband.

       She’s obsessed by a stranger.

She’s a devoted mother.

       She’s prepared to lose everything.

She knows what she’s doing.

       She’s out of control.

She’s innocent.

       She’s guilty as sin.

She’s living two lives.

       She might lose both.

Lara Boucher will do whatever it takes to get that coveted promotion to detective. She knows that something strange was happening at the incredibly handsome Jack's party. Working that out will have to take a back seat to discover why so many college girls have gone missing. But the last thing she expects when she goes undercover at the so-called 'spa' is to run into Jack again — or to feel such a strong attraction. The last thing Jack wants is to become the kind of man his father was. But that's just what's required if he's going to bring down this latest ring of Malcontents. Drawing on his legendary Casanova lineage, Jack works his way into the group. But will he be able to show Lara the man he really is without jeopardizing their mission? And can Lara ever trust a man with so many secrets?

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

From the writer and director of Knocked Up and the producer of Freaks and Geeks comes a collection of intimate, hilarious conversations with the biggest names in comedy from the past thirty years—including Mel Brooks, Jerry Seinfeld, Jon Stewart, Roseanne Barr, Harold Ramis, Louis C.K., Chris Rock, and Lena Dunham.

Before becoming one of the most successful filmmakers in Hollywood, Judd Apatow was the original comedy nerd. At fifteen, he took a job washing dishes in a local comedy club—just so he could watch endless stand-up for free. At sixteen, he was hosting a show for his local high school radio station in Syosset, Long Island—a show that consisted of Q&As with his comedy heroes, from Garry Shandling to Jerry Seinfeld. They talked about their careers, the science of a good joke, and their dreams of future glory (turns out, Shandling was interested in having his own TV show one day and Steve Allen had already invented everything).

Thirty years later, Apatow is still that same comedy nerd—and he’s still interviewing funny people about why they do what they do.

Sick in the Head gathers Apatow’s most memorable and revealing conversations into one hilarious, wide-ranging, and incredibly candid collection that spans not only his career but his entire adult life. Here are the comedy legends who inspired and shaped him, from Mel Brooks to Steve Martin. Here are the contemporaries he grew up with in Hollywood, from Spike Jonze to Sarah Silverman. And here, finally, are the brightest stars in comedy today, many of whom Apatow has been fortunate to work with, from Seth Rogen to Amy Schumer. And along the way, something kind of magical happens: What started as a lifetime’s worth of conversations about comedy becomes something else entirely. It becomes an exploration of creativity, ambition, neediness, generosity, spirituality, and the joy that comes from making people laugh.

Loaded with the kind of back-of-the-club stories that comics tell one another when no one else is watching, this fascinating, personal (and borderline-obsessive) book is Judd Apatow’s gift to comedy nerds everywhere.

Praise for Sick in the Head

“Open this book anywhere, and you’re bound to find some interesting nugget from someone who has had you in stitches many, many times.”

—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Incandescent . . . an irresistible, ultimate-insider’s comedy-interview extravaganza . . . Apatow never loses his unabashed fan’s enthusiasm even as he asks canny questions that yield superbly illuminating conversations rich in shop talk and musings on the lure, demands, and resonance of comedy.”

—Booklist (starred review)

“If Apatow’s gift for comedy is a sickness, may he never be cured.”

—Playboy

“Sprawling and insightful . . . The candidness of the interviews also exposes the peculiar community of comedians with anecdotes and cameos unlikely to be heard elsewhere. A delightful and hilarious read.”

—Kirkus Reviews

“These are wonderful, expansive interviews—at times brutal, at times breathtaking—with artists whose wit, intelligence, gaze, and insights are all sharp enough to draw blood.”

—Michael Chabon

“Anyone even remotely interested in comedy or humanity should own this book. It is hilarious and informative and it contains insightful interviews with the greatest comics, comedians, and comediennes of our time. My representatives assure me I will appear in a future edition.”

—Will Ferrell

Awards:

Anthony Awards

Barry Awards

'Three Pines is made up of good people, but one of us is festering.' The discovery of a dead body in the woods on Thanksgiving Weekend brings Chief Inspector Armand Gamache and his colleagues from the Surete du Quebec to a small village in the Eastern Townships. Gamache cannot understand why anyone would want to deliberately kill well-loved artist Jane Neal, especially any of the residents of Three Pines – a place so free from crime it doesn't even have its own police force. But Gamache knows that evil is lurking somewhere behind the white picket fences and that, if he watches closely enough, Three Pines will start to give up its dark secrets…

"It's hard to decide what provides the most pleasure in this enjoyable book: Gamache, a shrewd and kindly man constantly surprised by homicide; the village, which sounds at first like an ideal place to escape from civilization; or the clever and carefully constructed plot."

– -Chicago Tribune

"Cerebral, wise and compassionate, Gamache is destined for stardom. Don't miss this stellar debut."

– -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Terrific. Like a virtuoso, Penny plays a complex variation on the theme of the clue hidden in plain sight."

– -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A gem of a book."

– -Booklist (starred review)

Extraordinary Praise for STILL LIFE

"A stellar debut novel. The setting is entrancing… Well done!"

– -Deadly Pleasures

"A gem of a debut novel-clever, charming, with perceptively realized characters… and the enormously appealing Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. I can't wait for the next installment."

– -Deborah Crombie, author of Water Like a Stone

"An excellent, subtle plot full of understanding of the deeper places in human nature, and many wise observations that will enrich the reader long after the pages are closed."

– -Anne Perry, author of Long Spoon Lane

"Georges Simenon kept Maigret going for over a hundred books. It will be a delight for all of us who love detective fiction if Louise Penny can stay around long enough to do the same for Gamache."

– -Reginald Hill, author of The Stranger House

"Still Life is a masterpiece of a traditional drawing room mystery, repainted in the autumnal colors of the Canadian countryside. Louise Penny is a storytelling artist."

– -Julia Spencer-Fleming, author of To Darkness and to Death

"What a joy it is to discover a detective like Armand Gamache, strong, calm and charismatic, and at work on a good mystery in a believable setting."

– -Peter Lovesey, author of The Circle

"What a joy to read a crime novel written with such skill and integrity, strong on character and atmosphere… I couldn't put it down."

– -Margaret Yorke, author of False Pretences

"Still Life is a lovely, clever book and I hope I shall be reading a lot more by Louise Penny!"

– -Ann Granger, author of That Way Murder Lies

"It's hard to decide what provides the most pleasure in this enjoyable book: Gamache, a shrewd and kindly man constantly surprised by homicide; the village, which sounds at first like an ideal place to escape from civilization; or the clever and carefully constructed plot."

– -Chicago Tribune

"Cerebral, wise and compassionate, Gamache is destined for stardom. Don't miss this stellar debut."

– -Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Terrific. Like a virtuoso, Penny plays a complex variation on the theme of the clue hidden in plain sight."

– -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"A gem of a book."

– -Booklist (starred review)

Extraordinary Praise for STILL LIFE

"A stellar debut novel. The setting is entrancing… Well done!"

– -Deadly Pleasures

"A gem of a debut novel--clever, charming, with perceptively realized characters … and the enormously appealing Chief Inspector Armand Gamache. I can't wait for the next installment."

– -Deborah Crombie, author of Water Like a Stone

"An excellent, subtle plot full of understanding of the deeper places in human nature, and many wise observations that will enrich the reader long after the pages are closed."

– -Anne Perry, author of Long Spoon Lane

"Georges Simenon kept Maigret going for over a hundred books. It will be a delight for all of us who love detective fiction if Louise Penny can stay around long enough to do the same for Gamache."

– -Reginald Hill, author of The Stranger House

"Still Life is a masterpiece of a traditional drawing room mystery, repainted in the autumnal colors of the Canadian countryside. Louise Penny is a storytelling artist."

– -Julia Spencer-Fleming, author of To Darkness and to Death

"What a joy it is to discover a detective like Armand Gamache, strong, calm and charismatic, and at work on a good mystery in a believable setting."

– -Peter Lovesey, author of The Circle

"What a joy to read a crime novel written with such skill and integrity, strong on character and atmosphere … I couldn't put it down."

– -Margaret Yorke, author of False Pretences

"Still Life is a lovely, clever book and I hope I shall be reading a lot more by Louise Penny!"

– -Ann Granger, author of That Way Murder Lies

Barry Osgathorpe, known in the seventies as Ishmael the Zen Road Warrior, has decided to hole up for the nineties. A person can't even drive his Volkswagen Beetle with a clear conscience any more, for fear of polluting the environment. Yet, powerful forces are converging that will get him on the road again. When Barry learns that Volkswagens are being blown up all over the country, that a gang of skinheads is cruising the streets in a fleet of customized Beetles, and that his ex-girlfriend's deranged, Volkswagen-obsessed father and her current VW-collecting boyfriend are missing, he knows it's time to put the pedal to the metal.

A wry, moving collection of letters from the late J. F. Powers, “a comic writer of genius” (Mary Gordon)

Best known for his 1963 National Book Award — winning novel, Morte D’Urban, and as a master of the short story, J. F. Powers drew praise from Evelyn Waugh, Flannery O’Connor, Saul Bellow, and Philip Roth, among others. Though Powers’s fiction dwelt chiefly on the lives of Catholic priests, he long planned to write a novel of family life, a feat he never accomplished. He did, however, write thousands of letters, which, selected here by his daughter, Katherine A. Powers, become an intimate version of that novel, dynamic with plot and character. They show a dedicated artist, passionate lover, reluctant family man, pained aesthete, sports fan, and appreciative friend. At times wrenching and sad, at others ironic and exuberantly funny, Suitable Accommodations is the story of a man at odds with the world and, despite his faith, with his church. Beginning in prison, where Powers spent more than a year as a conscientious objector, the letters move on to his courtship, marriage, comically unsuccessful attempt to live in the woods, life in the Midwest and in Ireland, an unorthodox view of the Catholic Church, and an increasingly bizarre search for “suitable accommodations,” which included three full-scale emigrations to Ireland. Here, too, are encounters with such diverse people as Thomas Merton, Eugene McCarthy, Robert Lowell, Theodore Roethke, Sean O’Faolain, Frank O’Connor, Dorothy Day, and Alfred Kinsey.

Mixing fiction, history, psychoanalysis, and personal fantasy, "Teresa, My Love" follows Sylvia Leclercq, a French psychoanalyst, academic, and incurable insomniac, as she falls for the sixteenth-century Saint Teresa of Avila and becomes consumed with charting her life. Traveling to Spain, Leclercq, Kristeva's probing alterego, visits the sites and embodiments of the famous mystic and awakens to her own desire for faith, connection, and rebellion.

One of Kristeva's most passionate and transporting works, "Teresa, My Love" interchanges biography, autobiography, analysis, dramatic dialogue, musical scores, and images of paintings and sculptures to embed the reader in Leclercq's — and Kristeva's — journey. Born in 1515, Teresa of Avila survived the Spanish Inquisition and was a key reformer of the Carmelite Order. Her experience of ecstasy, which she intimately described in her writings, released her from her body and led to a complete realization of her consciousness, a state Kristeva explores in relation to present-day political failures, religious fundamentalism, and cultural malaise. Incorporating notes from her own psychoanalytic practice, as well as literary and philosophical references, Kristeva builds a fascinating dual diagnosis of contemporary society and the individual psyche while sharing unprecedented insights into her own character.

In settings that range from the old American West to pre-revolutionary France, from a present-day dig site in the high tablelands of South America to deep space, That Tiny Life is a wide-ranging and utterly original collection of short fiction and a novella that examines the idea of progress — humanity’s never-ending cycle of creation and destruction.

In the award-winning story, “Valley Floor,” a surgeon performs an amputation in the open desert in the American West. In “Da Capo al Fine,” set in eighteenth-century France, the creator of the fortepiano designs another, more brutal instrument. And in “That Tiny Life,” the reader gets a glimpse into a future in which human resource extraction goes far beyond Earth. Each story is infused with impeccably researched detail that brings obscure and fascinating subject matter into bright relief, be it falconry, ancient funeral rites, or space exploration. The result is an amazing interplay of minute detail against the backdrop of huge themes, such as human expression and impact, our need for connection, the innate violence in nature, and the god-complex present in all acts of human creation.

A highly accomplished, evocative, and wholly impressive work of short fiction, That Tiny Life introduces readers to a writer with limitless range and imagination.

This is the long-awaited first novel from one of the most original and memorable writers working today.

Things have never been easy for Oscar, a sweet but disastrously overweight, lovesick Dominican ghetto nerd. From his home in New Jersey, where he lives with his old-world mother and rebellious sister, Oscar dreams of becoming the Dominican J. R. R. Tolkien and, most of all, of finding love. But he may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fukú—the curse that has haunted the Oscar’s family for generations, dooming them to prison, torture, tragic accidents, and, above all, ill-starred love. Oscar, still waiting for his first kiss, is just its most recent victim.

Díaz immerses us in the tumultuous life of Oscar and the history of the family at large, rendering with genuine warmth and dazzling energy, humor, and insight the Dominican-American experience, and, ultimately, the endless human capacity to persevere in the face of heartbreak and loss. A true literary triumph, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao confirms Junot Díaz as one of the best and most exciting voices of our time.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year.

Stella Benson answers a classified ad for an au pair, arriving in a tiny Sussex village that's home to a family that is slightly larger than life. Her hopes for the Maddens may be high, but her station among them is low and remote. It soon becomes clear that Stella falls short of even the meager specifications her new role requires, most visibly in the area of "aptitude for the country life." But what drove her to leave her home, job, and life in London in the first place? Why has she severed all ties with her parents? Why is she so reluctant to discuss her past? And who, exactly, is Edward?

The Country Life is a rich and subtle novel about embarrassment, awkwardness, and being alone; about families, or the lack of them; and about love in some peculiar guises. Rachel Cusk's widely praised novel is a captivating tale of one young woman's adventures in self-discovery.

At fifty-six, Anatoly Sukhanov has everything a man could want. Nearly twenty-five years ago, he traded his precarious existence as a brilliant underground artist for the perks and comforts of a high-ranking Soviet apparatchik. Once he created art; now he censors it.

But a series of increasingly bizarre events transforms Sukhanov's perfect world into a nightmare. Buried dreams return to haunt him, long-repressed figures from his past surface to torment him, new political alignments threaten to undo him, and his once loving family and loyal comrades grow distant. As he stumbles through the dark corridors of memory, his life begins to unravel, and he finds himself losing everything he sold his soul to gain.

Olga Grushin tells the story of Sukhanov's betrayal of his talent, his friends, and his principles in dream sequences that may be real and in real time that may be nightmare, effortlessly shifting the borders between the two. Her masterly play with voice, time, and reality makes this often surreal exploration of self-dissolution and faithlessness an extraordinary reading experience. And her subtle transformation of Sukhanov from an arrogant and self-absorbed member of the ruling class to a terrified beggar in his own private hell is nothing short of miraculous. The Dream Life of Sukhanov is a virtuoso performance, original, startling, haunting.

A portrait of individual and communal struggles to maintain authenticity and revolutionary fervor in 1960s England from award-winning, bestselling author Alan Sillitoe

The final installment of the William Posters Trilogy revolves around the plights and foibles of the Handley family commune, which set up camp at the home of the wealthy Myra Bassingfield. There, painter Albert Handley is pursuing a whirlwind existence of art, sex, and chaotic domestic life. Of his seven children, four are giving him particular grief. His eldest son, Cuthbert, has been kicked out of theological college; his eldest daughter, Mandy, is pregnant by her unstable husband; and two of his younger sons, Richard and Adam, are pillaging army manuals for subversive and revolutionary ends. To top it all off, Myra’s lover, Frank Dawley, has returned from gunrunning in Algeria — and brought along his wife and two kids from Nottingham to live in the Buckinghamshire kibbutz.

Mma Ramotswe is still engaged to Mr J.L.B. Matekoni. She wonders when a day for the wedding will be named, but she is anxious to avoid putting too much pressure on her fiance. For he has other things on his mind – notably a frightening request made of him by Mma Potokwani.

Marketing consultant Blakemore finds that in moments of struggle and stress she revisits her favorite childhood women authors and their plucky heroines for respite, escape, and perspective. Jane Austen, who broke off an engagement and threw away her last chance at a respectable marriage, poked fun at polite society and its expectations of women in her novels, and she created a self-assured, self-respecting protagonist in Pride and Prejudice's Lizzy Bennet--who also doesn't need a man to complete her even if Lizzy does get a rich, handsome husband in the end. As Blakemore pushes against the boundaries of her own life, she also identifies with selfish Scarlett O'Hara, who, lacking in self-awareness and oblivious to the emotions of others, shoulders life's burdens and moves ahead, "her decisions swift, self-serving, and without compromise." The Little House on the Prairie series reminds Blakemore that when we focus on people and life instead of on material possessions, we learn to acknowledge what really counts. She finds inspiration, too, in Little Women, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn, The Color Purple, and Anne of Green Gables, and offers some nuggets of wisdom, but for the most part, her observations are familiar and pat.

A man who writes a hotel review-column for a newspaper is given the wrong key card when he checks in to a hotel, and he opens the door to the wrong room. Instead of finding an empty room he stumbles onto a porn shoot. Eventually he meets the woman who arranged the filming and becomes obsessed with her.

Gripping and provocative, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark tells a story of fame, love, and legacy through the propulsive rise of an iconoclastic artist.

“It’s hard for me to talk about love. I think movies are the way I do that,” says Sophie Stark, a visionary and unapologetic filmmaker. She uses stories from the lives of those around her — her obsession, her girlfriend, and her husband — to create movies that bring her critical recognition and acclaim. But as her career explodes, Sophie’s unwavering dedication to her art leads to the shattering betrayal of the people she loves most.

Told in a chorus of voices belonging to those who knew her best, The Life and Death of Sophie Stark is an intimate portrait of an elusive woman whose monumental talent and relentless pursuit of truth reveal the cost of producing great art, both for the artist and for the people around her.

In the tradition of Michael Herr’s Dispatches and works by such masters of the memoir as Mary Karr and Tobias Wolff, a powerful account of war and homecoming.

Brian Castner served three tours of duty in the Middle East, two of them as the commander of an Explosive Ordnance Disposal unit in Iraq. Days and nights he and his team — his brothers — would venture forth in heavily armed convoys from their Forward Operating Base to engage in the nerve-racking yet strangely exhilarating work of either disarming the deadly improvised explosive devices that had been discovered, or picking up the pieces when the alert came too late. They relied on an army of remote-controlled cameras and robots, but if that technology failed, a technician would have to don the eighty-pound Kevlar suit, take the Long Walk up to the bomb, and disarm it by hand. This lethal game of cat and mouse was, and continues to be, the real war within America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

But The Long Walk is not just about battle itself. It is also an unflinching portrayal of the toll war exacts on the men and women who are fighting it. When Castner returned home to his wife and family, he began a struggle with a no less insidious foe, an unshakable feeling of fear and confusion and survivor’s guilt that he terms The Crazy. His thrilling, heartbreaking, stunningly honest book immerses the reader in two harrowing and simultaneous realities: the terror and excitement and camaraderie of combat, and the lonely battle against the enemy within — the haunting memories that will not fade, the survival instincts that will not switch off. After enduring what he has endured, can there ever again be such a thing as “normal”? The Long Walk will hook you from the very first sentence, and it will stay with you long after its final gripping page has been turned.

A One-Minute Play

WHAT IS THIS BOOK ABOUT.

What are books by Sigmund Freud, Eric Berne, Frederick Perls, Carl Jung, etc., about?

These books are about us, people. About what we have inside of us and about what we should do to stop suffering and become happy and successful.

But if these classical books on psychology can be of such great use then why so few of us manage to read them? Why don't we apply the ideas in our everyday life? Probably it happens so because the texts are too complicated, they are written in a difficult language and do not contain any clear instructions of how to use the knowledge in practice. And also because the modern person, especially a young one, prefers using contemporary «gadgets» here and now instead of studying semiconductor physics, chemistry, electrodynamics and other sciences in order to understand how and why his/her mobile phone works.

The book by a talented business-coach, Elena Samsonova, «The New Technology of Managing your Life», is also about people and their lives. However, this book is written for modern people who are used to receiving high-quality information, quickly analyzing it, making decisions and acting immediately.

This book is based on the original theory of roles suggested by the author. Using the notion of a «role» (a dynamic informational system) and the notion of a «personality» (a dynamic role system) the author explains in simple terms the reasons of any person's psychological problems and suggests simple solutions which can be of great use in everyday life.

After reading this book you will be able to understand and solve most of the problems in personal life independently without consulting any specialists. The book contains a number of examples taken from real life which illustrate every theoretical statement and help to understand the technologies.

This book could be called «Human. Technical characteristics and user guide».

WHO IS THIS BOOK FOR?

The book will be interesting for:

– all those who want to find effective means of managing their lives in various situations and circumstances;

– young psychologists and coaches who would like to gain a competitive advantage on the market of psychological and business coaching by applying new effective technologies;

– business people and entrepreneurs who want to understand the system of human relations and become more effective in management, negotiations, career building, etc.;

And besides there is a lot of information in this book on personal growth and on how to become the person who is able to reach all the goals.

SPECIAL FEATURES OF THIS BOOK.

In order to use the technologies described in this book extensive knowledge of psychology and other sciences is not necessary. If you have a problem, a question which you would like to solve… you just take the corresponding technology from the book and start immediately changing your life.

The theory is understandable, the technologies are very simple; it's easy to perceive and apply them.

The author of the book has almost twenty years of practice in management consulting, business coaching, NLP training and life-management training.

In the first (paper) edition of the book it was called «Roles people play. Play your life by your own rules» («Piter» publishing house, 2013).

The book chronicles Brown’s career as a criminal profiler while also exploring the circumstances that led her to that line of study. Ironically enough, it was in the early 90's that Brown and her then-husband took in a male boarder so that she could afford to stay at home and school her children. When the strangled body of a young woman was discovered on the neighborhood jogging path a short time later, Brown had an intuitive suspicion that their boarder was guilty of the crime. Though her husband tried to assuage her concerns, she remained convinced that her hypothesis was correct and quickly amassed physical and circumstantial evidence of his guilt. The local police dismissed her as a busybody housewife. She remained vigilant in her efforts, and the police named him a person of interest six years later…

The Profiler is fascinating in many respects, not the least of which is that it lifts the veil of misconception that the news media and entertainment industry have created and reveals criminal profiling for what it actually is-an analysis of physical and behavioral evidence that is utilized to form the most scientific determination as to how a crime occurred and what type of person it was that committed it. Rather than individuals who physically track down and confront cold-blooded killers while coping with the demons that come with such a dangerous profession, profilers are generally behind-the-scenes thinkers who analyze and recreate scenarios, often years after the cases have gone cold-and often while being met with the resistance and/or indifference of the authorities.

Readers will be intrigued by Brown’s case files, many of which she reveals in the book. Along with a history of each crime, she chronicles the origins of her involvement in the case (most often by request of the victim’s family), the official police investigation and its conclusions, and her own thought process as to how the crime occurred-often the result of a reenactment of the crime, typically staged with the help of her good-natured children. She then lists her suspects, exploring the veracity of each supposition, and ultimately identifies the one person that she most strongly feels is guilty. (Some names and identifying characteristics have been changed to protect the identity of individuals discussed in the book.)

What is shocking is that nearly every case discussed in The Profiler has gone officially unsolved. Even in the instances where there is clear and compelling evidence of guilt, factors such as politics, economics, and/or the lack of available resources tend to thwart justice. This is a source of outrage to Brown, and it should inspire an equally incredulous response from readers. One of the greatest triumphs of the book is that it portrays a criminal justice system that fails much more often than we know, or would care to admit. And while this may indeed be a scary prospect, it is one that needs to be brought to light if reform is going to happen.

Almost conversational in tone, The Profiler is the rare book that takes a complex topic and simplifies, rather than compounds, its mystique. Brown has a distinct voice, which discernibly captures moments of despair, humor, and levity, and she proclaims her opinions boldly and without reservation. Just as she willingly admits that much of her job is reliant on common sense, readers should be equally forthcoming in recognizing that common sense is woefully underutilized, underappreciated, and underdeveloped. And that is a crime that affects all of us…

The Real Life of Alejandro Mayta is an astute psychological portrait of a modern revolutionary and a searching account of an old friend's struggle to understand him. First published in English in 1986, the novel probes the long and checkered history of radical politics in Latin America.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The inspiration for American Crime Story: The People v. O. J. Simpson on FX, starring Cuba Gooding, Jr., John Travolta, David Schwimmer, and Connie Britton

The definitive account of the O. J. Simpson trial, The Run of His Life is a prodigious feat of reporting that could have been written only by the foremost legal journalist of our time. First published less than a year after the infamous verdict, Jeffrey Toobin’s nonfiction masterpiece tells the whole story, from the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman to the ruthless gamesmanship behind the scenes of “the trial of the century.” Rich in character, as propulsive as a legal thriller, this enduring narrative continues to shock and fascinate with its candid depiction of the human drama that upended American life.

From New York Times best-selling, two-time Edgar Award-winning author Steve Hamilton comes an unforgettable new hero – a man who will walk out of prison and into a harrowing double life that is anything but free.

Nick Mason has already spent five years inside a maximum security prison when an offer comes that will grant his release 20 years early. He accepts – but the deal comes with a terrible price.

Now, back on the streets, Nick Mason has a new house, a new car, money to burn, and a beautiful roommate. He's returned to society, but he's still a prisoner. Whenever his cell phone rings, day or night, Nick must answer it and follow whatever order he is given. It's the deal he made with Darius Cole, a criminal mastermind serving a double life term who runs an empire from his prison cell.

Forced to commit increasingly more dangerous crimes, hunted by the relentless detective who put him behind bars, and desperate to go straight and rebuild his life with his daughter and ex-wife, Nick will ultimately have to risk everything – his family, his sanity, and even his life – to finally break free.

Suspenseful and atmospheric, this extraordinary novel portrays both the hardship and grace in the life of a man struggling to realize his destiny.

When Samuel Tyne emigrated from the Gold Coast (now Ghana) in 1955, he was determined to accomplish great things. He excelled at Oxford and then came to Canada with the uncle who raised him, leaving the traditions and hard life of his homeland behind. Here, in this nation of immigrants, Samuel would surely be free to follow his destined path to success.

That new beginning didn’t live up to Samuel’s expectations. As the novel opens fifteen years later, he is working as an economic forecaster for the government in Calgary. It’s a stiflingly bureaucratic, dead-end job, where petty managerial types and lifeless co-workers make Samuel’s days almost unbearable.

Everything changes for Samuel when he finds out that his Uncle Jacob has died. Samuel and his uncle had grown apart. They had not spoken for a number of years, though Jacob had raised Samuel and, in a way, sacrificed himself for Samuel’s future. Jacob’s death weighs heavily on Samuel, yet his reaction seems more about having “a singular chance to get all his sadness out” than about familial love. Samuel is jolted out of his sadness and his workaday world when he receives a call telling him he has inherited Jacob’s old mansion in the small town of Aster, Alberta. The town, originally settled by freed slaves from Oklahoma, sounds to Samuel like the perfect place to start a new life, one that would allow him to live up to his potential, and he decides to exchange the drudgery of the city for the simplicity of small-town existence. When Samuel leaves his office for good after yet another minor humiliation, we cheer his resolve and look forward to what the coming days will bring.

Samuel believes that he is setting on a path to fulfill his personal expectations, but we begin to see the signs of what one reviewer has called Samuel’s “pathological temerity.” He doesn’t tell his family what has happened: not that he’s inherited the house, or that he plans to move there or even that he’s quit his job. Instead, he spends his days tinkering in the shed, emerging at just the right time to make it seem like he’s coming home from work. The truth comes out only when one of his daughters discovers his secret. His deception points to a paralyzing inability to communicate with others and suggests that this new beginning may be as fruitless as the last.

Maud and the twins, Chloe and Yvette, resist the move to Aster, but are helpless in the face of Samuel’s conviction that this is the right thing to do. And when they arrive, their new home — a gloomy, worn-down remnant of days long past — doesn’t exactly fill them with hope. But the seeds of renewal have been sown, the move has been made and they hesitantly take up their new lives. At first, the Tynes seem to be settling in — they meet some of their neighbours, Samuel sets up his own electronics shop, Maud begins to fix up the house and the twins are curious enough to at least begin exploring their new home. However, the idealized Aster of Samuel’s imagination proves to be as false as his family’s veneer of acceptance, and a dark undercurrent of small-mindedness, racism and violence soon turns on the town’s newest residents. When mysterious fires begin to destroy local buildings, and the bizarre yet brilliant twins retreat into their own dark world, Samuel’s fabled second chance slips slowly out of his grasp.

The Second Life of Samuel Tyne is a harrowing and beautifully written work of fiction, one that shows us how fragile our dreams can be in the face of the relentless march of time. Esi Edugyan’s evocative writing and pitch-perfect ability to get into the minds of her characters confirm that this book heralds the arrival of a major new novelist.

Lady Gabriella March is the perfect domestic goddess-at least, that's what her editor at Milady magazine thinks! In truth she's simply Ellie March, cleaner and aspiring writer, who uses the beautiful mansion she is house-sitting to inspire her.

When the owner returns unexpectedly, Ellie's fledgling writing career is threatened. But even more dangerous is the man himself! Gorgeous Dr. Benedict Faulkner is quite the opposite of the aging academic she imagined, and soon it is her heart, and not just her secret, that is exposed…

Selected for 4 of Oprah's "Best Books" lists: * Best Memoirs * Best Beach Reads * Best First Lines * Top Books to Pick Up Now "Sometimes things shatter," writes Dawn Raffel in The Secret Life of Objects. "More often they just fade." But in this evocative memoir, moments from the past do not fade — they breathe on the page, rendering a striking portrait of a woman through her connections to the people she's loved, the places she been, what's been lost, and what remains. In clear, beautiful prose Raffel reveals the haunting qualities of the objects we gather, as well as the sustaining and elusive nature of memory itself." — Samuel Ligon, author of Drift and Swerve: Stories "Dawn puts memories, people and secrets together like perfectly set gems in these shimmering stories, which are a delight to read. Every detail is exquisite, every character beautifully observed, and every object becomes sacred in her kind, capable hands. I savored every word." — Priscilla Warner, author of Learning to Breathe — My Yearlong Quest to Bring Calm to My Life

This collection includes all of the writer’s earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1952-1955. These fascinating stories include “Beyond Lies the Wub”, “The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford”, “The Variable Man”, and 22 others.

Dr. Louise Banks is enlisted by the military to communicate with a race of radially-symmetrical aliens who initiated first contact with humanity. Woven through the story are remembrances of her daughter.

From a writer whom Thomas Keneally calls "one of the great figures on the cusp of the millennium" comes a novel that conjures an entire world that suggests our own, but tilted on its axis — a world whose most powerful country, Voorstand, dominates its neighbors with ruthless espionage and its mesmerizing but soul-destroying Sirkus.

Into that world comes Tristan Smith, a malformed, heroically willful, and unforgivingly observant child. Tristan's life includes adventure and loss, political intrigue, and a bizarre stardom in the Voorstand Sirkus, where animals talk and human performers die real deaths. The result is a visionary picaresque, staggering in its inventions, spellbinding in its suspense, and unabashedly moving.

Time travel with a twist!

What if Dexter could travel through time?

Scott McKenzie’s father killed his mother and himself. Scott vowed to do anything in his power to stop similar murders.

He longed to be a police officer, but a tour in Vietnam in 1970 derailed that career. Two years later, wounded in body and soul, Scott died. He didn’t go on to what was next, though. Instead, he woke up with a chance to live his life over and over until he got it right.

Murderers will never see him coming.

But, by using violence to save others, is he losing his own soul?

The Vigilante Life of Scott McKenzie is the seventh book in the Middle Falls Time Travel series. It is written as a standalone novel. The Middle Falls books can be read in any order.

Short listed for the Richard & Judy Book Club 2007. An uplifting story set in Los Angeles about one man's effort to bring himself back to life. Richard is a modern day everyman; a middle-aged divorcee trading stocks out of his home. He has done such a good job getting his life under control that he needs no one. His life has slowed almost to a standstill, until two incidents conspire to hurl him back into the world. One day he wakes up with a knotty cramp in his back, which rapidly develops into an all-consuming pain. At the same time a wide sinkhole appears outside his living room window, threatening the foundations of his house. A vivid novel about compassion and transformation, "This Book Will Save Your Life" reveals what can happen if you are willing to open up to the world around you. Since her debut in 1989, A.M. Homes has been among the boldest and most original voices of her generation, acclaimed for the psychological accuracy and unnerving emotional intensity of her storytelling. Her keen ability to explore how extraordinary the ordinary can be is at the heart of her touching and funny new novel, her first in six years.

The debut novel from Joseph O'Neill, author of the Man Booker Prize longlisted and Richard & Judy pick, ‘Netherland’.

James Jones is slipping steadily through life. He has a steady job as a junior partner at a solicitor's firm, a steady girlfriend and a steady mortgage. Nothing much is happening in Jones's life but he really doesn't mind — this is exactly the way he likes it.

Michael Donovan, meanwhile, is a star — a world-class international lawyer and advocate — he's everything Jones wanted to be and isn't. Jones was once Donovan's pupil and, for a while, it looked like he too would make his name — but he left that high-powered world behind a long time ago, or so he thought.

One day Jones reads in the paper that Donovan has collapsed in court — then, out of the blue, Donovan contacts him; he has a job he needs Jones to work on…

Joseph O'Neill's debut is wonderfully clever and comic novel — about ambitions and aspirations and the realities that they inevitably collide with.

With her husband Bernard two years in the grave, seventy-nine-year-old Harriet Chance sets sail on an ill-conceived Alaskan cruise only to discover through a series of revelations that she’s been living the past sixty years of her life under entirely false pretenses. There, amid the buffets and lounge singers, between the imagined appearance of her late husband and the very real arrival of her estranged daughter midway through the cruise, Harriet is forced to take a long look back, confronting the truth about pivotal events that changed the course of her life.

Jonathan Evison — bestselling author of West of Here, The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving, and All About Lulu—has crafted a bighearted novel with a supremely endearing heroine at its center. Through Harriet, he paints a bittersweet portrait of a postmodern everywoman with great warmth, humanity, and humor. Part dysfunctional love story, part poignant exploration of the mother/daughter relationship, nothing is what it seems in this tale of acceptance, reexamination, forgiveness, and, ultimately, healing. It is sure to appeal to admirers of Evison’s previous work, as well as fans of such writers as Meg Wolitzer, Junot Diaz, and Karen Joy Fowler.

This beautifully written novel, by one of South Africa's most celebrated writers, has an almost hypnotic power that draws the reader into one woman's life. As a post-apartheid novel, This Life considers both the past and future of the Afrikaner people through four generations of one family. In an elegiac narrator's tone, there is also a sense of compulsion in the narrator's attempts to understand the past and achieve reconciliation in the present. This Life is a powerful story partly of suffering and partly of reflection.

Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins's long-awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe.

Tom Robbins's warm, wise, and wonderfully weird novels — including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction, and Jitterbug Perfume—provide an entryway into the frontier of his singular imagination. Madcap but sincere, pulsating with strong social and philosophical undercurrents, his irreverent classics have introduced countless readers to hitchhiking cowgirls, born-again monkeys, a philosophizing can of beans, exiled royalty, and problematic redheads.

In Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins turns that unparalleled literary sensibility inward, weaving together stories of his unconventional life — from his Appalachian childhood to his globe-trotting adventures — told in his unique voice, which combines the sweet and sly, the spiritual and earthy. The grandchild of Baptist preachers, Robbins would become, over the course of half a century, a poet interruptus, a soldier, a meteorologist, a radio DJ, an art-critic-turned-psychedelic-journeyman, a world-famous novelist, and a counterculture hero, leading a life as unlikely, magical, and bizarre as those of his quixotic characters.

Robbins offers intimate snapshots of Appalachia during the Great Depression, the West Coast during the sixties' psychedelic revolution, international roving before Homeland Security monitored our travels, and New York publishing when it still relied on trees.

Written with the big-hearted comedy and mesmerizing linguistic invention for which Robbins is known, Tibetan Peach Pie is an invitation into the private world of a literary legend.

It is a sultry August at the very end of the twentieth century, and Tristano is dying. A hero of the Italian Resistance, Tristano has called a writer to his bedside to listen to his life story, though, really, “you don’t tell a life…you live a life, and while you’re living it, it’s already lost, has slipped away.” Tristano Dies, one of Antonio Tabucchi’s major novels, is a vibrant consideration of love, war, devotion, betrayal, and the instability of the past, of storytelling, and what it means to be a hero.

Авторы рассказывают нам о судьбах самых дальних родственников Тупака с 18-ого века и вплоть до века 20-ого. Параллельно авторы исследуют историю самих США. Читателю становится понятно почему чёрное сообщество так или иначе реагировало на действия властей США. Большую часть книги занимает биография самого Тупака. Она составлена в хронологическом порядке с момента его рождения и вплоть до гибели. Над созданием книги работали родственники, друзья и коллеги Тупака по музыкальному бизнесу. Здесь есть воспоминания его матери Офени, сестры Секивы, близкой подруги Джады Пинкетт, первого продюсера и подруги Лейлы Штайнберг, рэперов Shock G, Warren G, Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre и многих других. Подробно охвачен каждый период его жизни. В книгу включены его интервью, письма из тюрьмы, записи судебных заседаний, воспоминания телохранителей, одноклассников и преподавателей Балтиморской Школы Искусств. Таким образом, эта книга является наиболее подробным и увлекательным исследованием жизни самого великого рэпера всех времён и народов.

"Much less a book than a state of vision." – Henry James

The narrative drive of Stowe's classic novel is often overlooked in the heat of the controversies surrounding its anti-slavery sentiments. In fact, it is a compelling adventure story with richly drawn stories has earned a place in both literary American history.

Вегетарианцем быть не просто легко, но и полезно как для вас, так и для окружающей среды. Совместными усилиями блогеров, врачей и других специалистов мы собрали много интересной информации: как постепенно и без стресса перейти на вегетерианство, веганство и сыроедение, какие продукты выбирать, чтобы есть максимально здоровую пищу, что такое суперфуды и в чем их фишка, все об экологичных материалах и фирмах, которые не проводят тестирование на животных, об экологичной одежде и косметике, о том, как воспитывать и кормить детей веганов с рождения и далее, как снизить уровень холестерина, нормализовать кровяное давление и снизить риск заболевания раком, как разнообразить свой рацион, как искать правильные продукты и закупаться экономно и не только.

В книге вы найдете истории абсолютно здоровых и счастливых веганов, которые придерживаются такого образа жизни многие годы, а также лучшие рецепты от сыроедов и вегетарианцев.

Nicholas Pileggi’s vivid, unvarnished, journalistic chronicle of the life of Henry Hill-the working-class Brooklyn kid who knew from age twelve that “to be a wiseguy was to own the world,” who grew up to live the highs and lows of the gangster’s life-has been hailed as “the best book ever written on organized crime” (Cosmopolitan).

This is the true-crime bestseller that was the basis for Martin Scorsese’s film masterpiece GoodFellas, which brought to life the violence, the excess, the families, the wives and girlfriends, the drugs, the payoffs, the paybacks, the jail time, and the Feds… with Henry Hill’s crackling narration drawn straight out of Wiseguy and overseeing all the unforgettable action.

Read it and experience the secret life inside the mob-from one who’s lived it.

Now with an introduction by Martin Scorcese.

Книга представляет собой 413-страниц дневниковых записей, написанных между Рождеством 1986 года и Рождеством 1987 года. Довольно подробно описана запись альбома Motley Crue's Girls, Girls, Girls и последующего турне Girls Girls Girls, заканчивая передозировками героина Sixx в конце 1987 года, которые вдохновляют группу, чтобы бросить героин в целом.

Пятилетний Наруто после очередного удара по голове видит перед собой странную табличку, обещающую ему ослабление боли...

 Вышло то, что вышло, и даже не черепаха. Это не РПГ в мире Наруто, а жизнь в миpе Наруто с элементами РПГ - здесь есть характеристики и навыки, но нет уровней и циферок урона.

…Однажды, холодной зимней ночью, когда лил ледяной дождь, и Лорри, скрутившись калачиком, спала под каменным прилавком, накрывшись каким-то тряпьём, её заметили две стражницы из Городской стражи. Они о чём-то негромко поспорили, затем одна легонько толкнула перепуганную девочку ногой. Лорри ни за что не хотела покидать своё убежище. От других попрошаек девочка слышала, что дети, которых забирали стражники, больше не возвращались на улицы, исчезая из города навсегда… Что случилось дальше с героиней, вы узнаете, прочитав эту фэнтезийно-фантастическую книгу.