National Book Award Finalist. How did humanity originate and why does a species like ours exist on this planet? Do we have a special place, even a destiny in the universe? Where are we going, and perhaps, the most difficult question of all, “Why?” In The Meaning of Human Existence, his most philosophical work to date, Pulitzer Prize–winning …
One of the most notorious and bizarre mysteries of the Edwardian age, for readers who loved The Suspicions of Mr. Whicher.In 1898, an elderly widow, Anna Maria Druce, came to the British court with an astonishing request. She stood among the overflowing pews of St. Pauls Cathedral claiming that the merchant T. C. Druce, her late father-in-law, had …
Lincoln’s Greatest Case: The River, the Bridge, and the Making of America
The untold story of how one sensational trial propelled a self-taught lawyer and a future president into the national spotlight.In the early hours of May 6, 1856, the steamboat Effie Afton barreled into a pillar of the Rock Island Bridge―the first railroad bridge ever to span the Mississippi River. Soon after, the newly constructed vessel, crowded with passengers …
One of the greatest characters of medieval literature, the trickster Reynard the Fox, comes to life in this rollicking new translation.What do a weak lion king, a grief-stricken rooster, a dim-witted bear, and one really angry wolf have in common? The answer is they’ve all been had by one sly fox named Reynard. Originally bursting forth from Europe …
2015 Washington Post Notable BookThe Complete Works of Primo Levi, which includes seminal works like If This Is a Man and The Periodic Table, finally gathers all fourteen of Levi’s books―memoirs, essays, poetry, commentary, and fiction―into three slipcased volumes.Primo Levi, the Italian-born chemist once described by Philip Roth as that “quicksilver little woodland creature enlivened by the forest’s …
A Slate, and San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2014 From across strange aeons comes the long-awaited annotated edition of “the twentieth century’s greatest practitioner of the classic horror tale” (Stephen King). “With an increasing distance from the twentieth century…the New England poet, author, essayist, and stunningly profuse epistolary Howard Phillips Lovecraft is beginning to emerge as one …
A richly illustrated culinary tour of the United States through fifty signature dishes, and a radical exploration of our gastronomic heritage. Following his critically acclaimed Preparing the Ghost, renowned essayist Matthew Gavin Frank takes on America’s food. In a surprising style reminiscent of Maggie Nelson or Mark Doty, Frank examines a quintessential dish in each state, interweaving the …
Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures, and Innovations
A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist, this is “the perfect introduction to classical studies, and deserves to become something of a standard work” (Observer). Mary Beard, drawing on thirty years of teaching and writing about Greek and Roman history, provides a panoramic portrait of the classical world, a book in which we encounter not only Cleopatra and …
A sweeping, revisionist history of the Roman Empire from one of our foremost classicists.Ancient Rome was an imposing city even by modern standards, a sprawling imperial metropolis of more than a million inhabitants, a “mixture of luxury and filth, liberty and exploitation, civic pride and murderous civil war” that served as the seat of power for an empire that …
Whether you are looking to brush up or sample for the first time, this graphic adaptation of In Search of Lost Time is the perfect introduction to Proust’s masterpiece.”Proust was the greatest novelist of the twentieth century, just as Tolstoy was in the nineteenth,” wrote Graham Greene. “For those who began to write at the end of the …