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A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING AUTHOR: 17 short stories “about belonging, desire, and the boundaries of love” from “one of the 20th century’s great female writers”—with a foreword by Anita Desai (Washington Post). “Jhabvala has Alice Munro’s gift for making you feel you’re reading a novel in miniature.” —Seattle Times Nobody has written so powerfully of the relationship between and within India and the Western middle classes than Ruth Prawer Jhabvala. In this selection of stories, chosen by her surviving family, her ability to tenderly and humorously view the situations faced by three (sometimes interacting) cultures—European, post...
‘Almost like poetry, a rich ode to all things books and everything we love about them. The enjoyment and engagement is so palpable you can almost taste it and Kells proves to be the perfect guide through the subject matter and history.’ AU Review Libraries are filled with magic. From the Bodleian, the Folger and the Smithsonian to the fabled libraries of Middle-earth, Umberto Eco’s mediaeval library labyrinth and libraries dreamed up by John Donne, Jorge Luis Borges and Carlos Ruiz Zafón, Stuart Kells explores the bookish places, real and fictitious, that continue to capture our imaginations. The Library: A Catalogue of Wonders is a fascinating and engaging exploration of libraries as...
FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PEN/FAULKNER AWARD FOR FICTION FINALIST FOR PUBLISHING TRIANGLE'S EDMUND WHITE DEBUT FICTION AWARD In the last weeks of her pregnancy, a Muslim Indian lesbian living in San Francisco receives a visit from her estranged mother and sister that surfaces long held secrets and betrayals in this "sweeping family saga . . . with the beautiful specificity of real lives lived, loved, and fought for" (Entertainment Weekly) Working as a consultant for Kamala Harris’s attorney general campaign in Obama-era San Francisco, Seema has constructed a successful life for herself in the West, despite still struggling with her father’s long-ago decision to exile her from the family afte...
For readers of Bad Blood and Empire of Pain, an authoritative look at monopoly medicine from the dawn of patents through the race for COVID-19 vaccines and how the privatization of public science has prioritized profits over people Owning the Sun tells the story of one of the most contentious fights in human history: the legal right to produce lifesaving medicines. Medical science began as a discipline geared toward the betterment of all human life, but the merging of research with intellectual property and the rise of the pharmaceutical industry warped and eventually undermined its ethical foundations. Since World War II, federally funded research has facilitated most major medical breakthr...
“Bender's willingness to go deep, to burrow down into what's right and wrong about 21st century America and Americans, is a mirror that draws us in and does not allow us to look away." —Los Angeles Times on Refund The National Book Award finalist for Refund returns with a new collection of stories that boldly examines the changes in American culture over the last two years through the increasing presence of violence, bigotry, sexual harassment, and the emotional costs of living under constant threat. In the title story, the competition between two middle school cellists is affected by a shooting at their school, and it is only years later that they realize how the intrusion of violence a...
On the eve of the American Revolution, nearly three-quarters of all African Americans in mainland British America lived in two regions: the Chesapeake, centered in Virginia, and the Lowcountry, with its hub in South Carolina. Here, Philip Morgan compares and contrasts African American life in these two regional black cultures, exploring the differences as well as the similarities. The result is a detailed and comprehensive view of slave life in the colonial American South. Morgan explores the role of land and labor in shaping culture, the everyday contacts of masters and slaves that defined the possibilities and limitations of cultural exchange, and finally the interior lives of blacks--thei...
This New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year from the author of the Reese Witherspoon Book Club pick, On the Rooftop, is "a powerful tale of racial tensions across generations" (People) that explores the depths of women’s relationships—influential women and marginalized women, healers, and survivors. In 1924, Josephine is the proud owner of a thriving farm. As a child, she channeled otherworldly power to free herself from slavery. Now her new neighbor, a white woman named Charlotte, seeks her company, and an uneasy friendship grows between them. But Charlotte has also sought solace in the Ku Klux Klan, a relationship that jeopardizes Josephine’s family. Nearly one hundred y...
This collection of "eloquent essays that examine the relationship between the American landscape and the national character" serves to remind us that despite our differences we all belong to the same land (Publishers Weekly). “How was it possible, I wondered, that all of this American land––in every direction––could be fastened together into a whole?” What does it mean when a nation accustomed to moving begins to settle down, when political discord threatens unity, and when technology disrupts traditional ways of building communities? Is a shared soil enough to reinvigorate a national spirit? From the embaattled newsrooms of small town newspapers to the pornography film sets of t...
Gavin Francis fulfilled a lifetime's ambition when he spent fourteen months as the basecamp doctor at Halley, a profoundly isolated British research station on the Caird Coast of Antarctica. So remote, it is said to be easier to evacuate a casualty from the International Space Station than it is to bring someone out of Halley in winter. Antarctica offered a year of unparalleled silence and solitude, with few distractions and a very little human history, but also a rare opportunity to live among emperor penguins, the only species truly at home in he Antarctic. Following Penguins throughout the year –– from a summer of perpetual sunshine to months of winter darkness –– Gavin Francis explores the world of great beauty conjured from the simplest of elements, the hardship of living at 50 c below zero and the unexpected comfort that the penguin community bring. Empire Antarctica is the story of one man and his fascination with the world's loneliest continent, as well as the emperor penguins who weather the winter with him. Combining an evocative narrative with a sublime sensitivity to the natural world, this is travel writing at its very best
-- Stanley Persky, City University of New York