Set against such iconic backdrops as the California gold rush, the development of the transcontinental railroad, and a speeding train of modern-day strangers forced together by fate, it is a grand entertainment that asks big questions.The characters of Small World connect in the most intriguing and meaningful ways, winning, breaking, and winning our hearts again. In exploring the passengers' lives and those of their ancestors more than a century before, Small World chronicles 170 years of American nation-building from numerous points of view across place and time. And it does it with a fullhearted, full-throttle pace that asks on the most human, intimate scale whether it is truly possible to meet, and survive, the choices posed--and forced--by the age.The result is a historical epic with a Dickensian flair, a grand entertainment that asks whether our nation has made good on its promises. It dazzles as its characters come to connect with one another through time. And it hits home as it probes at our country's injustices, big and small, straight through to its deeply satisfying final words.

    Emma, a privileged young heiress, decides to mentor Harriet Smith, a pretty boarding-school pupil, and to matchmake her as eligibly as she can… But how is she to guess that Harriet has a secret?Meanwhile, the brilliant, penniless Jane Fairfax consents to a clandestine engagement with Frank Churchill – though not daring to confess, even to him, that she is being relentlessly pursued by her best friend’s husband. Harriet sidelines Emma herself in favour of the ingenious Harriet and the fascinating Jane Fairfax. It is Emma – but an Emma with a surprisingly believable twist in its tail.

    It's winter. It's so cold outside you could execute billionaires in the street about it. Sam lives with Eleanor and they are in love. He has three or four outstanding invoices that would each cover rent for a month. At some point, the President is going to make some absolutely wild announcements that will only end in doom. In a surreal, funny, and heart-breaking version of reality, Sasha Fletcher's highly anticipated first novel occupies that rare register that manages to speak to an increasingly incomprehensible world. Through scenes that poetically transform the mundane into the sublime and the absurd into the tragic, Be Here to Love Me at the End of the World is about the exquisite beauty of being in love in a world that is falling apart.

    His wife died. He lost his job. His brother is on the west coast. But something else, something different, something new is waiting for him.In uptown Charlotte, the lives of five strangers are bound together as tightly as the twisted metal frame of the bicycle at the center of a horrible hit-and-run accident.A homeless woman watches as a minister tries to comfort the young computer coder who believes he killed the cyclist, while an exhausted nurse and a power-driven CEO slip off into the night.As Jim begins to rebuild his life, a strange vagrant helps guide him to the five people involved in the accident, revealing the dangerous secrets and vulnerabilities threatening to destroy each one. Someone has a gun. Someone has been physically abused. A relationship desperately needs mending. Someone will die.Jim finds himself in situations with his new friends he never expected, giving him opportunities he never saw coming, providing new meaning in ways he never could have imagined.Filled with tragedy and promise, The Awakening of Jim Bishop is a powerful and moving story of loss, hope and healing sure to provoke thought long after the last page is turned.

    After his little brother is persecuted by bullies, J-Bee commits a retaliatory act of brutality, the nature of which scars him. When his best friend, Gilly, volunteers to fight in Vietnam, J-Bee--repulsed by his own violence--refuses to follow either his father or Gilly into the military. Instead, he matriculates at Columbia in 1971, an era of counterculture, drugs and sex and rock 'n roll, in order to seek his redemption. While there, he is introduced to the mysterious Serpent who recites in the campus caf�, and to the politically active Margo who schools him in anti-war politics and the virtues of peace. Although he feels loyalty to his best friend fighting overseas, he increasingly sympathizes with Margo's rationale against the war. Torn between supporting the war or protesting against it, J-Bee's paradoxical feelings are ignited when his friend Gilly, on furlough from Vietnam, visits him at Columbia. With ratcheting tensions and bullhorns leading students in protest, pro-war and anti-war factions collide in campus riots, and J-Bee makes the choice that defines his life.

    Drawing on her experiences as a woman and voracious reader living in the Islamic Republic of Iran, her life as an immigrant in the United States, and her role as literature professor in both countries, she crafts an argument for why, in a genuine democracy, we must engage with the enemy, and how literature can be a vehicle for doing so.Structured as a series of letters to her father, Baba, who taught her as a child about how literature can rescue us in times of trauma, Nafisi explores the most probing questions of our time through the works of Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, Margaret Atwood, and more.

    prestige, the Great Fear. waves of static. fleeing the body into something somehow more corporeal. white cube and black magician. hazy buzz-z-zzz-z-z-ing sound effects. bloodrip.exe and bertrand yamasaki. tiny, intimate, personal cataclysms. deep earth rumblings. the worst type of acid rain. youtube videos of mountains. quantum chromodynamics. broken-down vr synthetics. a pink ray to the brain. the stench of ambient decay. a bronze-age gargantua monolith.in the triptych third world magicks, significance, music and the measure of personal worth tear through dimensions of physical reality. music journalists blank zizou and bloodrip.exe calmly assess and destroy one another on the sharp metallic edges of claiming and competing for cultural capital, amidst the desperate attempt to stake relevant space in the esteems of others. all the while, people continue to exist on an island. all held captive by black magician, who renders souls into dust among leisure, boglioli linen suits and men with japanese names born from portugal, all while they create The Art. and then, the actual world comes crashing in after mike kleine’s peers begin to write about the book itself. 4th wall dramaticks. something something, critical mass.how do we measure what we create? how do we decide what is great? who truly controls the orbits of the moon? and when is it acceptable to erase something that already exists? third world magicks is a place where experience is only worth how it is described. it is a story of people who enjoy the ideas of things. it is a stage where death is meaningless. the beginning of time. and then, the ending of everything else... evaporation. abject bliss. artificial terror. oceans are burning.

    Caterino, author of The Promise, Pop Star, and The Girl from the Stars.

    This highly readable edition includes new and newly revised translations of selections from Herodotus—often called the “father of history”—Thucydides, Xenophon, and Plutarch, the four greatest Greek innovators of historical narrative. Here the reader will find their most important, and most widely taught, passages collected in a single volume. The excerpts chart the landmark events of ancient Greece and provide a comprehensive account of the entire classical Greek age. From the start the Greek historians demonstrated how broad and varied historical writing could be and brought their craft beyond a mere chronicle of past events. This volume explores each author’s interest in religion, leadership, character, and the lessons of war. How, for instance, should readers interpret Herodotus’ inclusion of speeches and dialogues, dreams, and oracles as part of the “factual” record? What did Thucydides understand about human nature that (as he said) stays constant throughout time? How did Plutarch frame historical biography as a means of depicting the moral qualities of great men? Complete with introductions to the works of each historian, footnotes providing context and explaining obscurities, maps, and an appendix on the Greek conduct of war, this volume is an invaluable resource for students and passionate readers of history alike.

    Inspired by the unexpected fall by coup, in November 2017, of Robert Mugabe, Zimbabwe's president of nearly four decades, Bulawayo's bold, vividly imagined novel shows a country imploding, narrated by a chorus of animal voices who unveil the ruthlessness and cold strategy required to uphold the illusion of absolute power, and the imagination and bullet-proof optimism to overthrow it completely.As with her debut novel We Need New Names, Bulawayo's fierce voice and lucid imagery immerses us in the daily life of a traumatized nation, revealing the dazzling life force and irrepressible wit that lies barely concealed beneath the surface of seemingly bleak circumstances. At the center of this tumult is Destiny, who has returned to Jidada from exile to bear witness to revolution--and focus on the unofficial history and the potential legacy of the women who have quietly pulled the strings in this country.The animal kingdom--its connection to our primal responses and resonance in the mythology, folktales, and fairytales that define cultures the world over--unmasks the surreality of contemporary global politics to help us understand our world more clearly, even as Bulwayo plucks us right out of it. Glory is a blockbuster, an exhilarating ride, and crystalizes a turning point in history with the texture and nuance that only the greatest of fiction can.

    Every day a lover departs. Every day a woman turns forty.All three happening together brings a moment of reckoning.Medieval historian Elizabeth Boyle made sense of these events the best way she knew how - by immersing herself in the literature that has been her first love and life's work for over two decades.Fierce Appetites is the exhilarating and deeply humane result. Not only does Elizabeth Boyle write dazzling accounts of ancient stories, familiar and obscure, from Ireland and further afield, but she uses her historical learning to grapple with the raw and urgent questions she faces, questions that have bedevilled people in every age. She writes on grief, addiction, family breakdown, the complexities of motherhood, love and sex, memory, class, education, travel (and staying put) with unflinching honesty, deep compassion and occasional dark humour. Fierce Appetites is captivating and original - as an insight into the mind and heart of a groundbreaking scholar, and as a wise and reassuring account of what it is to be human._____________________'I loved this luminous, radical book about bodies in time. It is a deeply personal history, that simultaneously brings medieval myth and poetry to breathing, bleeding life. An education for the mind and the heart' Clare Pollard'Highly original . . . engagingly candid [and] thought-proviking' Irish Independent 'An eloquent plea for the value of curiosity and the life of the mind, standing up the robustness of scholarship against the frailty of individuals, the resilience of myth against brittle daily preoccupations. It's an agile story, irreverent, capacious and constantly surprising: like nothing else you will read' Hilary Mantel'Bracingly honest, fiery, funny, scholarly, Fierce Appetites really is a wildly good book' Hilary Fannin'Extremely intriguing . . . I found myself completely absorbed' Ryan Tubridy'I absolutely loved this utterly original book. Immersing myself in Elizabeth Boyle's considerable brain was a true privilege, and the way she uses medieval narratives to unpick her own present was endlessly surprising and beautiful. I read it in two sittings, devouring her perspective on life, love, loss' Clover Stroud'Fiercely smart, strange, surprising, unsettling, unflinching' Jennifer O'Connell, Irish Times'An outstanding achievement. Fierce Appetites defies easy categorization, is brilliantly written and simply deserves to be read' Darach Ó Séaghdha'Everything is illuminated, magnified, revisioned: sexual desire, motherhood, family. Her writing is unorthodox, unnerving, and very exciting' Tanya Shadrick