Written as short monologues, each of these powerful, early works of autobiographical fiction is spoken in the voice of a character he stumbles upon during travels throughout America.

    The Knipl stories collected here resurrect a lost metropolis and its residents, summoning up half-forgotten yesterdays and celebrating the surreal substrate of the quotidien.

    Portrait Inside My Head was listed in The New Yorker’s “Books to Watch Out For” and praised by The New York Times Book Review as “riveting [and] arresting,” with “sculptured scenes worthy of fiction.” Hailed as “America’s Montaigne” by the Baltimore City Paper and compared to “Henry Roth and early Saul Bellow” by the Christian Science Monitor, Lopate has an easy, conversational style that pushes his piercing insights to new depths, celebrating the life of the mind and illuminating memories and feelings both distant and immediate. The result is a charming and spirited new book from the undisputed master of the form.

    Veteran journalist Pete Hamill never covered just politics. Or just sports. Or just the entertainment business, the mob, foreign affairs, social issues, the art world, or New York City. He has in fact written about all these subjects, and many more, in his years as a contributor to such national magazines as Esquire, Vanity Fair, and New York, and as a columnist at the New York Post, the New York Daily News, the Village Voice, and other newspapers. Seasoned by more than thirty years as a New York newspaperman, Hamill wrote on an extraordinarily wide variety of topics in powerful language that is personal, tough-minded, clearheaded, always provocative. Piecework is a rich and varied collection of Hamill's best writing, on such diverse subjects as what television and crack have in common, why winning isn't everything, stickball, Nicaragua, Donald Trump, why American immigration policy toward Mexico is all wrong, Brooklyn's Seventh Avenue, and Frank Sinatra, not to mention Octavio Paz, what it's like to realize you're middle-aged, Northern Ireland, New York City then and now, how Mike Tyson spent his time in prison, and much more. This collection proves him once again to be among the last of a dying breed: the old-school generalist, who writes about anything and everything, guided only by passionate and boundless curiosity. Piecework is Hamill at his very best.

    A remarkable collection of poetry by such authors as Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Countee Cullen, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Amiri Baraka, with commentary and a discussion of the development of African American arts known as the Harlem Renaissance.

    Photographs and personal accounts detail the struggles and pleasures—including the government’s eviction of the tunnel people and Amtrak’s offering them alternative housing—of Vietnam veterans, macrobiotic hippies, crack addicts, Cuban refugees, convicted killers, computer programmers, philosophical recluses, and criminal runaways. Humorous and compassionate, it also describes what has happened to these individuals 13 years since they’ve left.

    Through her masterful photography and darkroom work, Randall has created some of the restles

    Before he was five he began his studies; by the time he was ten he had outgrown the town's teachers and started to learn at home with his scholarly, impoverished grandfather. Even before his ordination at the age of fifteen, in 1943, he was famous for his erudition. But when the Nazis crushed the Jewish community of the Carpathians in 1944, he closed his Talmud. Halivni taught in the concentration camps and risked his life to save a scrap of paper from a sacred book. But adherence to the fundamentalist worldview that insists on reconciling every apparent contradiction in the text -- troubling to him even as a child -- had become impossible for him now. When he arrived in New York after the war, he began struggling toward the window of secular learning. From that synthesis emerged his original approach to critical study of the Talmudic text not only in its modern printed form but as it was in its original form, the Oral Torah from the mouths of countless sages.

    Both scary and funny, The Windigo's Return is based on an Ojibwe legend which recounts the winter when the People of the North Woods began to disappear, one by one. Exquisite, earthy paintings by Greg Couch make this book as pleasing to look at as it is to read. Full color.

    In NEW YORK, NEW YORK, Elizabeth Hawes gives us a lively, original account of this golden age of luxury apartment houses and how it transformed the city--socially, architecturally, psychologically--from a provincial place into a great metropolis. We see how such stately buildings as the Dakota, the Stuyvesant, and the Apthorp arose out of the old farmlands, and how the changes wrought in New York society reverberated in the lives and works of Henry James, Edith Wharton, and William Dean Howells. A book that will delight lovers of social history and architecture, and anyone wanting a greater understanding of the city.

    Here for the first time in English is the life, the philosophy, and the art of Escoffier - as he recorded it. Faithfully translated by his great granddaughter-in-law, Laurence Escoffier, the text eloquently communicates the warm sensibilities of Escoffier, a man who spoke of menus as poems. Here, we meet a young Auguste who wanted to be a sculptor, but was forced to apprentice in his uncle's restaurant at a time when "high society held little esteem for the profession of cook." We then follow Auguste Escoffier, year by year, through an inspired life that would forever change the job status of chef, not just for himself, but for every chef who followed. Escoffier's great love of food and culinary art glows from every page of his memoirs, creating a sensory feast for serious gourmands and professionals. Here, Escoffier intimately describes dishes, presentations, and original recipes. We are present as Escoffier creates the famed Peche Melba and offers it in tribute to the great diva, Nellie Melba, served in a silver bowl encrusted between the wings of a majestic ice swan. From a whimsical "Red Dinner" created to celebrate Monte Carlo roulette winnings to the coronation dinner for His Majesty Edward VII, King of England, Escoffier's passion shines through the details: tables smothered in red rose petals, the meticulous choreography of properly serving La Poularde Sainte-Alliance, his cherished secret recipe for Grenouilles Cardinalisees. In addition to Escoffier's original memoirs, this collector's gem includes historical highlights throughout the text; photographs illustrating Escoffier's world and original menus and recipes; a glossary of French culinary terms; and a concurrent timeline of Escoffier's career and world and American historical events.