Set in a working-class Brooklyn neighborhood in 1947, this poignant tale revolves around two of the most endearing characters in recent fiction: an 11-year-old Irish Catholic boy named Michael Devlin and Rabbi Judah Hirsch, a refugee from Prague.

    Through his eyes we encounter the composer Robert Christian Gustafson, an Iowa preacher's son whose good looks constitute both a mythic draw and a major limitation, and Angelina "Alabama" Byrnes, a failed deb, five feet tall but bristling with outsized talent.  These friends shelter each other, promote each other's work, and compete erotically.  When tragedy strikes, this circle grows up fast, somehow finding, at the worst of times, the truest sort of family.Funny and heartbreaking, as eventful as Dickens and as atmospheric as one of Fitzgerald's parties, Plays Well with Others combines a fable's high-noon energy with an elegy's evening grace.  Allan Gurganus's celebrated new novel is a lovesong to imperishable friendship, a hymn to a brilliant and now-vanished world.

    His affecting words cover topics from politics to prejudice, from the human spirit to the individual obstacles he faces every day in his solitary life.

    After the tremendous impact of Public Enemy - in which he notoriously pushed half a grapefruit into Mae Clarke's face - he was typecast as a gangster because of the terrifying violence that seemed to be pent up within him. Years of pitched battle with Warner Brothers finally liberated him from those roles, and he went on to star in such triumphs as the musicals Yankee Doodle Dandy (winning the 1942 Oscar for best actor) and Love Me or Leave Me. Even so, one of his greatest later roles involved a return to crime - as the psychopathic killer in the terrifying White Heat. He retired from films in 1961 after making Billy Wilder's One, Two, Three, only to return twenty years later for Ragtime. But however much Cagney personified violence and explosive energy on the screen, in life he was a quiet, introspective, and deeply private man, a poet, painter, and environmentalist, whose marriage to his early vaudeville partner was famously loyal and happy. His story is one of the few Hollywood biographies that reflect a fulfilled life as well as a spectacular career.

    The first novel, The Sins of the Fathers, appeared in 1975, and A Drop of the Hard Stuff—the 17th and most recent—was published in 2011. Over the years Scudder has also been featured in 11 short works of fiction; Out the Window, which first appeared in AHMM in 1977, is the first of them.Out the Window and A Candle for the Bag Lady kept Scudder alive for me after Dell failed to sell the first three books effectively. There seemed little point in trying to interest another publisher in a series that had already proved unsuccessful, but I couldn't abandon Scudder, and wrote the two novelettes for magazine publication. Then I wrote the fourth novel, A Stab in the Dark, and Don Fine published it at Arbor House, and Scudder was back in business.Out the Window is included in The Night and the Music, my collection of all 11 Matthew Scudder short stories, available for Kindle or in handsome trade paperback form.

    But as soon becomes clear, this is no ordinary dancing bear. "I mean, dance is all right, even street dance. It's the poetry of the body, flesh aspiring to grace or inviting the spirit in to visit," he muses, but before all else, the Bear's heart belongs to jazz. This is, in fact, one alto-sax-playing, Shakespeare-allusion-dropping, mystically inclined Bear, and he's finally fed up with passing the hat. One night he sneaks out to a jazz club and joins a jam session. On the strength of the next day's write-up in the Village Voice, the Bear begins to play around town and hobnob with some of jazz's real-life greats. A live album, a police raid, a jailbreak, a cross-country tour, and no small amount of fame later, Bear finds himself in love with a human woman -- and staring down the greatest improbability of all.Admittedly, a novel about a talking, sax-blowing bear may not initially seem everyone's cup of tea, but Zabor's Bear is no cuddly anthropomorph: "I may be wearing a hat and a raincoat, thought the Bear, but no one's gonna mistake me for Paddington." He lives, he suffers, he loves--in fact, the love scenes come as something of a shock, and not just for the usual interspecies reasons. Who knew that the description of a bear's reproductive mechanisms could be so tender or so unabashedly erotic? Most of all, though, The Bear Comes Home evokes the world of improvisational jazz with consummate skill; Zabor, a longtime jazz journalist and drummer, writes about music with a passion and inspiration seldom found on the printed page. A wistful fable about an artist's coming of age, a brilliantly satiric send-up of the music business and jazz criticism, The Bear Comes Home is a debut much like that of the Bear himself: transcendent, unexpected, wise.

    And even now, Schneider shows that Americans' relationship with the glorious mountains and rivers of the Adirondacks continues to change. As in every good romance, nothing is as simple as it appears.

    This is the ultimate guide to Kerouac's New York, packed with photos of the Beat Generation and filled with undercover information and little-known anecdotes.Eight easy-to-follow walking tours guide you to:Greenwich Village bars and cafés where Kerouac and his friends Allen Ginsberg, Neal Cassady, William Burroughs, Diane di Prima, Gregory Corso, Hettie and LeRoi Jones, John Clellon Holmes, Joyce Johnson, and others read poetry, drank, turned-on, and talked all night long.The Chelsea-district apartment where Jack wrote On the Road.Midtown clubs where Beat poets mingled with artists Jackson Pollock and Willem de Kooning and listened to jazz and blues greats Charlie Parker, Miles Davis, and Billie Holiday.Times Square, a magnet for Kerouac and the Beats.Columbia University, where the original Beats first met and began a revolution in American literature and culture.Each tour includes a map of the neighborhood, subway and bus information, and an insider's angle on Jack Kerouac's life in New York. A must for Beat enthusiasts and critics.Bill Morgan is a painter and archival consultant working in New York City. His previous publications include The Works of Allen Ginsberg 1941-1994: A Descriptive Bibliography and Lawrence Ferlinghetti: A Comprehensive Bibliography. He has worked as an archivist for Allen Ginsberg, Abbie Hoffman, and Timothy Leary.

    "New Art City "takes us from the solitude of the artist's studio to the uproarious bars where artists gathered, from the ramshackle bohemian neighborhoods of downtown Manhattan to the Midtown streets where steel-and-glass skyscrapers were rising and art galleries were proliferating. We encounter a kaleidoscopic range of artists. There are legendary figures-Jackson Pollock, David Smith, Willem de Kooning, Joseph Cornell, Andy Warhol, and Donald Judd-as well as still undervalued ones, such as the galvanic teacher Hans Hofmann, the lyric expressionist Joan Mitchell, the adventuresome realist Fairfield Porter, and the eccentric thinker John Graham. We encounter, too, the writers, critics, patrons, and hangers-on who rounded out the artists' world. Jed Perl helps us see what the artists were creating and understand how they confronted an exploding art audience. And he makes clear how the economic boom of the late 1950s and the increasingly enthusiastic response to Abstract Expressionism ushered in the rapacious art world of the 1960s and the theatricality of Pop Art. Artists drew strength from the dizzying onslaught of Manhattan, and produced a tidal wave of new forms. These included Hofmann's brazen flourishes of color; Pollock's quicksilver skeins of paint unfurling panoramic arabesques; and the crushed, jagged, turning-back-on-itself calligraphy of de Kooning's gnomic alphabets. And there was much more: Burgoyne Diller's levitating rectangles; Nell Blaine's explosive renderings of quotidian scenes; Ellsworth Kelly's extraordinary simplifications, suggesting sails or semaphores. A brilliant tapestry of social history, biographical portraiture, and criticism, "New Art City" illuminates a revolutionary, unprecedented time and place in American culture.

    Tattooing at the time evoked the dangerous fringes of society, and for over a decade Michael McCabe assiduously gained the confidence of the few surviving practitioners of this vanished era. These highly-charged interviews provide a privileged look into a clannish world of honor, respect, and jealously guarded trade secrets. They reveal facets of New York social history and a volatile, misunderstood and secretive art form.

    This riveting book offers 20 harrowing, real-life tales of sea kayaking accidents that will not only keep readers on the edge of their seats, but also instruct them with potentially life-saving lessons.

    Includes brief biographies and facts about the Ellis Island Oral History Project.In their own words, coupled with hand-painted collage illustrations, immigrants recall their arrival in the United States. Includes brief biographies and facts about the Ellis Island Oral History Project.

    This time, the gingerbread boy is on the loose in New York City, and he taunts everyone from construction workers to subway musicians, until his fateful chase through Central Park!A School Library Journal Best Book and New York Public Library “One Hundred Titles for Reading and Sharing.”

    

    9 1/2" x 12 1/2". Color photos.

    Rhapsodies in Black: Art of the Harlem Renaissance examines the cultural reawakening of Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s as a key moment in twentieth-century art history, one that transcended regional and racial boundaries. Published to coincide with the exhibition that opens in England and travels to the United States, this catalog reflects the Harlem Renaissance's impressive range of art forms—literature, music, dance, theater, painting, sculpture, photography, film, and graphic design. The participants included not only artists based in New York, but also those from other parts of the United States, the Caribbean, and Europe.Richard J. Powell and David A. Bailey present selected works that focus on six themes: Representing "The New Negro;" Another Modernism; Blues, Jazz, and the Performative Paradigm; The Cult of the Primitive; Africa: Inheritance and Seizure; and Jacob Lawrence's Toussaint L'Ouverture series. The visual arts from 1919 to 1938 included in the book suggest the extraordinary vibrancy of the time when Harlem was a metaphor for modernity. In spite of the importance of the Harlem Renaissance to early twentieth-century American culture and to the artistic climate of "Jazz Age" Paris and Weimar Berlin, few art exhibitions have been devoted exclusively to the subject. Rhapsodies in Black will be welcomed for its unique presentation of this creative time.

    The book is elaborately illustrated, and brings to life the theater's legendary past. The New Amsterdam is celebrating its renewed glory with the premiere run of The Lion King on Broadway.

    The island's beauty, its proximity and easy travel access to New York, and its suitability for yachting and other recreational pursuits made it the perfect place for the leisure class. From the Civil War to World War II, almost 1000 estates were built there, often by the nation's richest families--Morgan, Vanderbilt, Hearst, Astor, Woolworth, Chrysler, Whitney, Tiffany, Frick, and Guggenheim, to name a few.Long Island's rich architectural history is presented in this important and long-awaited volume. It is at once a fascinating glimpse at the homes of some of America's wealthiest families and a complete compendium of the architects who designed these breathtaking houses. Among them are Delano Aldrich; Cass Gilbert; Richard Morris Hunt; McKim, Mead White; Horace Trumbauer; Calvert Vaux; and Warren Wetmore.

    A death she couldn't stop even if she wanted to. She is stalked, yet blindly charmed. And when he kills her, seductively, silently, she smiles.Sarah's ex-husband, police officer Robert Sinclair, is the first to find her body and he calls it in to the one officer who will understand: his ex-mistress Detective Lane Frank. As Lane struggles to follow the increasingly elusive trail of clues, another macabre trail emerges--of bodies, coldly, tauntingly abandoned.As the FBI becomes involved, Lane must fight to retain her hold on the case and her grip on Robert Sinclair, whose grief sinks him further into an alcoholic haze of despair and desperation. As a calculating last resort, Lane calls on the one man who can help her stop the killing, a forensic psychiatrist who had stepped too close to the edge, crawled too deeply into the mind of evil. She calls a profiler who has dropped out of society, living simply in a cabin in the woods far away from the madness that called to him, threatened him. Lane calls her father.As they work together, Lane and her father slowly craft an image of a killer so brilliant he has murdered perhaps hundreds and never been caught, so cold that he cannot relinquish his power. With a tortuous trail of names and faces, the killer has insulated himself from those who would repress him and his need to kill, a need rooted in a disturbing, horrifying childhood. And as Lane and her father grow closer to finding the killer, the game becomes personal between two men on opposing sides of evil, men on the edge of an abyss of madness, from which there is only one escape--death.

    Charyn successfully peels back the years of his life to recapture the innate curiosity, sense of wonder, and uncommon reasoning that all young children possess. And he lovingly reproduces one of the most influential figures of his youth -- his mother, The Dark Lady of Belorusse.

    Attract pollinating bumblebees to your garden. Capture and observe your own bumblebee colony. Become a bee watcher: identify the bumblebees in your garden. A must-have book in every nature lover's library.

    Quinn, is a glorious cry of victory via a remarkable portrayal of some of the most durable and stubbornly determined survivors in the faunal and floral kindgdom.The setting is the New Jersey Meadowlands, a wild and reedy tract located a mere six miles west of New York's Times Square. It is considered by many as nothing more than a "toxic wasteland," but is in fact home to a dazzling array of often overlooked plants and animals. While there is little doubt that many of the life forms that once thrived here are long gone, many others remain, and these are the primary focus of this book. Many, many species are discussed; far too many to list here. Suffice it to say Quinn leaves no stones unturned.The book has three central parts, respectively called "Yesterday," "Today," and "Tomorrow." Each covers a different time period in the ecological life of the Meadowlands. There also is an "Introduction," a "Starting Point," an "Epilogue," a bibliography, an index, and an interesting sort of "hands-on" chapter called "Exploring the Meadowlands." This will be of particular interest to anyone who lives within traveling distance of the region. It gives helpful and experienced advice on enjoyed the Meadowlands firsthand through boating, fishing, hiking, and the visiting of local parks.

    These rare and mostly never-before-published maps span four centuries. 64 color illustrations. Size D. 176 pp.

    Rose Kho, Hong Kong girl who left home, returned and has left it again for New York to escape her marriage, reflects on life, scotch in hand. The sun sets on the Statue of Liberty, while her employer's premises are being searched by the Feds; they are under investigation for illegal arms running. The novel rewinds through a drama in Hong Kong of the seventies. Set against the Asian and international airline world, Hong Kong Rose was an instant bestseller upon publication in 1997 after which it was sadly allowed to lapse out of print. This new edition reinstates an important work that boldly tackles courage, cowardice and compromise in modern Asian society.