Tintin


Michael Farr - 2007
    These books are intended for fans of Tintin – young or old, boy or girl, hopeful reporters or potential professors.

Nostromo


Joseph Conrad - 1904
    Conrad's deeply moral consciousness and masterful narrative technique are at their best in this, one of his finest works.

Infinite City: A San Francisco Atlas


Rebecca Solnit - 2010
    Aided by artists, writers, cartographers, and twenty-two gorgeous color maps, each of which illuminates the city and its surroundings as experienced by different inhabitants, Solnit takes us on a tour that will forever change the way we think about place. She explores the area thematically—connecting, for example, Eadweard Muybridge’s foundation of motion-picture technology with Alfred Hitchcock’s filming of Vertigo. Across an urban grid of just seven by seven miles, she finds seemingly unlimited landmarks and treasures—butterfly habitats, queer sites, murders, World War II shipyards, blues clubs, Zen Buddhist centers. She roams the political terrain, both progressive and conservative, and details the cultural geographies of the Mission District, the culture wars of the Fillmore, the South of Market world being devoured by redevelopment, and much, much more. Breathtakingly original, this atlas of the imagination invites us to search out the layers of San Francisco that carry meaning for us—or to discover our own infinite city, be it Cleveland, Toulouse, or Shanghai.CONTRIBUTORS:Cartographers: Ben Pease and Shizue SeigelDesigner: Lia TjandraArtists: Sandow Birk, Mona Caron, Jaime Cortez, Hugh D'Andrade, Robert Dawson, Paz de la Calzada, Jim Herrington, Ira Nowinski, Alison Pebworth, Michael Rauner, Gent Sturgeon, Sunaura TaylorWriters and researchers: Summer Brenner, Adriana Camarena, Chris Carlsson, Lisa Conrad, Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Joshua Jelly-Schapiro, Paul La Farge, Genine Lentine, Stella Lochman, Aaron Shurin, Heather Smith, Richard WalkerAdditional cartography: Darin Jensen; Robin Grossinger and Ruth Askevold, San Francisco Estuary Institute

Plato: Complete Works


PlatoJ.M. Edmonds
    In his introductory essay, John Cooper explains the presentation of these works, discusses questions concerning the chronology of their composition, comments on the dialogue form in which Plato wrote, and offers guidance on approaching the reading and study of Plato's works.Also included are concise introductions by Cooper and Hutchinson to each translation, meticulous annotation designed to serve both scholar and general reader, and a comprehensive index. This handsome volume offers fine paper and a high-quality Smyth-sewn cloth binding in a sturdy, elegant edition.

Black Ink: Literary Legends on the Peril, Power, and Pleasure of Reading and Writing


Stephanie Stokes Oliver - 2018
    This unique collection seeks to shed light on that injustice and subjugation, as well as the hard-won literary progress made, putting some of America’s most cherished voices in a conversation in one magnificent volume that presents reading as an act of resistance. Organized into three sections, the Peril, the Power, and Pleasure, and with an array of contributors both classic and contemporary, Black Ink presents the brilliant diversity of black thought in America while solidifying the importance of these writers within the greater context of the American literary tradition. At times haunting and other times profoundly humorous, this unprecedented anthology guides you through the remarkable experiences of some of America’s greatest writers and their lifelong pursuits of literacy and literature. The foreword was written by Nikki Giovanni. Contributors include: Frederick Douglass, Solomon Northup, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, Zora Neale Hurston, Langston Hughes, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Maya Angelou, Martin Luther King, Jr., Toni Morrison, Walter Dean Myers, Stokely Carmichael [Kwame Ture], Alice Walker, Jamaica Kincaid, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Terry McMillan, Junot Diaz, Edwidge Danticat, Colson Whitehead, Marlon James, Roxane Gay, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and Colson Whitehead. The anthology features a bonus in-depth interview with President Barack Obama.

Scandalmonger


William Safire - 2000
    In this gripping and timely work, William Safire unveils the story behind the nation's first great political scandals. James Thomson Callender, the "scandalmonger" of the title, is an ambitious gossip-peddling editor secretly hired by Thomas Jefferson as a political weapon. After carefully damaging Alexander Hamilton's reputation, thereby paving the way for Jefferson's success, Callender is shunned by the very politicians on whose behalf he was jailed for sedition. Broke and betrayed, Callender seeks revenge by exposing an illicit affair between Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemmings, an accusation that ultimately cost Callender his career and would not be authenticated for two centuries. By using actual letters, records, and notes to re-create dialogue and events, Scandalmonger embodies historical fiction at its best, politics at its most intriguing, and our Founding Fathers at their most notorious. For those who think that Washington sex scandals and lurid journalism are recent developments, this novel will be a revelation, for Safire shows how media intrusiveness into private lives-and politicians' cool manipulation of the press-are practices as old as the Constitution.

The Company


Robert Littell - 2002
    In a style intelligent and ironic, Littell tells it like it was: CIA agents fighting not only 'the good fight' against foreign enemies, but sometimes the bad one as well, with the ends justifying such means as CIA-organized assassinations, covert wars, kidnappings, and toppling of legitimate governments. Behind every manoeuvre and counter-manoeuvre, though, one question spans the length of the book... Who is the mole within the CIA? The Company - an astonishing novel that captures the life and death struggle of an entire generation of CIA operatives during a long Cold War.

In Search of Shiva: A Study of Folk Religious Practices in Pakistan


Haroon Khalid - 2015
    Comprising traditions that have their roots in the antiquity of the Indus Valley Civilization, it finds expression in shrines of phallic offerings, sacred animals and sacred trees. In the backdrop of economic development and rising extremism, these shrines exist as an anomaly and are increasingly at risk of being eroded. Growing connectivity between rural and urban areas further threatens the distinctiveness of these shrines and religious traditions.In Search of Shiva documents these religious traditions and studies how they have survived over the years and are now adapting to the increasingly rigid religious climate in Pakistan.

The Fifth Queen


Ford Madox Ford - 1908
    Corruption and fear pervade the King's court, and the dimly lit corridors vibrate with the intrigues of unscrupulous courtiers hungry for power. Soon Katharine is locked in a vicious battle with Thomas Cromwell, the Lord Privy Seal, as she fights for political and religious change.Ford saw the past as an integral part of the present experience and understanding, and his sharply etched vision of the court of Henry VIII--first published in 1908--echoes aspects of Edwardian England as it explores the pervading influence of power, lies, fear, and anxiety on people's lives.

Becoming Lola


Harriet Steel - 2010
    It brings to vibrant life the true story of Eliza Gilbert, the daughter of an obscure Ensign in the British Army and his cold Irish wife. When she grew up, Eliza changed her name to Lola Montez. She was a dancer, a courtesan, a bigamist, the mistress of a king and the nineteenth-century’s most notorious adventuress. Blazing like a female firecracker across the stages and courts of Europe and beyond, she was, for a while, second only to Queen Victoria in fame.

We the Living


Ayn Rand - 1936
    It tells of a young woman’s passionate love, held like a fortress against the corrupting evil of a totalitarian state.We the Living is not a story of politics, but of the men and women who have to struggle for existence behind the Red banners and slogans. It is a picture of what those slogans do to human beings. What happens to the defiant ones? What happens to those who succumb? Against a vivid panorama of political revolution and personal revolt, Ayn Rand shows what the theory of socialism means in practice.

Imperium


Ryszard Kapuściński - 1992
    This is Kapuscinski's vivid, compelling and personal report on the life and death of the Soviet superpower, from the entrance of Soviet troops into his hometown in Poland in 1939, through his journey across desolate Siberia and the republics of Central Asia in the 1950s and 60s, to his wanderings over the vast Soviet lands - from Poland to the Pacific, the Arctic Circle to Afghanistan - in the years of the USSR's decline and final disintegration in 1991.

City of God


Augustine of Hippo
    And since medieval Europe was the cradle of modern Western society, this work is vital for understanding our world and how it came into being.

Twilight


Elie Wiesel - 1987
    He hears voices. He talks to ghosts. He is spending the summer at the Mountain Clinic, a psychiatric hospital in upstate New York—not as a patient, but as a visiting professional with a secret, personal quest. A professor of literature and a Holocaust survivor, Raphael, having rebuilt his life since the war, sees it on the verge of coming apart once more. He longs to talk to Pedro, the man who rescued him as a fifteen-year-old orphan from postwar Poland and brought him to Paris, becoming his friend, mentor, hero, and savior. But Pedro disappeared inside the prisons of Stalin’s Russia shortly after the war. Where is Pedro now, and how can Raphael discern what is true and what is false without him? A mysterious nighttime caller directs Raphael’s search to the Mountain Clinic, a unique asylum for patients whose delusions spring from the Bible. Amid patients calling themselves Adam, Cain, Abraham, Joseph, Jeremiah, and God, Raphael searches for Pedro’s truth and the meaning of his own survival in a novel that penetrated the mysteries of good, evil, and madness.

From the Holy Mountain: A Journey Among the Christians of the Middle East


William Dalrymple - 1997
    On the way John Moschos and his pupil Sophronius the Sophist stayed in caves, monasteries, and remote hermitages, collecting the wisdom of the stylites and the desert fathers before their fragile world finally shattered under the great eruption of Islam. More than a thousand years later, using Moschos's writings as his guide, William Dalrymple sets off to retrace their footsteps and composes an evensong for a dying civilization --Kirkus Reviews, starred review