That quixotic quest for understanding has drawn much of the world’s population eastward ever since Buddha first assumed the lotus position, and writer Mara Altman needed to know why. So she flew around the world in search of an answer not only to that mystery, but also to the deeper questions that plague all who yearn to define the meaning of life. What Altman found in her wild, comic 18-day reporting trek across India – a journey that took her on a laborious, 37-hour cross-country train trip, onto a mystical flat rock by the ocean in Pondicherry, and eventually into the emergency room of a cut-rate Bangalore hospital – will make you laugh, learn and ponder. By the end of her epic odyssey, it will also take you unexpectedly and thrillingly close to the pulsing heart of human existence. After graduating from Columbia University’s Graduate School of Journalism, Mara Altman worked as a staff writer for The Village Voice. In 2009, HarperCollins published Altman's first book, Thanks For Coming: A Young Woman's Quest for an Orgasm, which was optioned as a comedy series by HBO. She has published seven bestselling Kindle Singles, including the #1 bestseller Bearded Lady, and has also written for New York Magazine and The New York Times. Cover design by Adil Dara

    There's no such thing as too many laughs! Dave Barry's quirky take on American life will shed new light on popular culture.

    The seventeen-syllable form is rooted in a Japanese tradition of close observation of nature, of making poetry from subtle suggestion. Infused by its great practitioners with the spirit of Zen Buddhism, the haiku has served as an example of the power of direct observation to the first generation of American modernist poets like Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams and also as an example of spontaneity and Zen alertness to the new poets of the 1950s. This definitive collection brings together in fresh translations by an American poet the essential poems of the three greatest haiku masters: Matsuo Basho in the seventeenth century; Yosa Buson in the eighteenth century; and Kobayashi Issa in the early nineteenth century. Robert Hass has written a lively and informed introduction, provided brief examples by each poet of their work in the haibun, or poetic prose form, and included informal notes to the poems. This is a useful and inspiring addition to the Essential Poets series.

    It tells the story of William Stoner, who attends the state university to study agronomy, but instead falls in love with English literature and becomes an academic. The novel narrates the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner's academic and personal life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, set against the backdrop of the first half of the twentieth century.In his entry in the Bookmarked series, author Steve Almond writes about why Stoner has endured, and the manner in which it speaks to the impoverishment of the inner life in America. Almond will also use the book as a launching pad for an investigation of America’s soul, in the process, writing about his own struggles as a student of writing, as a father and husband, and as a man grappling with his own mortality.

     Nothing could have prepared him for the reality he ended up facing. Placing his focus on the day to day existence of the soldiers in the trenches, Adams presents a grim picture of mud-coated billets, relentless artillery barrages, working parties, training and the art of military sniping. Just as it would have been for the soldiers’ lives, Adams heightens his work with an emotive account of his first night patrol, the detonation of mines, battlefield duels and being wounded whilst out wiring in No Man’s Land. Understated and striving for truth over melodrama, Nothing of Importance is the original memoir of the First World War — the only record published while the conflict was still being fought — and the definitive account of trench warfare. Bernard Adams (1890-1917) was a British Army officer, joining 1 Royal Welsh Fusiliers as a Lieutenant in November 1914. He was the first of a triumvirate of authors who, for a time, served simultaneously in the same battalion: the second was Siegfried Sassoon, the third Robert Graves. Written whilst convalescing in 1916, he did not live to see it published.

    

    Having uprooted herself from a promising career in publishing in her adopted Brooklyn, Palmer embarks on a quest to determine the fate of her lost homes—and of a community that has been erased by unchecked Southern progress. Palmer's journey takes her from the ruins of kudzu-covered, airport-owned ghost towns to carefully preserved cemeteries wedged between the runways; into awkward confrontations with airport planners, developers, and even her own parents. Along the way, Palmer becomes an amateur detective, an urban historian, and a mother. Lyrically chronicling the overlooked devastation and beauty along the airport’s fringe communities in the tradition of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Leslie Jamison, Palmer unearths the startling narratives about race, power, and place that continue to shape American cities. Part memoir, part urban history, Flight Path: A Search for My Roots beneath the World's Busiest Airport is a riveting account of one young mother's attempt at making a home where there’s little home left.

    G. Ballard has provided thoughtful remarks on the state of the world for decades. J.G. Ballard Conversations brings together several of Ballard's latest interviews and gives readers penetrating insight into the mind of one of the freshest thinkers at work today. Covering topics such at the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the evolution of sexual relationships, and our strange, immersive celebrity culture, this book is a fount of provocative takes on the things that matter. Rounded out with rare photographs of Ballard and supplemental resources, J.G. Ballard Conversations is a necessary item for anyone interested in the modern world.

     Adapted from the column on its author's website, Nathan Rabin's Happy Place, with 52 hilarious, sometimes obscure and often oddly beautiful new original illustrations from Felipe Sobreiro and an introduction from Al himself, The Weird Accordion to Al explores every track on all sixteen of Al's records (14 studio albums, the Medium Rarities obscurities collection and Peter & the Wolf, his collaboration with Wendy Carlos) with an obsessiveness thats downright peculiar. Equal parts music criticism, cultural and comedy history, autobiography and comic meditation on nostalgia, television, consumerism, childhood, technology and food, The Weird Accordion to Al does justice to a musical legend and comic genius the extent of whose remarkable achievements are only now being fully understood and appreciated. Praise for The Weird Accordion to Al “A brilliant, heartfelt cry of obsession and love for an already beloved and obsessed-over artist. Share Nathan’s madness and be freed!”—Patton Oswalt "This book is pop culture history, music dissertation, and comedic theory. Nathan has exemplified the qualities that make Weird Al an artist who is equal parts Frank Zappa, Mel Brooks, and Mark Twain.”—Jonah Ray “You don’t have to be a fan of Weird Al to enjoy Rabin’s raucous deep-dive into the complete discography. But if you’re not a Weird Al fan there’s clearly something wrong with you”—Alex Winter “Wonderfully captures the quirks and fun details that have made the Yank-oeuvre ooze with oddness for almost four decades. Nathan really shows you what makes Al's mind tick. Spoiler: It's the neurons. A must read for anyone unemployed, childless, or with ninety spare hours to kill.”—Scott Aukerman “The Weird Accordion to Al is the definitive companion to the “Weird Al” catalogue. It’s chock full of fascinating insights that left my head spinning like a Frankie Yankovic record (no relation). Nobody covers the Al canon in better depth than Nathan Rabin. It’s a must-read for the weirdos in your life. I learned so much from this VERY SPECIFIC book.”—Thomas Lennon "Nathan Rabin is obsessive in the best sense of the word. He literally ALREADY wrote the book on Weird Al that Weird Al asked him to write. That wasn't enough for Nathan and that's why we are lucky to have this book. Al's contributions to pop culture deserve the kind of obsession that only Nathan Rabin can bring to the page and he brings it big time in this book. He dares to be very smart about "Dare To Be Stupid.’”—Jake Fogelnest

    Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth’s interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.

    In this one celebratory volume, the reader is exposed to the free-ranging thoughts of one of the century's most brilliant minds--Kenzaburo Oe, winner of the 1994 Nobel Prize in Literature--who offers his message for mankind as well as a selection of his most penetrating essays on themes varying from Hiroshima to the state of modern fiction.

    This one-of-a-kind anthology captures the spine tingling adventures of daring men and women who venture into Alaska's vast wilderness and look death in the eye. Danger Stalks the Land relates gripping episodes of animal attacks, avalanches, aircraft disasters, fishing, hunting, and skiing accidents, and chronicles risky climbs and reckless mountaineering amid Alaska's fantastic peaks. Through exhaustive research and interviews, author Larry Kaniut has captured in one volume, the terror and beauty of man's attempt to explore a vast and unforgiving land.

    She taught her family how to read Scott’s medical chart and to ask pointed questions, no longer leaving his care to the medical professionals who had overdosed him with drugs to the very brink of death in less than three days.“Jo, you have to tell people what they’ve done to me. You have to tell them!”pleaded her little brother, as he lay writhing in agony.In “For the Love of Scott!”, the author recollects her family’s poignant story of love, bewilderment, and lingering frustration when faced with catastrophic medical mistakes. Read the experiences of Scott Hamilton’s family members as they struggle through a storm of horrific medical errors that could have been prevented and recognize what you need to do when someone you love is faced with life-threatening circumstances created by health experts.It took Jo 27 years to put this heartbreaking event down on paper. Writing opened old wounds and required hours of research and documentation. It forced her family to relive a chapter in their own lives that they desperately wanted closed. Yet, they rallied together to help Jo with her mission to keep that promise.To help further her goals, Jo Hamilton will be donating a portion of the proceeds from the sale of her book, to the 1984 Olympic Gold Medal Winner, Scott Hamilton's foundation, The Scott Hamilton CARES Initiative. The Scott Hamilton CARES Initiative was created to help with cancer research, support cancer patients and their families, and find a cure cancer.

    No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight is a memory of his time in the iconic town, and one of the finest works of Indian non-fiction in recent years.Parimal evocatively describes his arrival, through drizzle and impenetrable fog, at a place that was at odds with the grand picture of it he had painted for himself. And his first night there was spent sleepless in a ramshackle hotel above a butcher's shop. Yet, as he tramped its roads and winding footpaths, Darjeeling grew on him. He sought out its history: a land of incomparable beauty originally inhabited by the Lepchas and other tribes; the British who took it for themselves in the mid-1800s so they could remember home; the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway--once a vital artery, now a quaint toy train--built in 1881; and the vast tea gardens with which the British replaced verdant forests to produce the fabled Orange Pekoe.In the enmeshed lives of his neighbours--of various castes, tribes, religions and cultures--lived at the measured pace of a small town, Parimal discovered a richly cosmopolitan society which endured even under threat from cynical politics and haphazard urbanization. He also found new friends: Benson, a colleague whose death from AIDS showed him the dark underbelly of the hill station; Pratap and Newton, whose homes and lives reflected the irreconcilable pulls of tradition and upward mobility; and Julia and Hemant, with whom he trekked the forests of the Singalila mountains in search of a vanished Lepcha village and a salamander long thought extinct.With empathy, and in shimmering prose, No Path in Darjeeling Is Straight effortlessly merges travel, history, literature, memory, politics and the pleasures of ennui into an unforgettable portrait of a place and its people.