A measured blend of personal memoir, exacting legal analysis, and brilliant insight, Ogletree's eyewitness account of the legacy of Brown v. Board of Education offers a unique vantage point from which to view five decades of race relations in America.

    An incisive look at how we love and hate our political leaders, and how they love and hate us back, The X President touches the very heart of what it means to be president—and what a president means to America.It is the year 2055 and America is entangled in a devastating world war—and losing badly. As the threat of homeland invasion grows stronger, the United States is desperate to change the tide, anyway it can.Enter Sal Hayden, official biographer of a former president known as BC, now 109 years old and all but forgotten. Charismatic, controversial, and always willing to feel another person’s pain, BC’s political career, like his personal life, is marked by both uncanny triumphs and key blunders—some of which may have doomed the U.S. to defeat. Recording his story has not always been easy, but it has been straightforward. That is, until the day Sal is asked to rewrite it—and not just on the page. For Sal will be granted a biographer’s most fantastic dream, one that will thrust her into the greatest moral dilemma of her life—and the world’s most daring, dangerous, and spectacular spin job. . . .

    Marisa Silver's singular voice makes us care deeply about their everyday desperations and hard-won hopes.

    They are populated by lawyers, professors, scrap-iron dealers, dry cleaners, all men of a certain age who feel themselves adrift in the radically changed values of the day. Epstein's richly drawn characters are at various crossroads and turning points in their lives: bitter Seymour Hefferman, who anonymously sends scathing postcards to writers until he gets caught; Moe Bernstein, who, inspired by his grandson, decides to attend to his own health after long delay; divorcé Artie Glick, who wants to marry his pregnant girlfriend. Fabulous Small Jews is a marvelous collection from a master of the short form.

    Through the eyes of Antoine, grandson of the tribal leader, we see the tribe attempt to overcome their demoralization at the hands of advancing white civilization.The Indians respond to the building of a dam by trying to gain the return of a sacred medicine bundle. McNickle's ability to depict psychologically complex characters of both races, such as Bull, the aging leader of the Little Elk, and Rafferty, the Indian Agency Superintendent, results in a convincing story and leads the reader to hope that tragedy can be averted. At the same time, McNickle provides a sensitive portrait of the religious depth and human warmth of Indian culture. But although whites and Indians grow in their understanding of one another, the mistakes of the past compound to bring about the violent final confrontation, envisioned in the dreams of the mysterious Two Sleeps.

    From within a small iron cage, this small, often fearful woman is challenging herself to face the planet's largest land carnivores in the bone-aching cold of an unforgiving terrain. Before long, disaster strikes, and she must draw on her every strength in order to survive.

    She and the baby, and sometimes Ramsden, eke out their days at shabby hospitals across England, dreaming always of better places, other things.

    A way of life pervading each thought and conditioning our every action? Yes, but something much more, even though it only exists, as pervasive, intermittently. "How to live"—yes, but the phrase is too negative. In one of the unpublished notebooks of Rilke there is a phrase that might be our text, "...if you're not one up (Bitzleisch) you're...one down (Rotzleisch)."How to be one up—how to make the other person feel that something has gone wrong, however slightly. The Lifeman is never caddish, but how simply and certainly often he of she can make the other person feel a cad, and over prolonged periods.

    Mary Grace Thompson is about to turn thirteen, horse-crazy, doted upon by two sets of feuding grandparents - the respectable Thompsons and the trashy Broomes. She lives with her divorced father, Frank, a North Carolina state trooper. It's three years since her mother ran away with the county tax collector - and she hasn't come back, even for a visit. Frank dates, but the center of his universe is his daughter. On the verge of puberty, Mary is just beginning to try her wings - wangling her way into riding lessons, pushing her father toward the beautiful riding instructor, dreaming of boys. She's precariously aware that if she wants she can join the crowd whose grades and looks will take them someplace. Every day on the job, Frank brings calm to other people's catastrophes - from an overturned poultry truck spewing panicked chickens over the highway to fatal accidents. Suddenly, the catastrophe that he feels has been circling his own world since his wife took off comes home to stay. Suddenly, Mary Grace is diagnosed with an incurable disease. Armed with courage, humor, and a shaky faith in God, Frank, the family, and their friends face this most devastating of events - the slow death of a beloved child. The vivid and various responses - of Mary Grace herself, of her wisecracking granddad, of her no-account mother, of her adoring father, as well as his two girlfriends and his fellow state troopers - are told with an immediacy that floods this novel with a rush of life. With profound feeling, with a humor both delicate and robust,Doris Betts gives us a family richly varied and real. Souls Raised from the Dead is her finest novel yet.

    bombers began pounding Al Qaeda and Taliban forces. His dispatches provide an unprecedented and riveting on-the-ground account of the Afghan conflict, and his e-mails to the magazine — selections of which frame the pieces here — paint a vivid behind-the-scenes portrait of war journalism. From the battle for the Taliban bastion of Kunduz and the interim government's clumsy takeover of Kabul, to the search for Osama bin Laden in the Tora Bora caves and the truth of Al Qaeda's assassination of charismatic Northern Alliance leader Ahmad Shah Massoud — two days before September 11, 2001 — Anderson offers an unprecedented look into the forces that shape the conflict and the players who may threaten Afghanistan's future. In the distinguished tradition of New Yorker war reporting, The Lion's Grave illuminates a region to which we will be inextricably bound for some time to come.

    Kate's odyssey takes her from a privileged girlhood, through her meaningless marriage to a lawless tycoon, and an empty erotic affair with a true-blue gentleman. But when her life of pampered pleasure gives way to one of unspeakable tragedy, all certainties are shattered, and Kate is plunged into a blind gamble on an unknown future in the middle of nowhere. The job she finds, the lovers she takes, and her final confrontation with her husband's power and her own past self interweave comedy, irony, drama, suspense, and wondrously affirmative human revelation. With its vivid setting, its cross-section of colorful characters, and, at its center, its passionate heroine caught in a nightmare of grief and deception, Women of the Inner Sea is at once startlingly intimate and universally appealing. It adds a new dimension and fresh luster to one of the major literary reputations of our time.One of the finest storytellers in the business . . . at the top of his form . . . an extraordinary, eloquently written tale.--The Boston Globe

    A couple suspects their friends think them boring; a woman resolves to see herself as nothing but then concludes she's set too high a goal; and a funeral home receives a letter rebuking it for linguistic errors. Lydia Davis once again proves in the words of the Los Angeles Times "one of the quiet giants in the world of American fiction."

    Little writes about the world he used to inhabit, a place filled with drugs, crime and danger at every turn. His electrifying prose brings to life the rough, raw, and seedy life of Boston's underworld where corruption lies at the heart of every deception.Bobbie is a young criminal prodigy. Living in Boston he's approached by a mysterious Greek on behalf of an anonymous shipping tycoon, who wants to commission a theft. The Fogg museum is the target; a collection of ancient Greek coins the score. Everything goes fine with the burglary, but with easy street just around the corner Bobbie's life takes an unexpected twist and his big score evaporates. With his life on the line, Bobbie must learn who he can trust when trusting anyone can make you lose everything. Steel Toes is as close to reality as fiction can get. Little draws you in with his knife sharp writing, his authentic and unflinching characters and plot as tight and strong as the hold of addiction.

    Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely--and ultimately fatally--tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, this is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

    Fourteen-year-old Claire, a victim of child abuse, gradually finds love in the world with the help of two unlikely friends.