From the author of the bestselling true-crime classic 'Fred & Rose', comes the astonishing inside story of the world's biggest cash robbery: the Tonbridge Securitas heist.

    Purchasers are entitled to a free trial membership in the General Books Club where they can select from more than a million books without charge.

    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.

    Ironically, the first thing we read is Kingston's mother's warning Kingston, "You must not tell anyone . . . what I am about to tell you."

    It's a book that has remained current for over half a century, fighting off critics and changing tastes in fiction. But do even its biggest fans know all there is to appreciate about The Great Gatsby?Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for "Fresh Air" and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon -- when we were "too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret" to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ("it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it," as she puts it). No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to "classic" (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender.With rigor, wit, and an evangelistic persuasiveness, Corrigan will leave readers inspired to grab their old paperback copies of Gatsby and re-experience this great novel in an entirely new light.

    Subterranean Press bundles together all of their John Scalzi titles into one easy-to-buy special this November:How I Proposed To My Wife: An Alien Sex StoryAn ElectionJudge Sn Goes GolfingQuestions for a SoldierThe Sagan DiaryThe Tale of the WickedThe God EnginesYou're Not fooling Anyone When You Take Your Laptop to the Coffee Shop

    The one-size-fits-all approach to your best life is outdated - you can do better.You don't have to be exceptional (or even the exception) to be successful. You just need to learn the algorithm. Through her own success experiment, Lillian transformed herself from a two-time uni drop-out stuck in a career that paid in burnout, into a highly sought-after media personality FlexMami. And here she shows that her experience hasn't been a fluke. Instead of focusing on what you can't change, spend your time hacking what you can - yourself. This formula combines what you know about yourself with what you know about society. The result? Getting what you really want. (Via Bloomsbury)

    Worth reading for both it's historical and current value.

    

    S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper’s defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars.The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favourite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad: all are here, in anonymously published pieces, in which may be glimpsed the thinking behind Woolf’s works of fiction and the enquiring, feminist spirit of A Room of One’s Own.Here is Woolf the critical essayist, offering, at one moment, a playful hypothesis and, at another, a judgement laid down with the authority of a twentieth-century Dr Johnson. Here is Woolf working out precisely what’s great about Hardy, and how Elizabeth Barrett Browning made books a “substitute for living” because she was “forbidden to scamper on the grass”. Above all, here is Virginia Woolf the reader, whose enthusiasm for great literature remains palpable and inspirational today.

    This IS NOT an OCR'd book with strange characters, introduced typographical errors, and jumbled words. This book may have occasional imperfections such as missing or blurred pages, poor pictures, errant marks, etc. that were either part of the original artifact, or were introduced by the scanning process. We believe this work is culturally important, and despite the imperfections, have elected to bring it back into print as part of our continuing commitment to the preservation of printed works worldwide. We appreciate your understanding of the imperfections in the preservation process, and hope you enjoy this valuable book.

    No round of beef or tongue or ham is expressly cooked for me, no pigeon-pie is especially made for me, no hotel-advertisement is personally addressed to me, no hotel-room tapestried with great-coats and railway wrappers is set apart for me, no house of public entertainment in the United Kingdom greatly cares for my opinion of its brandy or sherry.

    A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else.Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of.But it doesn't tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant. Now, Emma Smith - an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer - takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day; flirting with and skirting round the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex, and the Shakespeare she reveals in this book poses awkward questions rather than offering bland answers, always implicating us in working out what it might mean.

    L. Mencken's astonishing career as the premier American social critic of the twentieth century. Gathered by Mencken himself before he died in 1956, this second chrestomathy ("a collection of selected literary passages," with the accent on the tom) contains writings about a variety of subjects - politics, war, music, literature, men and women, lawyers, brethren of the cloth. Some of his essays have beguiling titles - "Notes for an Honest Autobiography," "The Commonwealth of Morons," "Le Vice Anglais," "Acres of Babble," "Hooch for the Artist." All of them are a pleasure to read, and we are reminded that what Mencken wrote in the early years of this century remains applicable to a very different America.Publishers WeeklyThis book's precursor, A Mencken Chrestomathy (collection), was a bestseller in 1949; this anthology of 238 short excerpts from a range of works, selected and annotated by Mencken but unfinished, lay undisturbed in a Baltimore library until Teachout, an arts columnist for the New York Daily News, found it in 1992, while working on a Mencken biography. Teachout considers Mencken's work still immediate. Indeed, quotable lines abound: ``His public life is an endless series of evasions and false pretenses,'' writes Mencken on ``the politician under democracy.'' Baltimore's bard can be magnificent and maddening in the same passage, damning American idiocies while disparaging immigrants. But what impresses most about this collection is Mencken's breadth; few contemporary writers would assume such a broad brief, writing not only about politics, law and the clergy but also about geography, literature, music and drink. To apply a Mencken sobriquet, he was no lesser eminento. (Jan.)Library JournalSelected as a continuation of the original chrestomathy by the Baltimore iconoclast himself before his death, this logically organized sampling of his pre-Depression credos (mostly from The Smart Set and American Mercury) suggests why Mencken was to a whole generation of American youth not just a witty newspaperman with a dazzling style but a force gleefully battering America's deep-rooted Puritan inhibitions. An early champion of Sinclair Lewis, Eugene O'Neill, and Theodore Dreiser, Mencken ridiculed America's institutions, from Rotary Clubs to Harvard professors to the Senate. Sometimes wrongheaded in his judgments, he was unschooled but self-educated in music and politics. His views are sometimes racist and sexist, but they're seldom dull and-in an age of self-conscious "niceness"-never polite. Well worth dipping into.-Charles C. Nash, Cottey Coll., Nevada, Mo.Gilbert TaylorFollowing My Life as Author and Editor" (1993) and Fred Hobson's biography , the Menckenian revival continues apace with this sparkling successor to the first chrestomathy, which was a best-seller in 1949. More than an anthology, the second volume represents pieces (some previously unpublished) that Mencken himself selected and revised before his stroke aborted the project; another proposal to publish came to nought in 1963. Over 60 percent of the 238 items, many from Mencken's magazines Smart Set" and American Mercury", are not available elsewhere, which in itself makes the publication of this title something of a literary event. That it parades again the sage of Baltimore in his incisive, if often irksome, eloquence only confirms him as one of the better belletrists of the century. The job of discriminator of taste exists to be seized in any age, and in the teens and twenties, Mencken extolled and excoriated with idiosyncratic abandon. The books and music he reviewed have faded from memory, but his satirical exfoliations remain fresh, for example, in praise of a bartender's memoir of the bibulous arts or in contempt for a Rotarian's history of his organization. Edited by New York critic Terry Teachout, who is preparing his own biography of the provocateur, this entertaining, exasperating collection captures Mencken's gloomy view of human nature and his bright delight in stripping from it all cant and concealment.

    In these diaries, she recounts the daily joys and despairs of working on this film as writer and star, with actors Hugh Grant, Kate Winslet and Alan Rickman.