Vienna 1814: How the Conquerors of Napoleon Made Love, War, and Peace at the Congress of Vienna
by David King

Hardcover $27.50 - 10%

“It would have been more fun to attend the Congress of Vienna than any other political assembly in history. Next best is to immerse yourself in David King’s Vienna 1814, which reads like a novel. A fast-paced page-turner, it has everything: sex, wit, humor, and adventures. But it is an impressively-researched and important story that it tells. There was much frivolousness in the Vienna congress, but it did bring peace to Europe and shape the 19th century; and while the deliberations of the Vienna statesmen took place, the fate of the world hung in the balance.”
—David Fromkin, author of Europe’s Last Summer

“Leaders from the world’s five major diplomatic forces–Great Britain, France, Austria, Prussia and Russia–convened in Vienna in 1814 to found a new order for post-Napoleonic Europe. Historian King (Finding Atlantis) calls it “the greatest and most lavish party in history,” at which delegates “would plot, scheme, jockey for position, and, in short, infuriate each other as they competed in affairs of state and the heart.” King covers the diplomatic wrangling well, particularly over the fates of Poland, Saxony and the Kingdom of Naples. His greater strength is in depicting the personalities and motivations of the key players, such as Metternich’s daring love affair with a baroness and Czar Alexander I’s growing reliance on a German mystic. Despite endless parties, the Congress achieved pioneering work in culture and human rights, including Jewish rights and a vote to abolish slavery. Most important, it established alliances that defeated Napoleon’s attempt to regain power in 1815 and helped “foster a spirit of cooperation that, in some ways, has still not been surpassed.” King’s fine work is not quite as scholarly as the book it recalls, Margaret Macmillan’s Paris 1919, but it is more deftly paced and engagingly written.”
—Publishers Weekly

“King does a superb job of evoking the bedazzling social scene that served as the backdrop to the Congress of Vienna. This is a worthy contribution to the study of a critical historical event long neglected by historians. It should be in every European history collection.”
—Library Journal, starred review

The Rain Before It Falls
by Jonathan Coe

Hardcover $23.95 - 10%

From Publishers Weekly
In the latest from acclaimed London novelist Coe (The Rotter’s Club), the story of two cousins’ friendship is keyed to a hatred that is handed down from mother to daughter across generations, as in a Greek tragedy. Evacuated from London to her aunt and uncle’s Shropshire farm, Rosamond bonds with her older cousin, Beatrix, who is emotionally abused by her mother. Beatrix grows up to abuse her daughter, Thea (in one unforgettable scene, Beatrix takes a knife and flies after Thea after Thea has ruined a blouse), with repercussions that reach the next generation. All of this is narrated in retrospect by an elderly Rosamond into a tape recorder: she is recording the family’s history for Imogene, Beatrix’s granddaughter, who is blind, and whom Rosamond hasn’t seen in 20 years. As the story progresses, it becomes clear that Rosamond’s fundamental flaw and limit is her decency, a quality Coe weaves beautifully into the Shropshire and London settings—along with violence. Through relatively narrow lives on a narrow isle, Coe articulates a fierce, emotional current whose sweep catches the reader and doesn’t let go until the very end.

The Last Mughal: The Fall of a Dynasty: Delhi, 1857
by William Dalrymple

Paperback $16.95

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From Publishers Weekly
In time for the 150th anniversary of the Great Mutiny, the uprising that came close to toppling British rule in India, Dalrymple presents a brilliant, evocative exploration of a doomed world and its final emperor, Bahadur Shah II, descendant of Genghis Khan and Tamerlane. Bahadur, more familiarly known as Zafar, was a reluctant revolutionary: the mutinous sepoys who had murdered every Christian in Delhi proclaimed him their commander, an honor he hadn’t sought. British besiegers took the capital in September 1857, followed by massacre, purges and destruction. Zafar died five years later in penury and exile. Dalrymple (White Mughals), however, is primarily concerned with compiling “a portrait of the Delhi he [Zafar] personified, a narrative of the last days of the Mughal capital and its final destruction.” In this task, he has been immeasurably aided by his discovery of a colossal trove of documents in Indian national archives in Delhi and elsewhere. Thanks to them Dalrymple can vividly recreate, virtually at street level, the life and death of one of the most glorious and progressive empires ever seen. That the rebels fatefully raised the flag of jihad and dubbed themselves “mujahedin” only adds to the mutiny’s contemporary relevance.

Finn: A Novel
by Jon Clinch

Paperback $14.00

From Publishers Weekly
In this darkly luminous debut, Finn, the namesake of the title, is not Twain’s illustrious Huck, but Huck’s father, “Pap.” As the novel opens, an African-American woman’s bloated corpse floats downriver from Lasseter, Ill., toward the slave territory of St. Petersburg, Mo. In the Lasseter woods, Finn—a dangerous, bigoted drunk—tells his blind bootlegger friend, Bliss, that he’s finally “quit” his on-again, off-again African-American companion Mary, the mother of Finn’s second son (also, confusingly, named Huck). Chronically short on money, Finn is shunned by his father (Adams County Judge James Manchester Finn) and by his brother, Will. Finn does odd jobs, traps catfish and claims tutelary rights to Huckleberry’s share of Injun Joe’s gold. (In this last, he is thwarted by Widow Douglas and Judge Thatcher, high-handed and stifling as ever.) The opaque in medias res narrative then backs up to detail Finn and Mary’s life together: his drinking, his stint in the penitentiary following an assault (sentenced by his own father), Mary’s rising debts and Finn’s attempts at restitution. As the nature of the woman’s murder becomes clear, Clinch lyrically renders the Mississippi River’s ceaseless flow, while revealing Finn’s brutal contradictions, his violence, arrogance and self-reproach. If Clinch’s debut falls short of Twain’s achievement, it does further Twain’s fiction.

Sitting Practice: A Novel
by Caroline Adderson

Hardcover $21.95

It only takes a moment for your life to be changed forever—as the characters of this darkly comic novel discover early on. The fateful moment for the newlyweds Ross and Iliana comes with the freak automobile accident that leaves Iliana paralyzed, Ross grief-stricken, and both of them struggling to come to terms with a married life nothing like they originally had in mind. As the usually affable Ross struggles with guilt and with finding ways to cope with his newly fractured life, Iliana gets used to her unwelcome existence as a wheelchair-bound wife, to her husband’s growing sense of alienation, and to their awkward new lack of intimacy.

What ultimately happens with Ross and Iliana is as unexpected and surprising as the fateful mishap that sets the events in motion in the first place. Sitting Practice is a clever and insightful study of love’s collision with harsh reality, told by an author with a remarkable instinct for the workings of human nature, a nimble gift for language, and the ability to find humor in the oddest places.

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad
by John Stape

Hardcover $30.00 - 10%

The Several Lives of Joseph Conrad is the first new biography in more than a decade of one of modern literature’s most important writers–whose work remains widely read and acutely relevant eighty years after his death. In this authoritative, insightful book, we see Joseph Conrad as a man who consistently reinvented himself. Born in 1857 in Berdichev, Ukraine, he left home early and worked as a sailor out of Marseilles; traveled to the Far East and Africa with the British merchant navy; and, finally, in 1891, settled in England, beginning a precarious existence as an novelist and family man. Here is a Conrad for our moment: a man with a deep sense of otherness; a writer with multiple cultural identities who wrote in his third language and whose fiction became the cornerstone of literary Modernism.
With his exceptional knowledge and understanding of Conrad, and drawing on unpublished letters and documents, John Stape succeeds in casting an illuminating new light on the life of a willfully enigmatic man who remains one of the greatest writers of his, and our, time.

Special Orders: Poems
by Edward Hirsch

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

In Special Orders, the renowned poet Edward Hirsch brings us a new series of tightly crafted poems, work that demonstrates a thrilling expansion of his tone and subject matter. It is with a mixture of grief and joy that Hirsch examines what he calls “the minor triumphs, the major failures” of his life so far, in lines that reveal a startling frankness in the man composing them, a fearlessness in confronting his own internal divisions: “I lived between my heart and my head, / like a married couple who can’t get along,” he writes in “Self-portrait.” These poems constitute a profound, sometimes painful self-examination, by the end of which the poet marvels at the sense of expectancy and transformation he feels. His fifteen-year-old son walking on Broadway is a fledgling about to sail out over the treetops; he has a new love, passionately described in “I Wish I Could Paint You”; he is ready to live, he tells us, “solitary, bittersweet, and utterly free.”
More personal than any of his previous collections, Special Orders is Edward Hirsch’s most significant book to date.

The highway signs pointed to our happiness;
the greasy spoons and gleaming truck stops
were the stations of our pilgrimage.

Wasn’t that us staggering past the riverboats,
eating homemade fudge at the county fair
and devouring each other’s body?

They come back to me now, delicious love,
the times my sad heart knew a little sweetness.

from “The Sweetness”

In Spite of the Gods: The Rise of Modern India
by Edward Luce

Paperback $14.95

From Publishers Weekly
A burgeoning economic and geopolitical giant, India has the 21st century stamped on it more visibly than any other nation after China and the U.S. It’s been an expanding force since at least 1991, explains journalist Luce, when India let go of much of the protectionist apparatus devised under Nehru after independence in 1947 from Britain, as part of a philosophy of swadeshi (or self-reliance) that’s still relevant in India’s multiparty democracy. From his vantage as the (now former) Financial Times’s South Asia bureau chief, Luce illuminates the drastically lopsided features of a nuclear power still burdened by mass poverty and illiteracy, which he links in part to government control of the economy, an overwhelmingly rural landscape, and deep-seated institutional corruption. While describing religion’s complex role in Indian society, Luce emphasizes an extremely heterogeneous country with a growing consumerist culture, a geographically uneven labor force and an enduring caste system. This lively account includes a sharp assessment of U.S. promotion of India as a countervailing force to China in a three-power “triangular dance,” and generally sets a high standard for breadth, clarity and discernment in wrestling with the global implications of New India.

Nixon and Mao: The Week That Changed the World
by Margaret Macmillan

Paperback $17.00

From Publishers Weekly
Richard Nixon’s 1972 visit to Beijing to open relations with Communist China was both a Cold War milestone and compelling political theater. Diplomatic historian MacMillan, author of the acclaimed Paris 1919, gives a lively account of the pomp and protocol surrounding the trip: the awkward banquets, the toasts to peace and friendship (punctuated by occasional anti-imperialist lectures), the Great Wall pilgrimages, the proletarian operas (Nixon attended The Red Detachment of Women, in which peasants and revolutionaries battle landlords). MacMillan’s even better on the behind-the-scenes negotiations, as the two sides wrangle over every word of the climactic Shanghai communiqué. More than Nixon and the cloistered Mao, the central figures are Henry Kissinger and Chinese premier Chou En-Lai, tasked with finding common ground and finessing differences with subtle verbiage and winks and nods. The author fills in the background with colorful, incisive biographical sketches and a lucid history of Sino-American relations. The encounter seems to have had little impact on the issues discussed during the trip—the Vietnam war, the fate of Taiwan, relations with the Soviets. Still, MacMillan argues, it opened the door to today’s necessary relationship between the two Pacific powers, and she turns a potentially dry diplomatic story into a fascinating study in high-wire diplomacy, full of intrigue and drama.

Hardcover $26.95

PRAISE FOR PHYSICS OF THE IMPOSSIBLE

“Science and science fiction buffs can easily follow Kaku’s explanations as he shows that in the wonderful worlds of science, impossible things are happening every day.” —Publishers Weekly

“A fascinating exploration of the interface between science and science fiction, extremely well researched, lively, and tremendously entertaining. – Fritjof Capra, author of The Tao of Physics and The Science of Leonardo

CRITICAL ACCLAIM FOR PARALLEL WORLDS

“A wonderful tour, with an expert guide, of a cosmos whose comprehension forces us to stretch to the very limits of imagination.” —Brian Greene, author of The Fabric of the Cosmos

“A highly readable and exhilarating romp through the frontiers of cosmology.”
—Martin Rees, author of Our Cosmic Habitat and Our Final Century

“A roller-coaster ride through the universe—and beyond—by one of the world’s finest science writers.” —Paul Davies, Australian Centre for Astrobiology, Macquarie University, Sydney, and author of How to Build a Time Machine