100 Animals to See Before They Die (Bradt Guides) (Hardcover)
by Nick Garbutt

Hardcover $24.99 - 10%

Marking a new departure for Bradt, this full color, large format title builds on the brand’s reputation for ethical travel and conservation, presenting a compendium of 100 of the world’s most endangered mammals in association with ZSL – Zoological Society of London – and its much-acclaimed Evolutionarily Distinct and Globally Endangered program.

Each animal is accompanied by full color pictures, a distribution map, and easily understood text about its characteristics, the issues it faces, conservation work taking place, visiting responsibly, and organizations to contact to assist with conservation work.

This is a must-have title for anyone with any interest in the welfare of our planet and the protection of some of its most endangered species.

Oil!
by Upton Sinclair

Paperback $15.00

Sinclair’s 1927 novel did for California’s oil industry what The Jungle did for Chicago’s meat-packing factories. The plot follows the clash between an oil developer and his son. Typical of Sinclair, there are undertones here of socialism and sympathy for the common working stiff. Though the book is not out of print, this is the only paperback currently available.

My Father’s Heart
by Steve McKee

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

A memoir of a father and son relationship cut short by heart attack, and the powerful pull of love across the empty years.

Sixteen-year-old Steve McKee watched his father die of a heart attack on the couch in their TV room. A lifelong smoker and workaholic, John McKee had been floored by a heart attack five years earlier. The McKee clan–perhaps including a demoralized John himself–had long been waiting for the other shoe to drop.

At age fifty-two, Steve McKee learned that he was his father’s son more than he had ever hoped–he, too, has serious cardiovascular disease. Haunted by his father’s seeming surrender to the condition, McKee set out to find the man who died before the son could know him. In so doing, what might he, Steve McKee, learn of himself?

Chronicling the disorienting first days following John McKee’s death, My Father’s Heart is an extraordinary story of an all-too-ordinary scenario: A father dies, a son remains, and the loss casts a long shadow across a generation. Rich in evocative detail of time, place, and family, it is a powerful memoir of love, forgiveness, and finding oneself.

The Shakespeare Wars: Clashing Scholars, Public Fiascoes, Palace Coups
by Ron Rosenbaum

Paperback $18.00

Acclaimed journalist Rosenbaum, New York Observer columnist and cultural omnivore (Explaining Hitler), conveys the impassioned arguments of leading directors and scholars concerning how Shakespeare should be printed and performed. “Hearing Sir Peter Hall pound his fists in fury over the vital importance of a pause at the close of a pentameter line, for instance—wonderful!” Rosenbaum enthuses. Elsewhere he recalls how seeing Peter Brook’s definitive 1970 production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream inspired Rosenbaum’s “outsider’s odyssey into the innermost citadels of scholarship” to investigate the painstaking work of Shakespearean textual experts as they convert the Bard’s earliest published works into authoritative editions. Evoking the clashing methodologies and discourses of scholars, the dizzying depths of lexicographic databases and a rare instance of Shakespeare’s voice transcribed in a court proceeding, Rosenbaum captures with clarity and wry humor the obsessive fervor, theoretical about-turns and occasional scholarly fiasco that characterize this arcane world. He considers the politics of portraying Shylock and Falstaff, appraises Shakespeare on film and provocatively comments on the work of such influential critics as Harold Bloom, Stephen Greenblatt and Stephen Booth. Balancing academic reportage with his own lively observations, Rosenbaum wrestles with the weightiest issues of Shakespeare studies in a down-to-earth manner that readers will applaud.

Cleaver: A Novel
by Tim Parks

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

Tim Parks is the author of seventeen books, both fiction and nonfiction, including Europa, Destiny, Judge Savage, and A Season with Verona.

Things I’ve Learned From Women Who’ve Dumped Me (Hardcover)
Edited by Andy Selsberg, Ben Karlin, and Nick Hornby. Forward by Ben’s Mom

Hardcover $23.99 - 10%

The Emmy award-winning former executive producer of The Daily Show and The Colbert Report has assembled a stellar lineup of men who have one thing in common:all have been dumped…and are willing to share their pain and the lessons learned.Relationships end.And in almost all of them, even the most callow among us take something away. This is a book about that something, whether it be major life lessons, like “If you lie, you will get caught,” simple truths like, “Flowers work,” or something wholly unique like, “Watch out for the high strung brother in the military.”This anthology will be comprised of longer and shorter pieces, drawn from an array of impressive celebrities, writers and public figures.Some pieces may be a paragraph in length while others will be full-blown essays.All of them will be about that salient something men take away from a failed relationship. Yes, men learn.This is not a touchy-feely book.This is not a self-help book. This is a book packed with smart, funny and insightful stories from men you probably thought never got dumped, or if they did, would never admit it.

Love Poems
by Pablo Neruda. Translated by Donald D. Walsh
Paperback $11.95

“One of the greatest major poets of the twentieth century.”—The New York Times Book ReviewCharged with sensuality and passion, Pablo Neruda’s love poems caused a scandal when published anonymously in 1952. In later editions, these verses became the most celebrated of the Noble Prize winner’s oeuvre, captivating readers with earthbound images that reveal in gentle lingering lines an erotic re-imagining of the world through the prism of a lover’s body: “today our bodies came vast, they grew to the edge of the world / and rolled melting / into a single drop / of wax or meteor….” Written on the paradisal island of Capri, where Neruda “took refuge” in the arms of his lover Matilde Urrutia, Love Poems embraces the seascapes around them, saturating the images of endless shores and waves with a new, yearning eroticism. This wonderful book collects Neruda’s most passionate verses.
Beautiful Children: A Novel
by Charles Bock

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

A wide-ranging portrait of an almost mythically depraved Las Vegas, this sweeping debut takes in everything from the bland misery of suburban Nevada to the exploitative Vegas sex industry. At the nexus of this Dickensian universe is Newell Ewing, a hyperactive 12-year-old boy with a comic-book obsession. One Saturday night, Newell disappears after going out with his socially awkward, considerably older friend. Orbiting around that central mystery are a web of sufferers: Newell’s distraught parents, clinging onto a fraught but tender marriage; a growth-stunted comic book illustrator; a stripper who sacrifices bodily integrity for success; and a gang of street kids. Into their varying Vegas tableaux, Bock stuffs an overwhelming amount of evocative detail and brutally revealing dialogue (sometimes in the form of online chats). The story occasionally gets lost in amateur skin flicks, unmentionable body alterations and tattoos, and the greasy cruelty of adolescents, all of which are given unflinching and often deft closeups. The bleak, orgiastic final sequence, drawing together the disparate plot threads, feels contrived, but Bock’s Vegas has hope, compassion and humor, and his set pieces are sharp and accomplished.

Fair Shares for All: A Memoir of Family and Food
by John Haney

Hardcover $26.00 - 10%

In this beautifully written, vividly rendered memoir, John Haney, Gourmet magazine’s copy chief, describes his family’s day-to-day struggles, from the twilight of Queen Victoria’s reign to the dawn of the third millennium, in London’s least affluent working-class enclaves and suburbs, including a place called the Isle of Dogs–and reflects on how his family’s affection for the past and the food they loved brought them all together.

As a young John grows up in the fifties and sixties, the Haneys are a rough-and-tumble clan of bus drivers, telegraph operators, salesmen, junior civil servants, and secretaries. They work hard to put meals on the table and a shilling in the gas meter. When they gather at weddings and wakes and Christmas parties, they talk about politics and two world wars, drink cheap sherry, chain-smoke cigarettes, and eat platefuls of distinctly British fare: winkles, whelks, sausage rolls, marmalade sandwiches, and spotted dick.

Enchanted and, at the same time, slightly embarrassed by his Cockney pedigree, the young John Haney lives a life torn between his colorful East End relatives–with their penchant for bangers, bacon sandwiches, and highly irreverent banter–and his lower-middle-class mother, who is preoccupied with her children’s education. Thanks to the generosity of his more moneyed neighbors, John is able to take trips to France and Italy, where, despite his continuing passion for baked beans on toast and toad-in-the-hole, he cultivates a taste for snails, Sancerre, stinky cheese, and minestra di pasta grattata.

Having survived grammar school, university, four years of part-time horsing around in the RAF’s equivalent of the JROTC, and a stint of semi-starvation in the music business, John is poised to break out of the working class–and ends up in Manhattan, where he promptly falls in love and decides to stay put.

But crossing the Atlantic–and with it the class barrier–leaves John with deep feelings of displacement and nostalgia. As he eats in some of New York City’s most expensive restaurants, he tries (and fails) to reconcile his new appetites with the indelible tastes of his youth. His sense of self becomes further conflicted when his father, a taciturn but loving man, dies and later when his ferociously proud mother, following the death of her second husband, must subsist on a minuscule pension. Suddenly John is forced to reconsider his defection and to grapple with memories, fleeting but formidable, of the long-ago life that has continued to, and always will, define him.

Peopled with unforgettable characters who find in even the greasiest kitchens the sustenance to see them through life’s hardships, Fair Shares for All is a remarkable memoir of resolve and resilience, food and family.

Ellington Boulevard: A Novel in A-Flat
by Adam Langer

Hardcover $24.95 - 10%

Clarinetist Ike Morphy, his dog Herbie Mann, and a pair of pigeons who roost on his air conditioner are about to be evicted from their apartment on West 106th Street, also known as Duke Ellington Boulevard. Ike has never had a lease, just a handshake agreement with the recently deceased landlord; and now that landlord’s son stands to make a killing on apartment 2B.

Centering on the fate of one apartment before, during, and after the height of New York’s real estate boom, Ellington Boulevard’s characters include the Tenant and His Dog; the Landlord, a recovered alcoholic and womanizer who has newly found Judaism and a wife half his age; the Broker, an out-of-work actor whose new profession finally allows him to afford theater tickets he has no time to use; the Broker’s New Boyfriend, a second-rate actor who composes a musical about the sale of 2B (“Is there no one I can lien on if this boom goes bust?”). There’s also the Buyer, a trusting young editor at a dying cultural magazine, who falls in love with the Tenant; the Buyer’s Husband, a disaffected graduate student taken to writing bawdy faux-academic papers; and the Buyer’s Husband’s Girlfriend, a children’s book writer with a tragic past.

With the humor and poignancy that made Langer’s first novel, Crossing California, a favorite book of the year among critics across the country, Ellington Boulevard is an ode to New York. It’s the story of why people come to a city they can’t afford, take jobs they despise, sacrifice love, find love, and eventually become the people they never thought they’d be—for better and for worse.

Against the Machine: Being Human in the Age of the Electronic Mob
by Lee Siegel

Hardcover $22.95 - 10%

Of course the Internet is not one thing or another; if anything, its boosters claim, the Web is everything at once. It’s become not only our primary medium for communication and information but also the place we go to shop, to play, to debate, to find love. Lee Siegel argues that our ever-deepening immersion in life online doesn’t just reshape the ordinary rhythms of our days; it also reshapes our minds and culture, in ways with which we haven’t yet reckoned. The web and its cultural correlatives and by-products—such as the dominance of reality television and the rise of the “bourgeois bohemian”—have turned privacy into performance, play into commerce, and confused “self-expression” with art. And even as technology gurus ply their trade using the language of freedom and democracy, we cede more and more control of our freedom and individuality to the needs of the machine—that confluence of business and technology whose boundaries now stretch to encompass almost all human activity.

Siegel’s argument isn’t a Luddite intervention against the Internet itself but rather a bracing appeal for us to contend with how it is transforming us all. Dazzlingly erudite, full of startlingly original insights, and buoyed by sharp wit, Against the Machine will force you to see our culture—for better and worse—in an entirely new way.

The Commoner: A Novel
by John Burnham Schwartz

Hardcover $24.95 - 10%

It is 1959 when Haruko, a young woman of good family, marries the Crown Prince of Japan, the heir to the Chrysanthemum Throne. She is the first non-aristocratic woman to enter the longest-running, almost hermetically sealed, and mysterious monarchy in the world. Met with cruelty and suspicion by the Empress and her minions, Haruko is controlled at every turn. The only interest the court has in her is her ability to produce an heir. After finally giving birth to a son, Haruko suffers a nervous breakdown and loses her voice. However, determined not to be crushed by the imperial bureaucrats, she perseveres. Thirty years later, now Empress herself, she plays a crucial role in persuading another young woman—a rising star in the foreign ministry—to accept the marriage proposal of her son, the Crown Prince. The consequences are tragic and dramatic.

Told in the voice of Haruko, meticulously researched and superbly imagined, The Commoner is the mesmerizing, moving, and surprising story of a brutally rarified and controlled existence at once hidden and exposed, and of a complex relationship between two isolated women who, despite being visible to all, are truly understood only by each other. With the unerring skill of a master storyteller, John Burnham Schwartz has written his finest novel yet.

The Unknown Terrorist: A Novel
by Richard Flanagan

Paperback $14.00 - 10%

The standard model of good and evil is simple if not simplistic: Everybody on our side is good, and everybody on their side is bad. For anyone in the post-9/11 world who still believes this, Richard Flanagan’s The Unknown Terrorist should be required reading — with eyelids pinned open, if necessary, and forced to look. Flanagan, whose previous works are set in his native Tasmania, turns his unflinching gaze toward modern-day Sydney, in the aftermath of a terror bomb scare. Over three scorching summer days, we follow a dissolute cast: an exotic dancer, an opportunistic journalist and a populace blinded by the politics of fear.

The dancer is a mysterious girl trying to remake her life following personal tragedy. Though she has a full name — Gina Davies — she is known simply as the Doll. Objectified and alluring, she lives her life in a semi-robotic attempt to reject romantic dreams and embrace life’s hard realities. Life is something she can and will control, the way she controls a man by making him want her, and then slipping away, unattainable.

Her circumstances are nothing like ours, yet her tastes are all-too familiar. She hungers for the Versace this and the Prada that, pops Zoloft and Stemetil, designer labels and designer tranquilizers melding into the same illusion of meaning and security. She saves to buy a house, the Australian dream, a $50,000 down-payment almost in her grasp. She keeps her savings in cash, ill-gotten gains that will be used against her in ways she can’t imagine. Nightly she engages in an outlandish routine, covering her naked body in $100 bills, as if the money or the ritual itself can somehow shield her. Despite these and other eccentricities, the Doll is emotionally fragile and utterly human.

But not to Richard Cody, an on-camera reporter for a Fox-like news station, yellow journalist to the core. Cody isn’t evil, but he is desperate. His job in television news is not about truth, but about “the art of making a sow’s ear out of a silk purse.” He faces demotion within a conglomerate that produces news by the credo that “people don’t want the truth.” People want a story, and Cody’s looking for that story even as he pays the Doll to take her clothes off.

He finds it after the Doll meets a handsome young Arab named Tariq. They run into each other at Mardi Gras, amid an evening of parading excess, of “Dykes on Bikes” and “Scats with Hats.” When they sleep together, the Doll is unexpectedly moved. But after a passionate one-nighter, Tariq disappears, and the Doll glides through the next day on the fringes of police barricades and storming SWAT teams, a terrorist search that brings Sydney to the brink of hysteria. Then, on television, she sees grainy security-camera footage of herself with Tariq, entering his apartment building, beneath a strident voice-over: “Terrorist suspect . . . with a female accomplice.”

Tariq is obviously a terrorist — or is he? After he is fingered by ASIO, Australia’s version of Homeland Security, his guilt slides along runners well-oiled by ethnic prejudice and faith in authority. When Cody sees that video, he not only recognizes the Doll, he sees his professional salvation, and the inexorable train-wreck begins.

Flanagan ushers us through a modern-day looking glass, with Cody “piecing together not so much the truth of Gina Davies’ life as rehearsing the story he would present about it.” The mysteries that once made the Doll inscrutable and even successful become the lies that make her Australia’s “Unknown Terrorist.” Shock-jocks rant, spies manipulate the truth, terror experts pontificate, and the entire nation cries for blood in a thunderstorm of fear. The Doll’s fate is as inevitable as it is horrible, grinding toward a bloody end — or so it would seem.

Flanagan’s tightly crafted narrative is akin to the oppressive power of Kafka’s Trial, or Capote’s In Cold Blood, stark realism revealing underlying sickness. His prose glitters and shrieks with spare vitality: “Anyone not working had retreated indoors and taken refuge near their air con vents and in cold beer and chilled wines. Some watched something on television and afterwards couldn’t remember whether it was sport or reality tv or a documentary on Hitler. Some surfed the net looking at porn or eBay. . . . Most did nothing. It was difficult to sleep, yet almost impossible to move. It was easy to be irritated about everything that was of no consequence, yet care about nothing that mattered.”

Here lies Flanagan’s real point: In a world of terror and the ensuing decay of personal liberties, the fault lies not in remote devils or political adversaries, but in ourselves. He moves his plot at a thriller’s pace, and we can’t take our eyes off it. It’s about us, after all, and our new realities, a disturbing gaze at the social and psychological mechanisms of terror. In this world, violent necessity dominates, and someone — maybe anyone — must be tracked and killed for people to feel safe for a little while longer.