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Center City Philadelphia contains a concentration and diversity of religious places unmatched by any other area of similar size in the country. Sacred Sites of Center City describes the history and architecture of these landmarks. The guide includes color photographs of each building and offers five walking tours that enable the visitor to experience the neighborhood environments in which these distinctive properties are located. Two churches located in the commercial shopping district are also included.

William Penn described the founding of the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682 as a "holy experiment." Central to that experiment was freedom of worship for all religions, something unavailable in any other part of the British Empire at that time. Penn hoped that tolerance of religious differences would lead to a society in which all individuals, of all backgrounds—including the local Native American population—would be able to live in peace and harmony. This was the second aspect of his holy experiment.

The opportunity for freedom of worship encouraged people of many different faiths to come to the Philadelphia and construct places of worship. Many early settlers were, like Penn, members of the Religious Society of Friends (Quakers), but Anglican, Catholic, and various Protestant churches, and Jewish synagogues quickly joined the Quaker meetinghouses. As the growth of the city moved south and then west from its original settlement in what is now called Old City, religious congregations followed, erecting larger and more sumptuous religious structures.

These buildings stand as landmarks in every section of Center City to remind us of Penn's vision.

John Andrew Gallery has been a member of Philadelphia's community development and historic preservation community for close to fifty years. From 2002 to 2013, he was Executive Director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, where he advocated for the city's historic built environment. He is the author of Philadelphia Architecture, A Guide to the City, and The Planning of Center City Philadelphia, also available from Paul Dry Books.

The two-decades-long controversy over same-sex marriage in the United States was finally resolved on June 26, 2015, when the U.S. Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, which held that the Fourteenth Amendment’s Due Process and Equal Protection Clauses required states to allow same-sex couples to marry on the same terms as opposite-sex couples.

Under our American system of government, divisive and often abiding disputes may be resolved either through legislation or judicial decisions.

In Same-Sex Marriage and American Constitutionalism, Murray Dry explains why the process by which Americans arrive at these resolutions can be as important as the substance of the resolutions themselves. By taking up the question of same-sex marriage, Dry excavates the bases of why and how Americans decide as we do (and as we have done when major questions arose in the past; think: school integration, abortion, gun control, and campaign finance).

As Professor Dry retraces the path that same-sex marriage took as it wended its way through the political (that is, the legislative) process and through the court system, he finds a vivid framework for the question, “Who should decide?” It’s a question often overlooked, but one that Dry believes should not be. He argues convincingly that it does matter whether the Supreme Court or the legislature makes the final decision—so that court-mandated law does not threaten democratic representative government, and so that legislation does not trample on fundamental constitutional rights.

Murray Dry is the Charles A. Dana Professor of Political Science at Middlebury College. He is the author of Civil Peace and the Quest for Truth.

These wide-ranging conversations have an exceptionally open and intimate tone, giving us a personal glimpse of one of the most fascinating figures in contemporary world literature.

Interviewer Fernando Sorrentino, an Argentinian writer and anthologist, is endowed with literary acumen, sensitivity, urbanity, and an encyclopedic memory of Jorge Luis Borges' work (in his prologue, Borges jokes that Sorrentino knows his work "much better than I do"). Borges wanders from nostalgic reminiscence to literary criticism, and from philosophical speculation to political pronouncements. His thoughts on literature alone run the gamut from the Bible and Homer to Ernest Hemingway and Julio Cortázar. We learn that Dante is the writer who has impressed Borges most, that Borges considers Federico García Lorca to be a "second-rate poet," and that he feels Adolfo Bioy Casares is one of the most important authors of this century. Borges dwells lovingly on Buenos Aires, too.

From the preface:

For seven afternoons, the teller of tales preceded me, opening tall doors which revealed unsuspected spiral staircases, through the National Library's pleasant maze of corridors, in search of a secluded little room where we would not be interrupted by the telephone…The Borges who speaks to us in this book is a courteous, easy-going gentleman who verifies no quotations, who does not look back to correct mistakes, who pretends to have a poor memory; he is not the terse Jorge Luis Borges of the printed page, that Borges who calculates and measures each comma and each parenthesis.

Sorrentino and translator Clark M. Zlotchew have included an appendix on the Latin American writers mentioned by Borges.

Fernando Sorrentino is an Argentine writer born in Buenos Aires in 1942. His works have been translated into more than twelve languages.

Clark M. Zlotchew is a professor of Spanish at SUNY Fredonia. Some of his areas of specialization: Jorge Luis Borges, 20th century Spanish-American Fiction, Literary Translation, and Literary Interview.

Paul Dry Books' edition of this 1947 classic has been produced with the highest publishing standards as a companion to our edition of The Trivium

“Sister Miriam Joseph’s Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language remains, after more than half a century, an immensely valuable aid to serious students of the greatest of all writers. The book manifests enormous learning and real wisdom in applying that erudition to the needs of contemporary readers.”—Harold Bloom

“The importance of this book is that it makes clear what we ought to mean when we call Shakespeare an artist in language…The average person today knows two figures of speech if he knows any…Shakespeare knew two hundred.”—Mark Van Doren, New York Herald Tribune

As part of their education in the trivium (the liberal arts of logic, grammar, and rhetoric), grammar school students in Shakespeare’s time were taught to recognize the two hundred figures of speech that Renaissance scholars had derived from Latin and Greek sources. Sister Miriam Joseph views this theory of composition as integral to Shakespeare’s mastery of language. In her classic 1947 book, she lays out these figures of speech in simple, understandable patterns and explains each one with examples from Shakespeare. Her analysis of his plays and poems illustrates that the Bard knew more about rhetoric than perhaps anyone else.

Sister Miriam Joseph (1898–1982) earned her doctorate from Columbia University. A member of the Sisters of the Holy Cross, Sister Miriam was professor of English at Saint Mary’s College from 1931 to 1960.

"Gabriel Zaid's defense of books is genuinely exhilarating. It is not pious, it is wise; and its wisdom is delivered with extraordinary lucidity and charm. This is how Montaigne would have written about the dizzy and increasingly dolorous age of the Internet. May So Many Books fall into so many hands."—Leon Wieseltier

"Reading liberates the reader and transports him from his book to a reading of himself and all of life. It leads him to participate in conversations, and in some cases to arrange them…It could even be said that to publish a book is to insert it into the middle of a conversation."—from So Many Books

Join the conversation! In So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid offers his observations on the literary condition: a highly original analysis of the predicament that readers, authors, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and teachers find themselves in today—when there are simply more books than any of us can contemplate.

"With cascades of books pouring down on him from every direction, how can the twenty-first-century reader keep his head above water? Gabriel Zaid answers that question in a variety of surprising ways, many of them witty, all of them provocative."—Anne Fadiman, Author of Ex-Libris

"A truly original book about books. Destined to be a classic!"—Enrique Krauze, Author of Mexico: Biography of Power, Editor of Letras Libres

"Gabriel Zaid's small gem of a book manages to be both delectable and useful, like chocolate fortified with vitamins. His rare blend of wisdom and savvy practical sense should make essential and heartening reading for anyone who cares about the future of books and the life of the mind."—Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Author of Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books

"Gabriel Zaid is a marvelously elegant and playful writer—a cosmopolitan critic with sound judgment and a light touch. He is a jewel of Latin American letters, which is no small thing to be. Read him—you'll see."—Paul Berman

"'So many books,' a phrase usually muttered with despair, is transformed into an expression of awe and joy by Gabriel Zaid. Arguing that books are the essential part of the great conversation we call culture and civilization, So Many Books reminds us that reading (and, by extension, writing and publishing) is a business, a vanity, a vocation, an avocation, a moral and political act, a hedonistic pursuit, all of the aforementioned, none of the aforementioned, and is often a miracle."—Doug Dutton

"Zaid traces the preoccupation with reading back through Dr. Johnson, Seneca, and even the Bible ('Of making many books there is no end'). He emerges as a playful celebrant of literary proliferation, noting that there is a new book published every thirty seconds, and optimistically points out that publishers who moan about low sales 'see as a failure what is actually a blessing: The book business, unlike newspapers, films, or television, is viable on a small scale.' Zaid, who claims to own more than ten thousand books, says he has sometimes thought that 'a chastity glove for authors who can't contain themselves' would be a good idea. Nonetheless, he cheerfully opines that 'the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.'"—New Yorker

Gabriel Zaid's poetry, essays, social and cultural criticism, and business writings have been widely published throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He lives in Mexico City with the artist Basia Batorska, her paintings, three cats, and ten thousand books.

Natasha Wimmer is an editor and a translator in New York City. Her recent translations include The Savage Detectives and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño andThe Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa.

“A novel of epic scope and ambition.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"A masterwork."—Wall Street Journal

An influential Polish classic celebrates 50 years—and its first English edition

As Stone Tablets opens, Istvan Terey, a poet and World War II veteran, is serving as cultural attaché with the Hungarian embassy in Delhi just a few months before his country is torn apart by the Hungarian Uprising of 1956. He is personable and popular with Indians and Europeans, communists and capitalists, but his outspoken criticisms of corruption in the Hungarian government and the embassy threaten to undermine his career. Meanwhile, he has fallen in love with Margit, an Australian ophthalmologist working in India, who is still living through a tragedy of her own: her fiancé died under torture during World War II.

Draining heat, brilliant color, intense smells, and intrusive animals enliven this sweeping Cold War romance. Based on the author’s own experience as a Polish diplomat in India in the late 1950s, Stone Tablets was one of the first literary works in Poland to offer scathing criticisms of Stalinism, and was censored when it was first submitted for publication. Stephanie Kraft’s translation opens this book for the first time to English-speaking readers.

“A high-paced, passionate narrative in which every detail is vital.”—Leslaw Bartelski

Zukrowski is “a brilliantly talented observer of life, a visionary skilled at combining the concrete with the magical, lyricism with realism…a distinguished stylist.”—Leszek Zulinski

“A romance fraught with personal and political risk is at the core of this historically important yet previously untranslated novel by a Polish diplomat stationed in India during the Cold War…inspired by the author’s own experiences, Zukrowski’s precise descriptions of India are memorable, and there is a certain throwback appeal to the depictions of diplomacy conducted through telegrams and glasses of whiskey. But it is Zukrowski’s trenchant critique of Stalinism and political message, bold for its time, that make this novel truly noteworthy.”—Booklist

Wojciech Zukrowski (1916–2000) was one of Poland’s best-known twentieth-century authors. A prolific novelist, screenwriter, and essayist, he was a war correspondent in Vietnam in the early 1950s, and worked at the embassy in New Delhi from 1956 to 1959. In 1996 Zukrowski won the Reymont Prize for lifetime literary achievement.

"[A] thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness." —Lydia Davis

In 2004 Rachel Hadas's husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of sixty-one. Strange Relation is her account of "losing" George. Her narrative begins when George's illness can no longer be ignored, and ends in 2008 soon after his move to a dementia facility (when, after thirty years of marriage, she finds herself no longer living with her husband). Within the cloudy confines of those difficult years, years when reading and writing were an essential part of what kept her going, she "tried to keep track…tried to tell the truth."

"If only all doctors and nurses and social workers who care for the chronically ill could read this book. If only patients and family members stricken with such losses could receive what this book can give them. While Strange Relation relates one illness and the life of one family, it is also, poetically, about all illnesses, all families, all struggles, all living. The art achieves the dual life of the universal and the particular, marking it as timeless, making it for us all necessary."—Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University

"Rachel Hadas's own wonderfully resonant poems, along with the rich collection of verse and prose by other writers that she weaves into her story, clarify and illuminate over and over again this thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness—illness that, as she shows us so well, is at once frighteningly alien and also deeply a part of our unavoidable vulnerability as mortal beings. Beautifully written, totally engrossing, and very sad."—Lydia Davis

"Strange Relation is a deeply moving, deeply personal, beautifully written exploration of how the power of grief can be met with the power of literature, and how solace can be found in the space between them."—Frank Huyler

"A poignant memoir of love, creativity and human vulnerability. Rachel Hadas brings a poet's incisive eye to the labyrinth of dementia."—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of Medicine in Translation and Singular Intimacies

"Like an elegy, Strange Relation is about loss and grief. Like all elegies, it also memorializes and celebrates. Rachel Hadas, in the course of her personal narrative, cites accounts of dementia, in its social and personal meanings."—Robert Pinsky

"Brilliant and tough-minded, poignant but clear-headed, Rachel Hadas shines a steady light on her experience as the wife of an accomplished composer who, at a comparatively early age, descended into dementia. Strange Relation never sacrifices truth for easy answers. Instead, Hadas uses literature to chart a course through wrenching complexities. This lauded and exceptional poet shows how language itself, the very thing her husband loses, became her shield as she crossed the ravaged lands of decision-making, making new discoveries, new friends, and new sense of the world. Strange Relation snaps with bravery, intelligence, and Hadas' tart, candid wisdom."—Molly Peacock

"Strange Relation is a beautifully written and piercingly honest account of life with a brilliant man as he descends into dementia, in his sixties."—Reeve Lindbergh

Rachel Hadas is Board of Governors Professor of English at Rutgers University in Newark. She is the author of many books, including The River of Forgetfulness, Laws, Indelible, and Halfway Down the Hall: New & Selected Poems. She co-edited the anthology The Greek Poets: Homer to the Present. She lives in Manhattan.

“A necessary manual for those interested in the perpetuation, and the possibilities, of good English prose.”—Harper’s Magazine

“[Lanham’s] style is notable for its audacity, liveliness, and grace.”—The Times Literary Supplement

“The most applicably provocative book on the subject of prose style available. Imperative reading for all teachers and students of writing.”—Choice

This humorous and accessible classic on style calls for the return of wordplay and delight to writing instruction. Richard Lanham argues that many tomes on writing, with their trio of platitudes—clarity, plainness, sincerity—lie “upon the spirit like wet cardboard.”

"People seldom write to be clear. They have designs on their fellow men. Pure prose is as rare as pure virtue, and for the same reasons…The Books [Lanham’s term for misguided composition textbooks], written for a man and world yet unfallen, depict a ludicrous process like this: 'I have an idea. I want to present this gift to my fellow man. I fix this thought clearly in mind. I follow the rules. Out comes a prose that gift-wraps thought in transparent paper.' If this sounds like a travesty, it’s because it is one. Yet it dominates prose instruction in America."—from Chapter 1

Richard A. Lanham is professor emeritus of English at the University of California, Los Angeles, and president of Rhetorica, Inc., a consulting and editorial services company. He is the author of numerous books on writing, including A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Analyzing Prose, The Electronic Word, and most recently, The Economics of Attention.

"Incredibly charming…Suzanne Davis Gets a Life has an emotional honesty and moments of real wisdom."—Philadelphia Inquirer

Cohen "portrays timeless and universal challenges through a buoyant combination of humor, pathos, and gumption."—Booklist

"Suzanne Davis Gets a Life isn't just seriously entertaining, it's entertainingly serious…I want my romantic comedy heroines to have wit, but I want them to have character too, and be as interested in the world as in themselves. Paula Marantz Cohen has given me all of that."—Margo Jefferson

A "witty commentary on contemporary life, enriched by a funny, flawed, and likable heroine."—Kirkus

"Ms. Cohen is a perceptive, comic writer."—Wall Street Journal

Suzanne Davis lounges around her tiny New York City apartment in her pajamas, writing press releases for the International Association of Air-Conditioning Engineers, listening to the ticking of her biological clock, and wondering where life is taking her. As her 35th birthday looms, Suzanne embarks on a wrong-headed, but very funny, quest—to find Mr. Right and start the family she hopes will give meaning to her life.

Her quest plunges us into the world of her Upper West Side apartment building, a world of overly invested mothers, fanatical dog-owners, curmudgeonly longtime residents, and young (and not so young) professionals. All are keenly observed by Suzanne, whose witty self-deprecation endears her to us even as it makes us want to shake some sense into her.

Light in its tone but incisive in its social satire, Suzanne Davis Gets a Life balances its wit with true concern for its protagonist. We can't help but wish Suzanne success in "getting a life." But can such a search possibly yield the meaning she craves? When her extremely annoying mother arrives on the scene, it appears that her plan has been hijacked. But serious illness opens her to new people and a new perspective. She ends by getting a life—even as she may lose one.

Paula Marantz Cohen's novels include Jane Austen in Scarsdale or Love, Death and the SATs; Jane Austen in Boca; and the recent What Alice Knew: A Most Curious Tale of Henry James and Jack the Ripper. Cohen is Distinguished Professor of English at Drexel University, and is host of the weekly public television program The Drexel Interview.

Praise for Paula Marantz Cohen

"Cohen's wit is sharp, smart, and satirical, and her characterizations are vividly on target."—San Francisco Chronicle

Praise for Jane Austen in Boca

"Utterly charming."—Vanity Fair

"Page turner of the week."—People Magazine

Praise for Much Ado about Jesse Kaplan

"A brightly comic book."—Times Literary Supplement

"Kept me laughing from beginning to end…a comic tour-de-force."—The Hudson Review

Praise for Jane Austen in Scarsdale

"Paula Marantz Cohen has done it again! Jane Austen in Scarsdale is laugh-out-loud funny, literate, wise—and best of all, a satirical mirror of our times. She has become our own Jane Austen."—Diane Ravitch, author of The Language Police

Praise for What Alice Knew

"A marvelously rich and intelligent read."—John Banville

Remembering life under the Romanovs

“With his eye for detail, his taste for anecdote, and his sheer delight in the process of living, Rodzianko has created a delightful, if often sad, work.”—Gary Saul Morson, from his new foreword for this first American edition

"Capacious, powerful, and subtle—a forgotten work with real claims to historic interest and aesthetic value . . . It is Paradise Lost as told by Dostoevsky."—Washington Independent Review of Books

Born into Russian aristocracy at the end of the 19th Century, Paul Rodzianko led a life rich in love, challenged by war, and inspired by great jumping horses. With humor and infectious joy, he recounts the adventures of his charmed childhood—playing with his cousins at the Winter Palace, riding horses at his family’s many country estates, and, most spectacularly, serving as a page in the court of Tsar Nicolas II.

Then, on August 1, 1914, Russia and Germany declare war on each other, and, Rodzianko writes, “The hurricane descended and swept our world away.” Serving in the Chevalier Guards, he fights first against the Germans and then, after the Revolution, against the Reds in Siberia. He writes movingly about WWI and the Russian Civil War: the initial excitement about going to war and the grim realities, the frustrating shortages of munitions and the failures of the railroads, the shocking execution of the Romanovs, and the brutal deaths of millions of young men.

Tattered Banners is an evocative and haunting account of a time and people that have continued to intrigue us for more than a century.

In Teaching Particulars, Helaine Smith engages her students, grammar school through twelfth grade—and any avid reader—in the questions that great literature evokes. Included are chapters on Homer and Genesis; plays by Sophocles, Shakespeare, and Beckett; poems by Jonson, Donne, Coleridge, Browning, Hopkins, Yeats, Bishop, Hecht, Dove, and Lowell; essays by Baldwin, Lamb, and White; and fiction by Flannery O’Connor, Dickens, Joyce, Poe, Tolstoy, Mann, and Kafka. Whether Helaine Smith is talking to young or older students, she shows how any devoted reader can uncover all sorts of subtle beauty and meaning by reading closely and by assuming that virtually every word and phrase of a great text is deliberate. The question-and-answer form of these jargon-free dialogues creates the feeling of a vibrant classroom where learning and delight are the watchwords.

“After her forty years of teaching, Smith’s keen understanding of the literary canon makes her the perfect candidate to write this humorous and insightful book." —Foreword Reviews

“Teaching Particulars is an exemplary series of literary conversations by a master teacher on a great variety of important, life-shaping books. The guidance is unfailingly humane, the essays thoughtfully presented by someone who cares as much for the written word as she does about her classroom and her subject matter. Her commentary on Hecht’s ‘Rites and Ceremonies,’ the poet’s complex response to Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land,’ ranks among the very best anywhere, as is true for her reading of Hecht’s ‘Devotions of a Painter,’ which has the further advantage of illuminating that work in light of Elizabeth Bishop’s profound meditation on painting in her ‘Poem.’ Reading Teaching Particulars makes me wish that all of my students could have had Helaine Smith as their teacher.” —Jonathan F. S. Post, Distinguished Professor of English and former Chair of the Department, UCLA

“There’s simply nothing else like Teaching Particulars, a book packed with so much wisdom and practical advice about teaching literature that every instructor of grades 6 to 12—and of college classes, too—will want to get a copy right now. Even if you’re not a teacher, I highly recommend it. The love of books pulses through every page Helaine Smith writes, and her passion is infectious. She opens our eyes to the pleasures of reading in a way that few critics can, and she does it all in a book whose style is both elegant and friendly.” —David Mikics, John and Rebecca Moores Professor of English, University of Houston, and author of Slow Reading in a Hurried Age

“Teaching Particulars…is a bounteous resource for all teachers, as well as a pleasure just to curl up with and read away.” —Susan J. Wolfson, Professor of English, Princeton University

“Helaine Smith is a genius of a teacher: witty, imaginative, precise, intuitive, and gracefully learned. Now anyone who opens her Teaching Particulars can have the rare privilege of learning from her how to read, in the truest sense. It’s never too late to be startled into delight by the power of language, and that is the experience offered on every page of this book. It’s a book not only for the schoolroom, but for the school of life.” —Rosanna Warren, Hanna Holborn Gray Distinguished Service Professor, The Committee on Social Thought, The University of Chicago

For forty years, Helaine L. Smith has taught English to grades 6 through 12 at Hunter College High School and at The Brearley School in Manhattan.

"Elegant and deeply personal, McConkey's essays reveal a seasoned mind and a soulful spirit."—Publishers Weekly

"Like his colleagues Forster and Chekhov, James McConkey combines a sharp eye, a nimble mind and a bottomless generosity. In The Telescope in the Parlor, as in all his fine and intimate essays, he is concerned with the very deepest subjects: time, memory, and what it means to be human. May this new addition to his 'Court of Memory' remind readers how vital and necessary a writer he is."—Stewart O'Nan, author of A Prayer for the Dying

In this collection of essays, James McConkey—novelist, professor, and memoirist—writes about the authors and experiences that have meant the most to him. In "Three Autobiographical Essays" and "A Story for a Child," McConkey poignantly recalls events of courting and family life that remain as clear in his inner vision as the day they took place. In "Eight Essays about Literature," he explains why he loves the books he loves and why he responds to the work of A. R. Ammons, Anton Chekhov, and E. M. Forster, among others. With an even greater power than the telescope standing in the corner of his study, McConkey's inner eye observes telling scenes of memory and imagination, which through the magic of his writing become vibrant images in the reader's own imagination.

In the title essay, McConkey recalls the vivid moment that led him to become a chronicler of his own experiences, when he "attempt[ed] to connect the normal details of daily living to a unity…apprehended only for an instant, and which consciousness itself has since kept from [his] reach." Watching McConkey make these connections is but one of the delights this book provides.

"James McConkey uses his own memory as a tool that unlocks everything—a telescope with a view of the entire universe. I can't think of another writer who uses that tool with as much precision, delicacy, and love."—Anne Fadiman, author of Ex Libris

"McConkey makes of his own life…a thoughtful, powerful and vivid work of art."—Annie Dillard

"James McConkey speaks to the reader with poignant force, illuminating ordinary life…There is no voice like his alive today."—May Sarton

"The genre in which McConkey does his best writing has no name. He invented it…What McConkey does is to create meaning out of ordinary life…he'll create what is not exactly a story but a pattern in time…His books should be famous."—Noel Perrin, USA Today

James McConkey is the author of Crossroads, The Tree House Confessions, The Novels of E. M. Forster, and Court of Memory (a continuing biography that appeared serially in various magazines, primarily The New Yorker), and many other books. He is Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Cornell University.

"If you like Hank, you'll like Wilder Good, too."—John R. Erickson, author of Hank the Cowdog

"I am a big fan of this series. Last fall I included The Elk Hunt in my list of favorite books of 2013, and Texas Grit is every bit as insightful and positive as the first one."—Glenn Dromgoole

"Dahlstrom writes about ranch life with flair and specific detail."—WORLD magazine

Will Rogers Medallion Gold Medal Winner - 2015

In Texas Grit, Wilder spends a week in West Texas at his grandfather's ranch, while his mother and father travel to Denver to see her doctors.

Wilder finds it hard to leave his parents. Papa Milam is a cowboy, gruff and sometimes a bit intimidating, yet grandfather and grandson care for each other very much—and find they actually have lots to learn from each other, too.

Wilder works cattle on horseback and explores the rough ranch country with Papa. One night they start out to hunt for whitetail deer in the cottonwood bottoms but end up encountering a rattlesnake instead. A few days later, four cowboys arrive at the ranch to help with the branding of Papa's new calves. Wilder gets the opportunity to join the crew and takes his place alongside the grown men in the strenuous and sometimes dangerous work of herding, roping, and branding.

Wilder does a lot of growing up over the week, and together he and Papa experience the kind of adventures that only a place like Texas can provide.

S. J. Dahlstrom lives and writes in west Texas. He has numerous magazine credits for his writing and photography. The Adventures of Wilder Good is his first series. His writing draws on his experiences as a cowboy, husband, father, and founder of a boys' ranch.

John Keats is among the greatest English poets. (He himself imagined he would be counted so!) For some readers, his odes define the essence of poetry. We also discover in Keats a great composer of sonnets. Here, for the first time published in a separate edition, are all sixty-four sonnets, the first written when Keats was eighteen, the last just five years later. Reading these poems, you'll experience the wonder of Keats's growing poetic powers; you'll feel the "shock of recognition" when you come upon the great ones. Presented with an introduction by Edward Hirsch, and accompanying explanatory notes, the sonnets stand out as a triumph of their own.

"Between 1814 and 1819, John Keats wrote sixty-four sonnets. He was eighteen years old when he composed his first sonnet; he was turning twenty-four when he completed his last one. He restlessly experimented with the fourteen-line form and used it to plunge into (and explore) his emotional depths. You can sit down and read these poems in a single night and have a complete Keatsian experience—he breathes close and offers himself to us; his presence is near. You can also read them throughout your adulthood and never really get to the bottom of them. These short, durable poems are filled with the mysteries of poetry.

"In the sonnets, Keats conveys the range of his interests, his concerns, his attachments, his obsessions. Some are light and improvisatory, tossed off in fifteen minutes, a moment's thought. Some are polemics, or romantic period pieces; others are brooding testaments or compulsive outpourings, which seem to expand on the page. These sonnets are replete with a sensuous feeling for nature—'The poetry of earth is never dead'—that looks back to Wordsworth and forward to Frost. They also luxuriate in the spaces of imagination—'Much have I travell'd in the realms of gold'—and trigger the daydreaming capacities of the mind." —from the Introduction by Edward Hirsch

Edward Hirsch has published six books of poems: For the Sleepwalkers (1981), Wild Gratitude (1986), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, The Night Parade (1989), Earthly Measures (1994), On Love (1998), and Lay Back the Darkness (2003). He has also written three prose books: How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry (1999), a national bestseller, Responsive Reading (1999), and The Demon and the Angel: Searching for the Source of Artistic Inspiration (2002). He writes a weekly column on poetry for the Washington Post Book World. He has received the Prix de Rome, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the American Academy of Arts and Letters Award for Literature, and a MacArthur Fellowship. He taught for eighteen years at the University of Houston, and is now the fourth president of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation.

Francis Bacon's The Advancement of Learning (1605) is considered the first major philosophical book written in English. In it, Bacon is concerned with scientific learning: the current state of knowledge, obstacles to its progress, and his own plans for revitalization of schools and universities. Here Bacon sets forth the first account of science as intended for "the relief of man's estate."

With this newly designed and reset edition, this important work is again available in paperback. Difficult and fundamental, The Advancement of Learning helps define the modern era.

"This extraordinary genius, when it was impossible to write a history of what men already knew, wrote one of that which they had to learn." —Diderot

"Bacon was the first to address the issues that have again become so pressing in our time: Why should we pursue scientific progress? What are the implications of modern science for religion and morality? Does technology enhance or disfigure the human soul?…It is therefore hard to imagine a book more attuned to our times." —from the new Introduction by Jerry Weinberger

Francis Bacon (1561-1626) was a philosopher, statesman, and essayist. He served as the attorney general and Lord Chancellor of England and was the author of Novum Organum.

Jerry Weinberger is Professor of Political Science at Michigan State University.

"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?"—Henry Ward Beecher

The Book Shopper is a spirited and witty guide to the world of disheveled used bookstores and dusty basements where shelves sag under the burden of so many books. In the limitless sea of books, here's one that will make you laugh as it helps you find your way to titles and authors you'll really want to read.

"This predilection [for browsing used bookstores] has grown into a real (albeit quirky) passion for thinking about the many ways books affect our lives—how and where we shop for them, the people we know who read them, the small passages that stick in our heads for years only to reappear at the oddest moments. The minds of book people are mosaics of ideas, thoughts, and phrases that have originated in books…I'm fascinated by how we hold and shape these fragments, how they coalesce into what I call my book shopper state of mind."—from Chapter 1 of The Book Shopper

In chapters such as "Book Lovers Are Not Necessarily People Lovers," "Prerequisites: What Every Good Bookstore Should Have," "Books as Gifts," and "The Classic Book Group," Murray Browne offers a lifeline to readers who love to browse for books and are always looking for that next great read—and a good deal—but who may be swamped by the vast offerings.

Murray Browne has published numerous essays, book reviews, newspaper articles, feature stories, and technical articles. He holds a BA in English and Radio-Television and an MS in Information (Library) Sciences from the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. Though he grew up in the Midwest, Browne now lives in Atlanta, where he works as a media content analyst.

"This whimsical Italian fantasy, originally published in 1922, belongs on the shelf next to The Little Prince and Alice and Wonderland. Simple language by translator Gilson gives the novel a poetic tone, while STO's charming black-and-white illustrations add humor."—VOYA

Alone in a room with nothing but an old mirror and a chess set, a young boy anticipates a boring afternoon. But like Alice just before she fell down the rabbit hole—and wound up in Wonderland—this boy is about to embark on a marvelous adventure. Gazing at the mirror, he discovers that the chess pieces (the reflections, not the real ones) are alive! When the White King invites him into the world on the other side, the excitement begins. There, all the rules of the real world are reversed. There, you can have a perfectly reasonable conversation with a perfectly unreasonable chess piece. There, you can meet anyone who's ever looked into the mirror (even a hundred years ago). This bewildering experience leads to some odd questions: What goes on inside a mirror when no one is looking at it? What if the reflected world is more real than the one where we live? And speaking of our world, how will our hero get back to this side of the mirror?

Join him on his fantastic journey where nothing is more absurd than reason or more important than freedom of imagination.

"[A] story told in a voice that's charmingly direct, sweetly self-referential…and more than a little trippy…Like all good books for children, it also has unusual insights into childhood itself: '…when you're ten years old, standing or sitting are exactly the same.'"—Philadelphia Inquirer

"The narrator's dry wit, reminiscent of P. G. Wodehouse, makes for an appealing journey and, coupled with the whimsical pen-and-ink drawings, a charming package with a timeless air."—Publishers Weekly

"Motherhood is the theme of these two intimate novellas by Italian writer Bontempelli, who preceded such better-known authors of 'magic realism' as Jorge Luis Borges and Alejo Carpentier by more than two decades in his fusion of the miraculous and the matter-of-fact…The elegantly restrained passion of these two tales, penned in Bontempelli's delicate prose, proves yet again the writer's literary genius."—Publishers Weekly (review of Separations)

"Separations is a complete triumph. Bontempelli's work prefigured the magic realism popularized by many Latin American writers, andSeparations is an excellent example of this style. Elegant, superbly crafted, and masterfully written, these tales are not easily forgotten; the heroines are haunting and the plots finely honed. Bontempelli is truly a 'fantastic' writer."—Library Journal (review of Separations)

A protégé of Pirandello, Massimo Bontempelli (1878–1960) was a prolific writer of poetry, plays, and prose fiction. Bontempelli now occupies a major place in 20th century Italian letters, and his works are translated in every major European language.

Sergio Tofano, also known as STO, was an Italian illustrator, actor, director, and playwright. For fifty years his illustrated work appeared in the children's supplement of Corriere della Sera, one of the oldest and most widely read newspapers in Italy.

Estelle Gilson's translation of Umberto Saba's Stories and Recollections won both the Italo Calvino and PEN Renato Poggioli awards, and the MLA's first Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione award in 1994 as the best literary translation of the previous two years. Her fiction, essays, and articles appear in many publications. She translated Bontempelli's Separations.

"Absolutely stunning."—Times Literary Supplement

"[The Discovery of Slowness] is about a guy who is so incredibly slow in his perception that he . . . actually sees shadows moving. [T]he amazing thing that I remember from reading that book is, whenever I looked up from that book, I felt I had this view from the book in my real world. This book made my life more interesting."—Christoph Niemann (as described in the Netflix series Abstract: The Art of Design)

"This remarkable, superbly translated novel derives from the life of the real 19th century explorer John Franklin…[whose] adventures are conveyed with spellbinding skill."—Publishers Weekly

The Discovery of Slowness—a huge commercial and critical success across Europe, where it is considered the popular author's masterpiece—recounts the life of the nineteenth-century British explorer Sir John Franklin (1786-1847).

Through the author's acute reading of history and his marvelous storytelling prowess, the reader follows John Franklin's development from awkward schoolboy and ridiculed teenager to expedition leader, governor of Tasmania, and icon of adventure. Slow and deliberate from boyhood, Franklin appeared destined to be a misfit. But he escaped from the ever-expanding world of industry and Empire to the sea's silent landscape, where the universe seemed more manageable. At age fourteen he joined the navy. After surviving the harrowing battles of Copenhagen and Trafalgar, he embarked on several voyages of discovery into the Canadian North, and served as governor of Van Diemen's Land (now Tasmania). Everyone with whom he came into contact sensed that Franklin was a rare man, one who was “out of his time” and who moved to a different, grander beat. That beat eventually led Franklin to sail once more—on his final, fateful voyage—into the Arctic in search of the Northwest Passage.

The Discovery of Slowness is a riveting account of a remarkable and varied life. And it is also a profound and thought-provoking meditation on time. The result is an unforgettable and deeply moving reading experience that justifies the novel's reputation as one of the classics of contemporary world literature.

***

"Nadolny evinces remarkable empathy with his unlikely Odysseus and Ralph Freedman's translation captures the crystalline freshness of the author's imagery."—Washington Post Book World

"The Discovery of Slowness is a masterpiece of characterization, a portrait of inwardness in the most outward-thrusting of lives."—The New Republic

"Fluid and suspenseful, a thought-provoking reminder of contemporary society's tendency to speed through everyday life."—The Providence Journal-Bulletin

"Amazing…His book is a historical painting, a seafarer's novel, a love story, an outcast's story all in one. This variety appears very harmonious, just as it incidentally, almost secretly, reflects on our right to discover the world at our own, personal pace."—Frankfurter Allegemeine Zeitung

"Sir John Franklin is the embodied contrast to the frenetic agitation of the modern world. The discovery of slowness is the slowness of discovery."—New York Review of Books

"Nadolny's vision is conveyed with restraint and charm…He has written a Utopia of character."—New York Times Book Review

"Its appeal lies in its observation of the texture of life, seen by a character who has to work everything out from first principles. It needs to be read slowly, to be absorbed as much as understood."—Scotland On Sunday

"This is more than an adventure; it's a meditation on time and perception…Not to be rushed, or forgotten."—The Herald

"Nadolny brilliantly sets the narrative pace to the rhythms of the frozen landscape, and to the 'slowness which is bred by hunger.'"—Robert MacFarlane

"This is both a wonderful historical novel and a spell-binding individual portrait…This is a marvellous translation of a masterly work."—The Observer

Sten Nadolny (b. 1942) was an historian and filmmaker, before writing four novels and two collections of essays. He lives in Berlin and has been awarded four prizes: Ingeborg Bachmann (1981), Hans-Fallada (1985), Premio Vallombrosa (1986), Ernst Hoferichter (1995). The Discovery of Slowness (1983) has been translated into all major languages.

"A delightful book."—New York Times

"I have studied with pleasure [this] new book…Beautiful examples…Illuminating. I am convinced that [Lieber's] original enterprise will get the recognition it so richly deserves."—Albert Einstein

"The Liebers have written an ingenious, entertaining, and illuminating book."—Saturday Review of Literature

"The book should be 'required reading' especially for non-mathematicians."—E.T. Bell, author of The Development of Mathematics

First published in 1942, this whimsical exploration of how to think in a mathematical mood continues to delight math-lovers of all ages.

Do you know that two times two is not always four; that the sum of the angles in a triangle does not always equal 180°; that sometimes it is possible to draw two parallel lines through the same point? InThe Education of T. C. MITS, Lillian Lieber opens the door to the wonder of mathematical thinking and its application to everyday life. Lieber uses simple language and fanciful illustrations drawn by her husband, Hugh, to present fundamental mathematical concepts with a deft touch.

The new foreword by Harvard University mathematics professor Barry Mazur is a tribute to the Liebers' influence on generations of mathematicians.

Lillian Lieber was the head of the Department of Mathematics at Long Island University. She wrote a series of lighthearted (and well-respected) math books in the 1940s, including The Einstein Theory of Relativity, Infinity, and Mits, Wits & Logic.

Hugh Gray Lieber was the head of the Department of Fine Arts at Long Island University. He illustrated many books written by his wife Lillian.

Barry Mazur Barry Mazur is a mathematician and is the Gerhard Gade University Professor at Harvard University. He is the author of Imagining Numbers (particularly the square root of minus fifteen). He has won numerous honors in his field, including the Veblen Prize, Cole Prize, Steele Prize, and Chauvenet Prize.

“Oh, what a delightful book! This is the clearest explanation of relativity available—and the most fun. It’s great to have it available again. Whether or not you’re a scientist, you will relish this book.”—Walter Isaacson, author of Einstein: His Life and Universe

Using “just enough mathematics to help and not to hinder the lay reader,” Lillian R. Lieber provides a thorough explanation of Albert Einstein’s theory of relativity. Her delightful style, in combination with her husband’s charming illustrations, makes for an interesting and accessible read about one of the most celebrated ideas of all times.

“A clear and vivid exposition of the essential ideas and methods of the theory of relativity…can be warmly recommended especially to those who cannot spend too much time on the subject.”—Albert Einstein

“If you know high-school math, are not afraid of equations, and want to find out what Einstein really said, read Lillian Lieber’s book. She will lead you through special and general relativity, helping you at every step to understand the essential equations, including tensors, with amazing clarity and conciseness. This uniquely charming book remains as vivid as ever and even more helpful, thanks to the excellent new foreward and notes by David Derbes and Robert Jantzen.”—Peter Pesic, author of Abel’s Proof: An Essay on the Sources and Meaning of Mathematical Unsolvability and Sky in a Bottle

“Does the nature of time fascinate you? Does gravity seem a mysterious subject? Are you interested in learning just what it is that Einstein actually did that made him so famous? Then this wonderful book is just the thing. I read the original 1945 edition when I was a high-school student in the 1950s, and it had a tremendous impact on me. I predict the same experience for you, or perhaps a young friend, with this new, updated edition.”—Paul J. Nahin, author of Time Machines, Oliver Heaviside, and Dr. Euler’s Fabulous Formula

Lillian R. Lieber was a professor and head of the Department of Mathematics at Long Island University. She wrote a series of lighthearted (and well-respected) math books, many of them illustrated by her husband, Hugh Gray Lieber.

David Derbes teaches physics at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

Robert Jantzen is a professor of mathematics at Villanova University.

"If you like Hank, you'll like Wilder Good, too."—John R. Erickson, author of Hank the Cowdog

Meet 12-year-old Wilder Good, who lives with his parents and little sister, Molly, in a small town in southern Colorado. When he's lucky, he gets to go hunting with Gale Loving, a 72-year-old elder at the church the Goods attend, and a good friend and mentor to Wilder. They make sort of an odd pair, an old man and a boy, but they fit together pretty well in the outdoors. (Though sometimes Wilder still can't help but wonder what kind of a name "Gale" is for a grown man.)

Wilder plays basketball, is active in his 4-H club, likes to read—his hero is Teddy Roosevelt—and does all the things that seventh-graders do. (He has a "secret" girlfriend, too.) He's a Dallas Cowboys fan. But mostly he loves the outdoors, hunting in the Colorado Rockies with Gale or his dad, or at his grandfather's Texas ranch.

Wilder is on the threshold between being a kid and beginning to grow up, and he's trying his best to figure out just what it means to join that grownup world. There's a lot to learn, and he's grateful to have rock-steady Gale to guide him.

In The Elk Hunt, Wilder accompanies Gale into the mountains in search of his first elk. It's a special day for Wilder in many ways—the biggest game he's ever hunted, and the first chance to use his grandfather's Winchester .270. He's determined to succeed with high marks.

Hunting elk is an exciting and demanding pursuit, but even after Wilder and Gale are headed home, there's still danger to face—that's when nature decides to really test Wilder's resolve.

S. J. Dahlstrom lives and writes in west Texas. He has numerous magazine credits for his writing and photography. The Adventures of Wilder Good is his first series. His writing draws on his experiences as a cowboy, husband, father, and founder of a boys' ranch.

To mark Eva Brann’s fiftieth year on the faculty of St. John’s College in Annapolis, Maryland, twenty-three of her colleagues, friends, and former students have contributed essays, poems, and artwork to The Envisioned Life. They celebrate Brann’s “passion for learning and her deep love of books, her breadth of knowledge and interests, her boundless energy, her mastery of the spoken and of the written word, her virtues of leadership, and her bright and generous spirit.”

Paul Dry Books has published three books by Eva Brann: Homeric Moments, The Music of the Republic, and Open Secrets / Inward Prospects.

"Lucid, thoughtful…writers and teachers will learn much from it…Belongs wherever Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style finds frequent use."—Booklist

"Writers will actually learn things here."—Los Angeles Times

"Perfect for teachers, critics and general readers."—Library Journal

"Required reading for all those who care about good fiction."—Kirkus Reviews

Drawing upon twenty-eight years of experience as the CEO and editorial director of St. Martin’s Press, Thomas McCormack gives practical guidance about how to plan, write, and revise a novel. A standard reference for editors since its first publication in 1988, The Fiction Editor has also become popular with writers because McCormack’s advice is constructive at every step of the creative process. From individual word choice right up to the overarching effect of the work as a whole, he details how to structure the novel, choose the characters, drive the story, diagnose narrative ailments, and find and apply specific remedies.

In this revised second edition, McCormack takes advantage of almost two decades of additional experience to clarify and expand on what he has learned.

"Written in an amiable tone, often using examples, hypothetical writing scenarios, or dialogue-style discourse between industry professionals to clarify its points, The Fiction Editor, the Novel, and the Novelist is a superb handbook for fiction writers but especially recommended for prospective and professional fiction editors."—Midwest Book Review

Thomas McCormack edited authors as diverse as James Herriot (All Creatures Great and Small) and Thomas Harris (The Silence of the Lambs). He was awarded LMP's Lifetime Achievement Award and the AAP's Curtis Benjamin Award for Creative Publishing. For two years, he wrote "The Cheerful Skeptic" column in Publishers Weekly.

From a short lyric to a complex novel, follow Reuben Brower's lead through the attentive reader's fields of light.

In this classic study, Harvard professor Reuben Brower guides the reader from noticing the alluring details of a well-made poem, novel, or play to attending to the encompassing ways in which the writing achieves its greatness.

Part One: THE DISCOVERY OF DESIGN
I. The Speaking Voice (Dramatic Design)
II. The Aura Around a Bright Clear Centre (Design in Imagery)
III. Saying One Thing and Meaning Another (Design in Metaphor and Irony)
IV. The Figure of Sound (Design in Sound)
V. The Sinewie Thread (Key Designs)

Part Two: IN LARGE LETTERS
VI. The Mirror of Analogy 'The Tempest'
VII. Something Central Which Permeated: Virginia Woolf and 'Mrs. Dalloway'
VIII. The Groves of Eden: Design in a Satire by Pope
IX. Light and Bright and Sparkling: Irony and Fiction in 'Pride and Prejudice'
X. The Twilight of the Double Vision: Symbol and Irony in 'A Passage to India'
XI. The Flower of Light: Integrity of Imagination

"Not only does Brower begin his book with a lyric, but he deliberately chooses a very short one indeed, as if to show how much can be said about the smallest of poetic 'figures' looked at closely. The poem is 'The Sick Rose,' one of William Blake's best-known songs of experience…Brower's task is to show how the poem is 'imaginatively organized,' by which he means that, to read it, we must sense the 'extraordinary interconnectedness among a relatively large number of different items of experience.'" –From the Foreword by William H. Pritchard

Reuben Arthur Brower (1908–1975) was a professor of classics and English at Amherst College before he moved to Harvard University, where he became Cabot Professor of English. He is perhaps best (and most fondly) remembered for a course he created at Harvard, Humanites 6: Interpretation of Literature, known familiarly to students as "Hum 6."

"One of the great and lasting books about Greece."—Patrick Leigh Fermor

"An intense and compelling account of an educated, sensitive archaeologist wandering the back country during the civil war. Half a century on, still one of the best books on Greece as it was before 'development.'"—The Rough Guide to the Greek Islands

"He also is in love with the country…but he sees the other side of that dazzling medal or moon…If you want some truth about Greece, here it is."—Louis MacNeice, The Observer

"One of the best and most honest books about the modern Greeks."—E. R. Dodds

"Kevin Andrews experienced the dangers of the countryside during the civil war. The Flight of Ikaros, the book he produced from his travels, remains not only one of the greatest we have about postwar Greece—memorializing a village culture that has almost vanished—but also one of the most moving accounts I have ever read of people caught up in political turmoil…Flight was first published in 1959 and last reprinted by Penguin in 1984. For too many years, this rare account has languished out of print."—Wall Street Journal

In 1947, at the age of twenty-three, Kevin Andrews received a Fulbright Fellowship to study medieval fortresses in the Peloponnese. Andrews spent the long summers of 1948 to 1951 traveling through the region and the winters writing in Athens. This opportunity to travel through little-frequented areas during Greece’s postwar civil war—and before the advent of tourism, industrialization, or easy communications—brought Andrews into immediate contact with village populations, shepherd clans, and the paramilitary vigilantes who kept their own kind of order in the provinces, as well as with the displaced peasants of the Athenian slums. The close experience of all these lives took shape in The Flight of Ikaros, first published in 1959. Paul Dry Books is pleased to return to print this modern travel classic.

Kevin Andrews (1924–1989) was a writer and archaeologist. After serving in the U.S. Army during World War II, he attended Harvard University and then traveled to Greece on a Fulbright fellowship. In addition to The Flight of Ikaros, he wrote many other books about Greece, where he became a citizen in 1975.

Winner of the Western Heritage Award for Juvenile Book

Winner of the Will Rogers Medallion Award for Young Readers

Finalist, Western Writers of America Spur Award for Juvenile Fiction

"The Green Colt is told beautifully, with grace and quiet power, and shows S. J. Dahlstrom to be a big new talent. I highly recommend this wonderful book."—Nancy Plain, award-winning author and vice-president of Western Writers of America

Twelve-year-old Wilder Good likes basketball, 4-H club, hanging out with his friends, and reading. But, more than anything, he loves to be outdoors.

In this fourth book of the series, Wilder is back at his grandfather's ranch in West Texas. Papa Milam gives him an unexpected gift—his very own 'green' colt to break. Wilder is excited to begin, but he quickly realizes that even getting near the colt is much harder than he expected. So Papa hires Tequito, a Mexican vaquero, to help. Tequito doesn't speak much English, and at first Wilder is intimidated. But the vaquero is both gentle and firm with the colt, and soon they're making good progress. Wilder sees how skilled Tequito is with horses, and learns that American cowboying has its roots in a much older Mexican tradition.

Breaking his new colt is a challenge, but—as Wilder discovers—it's only the beginning of the joy and pain of owning a horse.

Award-winning author S. J. Dahlstrom delivers a powerful story with a timeless theme. A welcome addition to any child's bookshelf.

S. J. Dahlstrom lives and writes in West Texas. He has numerous magazine credits for his writing and photography. The Adventures of Wilder Good is his first series. His writing draws on his experiences as a cowboy, husband, father, and founder of a boys' ranch.

"Two fascinating fictions."—Wall Street Journal

"Rich and intriguing."—Kirkus Reviews on The Last of All Possible Worlds

"Convincing and haunting."—Publishers Weekly on The Temptation to Do Good

Best-selling author Peter F. Drucker wrote just two novels. Here for the first time in paperback are both.

In The Last of All Possible Worlds, royalty, bankers, lovers, and wives intertwine to create a vivid portrait of Europe in the early 1900s. We meet wise and worldly Prince Sobieski, Vienna’s ambassador in London, his enchanting wife, her English lover, and her enigmatic lifelong companion, Josefa. When Sobieski’s illegitimate daughter makes a demand of her influential father, the unspoken rules of the family are challenged. Sobieski’s world is further upset when two powerful merchant bankers, the tragic McGregor Hinton and the ambitious Julius von Mosenthal, arrive in London—both with their own requirements of the prince.

The Temptation to Do Good tells the story of Father Heinz Zimmerman, the well-regarded president of an American Catholic university. When he attempts to help a chemistry teacher who has been denied tenure he accidentally opens the door to the underlying tensions in the university.

Peter F. Drucker (1909–2005) was a writer, teacher, and management consultant. Born and raised in Austria, he lived in Germany and England before immigrating to the United States in 1937. His thirty-nine books have been published in more than thirty languages and have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide. His writing and teaching were unique for their focus on the human impact of business decisions. Drucker was the Honorary Chairman of the Peter F. Drucker Foundation for Nonprofit Management and was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Peter Kalkavage's The Logic of Desire guides the reader through Hegel's great work. Given the book's legendary difficulty, one may well ask, "Why even try to read the Phenomenology?" In his preface, Kalkavage explains why he thinks a reader should try:

There is much to commend the study of Hegel: his attentiveness to the deepest, most fundamental questions of philosophy, his uncompromising pursuit of truth, his amazing gift for characterization and critique, his appreciation for the grand sweep of things and the large view, his profound admiration for all that is heroic, especially for the ancient Greeks, those heroes of thought in whom the philosophic spirit first dawned, his penetrating gaze into modernity in all its forms, his enormous breadth of interests, and his audacious claim to have captured absolute knowing in a thoroughly rational account.

According to Kalkavage, the Phenomenology belongs to a quartet of the greatest works on education. The other three members of the quartet are Plato's Republic, Dante's Divine Comedy, and Rousseau's Emile. No genuine philosophic education can omit a serious encounter with this giant of the modern age, the giant who absorbed all the worlds of spiritual vitality that came before him and tried to organize them into a coherent whole.

"This book comes as close as I have seen to a guide to Hegel for the 'courageous non-specialist,' to employ Mr. Kalkavage's expression. He writes from what is obviously a lengthy and deep study of Hegel and of the Phenomenology in particular. There is no patronising of Hegel's complex teaching. The technical terminology is not avoided or concealed by the jovial jargon of a study manual. Kalkavage has mastered the art of presenting topics of great difficulty in a way that will instruct specialists as well as non-specialists. I found especially illuminating his portrait of determinate negation and the difference between consciousness and the phenomenolgical observer. This book should be in every college and university library."—Stanley Rosen

"Having taught philosophy to undergraduates for the past thirty-nine years, I can especially appreciate the value of Peter Kalkavage's book,The Logic of Desire. This work will truly benefit anyone who wishes to learn what Hegel himself is teaching in his first major volume. It provides remarkable insights on Hegel's complex work as a whole as well as serving as a sure guide for every chapter and for virtually every paragraph. Even the many endnotes are very valuable. It should be made readily available to every undergraduate who has to read any part of the Phenomenology."—Dr. Donald C. Lindenmuth, Pennsylvania State University

Peter Kalkavage is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he has taught for thirty years. He is the author of numerous articles on philosophy. He translated Plato's Timaeus and co-translated Plato's Phaedo and Sophist.

“In this extraordinary meditation, Eva Brann takes us to the fierce core of Heraclitus's vision and shows us the music of his language. The thought and beautiful prose in The Logos of Heraclitus are a delight.”—Barry Mazur, Harvard University

“An engaged solitary, an inward-turned observer of the world, inventor of the first of philosophical genres, the thought-compacted aphorism,” “teasingly obscure in reputation, but hard-hittingly clear in fact,” “now tersely mordant, now generously humane.”

Thus Eva Brann introduces Heraclitus—in her view, the West’s first philosopher.

The collected work of Heraclitus comprises 131 passages. Eva Brann sets out to understand Heraclitus as he is found in these passages and particularly in his key word, Logos, the order that is the cosmos.

“Whoever is captivated by the revelatory riddlings and brilliant obscurities of what remains of Heraclitus has to begin anew—accepting help, to be sure, from previous readings—in a spirit of receptivity and reserve. But essentially everyone must pester the supposed obscurantist until he opens up. Heraclitus is no less and no more pregnantly dark than an oracle…The upshot is that no interpretation has prevailed; every question is wide open.”

Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty-seven years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include Then and Now, Un-Willing, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).

"[The Magic Lantern of Marcel Proust] reduces the ungainly and intricately designed masterpiece to its shape, and with hardly a wasted word...The paragraphs on habit and memory are truly wonderful—wonderful as explication, as psychology, and as philosophy."—John Updike

"Almost everything Moss says seems to me right, illuminating, and new. This is the book of a mature and individual mind and sensibility, with a deep experience of moral, social, psychological, and aesthetic values which is rare among critics." —George D. Painter

"A moving and inspiring book. Moss clears away dark corners, clarifies motivations, and places the huge work within the reader's perspective. A book of great value to the scholar and the general reader." —Publishers Weekly

"Remembrance of Things Past is more than a novel; it is a work in which a single person's life is transformed into a mythology, with its own pantheon of gods, its own religious rituals, and its own moral laws. A total vision, it does not rely on any system outside itself for support. It is as if Dante had set out to write the Paradiso and the Inferno utilizing only the facts of his own existence without any reference to Christianity...Other novelists describe or invent worlds. Remembrance of Things Past is an entire universe created and interpreted by Marcel Proust." — from Chapter 1

"Moss lays out the sweeping claims and overarching structure of Remembrance of Things Past—the significance of Swann's Way and the Guermantes Way, or why there are such long party scenes—and is equally good at bringing to light all sorts of tiny, revealing details." — from the new Foreword by Damion Searls

Howard Moss was poetry editor of the New Yorker for almost forty years. He also wrote more than a dozen books of poetry, plays, criticism, and a book of arch parody-microbiographies of cultural figures, Instant Lives, illustrated by Edward Gorey.

Damion Searls is the author of What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going (stories) and has written for Harper’s, Bookforum, n+1, and The Believer. As a translator—of authors including Marcel Proust (On Reading)—he received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2012.

Written in 1159 and addressed to Thomas Becket, John of Salisbury's The Metalogicon presents—and defends—a thorough study of the liberal arts of grammar, logic, and rhetoric. The very name "Metalogicon," a coinage by the author, brings together the Greek meta (on behalf of) and logicon (logic or logical studies). Thus, in naming his text, he also explained it. With this lucid treatise on education, John of Salisbury urges a thorough grounding in the arts of words (oral and written) and reasoning, as these topics are addressed in grammar and logic.

The Metalogicon (Contents in brief)

Prologue — Occasion, Purpose, and General Nature of the Work

Book I — The Trivium and Grammar

Book II — Logic Proper: General Observations

Book III — Logic: Contents (Porphyry and Aristotle)

Book IV — Logic: Contents and Truth

The study of grammar in John of Salisbury's time included familiarization with the ancient Latin classics, and involved not only a reading of them but also an analysis and imitation of their style. It thus anticipated the humanism of the Renaissance. The study of logic, as it was then pursued, comprised learning and putting into practice the principles of Aristotle's Organon.

In The Metalogicon, a leading medieval scholar summarizes the essential lineaments of existing twelfth-century education, describes his experiences while a student at Chartres and Paris, and affords personal glimpses of such contemporary intellectual leaders as Peter Abelard, Gilbert de la Porrée, and Thierry of Chartres.

Written more than 950 years ago, The Metalogicon still possesses an invigorating originality that invites readers to refresh themselves at the sources of Western learning.

"Grammar is accordingly first among the liberal arts. Necessary for the young, gratifying to the old, and an agreeable solace in solitude, it alone, of all branches of learning, has more utility than show." — Quintilian, quoted by John of Salisbury in The Metalogicon

John of Salisbury (ca. 1115–1176) studied with almost all the great masters of the early twelfth century, served as an aid to Thomas à Becket, was friend to Pope Hadrian IV, an annoyance if not an enemy to England's King Henry II, and died as Bishop of Chartres.

Daniel D. McGarry was a professor of history at Saint Louis University. He died in 1999. His translation of The Metalogicon was the first to appear in any modern language.

“This collection of Eva Brann’s is one of the most valuable aids a lover of Plato could have.”—Walter Nicgorski, University of Notre Dame

In fourteen essays, Eva Brann talks with readers about the conversations Socrates engages in with his fellow Athenians. In doing so, she shows how Plato’s dialogues and the timeless matters they address remain important to us today.

The Music of the Republic “will establish [Eva Brann] as one of the great readers and interpreters of the Platonic dialogues in modern times.”—Bruce Foltz, Eckerd College

“It is a wonder and a delight to be led by Eva Brann through the Socratic conversations…Those who do not know the Republic will be initiated into its treasures. Those who believe that it is a great book will understand better what they already know. And all who teach the dialogues will find their souls expanded in the presence of this most generous teacher.” —Ann Hartle, Emory University

“In these wonderfully insightful essays, Eva Brann helps us hear the music of Plato’s dialogues and join the conversation…I found myself filled with envy for her students and happy, with this book, to now be included among them.”—Anthony T. Kronman, Yale University

"The title essay of this collection is a miniature masterpiece, one of the most seminal writings of our time on Plato's Republic."—John Sallis, Pennsylvania State University

Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for over fifty years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, Un-Willing, Then and Now, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).

"Joe Sachs's translation brings the reader quickly and deeply into The Odyssey."—Nickolas Pappas

This new translation powerfully presents The Odyssey with a modern clarity that suits the vigorous narrative of Odysseus's perilous ten-year voyage home to Ithaca. Joe Sachs, whose translations are known for being faithful to the original Greek, brings new layers of depth, understanding, and interest to the epic.

"I have never met a translation of The Odyssey I didn't like." Thus Joe Sachs invites us to partake in his new rendering of Homer's epic.

"The poem appears in as many guises as Odysseus himself…There is so much power and grace in Homer's poetry that a reader responsive to a few partial strands of it can find in them a wholly satisfying experience and every translator whose work I have read has detected and magnified something in the original that I had not found by other means…Any newly encountered translation of a poem is an opportunity to participate in a fresh reading through a new pair of eyes, and while those readings cannot all be taken in at one view, each one adds something to the sight that occupies the foreground at any moment. It is not because a new translation is needed that I now offer this one, but because every new translation is a contribution that enhances the self-revelation of a poem of boundless variety…The friction of one translation against another can be the quickest way for a path to light up for a reader's own entry into the work. And this invitation to use the available translations not as rivals but in partnership gives license to any single translator to sacrifice part of the meaning and weight of any word or phrase to capture more effectively whatever seems to matter most in it…There comes a point when your best recourse is to rely on no one's judgment but your own, to confront the intelligence, imagination, and heart we know as Homer on your own, and to join the fun."—from the Introduction by Joe Sachs

"The transparent, natural language of Joe Sachs's translation brings the reader quickly and deeply into The Odyssey. Behind that language, both intimate and clear, we sense his sure feel for The Odyssey's people and places. And as much as the scenes of the poem vary, and the language with them, we detect the idea of The Odyssey that Sachs articulates in his valuable afterword: that Homer can begin his story in the middle of things because we are always in the midst of The Odyssey's action no matter where we start reading—because the poem's sub­ject is the discovery of what is essentially human, a discovery that humans are always, wonderingly, in the middle of."—Nickolas Pappas, Professor of Philosophy at City College and the Graduate Center, CUNY

"Joe Sachs’s translation of Aristotle's Poetics is to me the most vibrant version of a well-thumbed text that is still the screenwriter's bible. So I am not surprised that he brings the same freshness to the world’s greatest long-voyage-home-to-a-lost-love story. This Odyssey is exciting reading for the general reader and essential reading for teachers and students who can now 'hear' how Homer’s epic might have been heard by listeners in times past. Let's hope Joe Sachs is now working on the Iliad."—Eoghan Harris, Irish National Film School (Dun Laoghaire Institute)

Joe Sachs taught for thirty years in the Great Books program at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland. He has translated numerous works by Aristotle and Plato.

"A well-written, well-researched, and engaging introduction to contemporary Syria."—Library Journal (starred review)

"American travel writing at its most generous and intrepid."—Adam Kirsch

"A nuanced appreciation of the sights, sounds, and historical densities that make Syria one of the most rewarding countries on Earth. Like the great cities of Damascus and Aleppo, The Other Side of the Mirror is a thing of layered beauty and a source of endless surprise and stimulation."—Ben Downing

"Engaging…I can vouch for the accuracy of her descriptions."—Malise Ruthven, New York Review of Books

"Brooke Allen's The Other Side of the Mirror is a hugely welcome piece of travel literature…Anyone with a curiosity about this fascinating nation will be well served."—Tom Bissell

Brooke Allen first traveled to Syria in 2009, expecting it to be much as American news media routinely depicted it—an ultra-conservative Muslim society, a rogue nation committed to an anti-American stance. She found, instead, a welcoming and captivating country where she and her family were treated with courtesy and gentleness.

She soon returned for a more leisurely trip through Syria's rich historical and archaeological treasures: the ancient cities of Aleppo and Damascus, the great Crusader castles, the Bronze Age ruins of Ebla and Mari, the Greco-Roman cities of Palmyra and Apamea. With her keen and appreciative eye (and ear) Allen introduces us to Syria's people, culture, and history.

Published in spring of 2011 at the beginning of the Syrian Civil War, the book has taken on a new resonance.

Brooke Allen's critical writings appear frequently in the New York Times Book Review, the Atlantic, and the Nation. Her Twentieth-Century Attitudes was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Her most recent book is Moral Minority: Our Skeptical Founding Fathers.

"The psychiatrist's insight and the storyteller's skill offer an absorbing tale."—Elie Wiesel

"A book to read again and again with the same piety with which it has been written. A rare event in publishing: at once an accurate and documented historical study, and in the interpretation made by one of today's greatest psychologists of a strange and symbolic disease."—Primo Levi

The Parnas recreates the final days of Giuseppe Pardo Roques, the lay leader, or parnas, of the Sephardic Jewish community of Pisa, Italy, who was killed in his home by the Nazis in August, 1944. Pardo was a mentor to the author, and, indeed, he was a figure adored and celebrated not only by the Jews of Pisa but by the Christians as well. He was learned and generous, but he was also profoundly phobic. Animals terrified him: so much so that he almost never left his house—except to go to the synagogue—for fear of encountering stray dogs or cats. At the outbreak of World War II, Arieti fled to America where he became a renown psychiatrist. But the parnas, despite a wealth of connections that could have helped him escape, was too phobic to flee Pisa. On the morning of August 1, 1944, Nazi soldiers, searching for Pardo's fabled riches, entered his home. The soldiers found neither gold nor silver, but they did find the parnas, along with six fellow Jews whom he was sheltering and five Christian neighbors. All were murdered. In The Parnas, Arieti imagines what took place in the home, and in the mind, of this devout, kindly, and tormented man in the last days of his life, providing, in the process, an overview of Italian Jewry. Arieti hopes to show "that tragic times have a perfume of their own, and smiles of hope, and traces of charm, and offer olive branches and late warnings that may not be too late."

"This is one of the most extraordinary stories yet to reach us from the bitter ashes of Nazism…Dr. Arieti weaves his story so beautifully that to unravel it would mean losing its dramatic effect. Suffice it to say that God, Jews, Christians, fascism, cowardice, and bravery are discussed throughout the story in such a way that the reader is at once shaken and enlightened as the plot unfolds. It is like a parable, suffused with the dignity of both the parnas and the author…a work of art."—New York Times Book Review

From the Foreword by Rabbi Harold S. Kushner: "In this brief, deceptively simple narrative, Arieti has told the story of Giuseppe Pardo, parnas (lay leader) of his native community of Pisa, and of his death at the hands of the Nazis. Pardo was the leading citizen of a small Jewish community that produced more that its share of distinguished Jews. He was a learned man, familiar with Bible, Talmud, and secular subjects. He was a wealthy man, and charitable to Jew and non-Jew alike. (He ultimately met his death together with six fellow Jews and five gentiles who had sought the protection of his home.) And he was a profoundly neurotic man, who had an irrational fear of animals, especially dogs. When he walked in the streets of Pisa—which was not often because of his fears—he would swing a cane from side to side behind him to drive away the imaginary animals. The distinguished psychiatrist tells of his strange life and equally strange death."

When William Penn founded the colony of Pennsylvania in 1682, he created a visionary plan for its principal city, Philadelphia, and the immediate surrounding region. Over the past 325 years Penn's plan of the city has been modified by many individuals to reflect an evolving vision of a city both beautiful and practical.

The Planning of Center City Philadelphia: From William Penn to the Present traces these three centuries of planning history, from Penn's original concept to the design of the Benjamin Franklin Parkway—one of the significant monuments of the City Beautiful movement in the United States—to the mid-20th century urban renewal efforts that made Philadelphia a national leader in city planning and urban revitalization. Richly illustrated with historic maps and photographs, the book also includes brief biographical sketches of nine Philadelphians who have contributed significantly to the practice of city planning, including Paul Philippe Cret, Edmund N. Bacon, David A. Wallace, and Denise Scott Brown. Also included are five walking tours of Center City, where the results of this planning history can be seen and experienced most easily: Old City, Society Hill, City Hall East, City Hall West (Penn Center), and the Benjamin Franklin Parkway.

The tours contain easily readable maps as well as photographs and descriptions of the most significant architectural landmarks in each area.

John Andrew Gallery has been a member of Philadelphia's community development and historic preservation community for close to fifty years. From 2002 to 2013, he was Executive Director of the Preservation Alliance for Greater Philadelphia, where he advocated for the city's historic built environment. He is the author of Philadelphia Architecture, A Guide to the City and editor of Sacred Sites of Center City, also available from Paul Dry Books.

"Clear, accessible, and very informative…a successful and inviting text."—Review of Metaphysics

"If only there were more books like this one! Jacob Howland's The Republic: The Odyssey of Philosophy opens up the wealth of the experience of reading Plato's Republic by carefully demonstrating how the dialogue cuts across the boundaries of philosophy and literature…[It] will be an invaluable aid to those teachers who want to introduce their students to a Plato that goes beyond the shopworn problems of Platonism."—Peter Warnek, University of Oregon

In the Republic, Plato addresses the deepest questions about the human soul and human community, the proper objects of worship and reverence, the nature of philosophy, and the relationship between the philosopher and the political community. As presented in the Republic, Socratic philosophizing is eternally unfinished, paradoxical, and ambiguous. According to Jacob Howland, this openness allows for ever-fresh approaches to the questions Plato raises.

"Jacob Howland's book is an engaging, readable, and extremely suggestive addition to the literature on Plato's magnum opus."—Ancient Philosophy

"In this concise, stimulating and provocative book Howland is in effect dealing with the central and persistent problem about the interpretation of the Republic : what is its purpose, and how do we establish what that is?"—Polis

"I know of no other book devoted to the Republic that so straightforwardly furnishes a healthy orientation to Plato's philosophic intentions. It will be of unqualified interest both to first-time students of the Republic and to their teachers. Yet it will also intrigue those looking for further, responsible light on apparently well-worn paths. A most inviting, helpful reading."—St. John's Review

Jacob Howland is McFarlin Professor of Philosophy at the University of Tulsa, where he teaches in the Honors Program as well as in philosophy. He has written and lectured on the work of Plato, Aristotle, Xenophon, and Hegel, among others. He is the author of The Paradox of Political Philosophy: Socrates' Philosophic Trial, Kierkegaard and Socrates, and Plato and the Talmud.

"Gabriel Zaid is a marvelously elegant and playful writer—a cosmopolitan critic with sound judgment and a light touch. He is a jewel of Latin American letters, which is no small thing to be. Read him—you'll see."—Paul Berman

"Mr. Zaid's goal is to capture the variety of anxieties that beset literary fame-seekers, and he does so with a mocking cleverness. A serious theme, though, runs through his book—that with the possible exception of a few agonized painters and musicians, no one can quite touch the exquisite torment of the literary artist as he faces the hazards of fate."— Wall Street Journal

In So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid explored the predicament in which all "unrepentant readers" find themselves today, when "the human race publishes a book every thirty seconds"—more books than any of us can even contemplate, much less read.

Now, in The Secret of Fame, this "playful celebrant of literary proliferation" (New Yorker) examines the methods and motivations of literary fame-seekers from ancient times to the present day. He shines a critical, yet humorous, light on today's book world, whose denizens often find it "more interesting to talk about writers than to read them," and he takes a serious look at the desire for fame and the disillusionment that can engulf those who achieve it. Along the way, Zaid pokes fun at literary and scholarly traditions, including the unwritten rules of quoting other authors, the ascendancy of the footnote, and the practice of publishing "foolishly complete works."

More important to Zaid than the fame of a piece of writing or of its writer is the miracle of great writing. "Fame concentrates society's attention on a few names. This can be a good thing. It keeps us reading the great books, keeps us revisiting the great works of art. But fame can also be a bad thing. It keeps us focused on names, not the living experiences of great works," which "focus our minds, speak to the best in us, and spark our imagination." Though the hunger for fame is not going away, the deeper quest on the part of the maker (as writer, artist, actor, etc.) is to make us "feel more alive, more engaged in meaningful conversation with life." He concludes, "Nobody knows where masterpieces come from. Miracles are miracles. They catch us before we catch them. But we’re not trapped by them—we're set free."

Gabriel Zaid's poetry, essays, social and cultural criticism, and business writings have been widely published throughout the Spanish-speaking world. Zaid is the founder and manager of a consulting firm in Mexico City involved with the publishing business.

Natasha Wimmer is an editor and a translator in New York City. Her recent translations include The Savage Detectives and 2666 by Roberto Bolano andThe Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa.

"Gabriel Zaid . . . is a jewel of Latin American letters, which is no small thing to be. Read him—you'll see."—Paul Berman

The first appearance in English of the poetry of Gabriel Zaid, this book comprises forty-two poems (in both English and the original Spanish), translated by a variety of English-speaking poets. Renowned in Mexico as one of his country's leading writers, Zaid has published two books in English, So Many Books and The Secret of Fame (both from Paul Dry Books).

Late Again
Translated by Eliot Weinberger

It's so hard to coordinate:
one hand over your head
like a halo
the other
perpendicular
to your navel.

Nevertheless it's a universal law:
people begin soaping
at their bellies
while other worlds
turn around in their heads.

Think with your stomach,
said the happy Buddha.
But we
ruminate with our heads.

Gabriel Zaid's poetry, essays, social and cultural criticism, and business writings have been widely published throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He lives in Mexico City, Mexico, with the artist Basia Batorska, her paintings, three cats, and ten thousand books. Paul Dry Books has published his So Many Books and The Secret of Fame.

"In 1611, Kepler wrote an essay wondering why snowflakes always had perfect, sixfold symmetry. It's a simple enough question, but one that no one had ever asked before and one that couldn't actually be answered for another three centuries. Still, in trying to work out an answer, Kepler raised some fascinating questions about physics, math, and biology, and now you can watch in wonder as a great scientific genius unleashes the full force of his intellect on a seemingly trivial question, complete with new illustrations and essays to put it all in perspective."—io9, from their list "10 Amazing Science Books That Reveal The Wonders Of The Universe"

When snow began to fall while he was walking across the Charles Bridge in Prague late in 1610, the eminent astronomer Johannes Kepler asked himself the following question: Why do snowflakes, when they first fall, and before they are entangled into larger clumps, always come down with six corners and with six radii tufted like feathers?

In his effort to answer this charming and never-before-asked question about snowflakes, Kepler delves into the nature of beehives, peapods, pomegranates, five-petaled flowers, the spiral shape of the snail's shell, and the formative power of nature itself. While he did not answer his original question—it remained a mystery for another three hundred years—he did find an occasion for deep and playful thought.

"A most suitable book for any and all during the winter and holiday seasons is a reissue of a holiday present by the great mathematician and astronomer Johannes Kepler…Even the endnotes in this wonderful little book are interesting and educationally fun to read."—Jay Pasachoff, The Key Reporter

New English translation by Jacques Bromberg

Latin text on facing pages

An essay, "The Delights of a Roving Mind" by Owen Gingerich

An essay, "On The Six-Cornered Snowflake" by Guillermo Bleichmar

Snowflake illustrations by Capi Corrales Rodriganez

John Frederick Nims' poem "The Six-Cornered Snowflake"

Notes by Jacques Bromberg and Guillermo Bleichmar

Johannes Kepler (1571-1631) was an important figure in the seventeenth century astronomical revolution. He is best known for his eponymous laws of planetary motion. Kepler wrote: "If there is anything that can bind the heavenly mind of man to this dusty exile of our earthly home…then it is verily the enjoyment of the mathematical sciences and astronomy."

"A splendid new edition."—James Campbell, Times Literary Supplement

"Xan Fielding was a gifted, many-sided, courageous and romantic figure, at the same time civilized and Bohemian, and his thoughtful cast of mind was leavened by humour, spontaneous gaiety, and a dash of recklessness. Almost any stretch of his life might be described as a picaresque interlude."—Patrick Leigh Fermor

During the Second World War, Xan Fielding served for two years as an officer in the British Special Operations Executive on German-occupied Crete, where he ran an intelligence network in cooperation with the Cretan resistance movement.

Seven years later, Fielding returned to Crete to spend a year traveling in the island's White Mountains (the "stronghold" of the title), revisiting sites of his wartime exploits and seeking out former comrades who had returned to their peacetime lives. His sojourn resulted in this remarkable memoir, a documentary-like record of days spent among Cretan peasants blended with history and literature—a travelogue like no other.

The Stronghold is a blending of "history and culture with experience, but one wedded to fidelity. Fielding never arrives; there is no great journey of self. There is just a question answered about the war and youth…he can't shake Crete, as no man can shake the formative experience of his youth."—from the new foreword by Robert Messenger

"This book of mine does not claim to be a serious sociological work; it is simply the account of a more or less carefree year spent among people who seem to fit so perfectly into their startling surroundings that at times I imagined it was not the landscape that conditioned their lives but their personalities that had conditioned the landscape."—Xan Fielding

Xan Fielding (1918–1991) was a British writer and traveler, and a lifelong friend of Patrick Leigh Fermor, who served with him in Crete during World War II. (The introduction to Fermor's A Time of Gifts is written as a "Letter to Xan Fielding.") Fielding also translated many novels from French, most notably, The Bridge on the River Kwai and The Planet of the Apes.

Robert Messenger is the books editor of the Wall Street Journal.

"A work of astonishing illumination and delight . . . so edgy, bright and subversive about women's inner lives and experience."—Francine Prose, New York Times Book Review

"The subtlety of James, the comedy of Spark, the penetrating—and the deep, unflinching—eye of Jane Austen."—Kirkus Reviews

*A New York Times Notable Book*

In The Summer House trilogy, three very different women, with three very distinct perspectives, narrate three very witty novels concerning one disastrous wedding in the offing.

The Clothes in the Wardrobe: Nineteen-year-old Margaret feels more trepidation than joy at the prospect of her marriage to forty-year-old Syl.

The Skeleton in the Cupboard: Syl’s mother, Mrs. Monro, doesn’t know quite what to make of her son’s life, but she knows Margaret should not marry him.

The Fly in the Ointment: And then there’s Lili, the free spirit who is determined that the wedding shall not happen, no matter the consequences.

"Brilliant…a little masterpiece."—Chicago Sun-Times

"Beautiful…one of the best short novels he has written."—New York Times Book Review

"Can rank with the best of Mann's writing."—The Boston Globe

"Magnificent…one of the greatest bits of writing which one of the world's greatest writers has ever given us."—Chicago Herald-American

"Brilliant…one of those splendid novelettes which in this reviewer's opinion represent the very essence of Mr. Mann's literary art."—Saturday Review of Literature

"Thomas Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and less accurate English version done by Helen Lowe-Porter for the original publication.)…What is especially noteworthy about The Tables of the Law among Mann's fictions is its playfulness." —Robert Alter, London Review of Books

"His senses were hot, and so he yearned for spirituality, purity, and holiness—the invisible, which seemed to him spiritual, holy, and pure."

Thus Thomas Mann introduces Moses in The Tables of the Law, the Nobel Prize winner's retelling of the prophet's life. Invited in 1943 to write this story as a defense of the Decalogue, Mann reveals how strange and forbidding Moses' task was. As "the Lawgiver"—endowed with the wrists and hands of a stonemason—engraves the tablets, so he hews the souls of his people:

"Into the stone of the mountain I carved the ABC of human behavior,but it shall also be carved into your flesh and blood, Israel…"

Mann's tale of the ethical founding and molding of a people sharply rebukes the Nazis for their intended destruction of the moral code set down in the Ten Commandments. But does his famous irony and authorial license mock or enhance the Biblical account of the shaping of the Jewish people? You know the Bible story. Now read Mann's version—it will grip you anew.

Newly translated from the German by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann.

"To present the foundation of law for half the world is no simple task. The Tables of the Law is a historical title following Moses as he is tasked by God to present the ten commandments, providing a human and much different insight on the role of Moses as the Prophet of God. Expertly translated, The Tables of the Law is a solid addition to any literary fiction collection."—Midwest Book Review

Thomas Mann (1875–1955) won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. His many works include Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Confessions of Felix Krull.

Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann co-authored a biography of the pianist Rudolf Serkin and have together translated Nietzsche's Human, All Too Human.

Michael Wood is the Charles Barnwell Straut Class of 1923 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Princeton University.

Finalist for the National Book Award and the PEN/Faulkner Award

"This small novel works like a laser beam, penetrating the American experience with searing and concentrated intensity."—Los Angeles Times

"The Tree of Life is one of the most powerful, original, and disturbing books that I have read in a long time. Hugh Nissenson has caught the voice of the old-time diary keeper just exactly. It's uncanny, marvelous, so direct and deceptively simple that you know what pains he has taken.The book is a work of art and no one who reads it will ever forget it."—David McCullough

"It is a tale more moving and haunting than one thinks it can possibly be."—The Village Voice

The year is 1811. Having suffered a loss of faith, Thomas Keene, Congregational minister from New England, abandons the East and moves to Richland County on the Ohio frontier. The Tree of Life is Keene's journal: stories and jottings appear alongside accounting entries and poems, coarse jokes and sermons, woodcuts and maps. In this "Waste Book," Keene conveys his longing for a young widow, his fascination with John Chapman (Johnny Appleseed), and his resolve in the face of the growing enmity between his fellow settlers and the Delaware Indians. The Tree of Life reveals a man of intellect and passion as he confronts the raw country.

"The juxtaposition of horror and information perfectly captures the genius of this imagined diary…Scarcely a word is wasted. Hardly an aspect of the struggle to found a new civilization remains untouched. The Tree of Life dramatizes, sometimes with almost unbearable intensity, the American dream and its attendant nightmare."—Time Magazine

"[The Tree of Life] confronts us where our deepest and most disturbing fantasies intersect with our sense of history…Given the richness of its texture and the strength of whichever of its threads one pursues, one can imagine that its force will grow and take an ever tighter grip on our understanding of the American past. It is a book that plants deep seeds."—New York Times

"A beautifully paced book…[it] allows the shocks and resonances to gather slowly, the way they do in life when you are taking everything in, but cannot yet allow yourself to admit how much you've been affected…In thrall to the powers Mr. Nissenson has invoked and wielded with such fearful symmetry—the powers of documentation and of vision—we can only read on."—Margo Jefferson, from her new Introduction

Hugh Nissenson (1933–2013) was born in New York City. After graduating from Swarthmore College, he published his first short story in Harper's Magazine in 1958. He taught writing at Yale, Barnard, and Auburn Theological Seminary, and was the author of a memoir, three collections of short stories and journals, and many novels.

Margo Jefferson is a Pulitzer Prize-winning cultural critic. She has been a staff writer for The New York Times and Newsweek; her reviews and essays have appeared in New York Magazine, Grand Street, Vogue, Harper's and many other publications.

Who sets language policy today? Who made whom the grammar doctor? Lacking the equivalent of l'Académie française, we English speakers must find our own way looking for guidance or vindication in source after source. McGuffey's Readers introduced nineteenth-century students to "correct" English. Strunk and White's Elements of Style and William Safire's column, "On Language," provide help on diction and syntax to contemporary writers and speakers. Sister Miriam Joseph's book, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, invites the reader into a deeper understanding—one that includes rules, definitions, and guidelines, but whose ultimate end is to transform the reader into a liberal artist.

A liberal artist seeks the perfection of the human faculties. The liberal artist begins with the language arts, the trivium, which is the basis of all learning because it teaches the tools for reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Thinking underlies all these activities. Many readers will recognize elements of this book: parts of speech, syntax, propositions, syllogisms, enthymemes, logical fallacies, scientific method, figures of speech, rhetorical technique, and poetics. The Trivium, however, presents these elements within a philosophy of language that connects thought, expression, and reality.

"Trivium" means the crossroads where the three branches of language meet. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, students studied and mastered this integrated view of language. Regrettably, modern language teaching keeps the parts without the vision of the whole. Inspired by the possibility of helping students "acquire mastery over the tools of learning" Sister Miriam Joseph and other teachers at Saint Mary's College designed and taught a course on the trivium for all first year students. The Trivium resulted from that noble endeavor.

The liberal artist travels in good company. Sister Miriam Joseph frequently cites passages from William Shakespeare, John Milton, Plato, the Bible, Homer, and other great writers. The Paul Dry Books edition of The Trivium provides new graphics and notes to make the book accessible to today's readers. Sister Miriam Joseph told her first audience that "the function of the trivium is the training of the mind for the study of matter and spirit, which constitute the sum of reality. The fruit of education is culture, which Mathew Arnold defined as 'the knowledge of ourselves and the world.'" May this noble endeavor lead many to that end.

"Is the trivium, then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe that it should be."—Dorothy L. Sayers

"The Trivium is a highly recommended and welcome contribution to any serious and dedicated writer's reference collection."—Midwest Book Review

"[A] delightfully literary and eclectic memoir about the manifold joys of birding…Cashwell is a storyteller. A very literate, observant, insightful storyteller."—The Bloomsbury Review

"Reading this book was the next best thing to wandering in the woods with Peter Cashwell hoping to add a rufous-capped warbler to my life list. No, it was better—I could laugh out loud in delight as I turned the pages without fear of scaring the birds."—Katharine Weber, author of The Music Lesson

"An entertaining and witty meditation on birding."—Library Journal

All around the world, birds are the subject of intense, even spiritual, fascination, but relatively few people see the word bird as a verb. Peter Cashwell is one who does, and with good reason: He birds (because he can't help it), and he teaches grammar (because he's paid to). An English teacher by profession and an avid birder by inner calling, Cashwell has written a whimsical and critical book about his many obsessions—birds, birders, language, literature, parenting, pop culture, and the human race.

Cashwell lovingly but irreverently explores the practice of birding, from choosing a field guide to luring vultures out of shrubbery, and gives his own eclectic travelogue of some of the nation's finest bird habitats. Part memoir, part natural history, part apology, The Verb 'To Bird' will enlighten and entertain anyone who's ever wandered around wet fields at the crack of dawn with dog-eared field guides crushed against the granola bars in their pockets. But you don't have to know the field marks of an indigo bunting to appreciate Cashwell's experiences with non-lending libraries, venomous insects, sports marketing, and animated Christmas specials.

"Birders as well as all others interested in birds will enjoy this witty and informative meditation. Declaring himself a victim of birding compulsive disorder, Cashwell, an English teacher in Virginia, does an excellent job of describing his fascination with observing and listening to birds."—Publishers Weekly

"Peter Cashwell possesses one of the rarest of all qualities in a nature writer: an intelligent wit."—Robert Finch, co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing

"A fine literary ramble and a good laugh to boot—no mean feat in a genre that perhaps takes itself to seriously."—John Hanson Mitchell, Editor of Sanctuary, Journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society

"Writing with humor and gentle environmental rants, Cashwell does for his beloved birds what Bill Bryson did for the Appalachian Trail in his best-selling A Walk in the Woods."—Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star

"[Cashwell] does not stint on the details that matter to birders, but it's his ability to translate the joy of the experience for the non-birder that extends the book's appeal beyond the Nature/Ornithology shelves."—The Charlotte Observer

"Cashwell plays with the language as joyfully and skillfully as a musician coaxes melodies from his instrument."—Rocky Mount Telegram

Birds first captured Peter Cashwell's attention when his mother hung an avian mobile over his crib. He was born in Raleigh, N.C., grew up in Chapel Hill, and graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he took every creative writing course permitted by the English department (and one that wasn't). Cashwell has worked at lots of different jobs—radio announcer, rock musician, comic-book critic, improv comedy accompanist. Now he teaches English and speech at Woodberry Forest School in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

"[A] delightfully literary and eclectic memoir about the manifold joys of birding…Cashwell is a storyteller. A very literate, observant, insightful storyteller."—The Bloomsbury Review

"Reading this book was the next best thing to wandering in the woods with Peter Cashwell hoping to add a rufous-capped warbler to my life list. No, it was better—I could laugh out loud in delight as I turned the pages without fear of scaring the birds."—Katharine Weber, author of The Music Lesson

"An entertaining and witty meditation on birding."—Library Journal

All around the world, birds are the subject of intense, even spiritual, fascination, but relatively few people see the word bird as a verb. Peter Cashwell is one who does, and with good reason: He birds (because he can't help it), and he teaches grammar (because he's paid to). An English teacher by profession and an avid birder by inner calling, Cashwell has written a whimsical and critical book about his many obsessions—birds, birders, language, literature, parenting, pop culture, and the human race.

Cashwell lovingly but irreverently explores the practice of birding, from choosing a field guide to luring vultures out of shrubbery, and gives his own eclectic travelogue of some of the nation's finest bird habitats. Part memoir, part natural history, part apology, The Verb 'To Bird' will enlighten and entertain anyone who's ever wandered around wet fields at the crack of dawn with dog-eared field guides crushed against the granola bars in their pockets. But you don't have to know the field marks of an indigo bunting to appreciate Cashwell's experiences with non-lending libraries, venomous insects, sports marketing, and animated Christmas specials.

"Birders as well as all others interested in birds will enjoy this witty and informative meditation. Declaring himself a victim of birding compulsive disorder, Cashwell, an English teacher in Virginia, does an excellent job of describing his fascination with observing and listening to birds."—Publishers Weekly

"Peter Cashwell possesses one of the rarest of all qualities in a nature writer: an intelligent wit."—Robert Finch, co-editor of The Norton Book of Nature Writing

"A fine literary ramble and a good laugh to boot—no mean feat in a genre that perhaps takes itself to seriously."—John Hanson Mitchell, Editor of Sanctuary, Journal of the Massachusetts Audubon Society

"Writing with humor and gentle environmental rants, Cashwell does for his beloved birds what Bill Bryson did for the Appalachian Trail in his best-selling A Walk in the Woods."—Fredericksburg Free-Lance Star

"[Cashwell] does not stint on the details that matter to birders, but it's his ability to translate the joy of the experience for the non-birder that extends the book's appeal beyond the Nature/Ornithology shelves."—The Charlotte Observer

"Cashwell plays with the language as joyfully and skillfully as a musician coaxes melodies from his instrument."—Rocky Mount Telegram

Birds first captured Peter Cashwell's attention when his mother hung an avian mobile over his crib. He was born in Raleigh, N.C., grew up in Chapel Hill, and graduated from the University of North Carolina, where he took every creative writing course permitted by the English department (and one that wasn't). Cashwell has worked at lots of different jobs—radio announcer, rock musician, comic-book critic, improv comedy accompanist. Now he teaches English and speech at Woodberry Forest School in the foothills of Virginia's Blue Ridge Mountains.

"When push comes to shove, Katniss Everdeen has nothing on Inas, daughter of Daidalos."—Betsy Bird

Inas leaps at adventure. She dives to the bottom of the Aegean Sea to harvest sponges and somersaults over charging bulls in front of thousands of people. Best of all, she soars from cliffs wearing the glider-wings her father builds in secret, safe from the prying eyes of their neighbors, who think flying is sorcery.

When Princess Ariadne seeks Inas's help to hatch a plan with Theseus, a young Greek who's held prisoner in the palace's Labyrinth, Inas doesn't realize how much adventure she is taking on. In fact, Inas suddenly finds that she may be about to lose everything she holds dear on the island of Crete.

A fun, fast-paced retelling of the Greek myths of Icarus and Theseus, this 1934 Newbery Honor book was ahead of its time and is sure to find lots of fans among today's readers.

Erick Berry was the pen name of Allena Champlin (1892-1974), an award-winning author and illustrator. She was born in New Bedford, Massachusetts, studied art in Paris, and spent time in Africa. She wrote nonfiction about life in Africa as well as historical fiction. She was married to author Herbert Best and illustrated many of his books in addition to her own.

Betsy Bird is Evanston Public Library's Collection Development Manager. She has served on the Newbery Award committee and written for The Horn Book. Currently, she runs the blog "A Fuse 8 Production" on the School Library Journal website.

Adapted from "Zinsser on Friday," The American Scholar's National Magazine Award–Winning Essay Series

For nineteen months William Zinsser, author of the best-selling On Writing Well and many other books, wrote a weekly column for the website of the American Scholar magazine. This cornucopia was devoted mainly to culture and the arts, the craft of writing, and travels to remote places, along with the movies, American popular song, email, multitasking, baseball, Central Park, Tina Brown, Pauline Kael, Steve Martin, and other complications of modern life. Written with elegance and humor, these pieces are now collected in The Writer Who Stayed.

"If you value vintage journalism of an old-fashioned vividness and integrity please, please read this book."—Wall Street Journal

"Our 'endlessly supple' English language will, Zinsser says, 'do anything you ask it to do, if you treat it well. Try it and see.' Try him and see craftsmanship."—George F. Will

"Zinsser—who, with On Writing Well, taught a whole lot of us how to set down a clean English sentence—last year won a National Magazine Award for his Friday web columns in The American Scholar. They're now in a collection that's completely charming, impeccably polished, and Strunk-and-White-ishly brief. He's the youngest 90-year-old you'll read this week."—New York Magazine

William Zinsser is a lifelong journalist and nonfiction writer—he began his career on the New York Herald Tribune in 1946—and is also a teacher, best known for his book On Writing Well, a companion held in affection by three generations of writers, reporters, editors, teachers, and students. His 17 other books range from memoir (Writing Places) to travel (American Places), jazz (Mitchell & Ruff), American popular song (Easy to Remember), baseball (Spring Training) and the craft of writing (Writing to Learn). During the 1970s he was at Yale University, where he was master of Branford College and taught the influential nonfiction workshop that would start many writers and editors on their careers. He has taught at the New School, in New York, his hometown, and at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

These two long essays make up a short book, one full of depth and knowledge, in which Eva Brann gets at the roots of our thinking—without tearing things apart.

Then

In the first essay, Brann parses out the schema and meaning of Herodotus's The History (The Persian Wars). She writes that Herodotus worked by indirection. Giving a full account of the Persians and the peoples who constituted their empire—and whose empire encircled the Greeks (thus the "Greek center")—Herodotus delineates the essential difference between the Barbarians and the Greeks. This difference Brann calls Athens' "elusive essence," its freedom contrasting with the slavery upon which the Persian empire depended.

Now

In the second essay, the author delves into what it means for a person to unite a disposition toward conservatism with a capacity to reiterate and rehearse events, scenes, and dramas in "the conservatory of the imagination." To uncover the meanings and consequences of this union—this imaginative conservatism—and the type of soul to which it applies, Brann offers twelve perspectives, starting with "Temperamental Disposition" and ending with "Eccentric Centrality" (without ever explicitly focusing on politics). Join her and you'll find both delight and education.

Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty-seven years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include Un-Willing, The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).

"One of our finest writers."—Annie Dillard

"What a pleasure, and how much there is to learn from this short book!" —Denise Levertov

"A deeply moving, exquisitely written book."—Washington Post Book World

"Exceptionally serene prose…leveled with sharp observation and subtle wit…neither history nor fiction , but rather a kind of reimagining of the past."—Michael Dirda, Smithsonian Magazine

"We have had many straight biographies of writers in recent years…that leave their subjects curiously diminished. Mr. McConkey's achievement…is to send the reader back to the Russian master with renewed wonder."—Harvey Shapiro, The New York Times

In 1890 Anton Chekhov—thirty years old and already a famous writer—left his home and family in Moscow to travel 6,500 miles across Russia, over frozen land and sea, by train, ferry, and troika, to visit the island of Sakhalin, a penal colony off the coast of Siberia.

What was Chekhov seeking by undertaking such a harrowing journey to that God-forsaken island? Ostensibly, he went in his role of physician, to observe the medical conditions and to collect statistical information (Indeed, Chekhov wrote that during his stay he filled out more than 10,000 census cards based on interviews with prisoners and exiles.) But his motivation, as James McConkey reflects, was more likely escape: escape from the sense of confinement that fame, fortune, and family had brought—a search, in other words, for freedom in a place where no one was free.

In To a Distant Island, McConkey recreates Chekhov's remarkable journey in all of its complexity, while interweaving a journey of his own. As McConkey guides us through the Russian wilderness and into the soul of this great writer, he uncovers the peculiar and hidden forces that shaped two lives.

"The genre in which McConkey does his best writing has no name. He invented it…What McConkey does is to create meaning out of ordinary life. He'll take a tiny incident…and by linking it through memory with a series of past events, he'll create what is not exactly a story but a pattern in time. By then the incident is no longer small; it has become the focus for a revelation…His books should be famous." —Noel Perrin, U.S.A. Today

James McConkey is the author of Crossroads, The Tree House Confessions, The Novels of E.M. Forster, and Court of Memory (a continuing biography that appeared serially in various magazines, primarily The New Yorker), and many other books. He is Goldwin Smith Professor of English Literature Emeritus at Cornell University.

Jay Parini is Axinn Professor of English at Middlebury College. He is the author of The Last Station: A Novel of Tolstoy's Last Year and Robert Frost: A Life and many other works of fiction, criticism, poetry, and biography.

Since ancient times, philosophers have written about "the will." But the will is more than a philosophic and scholarly topic. In our everyday speech, what do we mean when we speak of the "will"? Will-words turn up everywhere in the English language. We make wills. We exert our willpower. We are willful at times but merely willing at others. Above all, will is there a hundred times a day, when we use the auxiliary verb "will" to express our intentions or expectations for the future, or simply to indicate the future tense.

Yet it takes only a moment's reflection to see that there's a tremendous range of meaning here, and so something to think about. Moreover, all of us have wondered now and then, probably both as children and as adults, whether we are really free, and whether being free means being able to do what we want or being free of wants and desires or something else entirely. That is, we've all wrestled with the issue of free will in our informal, non-scholarly ways. Finally, we've probably all asked ourselves whether people who talk about will and willpower are all talking about the same thing or even talking sense.

These are all among the issues that Eva Brann puts at the center of Un-Willing. She takes the whole range of questions about the will that are implicit in our everyday lives and everyday thinking, articulates them, shows us how they have been dealt with within the philosophic tradition and contemporary scientific thought—and then wrestles with them herself.

"Eva Brann has a true aptitude for felicitous expression, and one can feel through her prose the presence of a great and patient teacher."—Dennis L. Sepper, University of Dallas, author of Understanding Imagination

Eva Brann is a member of the senior faculty at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where she has taught for fifty-seven years. She is a recipient of the National Humanities Medal. Her other books include The Logos of Heraclitus, Feeling Our Feelings, Homage to Americans, Open Secrets / Inward Prospects, The Music of the Republic, and Homeric Moments (all published by Paul Dry Books).

"Part detective story, part social commentary, part intellectual autobiography, part philosophical analysis, this is a jury book unlike any other."—Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law and former dean, Yale Law School

"[Norma Thompson] teaches us, brilliantly and painlessly, why judging, as opposed to simply knowing, is an essential part of a responsible human existence, recounting the trials and crimes and moral dilemmas of antiquity and classical tradition in a stunningly original reading."—Abraham D. Sofaer, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former United States district judge

In 2001, Norma Thompson served on the jury in a murder trial in New Haven, Connecticut. In Unreasonable Doubt, Thompson dramatically depicts the jury's deliberations, which ended in a deadlock. As foreperson, she pondered the behavior of some of her fellow jurors that led to the trial's termination in a hung jury. Blending personal memoir, social analysis, and literary criticism, she addresses the evasion of judgment she witnessed during deliberations and relates that evasion to contemporary political, social, and legal affairs. She then assembles an imaginary jury of Alexis de Tocqueville, Plato, and Jane Austen, among others, to show how the writings of these authors can help model responsible habits of deliberation.

Norma Thompson is senior lecturer in humanities and associate director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She is the author most recently of The Ship of State: Statecraft and Politics from Ancient Greece to Democratic America.

Up in the Hills "is too richly humorous, too full of wit, wisdom, gentle irony, salutary satire and the wonder which Spring offers to the welcoming eye to be read only by Dunsany's devotess."—New York Times

"No one can imitate Dunsany, and probably everyone who's ever read him has tried."—C. L. Moore

The hills stood for untameable things, things wild and no more to be checked by laws than the bright clouds that sparkled above them, and whose shadows all along the brows of the hills lay like a frown…the hills going right into cloudland.

What is there for an Irish lad to do when the old women of his village start leveling curses at visiting archaeologists, curses that may inadvertantly light upon innocent residents? Mickey Connor has a capital idea—he'll gather a small band of friends and take them up into the hills, to live there until the tumult in town subsides.

And how will they spend their time in the hills?

"Sure, I'd like to be a general," said Young Mickey. "Maybe we'll have a bit of war."

But the idyll that Mickey envisions is short-lived. For even in the hills of the newly independent Irish Free State, it's no easy thing, he discovers, to have "a bit of a war."

Yeats stayed in Dunsany's ancestral castle on numerous occasions and described Dunsany as "a man of genius…[with] a very fine style." Dunsany wrote his play The Glittering Gate at the request of Yeats, who wanted to "claim [Dunsany] for Ireland."

H. P. Lovecraft wrote of Dunsany, "To the truly imaginative he is a talisman and a key unlocking rich storehouses of dream." He also said of his own work: "There are my 'Poe' pieces and my 'Dunsany' pieces—but alas—where are my Lovecraft pieces?"

The critic S. T. Joshi wrote, "Let us marvel at [Dunsany's] seemingly effortless mastery of so many different forms (short story, novel, play, even essay and lecture), his unfailingly sound narrative sense, and the amazing consistency he maintained over a breathtakingly prolific output…Dunsany claimed aesthetic independence from his time and culture, [and] became a sharp and unrelenting critic of the industrialism and plebeianism that were shattering the beauty both of literature and of the world…yet retained a surprising popularity…through the whole of his career."

Edward John Moreton Drax Plunkett, 18th Baron Dunsany (1878–1957), inherited one of the oldest titles in the Peerage of Ireland. Lord Dunsany, who lived much of his life at Dunsany Castle in County Meath, was a prolific writer of novels, short stories, plays, essays, and autobiography. He is best known for his fantasy novels and stories, and his writing influenced the works of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, H.P. Lovecraft, and Ursula K Le Guin, among others.

"Mason reveals a glorious passion for literature, as well as an almost Whitmanesque openness to the ideas and emotions that inspire creative acts at all levels."—Library Journal (starred review)

"An illuminating literary cartography with many fascinating ports of call.”—Kirkus Reviews

"Mason expertly weaves the stories of great writers and places both ancient and new together into an imaginative literary odyssey."—Publishers Weekly

“How are voices like places? They move through us as we move through them.”

Celebrated poet David Mason explores surprising connections in geography and time, considering writers who traveled, who emigrated or were exiled, and who often shaped the literature of their homelands. He writes of seasoned travelers (Patrick Leigh Fermor, Bruce Chatwin, Joseph Conrad, Herodotus himself), and writers as far flung as Omar Khayyam, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, James Joyce, and Les Murray. In the end, he turns to his own native region, the American West, with Wallace Stegner, Edward Abbey, Robinson Jeffers, Belle Turnbull, and Thomas McGrath.

These essays are about familiarity and estrangement, the pleasure and knowledge readers can gain by engaging with writers’ lives, their travels, their trials, and the homes they make for themselves.

David Mason is the author of numerous books of poetry, most recently Sea Salt and Davey McGravy; a memoir, News from the Village; and a novel, Ludlow. A former Fulbright fellow to Greece, he lives in Colorado and Oregon and teaches at Colorado College.

"In the madcap, outspoken, yet hauntingly vulnerable Ruby, Kaufman has created an indelible character, one whose full life arc is succinctly yet voluptuously rendered through the incandescent vignettes of Kaufman’s masterful first novel-in-stories."—Booklist

Named a "Great Group Read" by the Women’s National Book Association

Where Somebody Waits instantly transports you to small-town Arkansas more than a half-century ago—a world of catfish and bourbon-and-Coke; of tent revival meetings and less boisterous discussions about heaven and hell; of finding love or just dreaming about it. A neighborly community, but with its share of intrigues.

And instantly you’re under the spell of Ruby Davidson, the magnetic central character of Where Somebody Waits. Self-assured, kind, always willing to take a stand for people less fortunate, at "five foot ten inches, with masses of red hair and a pompadour that increases her stature to six feet," she's also strikingly beautiful. Ruby loves her husband, adores her nephews and nieces, and more or less dutifully respects the tightly knit Jewish family into which she has married. Her life is filled with triumphs and failings, joy and sadness, lived with all possible grace, and told in a spirit of admirable and honest reflection.

A full life, yes, but not an untroubled one, because Ruby also still loves her high-school sweetheart. How she comes to terms with this old, old conundrum and how it affects the lives of everyone around her shape the heart of Where Somebody Waits.

"'Vinegar, cornbread and butter,' a character reminisces in Where Somebody Waits. 'The music of it.' Margaret Kaufman has captured those flavors and textures in a novel that may look like a miniature but is actually a chorus of voices that opens up a world rich with color and feeling. Her ear is wonderfully tuned to the undercurrents and ironies, the passions and dailyness of small-town life across time and change, and at the center, her salty, peppery Ruby is as strong as she is alluring—faithful and faithless and full of surprises."—Rosellen Brown

"Kaufman is an inimitable voice. You will be both soothed and transported by her delightful stories."—Paula Marantz Cohen

"A gifted, lyrical storyteller…she defines what it means not only to reflect on the breadth of one's experience with truth and grace but also to embrace the small, pivotal moments that, if attended to, have the power to transform us."—Francine Sterle

Margaret Kaufman has written five books of poetry. A resident of Kentfield, California, she leads poetry workshops, teaches at the Fromm Institute at the University of San Francisco, and edits both fiction and poetry. Where Somebody Waits is Kaufman’s first book of fiction.

"Edith Bruck tells the story of the 'Lager' with the inherent strength of a wounded animal and in confronting the unbearable sadness of it closes the account and does not surrender to the void…Unforgettable testimony."—Primo Levi

"With a style both warm and spare, Edith Bruck recreates the hardships of her existence as a Jewish child in Hungary before the Holocaust, the horrors of her time in the camps, and the protracted pain and disorientation of her lonely return to 'normal' life after the war. Her readers will marvel at her ability to perceive good as well as evil in those who preyed upon her. This is a beautiful book."—Susan Zuccotti, author of The Italians and the Holocaust

Passover, 1944. Edith Bruck's family sits in a darkened kitchen isolated from the other villagers by the black cloth on the window, their poverty, and their Judaism. Her mother explains that the Germans have reached their Hungarian village—that they will soon have to endure more than the cries of "Jewstink" and the deprivations that have been their lot for months. The next morning twelve-year-old Edith is roused by shouts of "Wake up! Outside! Quickly! I give you five minutes, you animals!"

In this memoir, Bruck tells the story of her imprisonment in Auschwitz, Dachau, and Bergen-Belsen. She and her older sister endure almost untellable horrors, and hunger so savage that the author tells of ripping bread from another's teeth. The end of the war brings freedom but little security. With no parents and no home, she moves from country to country, from household to household, and from relationship to relationship. In search of peace she and other family members immigrate to Israel, but even there peace eludes her. Bruck avoids both sentimentality and cynicism; she sees with clarity and passion, learns what she needs to survive, and catalogs other lessons for future use. At the end of Who Loves You Like This, she leaves Israel for Rome, where she lives today. In another country and in a foreign language, she finds the words to describe her life—without homeland, family, or native language.

Edith Bruck has lived in Rome since 1954. She is the author of several novels, collections of short stories, and volumes of poetry. She writes for radio and television and has directed several films. Bruck's works—for which she has won numerous literary prizes—have been translated from the original Italian into Dutch, German, Swedish, and Hungarian.

Who Loves You Like This is Bruck's first work to be translated into English.

"If you like Hank, you'll like Wilder Good, too."—John R. Erickson, author of Hank the Cowdog

Lamplighter Finalist 2017–18 (Triple Crown Awards)

If you've read the first two books about Wilder Good, you already know he's 12 years old and lives with his parents and little sister, Molly, in a small town in southern Colorado. He's on the threshold between being a kid and beginning to grow up, and he's trying his best to figure out just what it means to join that grownup world. There's a lot to learn, and Wilder is grateful to the adults in his life who guide him.

In this third installment of "The Adventures of Wilder Good," Wilder and his "secret" girlfriend, Sunny Parker, set out with Wilder's mentor, Gale Loving, for a day of fly fishing on the Rio Grande. But in the Colorado wilderness an afternoon of fishing and fun can shift suddenly to a life-and-death challenge. When Gale is injured, Wilder and Sunny must take charge. Together, the two learn what it is to aid and protect a friend. With no one to turn to, they have to make their own decisions and rely on their own skills as darkness falls and they prepare to spend the night in the canyon tending to Gale.

"I am a big fan of this series. Last fall I included The Elk Hunt in my list of favorite books of 2013, and Texas Grit is every bit as insightful and positive as the first one."—Glenn Dromgoole (a review of Wilder Good 2: Texas Grit)

"Dahlstrom writes about ranch life with flair and specific detail."—WORLD magazine (a review of Wilder Good 2: Texas Grit)

S. J. Dahlstrom lives and writes in west Texas. He has numerous magazine credits for his writing and photography. The Adventures of Wilder Good is his first series. His writing draws on his experiences as a cowboy, husband, father, and founder of a boys' ranch.

Gary Borjesson explores what it means to be friends — really friends — with a dog, and how that relationship can illuminate and inform the other friendships in our lives.

"We can learn much about friendship by examining our relationships with dogs, partly because of what we have in common with them, but also because of what we do not. Our differences put friendship and its terms in striking relief. The resulting perspective is especially valuable given how easy it is for dogs, friendship, and other familiar aspects of our experience to escape our notice." —from the Preface

Dogs are remarkable creatures. More than any other animal, they share with humans a deep interest in friendship, cooperation, and justice. (That's probably why we love them so much.) In Willing Dogs & Reluctant Masters, Gary Borjesson explores the source of—and justification for—our authority in the master-dog relationship, while inviting readers to ponder the role of authority in friendships among people, as well.

Willing Dogs & Reluctant Masters will delight dog owners as they see themselves and their dogs in Gary Borjesson's account of human-canine relations. And it will encourage all readers to wonder anew about how friendship enriches our lives.

Since 1999, Gary Borjesson has taught at St. John's College in Annapolis, Maryland, where he and his wife, Cindy Boersma, live with their German shepherd, Atkis.

Wise-cracking underachiever Lester Smith, class of '97, muddles through his senior year in this funny, moving debut novel.

It's 1996, senior year of high school has just begun, and Lester is at a total loss. He should be studying and making plans for life after graduation. (His best friend, Freesia, is applying to 37 colleges.) Instead, he wanders the back roads of his small town on the Puget Sound, visiting the local beaches and ignoring all his schoolwork. His father recently abandoned the family, his mother is more than slightly distracted, and his younger sister, Grace, is finding it hard to adjust to both their new family situation and ninth grade.

But Lester is smart and funny, and despite his general apathy, he does feel strongly about a few things: he loves his friends, Milton's Paradise Lost, the Ramones, and "the yearbook arts," as he calls them. Eventually he even comes to appreciate Mr. Traversal, the new Yearbook teacher who prefers that students call him by his first name, Jeff. When Lester and Jeff run afoul of the school's insufferable interim principal, they come up with a plan to create an "underground yearbook." This renegade project and Jeff's unlikely mentorship provide the spark that helps Lester to accept his past and to give his future a second chance.

From bright new talent Jesse Edward Johnson comes this hilarious and moving debut novel about learning to believe in yourself again. Whether you have yet to start high school or you graduated decades ago, you’re sure to love Yearbook and the whip-smart Lester Smith.

"Lester Smith, the unlikely hero of this coming-of age story, captivates even as he infuriates. He's snarky and smart and will totally break your heart. For fans of John Green and Rainbow Rowell, Yearbook is your next favorite read."
—T. Greenwood, author of Where I Lost Her, Two Rivers, and Bodies of Water

"Jesse Edward Johnson's Yearbook is a highly original account of the thorny, hilarious world of high school. Set in 1996 but entirely in sync with contemporary adolescent angst and hijinks, the novel centers on the emotional development of its narrator Lester Smith, a jaded smart-aleck--part Holden Caulfield, part contemporary hipster...Yearbook is an exceptional rendering of a vexed period in our growing up, an exploration of the mildly unhinged adolescent mind as it finds a measure of peace and equanimity."
—Paula Marantz Cohen, author of Jane Austen in Boca and Suzanne Davis Gets a Life

“Yearbook takes us on an unforgettable journey into the senior year of high school teen angst...Compellingly told, brilliant in its ventriloquistic ability to capture the teens’ voices, this tale compels the reader to fall in love with these students’ raw desire and sheer ecstasy.”
—Scott Driscoll, author of Better You Go Home

“Oh man, what a charming and deeply enjoyable novel...Lester is the perfect guide back to that bittersweet era known as the senior year of high school—a time shot-through with joy and agony, as life pivots decisively away from adolescence. And what a great motif Johnson’s found in the yearbook itself, that nostalgia-packing dispatch from the past.”
—Peter Mountford, author of A Young Man's Guide to Late Capitalism and The Dismal Science

"With Yearbook, Johnson does his part to stamp out boring art, one sentence at a time."
—John Baldessari

Jesse Edward Johnson is a writer and artist based in the Pacific Northwest. He has a Ph.D. in English from UCLA, where he taught literature for five years. He has taught at Richard Hugo House in Seattle, and at San Quentin Prison. Yearbook is his first novel.

"Kraft rubs together these pithy thoughts and phrases from traditional and present-day Zen with the sayings of Henry-David Thoreau and Mark Twain to come up with fresh portals of spiritual openness."—Spirituality & Practice

As Zen takes root in the west, new forms arise. For centuries Zen masters have tested their students with “koans” and “capping phrases.” A koan is a spiritual paradox that must be solved intuitively. A capping phrase is a trenchant comment. Both are meditative practices that reveal deeper truths about the self and, ideally, lead to enlightenment.

In Zen Traces, Buddhist scholar Kenneth Kraft plays off these practices in a new idiom. He selects passages from four sources: traditional Zen, present-day Zen, Henry David Thoreau, and Mark Twain. When a koan-like story about a contemporary Zen teacher is paired with a pithy comment by Mark Twain, something fresh emerges.

"A compelling thriller."—Los Angeles Times

"Zift is like a flaming shot of rotgut smuggled in from the old country…Vladislav Todorov adroitly uses the American genre of noir to excoriate the political villains of his homeland's past…Zift is gritty and brisk."—Matt Jakubowski, City Paper

"Todorov's raw, hard-boiled parody takes dead aim at noir and leaves it gasping for breath."—Michael Pinker, Review of Contemporary Fiction

December 21, 1963: Having served 20 years for a murder he didn't commit, "Moth" exits Central Sofia Prison anticipating his first night of freedom. Instead he steps into a new and alien world—the nightmarish totalitarianism of Communist Bulgaria. In his first hours of freedom he traverses the map of a diabolical city, full of decaying neighborhoods, gloomy streets, and a bizarre parade of characters.

A novel of grave wit, Zift unfolds in the course of a single, frenetic night, offering a fast-paced, ghoulish, even grotesque—but also enchanting—tour of shadowy, socialist Sofia. To achieve his depiction of totalitarian absurdity, Vladislav Todorov combines the methods of hardboiled American crime fiction and film noir with socialist symbols and communist ideological clichés.

"Todorov was obviously raised on a steady diet of American noir, and it shows in the pacing, the language, and the shadowy depths of every alleyway, every street corner."—Jessa Crispin

"…stalking its genre with the meticulousness of an assassin, while simultaneously parodying it. A novel that unfolds over a single night, in a single breath—and also reads that way…a black-and-white cinematographic vision of early-1960s Sofia by Night."—Georgi Gospodinov, author of Natural Novel

"The novel interweaves the key tropes of Soviet socialist realism and American hard-boiled detective fiction to produce a richly intertextual portrayal of a nightmarish—yet comical—Bulgarian communist society in late 1963."—Three Percent

"Pulp fiction by a historian of ideas."—Literary Weekly

"Tongue flambé."—Kultura

"Zift is a play on the pulp noir genre, in book and film, and Todorov has fun playing it to the hilt."—The Complete Review

"Zift is part noir, part crime story, part social satire, part black comedy (extremely black), part absurdist fairy tale."—BiblioBuffet

Zift, Vladislav Todorov's debut novel, was a finalist for the 2007 Vick Prize as Bulgarian Novel of the Year and a nominee for the Elias Canetti National Literary Prize. Todorov also wrote the screenplay for the 2008 film version of Zift. Variety hailed the movie as "an instant midnight fest fave." Todorov teaches film and literature at the University of Pennsylvania.

Joseph Benatov holds a BA and an MA from Sofia University and a PhD in comparative literature from the University of Pennsylvania, where he currently teaches.