The sensational new story collection from one of our sharpest, most original, and daringly cinematic stylists, National Book Award finalist and O Henry Prize winner Christine Schutt. In one eponymous novella and ten stories, Pure Hollywood brings us into private worlds of corrupt familial love, intimacy, longing, and danger. From an alcoholic widowed actress living in desert[read more...]
A life-changing journey intertwining humor, high romance, gastronomy, and an unsurpassable joie de vivre for readers of Julie and Julia and My Paris Kitchen. Susan’s life would never be the same after she meets Peter. A man who was larger than life, Peter pulls Susan out of her comfort zone to taste the fine life, literally. Together they embark on[read more...]
An American writer joins her husband, a contractor/consultant working in Iraq, to live in Amman, Jordan, and keeps a diary of day-to-day events. Out of this emerge so many stories of the pain and frustration of a forgotten world, which precedes the Iraq war, dating from a half-century earlier—the Palestinians who fled Israel in the[read more...]
As much as we may enjoy Swan Lake or The Nutcracker, for many of us ballet is a foreign language. It communicates through movement, not words, and its history lies almost entirely abroad-in Russia, Italy, and France. In Celestial Bodies, dance critic Laura Jacobs makes the foreign familiar, providing a lively, poetic, and uniquely accessible introduction to the world[read more...]
Winthrop tells the arresting tale—from multiple points of view—of a community locked in struggle with itself. Set during the hours leading up to the scheduled execution of a young black man for the alleged rape of a white woman in 1943 small-town Louisiana, Winthrop expertly captures the intimacy and tension of a town, its people,[read more...]
The story of how one woman’s long love affair with New York’s Central Park led her to organize its rescue from a state of serious decline, returning it to the beautiful place of recreational opportunity and spiritual sustenance that it is today. Elizabeth Barlow Rogers opens with a quick survey of her early life–a middle-class[read more...]
What makes a university great? Its faculty? Its students? Its curriculum? All three to be sure. But also its architecture. Great buildings inspire. They transform how we think, how we see, how we learn—how we act. No one who enters the cathedral of Chartres is the same person coming out. Too often architectural critics focus[read more...]
New York Times bestselling author Lauren Weisberger returns with a novel starring one of her favorite characters from The Devil Wears Prada—Emily Charlton, first assistant to Miranda Priestly, now a highly successful image consultant who’s just landed the client of a lifetime. Welcome to Greenwich, CT, where the lawns and the women are perfectly manicured, the Tito’s[read more...]
Have you ever had a secret so gut-wrenching you couldn’t tell anyone, not even the person who shares your bed? Told from the alternating perspectives of a husband and wife who both have something to hide, this incisive novel pulls back the curtain on a seemingly-happy marriage, posing the question: how much do we really know–and[read more...]