#1 New York Times Bestseller * #1 Wall Street Journal Bestseller From Daniel Silva, the internationally acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author, comes a riveting new thriller featuring art restorer and legendary spy Gabriel Allon. It was nearly one a.m. by the time he crawled into bed. Chiara was reading a novel, oblivious to the television, which was muted. On the screen was a live shot of St. Peter's Basilica. Gabriel raised the volume and learned that an old friend had died ... Gabriel Allon has slipped quietly into Venice for a much-needed holiday with his wife and two young children. But when Pope Paul VII dies suddenly, Gabriel is summoned to Rome by the Holy Father's loyal private secretary, Archbishop Luigi Donati. A billion Catholic faithful have been told that the pope died of a heart attack. Donati, however, has two good reasons to suspect his master was murdered. The Swiss Guard who was standing watch outside the papal apartments the night of the pope's death is missing. So, too, is the letter the Holy Father was writing during the final hours of his life. A letter that was addressed to Gabriel. While researching in the Vatican Secret Archives, I came upon a most remarkable book ... The book is a long-suppressed gospel that calls into question the accuracy of the New Testament's depiction of one of the most portentous events in human history. For that reason alone, the Order of St. Helena will stop at nothing to keep it out of Gabriel's hands. A shadowy Catholic society with ties to the European far right, the Order is plotting to seize control of the papacy. And it is only the beginning. As the cardinals gather in Rome for the start of the conclave, Gabriel sets out on a desperate search for proof of the Order's conspiracy, and for a long-lost gospel with the power to put an end to two thousand years of murderous hatred. His quest will take him from the Ponte Vecchio in Florence, to a monastery in Assisi, to the hidden depths of the Secret Archives, and finally to the Sistine Chapel, where he will witness an event no outsider has ever before seen--the sacred passing of the Keys of St. Peter to a newly elected pope. Swiftly paced and elegantly rendered, The Order will hold readers spellbound, from its opening passages to its breathtaking final twist of plot. It is a novel of friendship and faith in a perilous and uncertain world. And it is still more proof that Daniel Silva is his generation's finest writer of suspense and international intrigue.

#1 New York Times Bestseller "The pace of "The Cel-list" never slack-ens as its ac-tion vol-leys from Zurich to Tel Aviv to Paris and be-yond. Mr. Silva tells his story with zest, wit and su-perb tim-ing, and he en-gi-neers enough sur-prises to star-tle even the most at-ten-tive reader."--Wall Street Journal From Daniel Silva, the internationally acclaimed #1 New York Times bestselling author, comes a timely and explosive new thriller featuring art restorer and legendary spy Gabriel Allon. Viktor Orlov had a longstanding appointment with death. Once Russia's richest man, he now resides in splendid exile in London, where he has waged a tireless crusade against the authoritarian kleptocrats who have seized control of the Kremlin. His mansion in Chelsea's exclusive Cheyne Walk is one of the most heavily protected private dwellings in London. Yet somehow, on a rainy summer evening, in the midst of a global pandemic, Russia's vengeful president finally manages to cross Orlov's name off his kill list. Before him was the receiver from his landline telephone, a half-drunk glass of red wine, and a stack of documents.... The documents are contaminated with a deadly nerve agent. The Metropolitan Police determine that they were delivered to Orlov's home by one of his employees, a prominent investigative reporter from the anti-Kremlin Moskovskaya Gazeta. And when the reporter slips from London hours after the killing, MI6 concludes she is a Moscow Center assassin who has cunningly penetrated Orlov's formidable defenses. But Gabriel Allon, who owes his very life to Viktor Orlov, believes his friends in British intelligence are dangerously mistaken. His desperate search for the truth will take him from London to Amsterdam and eventually to Geneva, where a private intelligence service controlled by a childhood friend of the Russian president is using KGB-style "active measures" to undermine the West from within. Known as the Haydn Group, the unit is plotting an unspeakable act of violence that will plunge an already divided America into chaos and leave Russia unchallenged. Only Gabriel Allon, with the help of a brilliant young woman employed by the world's dirtiest bank, can stop it. Elegant and sophisticated, provocative and daring, The Cellist explores one of the preeminent threats facing the West today--the corrupting influence of dirty money wielded by a revanchist and reckless Russia. It is at once a novel of hope and a stark warning about the fragile state of democracy. And it proves once again why Daniel Silva is regarded as his generation's finest writer of suspense and international intrigue.

The best stories pull readers in and keep them turning the pages, eager to find the answer to the question, “And then what happened?” Edited by Neil Gaiman, a literary magician whose acclaimed work defies easy categorization and transcends all boundaries, and “master anthologist” (Booklist) Al Sarrantonio, Stories is a groundbreaking collection that reinvigorates and expands the boundaries of imaginative fiction, affording some of the best writers in the world—from Peter Straub and Chuck Palahniuk to Roddy Doyle and Diana Wynne Jones, Stewart O’Nan and Joyce Carol Oates to Walter Mosley, Jodi Picoult, the volume’s editors, and others—the opportunity to work together, defend their craft, and realign misconceptions. A brilliant and visionary compendium of diverse tales, Stories will transform your view of the world and ignite a new appreciation for the limitless realm of exceptional fiction.

From the author of How Should a Person Be? (“one of the most talked-about books of the year”— Time Magazine ) and the New York Times Bestseller Women in Clothes comes a daring novel about whether to have children. In Motherhood, Sheila Heti asks what is gained and what is lost when a woman becomes a mother, treating the most consequential decision of early adulthood with the candor, originality, and humor that have won Heti international acclaim and made How Should A Person Be? required reading for a generation. In her late thirties, when her friends are asking when they will become mothers, the narrator of Heti’s intimate and urgent novel considers whether she will do so at all. In a narrative spanning several years, casting among the influence of her peers, partner, and her duties to her forbearers, she struggles to make a wise and moral choice. After seeking guidance from philosophy, her body, mysticism, and chance, she discovers her answer much closer to home. Motherhood is a courageous, keenly felt, and starkly original novel that will surely spark lively conversations about womanhood, parenthood, and about how—and for whom—to live.

Written with a trenchant, sardonic edge, The Group is a dazzlingly outspoken novel and a captivating look at the social history of America between two world wars. "Juicy, shocking, witty, and almost continually brilliant."--CosmopolitanAward-winning Mary McCarthy's most celebrated novel follows the lives of eight Vassar graduates, known simply to their classmates as “the group.” An eclectic mix of personalities and upbringings, they meet a week after graduation to watch Kay Strong get married. After the ceremony, the women begin their adult lives -- traveling to Europe, tackling the worlds of nursing and publishing, and finding love and heartbreak in the streets of New York City. Through the years, some of the friends grow apart and some become entangled in each other's affairs, but all vow not to become like their mothers and fathers. It is only when one of them passes away that they all come back together again to mourn the loss of a friend, a confidante, and most importantly, a member of the group.

"Over the last twenty years, art has become more accessible than ever before. A painter can post their latest creation on Instagram and wait as the likes pile up; a budding filmmaker can shoot a clip on their iPhone, then upload it to YouTube for thousands to view. The digital landscape has fundamentally altered what it means to be creative, as well as how consumers interact with artistic production both economically and curatorially. William Deresiewicz, a leading critic of contemporary culture in America, argues that we are in the midst of an epochal transformation within art. Whereas the nineteenth century considered artists to be craftsmen and the twentieth century treated them as professionals, artists today are uniquely dependent upon themselves. The internet, along with decreases in art funding and the growing prevalence of gig economies, has forced artists to become responsible for every aspect of their work, from conception to promotion, from sales to legacy. In The Death of the Artist, Deresiewicz profiles those struggling to make a living through the arts, from the twenty-something college novelist with a multi-hyphenated job title to the midlife painter who must utilize social media to stay relevant. Deresiewicz shows what the birth of the "creative entrepreneur" signifies about our evolving society at large and what might be done to keep artists thriving, because we need them"--

"With the election of Donald J. Trump, many people on both the left and right feared that America's 240-year-old grand experiment in democracy was coming to an end, and that Sinclair Lewis' satirical novel, It can't happen here, written during the dark days of the 1930s, could finally be coming true. Is the democratic freedom that the United States symbolizes really secure? Can authoritarianism happen in America? [The editor] queried a number of the nation's leading thinkers. In this ... collection of essays, these ... thinkers and theorists explore the lessons of history, how democracies crumble, how propaganda works, and the role of the media, courts, elections, and 'fake news' in the modern political landscape--and what the future of the United States may hold."--

Over the last few decades, Edith Pearlman has staked her claim as one of the great practitioners of the short story. Her understanding and skill have earned her comparisons to Anton Chekhov, John Updike and Alice Munro. Her latest work, gathered in this stunning collection of twenty new stories, is an occasion for celebration. The stories in Honeydew are unmistakably by Pearlman; whole lives in ten pages. They are minutely observant of people, of their foibles and failings, but also of their moments of kindness and truth. Whether the characters are Somalian women who've suffered circumcision, a special child with pentachromatic vision or a staid professor of Latin unsettled by a random invitation to lecture on the mystery of life and death, Pearlman knows each of them intimately and reveals them with generosity.

Jenny Erpenbeck's highly acclaimed novel Go, Went, Gone was a New York Times notable book and launched one of Germany's most admired writers into the American spotlight. In the New Yorker, James Wood wrote: "When Erpenbeck wins the Nobel Prize in a few years, I suspect that this novel will be cited." On the heels of this literary breakthrough comes Not a Novel, a book of personal, profound, often humorous meditations and reflections. Erpenbeck writes, "With this collection of texts, I am looking back for the first time at many years of my life, at the thoughts that filled my life from day to day." Starting with her childhood days in East Berlin ("I start with my life as a schoolgirl ... my own conscious life begins at the same time as the socialist life of Leipziger Strasse"), Not a Novel provides a glimpse of growing up in the GDR and of what it was like to be twenty-two when the wall collapsed; it takes us through Erpenbeck's early adult years, working in a bakery after immersing herself in the worlds of music, theater, and opera, and ultimately discovering her path as a writer. There are lively essays about her literary influences (Thomas Bernhard, the Brothers Grimm, Kafka, and Thomas Mann), unforgettable reflections on the forces at work in her novels (including history, silence, and time), and scathing commentaries on the dire situation of America and Europe today. "Why do we still hear laments for the Germans who died attempting to flee over the wall, but almost none for the countless refugees who have drowned in the Mediterranean in recent years, turning the sea into a giant grave?" With deep insight and warm intelligence, Jenny Erpenbeck provides us with a collection of unforgettable essays that take us into the heart and mind of "one of the finest and most exciting writers alive" (Michel Faber).

In the Global Novel, acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch explores some of the 21st century's best-known writers--including Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, Roberto Bolaño, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Mohsin Hamid, Margaret Atwood, Michel Houellebecq, and Elena Ferrante. They are employing a way of imagining the world that sees different places and peoples as intimately connected. From climate change and sex trafficking to religious fundamentalism and genetic engineering, today's novelists use 21st-century subjects to address the perennial concerns of fiction, like morality, society, and love. The global novel is not the bland, deracinated, commercial product that many critics of world literature have accused it of being, but rather finds a way to renew the writer's ancient privilege of examining what it means to be human. -- Back cover.

A forested property on a Brandenburg lake outside of Berlin lies at the heart of this novel. This novel offers us the stories of twelve individuals who make their homes here.

In this celebration of imperfection, Katie Roiphe turns her exacting gaze on the surprisingly narrow-minded conventions governing the way we live now. Is there a preoccupation with 'healthiness' above all else? If so, does it lead insidiously to judging anyone who tries to live differently? Examining such subjects as the current fascination with Mad Men, the oppressiveness of Facebook ('the novel we are all writing'), and the quiet malice our society displays towards single mothers, Roiphe makes her case throughout these electric pages. This is a razor-sharp, wickedly entertaining and unapologetic defense of 'the messy life'.

A unique, revealing and entertaining insight into the political dramas of recent times. Rachel Johnson was born into what has been described by some as the UK's most famous political family , and by others as 'Poundshop Kennedys'. She was always keen to avoid the family business at all costs and plough her own furrow as a broadcaster, novelist and journalist. But, after the referendum to leave the EU in 2016, she felt the heavy hand of fate. When an insurgent centre party burst onto the scene in 2019, she felt compelled to stand for something rather than nothing - which happened to be just as her own older brother, Boris , was making his final assault on Downing Street . As some joked, she went into politics to spend more time with her family. Rake's Progress tells the extraordinary story of what happened next. From long silences on the radio when asked tricky policy questions to loud curses from David Cameron during tennis matches, Rachel reveals all about her brief political career. Taking on Ann Widdecombe and the Brexit Party , would she and her party make history - or become a forgotten footnote in the rolling omnishambles of British politics? Beyond her own story, Rake's Progress highlights the importance of standing up for your beliefs and the challenges of life in the public eye, and takes the reader behind the scenes, from the campaign trail to the 'Westminster bubble' and the carpeted corridors of power. Written with great honesty and self-deprecating humour, this is a book that reveals the very human side of politics.

What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau—and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature’s quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature’s possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for “workshop for potential literature”) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman’s delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something ). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic—and iconoclastic—group.

Four stories of comedy, deception, and revenge (including one previously unpublished) showcases heroes who suffer from willful self-deceit. These not-so-innocents proceed from self-deception to deceiving others, who do not take it lightly. The novella "Dictation" imagines a fateful meeting between the secretaries to Henry James and Joseph Conrad at the peak of their fame. Timid Miss Hallowes, who types for Conrad, comes under the influence of James's Miss Bosanquet, high-spirited, flirtatious, and scheming. In a masterstroke of genius, Ozick hatches a plot between them to insert themselves into posterity.--From publisher description.

"Throughout a unparalleled literary career that includes two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959 and Sabbath's Theater, 1995), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (American Pastoral, 1997), the National Book Critics Circle Award (The Counterlife, 1986), and the National Humanities Medal (awarded by President Obama in 2011), among many other honors, Philip Roth has produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction writing on a wide range of topics: his own work and that of the writers he admires, the creative process, and the state of American culture. This work is collected for the first time in Why Write?, the tenth and final volume in the Library of America's definitive Philip Roth edition. Here is Roth's selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, the entirety of the 2001 book Shop Talk, and "Explanations," a collection of fourteen later pieces brought together here for the first time, six never before published. Among the essays gathered are "My Uchronia," an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that "all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy"; "Errata," the unabridged version of the "Open Letter to Wikipedia" published on The New Yorker's website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia's egregious errors about his life and work; and "The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction," a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that celebrates the "refractory way of living" of Sabbath's Theater's Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth's retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work."--Amazon.

"Zoltan Beck is dying. His devoted but long-suffering sons, Ben and Frank, are trying to prepare themselves and their families for Zoltan's eventual departure...but they can't quite bring themselves to believe that the end is really at hand, and neither can Zoltan himself. The head of a family marked by war and tragedy for decades, he "can't stand to be in a room with a miserable person" and has done his best to keep the pain of his refugee past from his beloved children. But as he faces the end of his life, he discovers a heartbreaking secret from the War that will ultimately bring the family together - or irrevocably disrupt it. Set in both mid-20th century Hungary and contemporary Toronto, this is a deeply moving novel that revels in the energy of its extraordinary characters. It is the story of lost love and newfound connections, of a father and his sons desperately reaching out to bridge an ever-widening gap...even as their time together ebbs away."--Provided by publisher.

"Judaism and Jewish law are eternal and immutable. But the world changes and presents novel challenges. Modern science and developing technology create facts on the ground that raise relevant contemporary questions of which Halakhah must take cognizance. Fingerprint examination, blood typing and DNA matching were all unknown until recent decades. Jewish law posits strict laws of evidence and generally excludes circumstantial evidence for most purposes. Rabbi Bleich's comprehensive work explores the nature of DNA evidence in establishing paternity, the relief of agunot, mamzerut, inheritance, identity as a Jew and as a kohen, the so-called "Jewish" gene and the kohen gene." -- Publisher's description.

“Intelligent but accessible, and often poignant . . . [by] the biggest talents on the essay and blog beat.” —Publishers Weekly (on Vol. 2) Anyone still asking, “What is creative nonfiction?” will find the answer in this collection of artfully crafted, true stories. Selected by Lee Gutkind, the “godfather behind creative nonfiction,” and the staff of Creative Nonfiction, these stories—ranging from immersion journalism to intensely personal essays—illustrate the genre’s power and potential. Edwidge Danticat recalls her Uncle Moïse’s love of a certain four-letter word and finds in his abandonment of the word near the end of his life the true meaning of exile. In “Literary Murder,” Julianna Baggott traces her roots as a novelist to her family’s “strange, desperate (sometimes conniving and glorious) past” and writes about her decision, in The Madam, to kill off a character based on her grandfather. And Sean Rowe explains why, if you must get arrested, Selma, Alabama, is the place to do it. This exciting and expansive array of works and voices is sure to impress and delight.

Gathering 25 years work by one of America's most elegant and pertinent poets, this title contains work from eight books, including an excerpt from the erotic verse novel 'Love, Death and the Changing of the Seasons', and a work written in the shadow of hegemonic empire.