"The prose is fresh and energetic, the story-telling superb, and the writing comes out as raw and terrifying as an exposed nerve." New York Times Aaron Platt has spent every day of his life breaking his back to scrape a living from the rocky, played-out fields of the Adirondack farm he inherited from his sadistic father. One winter morning, he follows footprints in the snow to his barn and discovers a man freezing to death in a horse stall. What unfolds between the two men, past and present, is a brisk, gritty depiction of crime and punishment. But their harrowing story is more than that, exposing the shocking hypocrisy of the people who live in the nearby, bucolic town-a legacy of hatred that reaches back to the violent founding of the nation. This literary masterpiece, back in print for the first time in over 60 years, includes a new Afterword by Jack Mearns, author of John Sanford: An Annotated Bibliography "A first-rate story of violence and congealed hate." New Republic "The story is electrifying." Saturday Review of Literature "A brief, fast book, and those pages are terse. Sanford has injected the drama of spilled blood that made America." Los Angeles Times "An unusual book with some brilliant pieces of writing, exceeding Celine and Faulkner in depravity and language." Kirkus Reviews

"Captured in a beautiful package, including more than fifty color photographs, The Last Waltz tells the intriguing story of of the Viennese Strauss family known for producing some of the best known, best loved music of the nineteenth century. Johann and Josef Strauss, the Waltz Kings, composed hundreds of instantly recognizable and enduring melodies, including The Blue Danube Waltz, Tales from the Vienna Woods, Voices of Spring and The Radetzky March. Their iconic music has been featured on the scores of nearly a thousand films. Yet despite their success, this was a family riven with tension, feuds and jealousy, living in a country that was undergoing seismic upheaval. Through the personal and political chaos, the Strauss family continued to compose music to which the Viennese -- anxious to forget their troubles -- could dance and drank champagne, even as their country hurtled towards oblivion at the hands of the First World War. Classical music expert and radio host John Suchet skillfully portrays this gripping story, capturing the family dramas, the tensions, triumphs and disasters against the turbulent backdrop of Austria in the nineteenth century, from revolution to regicide." --

This work suggests that people do not get fat by eating the right foods, but rather by eating the wrong foods. It also suggests that we should follow the example of wild animals, who do no overeat just because the food is available, but stay thin to stay alive.

I invite everyone to look to Saint John of Avila [hoping] that the word and the example of this outstanding pastor will enlighten all priests and those who look forward to the day of their priestly ordination. a With these words, Pope Benedict XVI, at the 2011World Youth Day celebration in Madrid, announced his intention to declare Saint John of Avila a Doctor of the Universal Church. This small book is in some sense an answer to the Pope s desire to look to this great saint by introducing us to two of his most important treatises: On the Love of God and On the Priesthood. This present volume wants to bring this still unknown saint closer to the English-speaking world, thus helping the people of God, especially their priests, inflame their spiritual lives.

Attractive and successful, Joie Davidow presents a confident face to the world. But her carefully applied makeup conceals a secret she has kept for decades. Marked for Life chronicles Joie's struggle to overcome feeling that she was grotesquely flawed, while hiding behind a cosmetic mask that granted her entry into a profession that puts a premium on appearance, culminating in the life-changing realization that in deceiving others, she was also betraying herself. Written with humor and refreshingly devoid of self-pity, it will touch anyone who has ever felt "different" from the rest of the world.

The official Bramnick guide to interpersonal skills The author is a politician, comedian and trial lawyer.

Called a "cunning and elegant play...[with] dest story-telling" (John Lahr, The New Yorker), Ten Unknowns, John Robin Baitz's latest work, is an explosive drama about art--and what happens when it becomes commerce. Malcolm Raphelson is a painter who was at the top of the art world--until the critical vogue turned from realism to abstract expressionist work. He has been in self-imposed exile in Mexico for decades, unit dealer Trevor Fabricant decides it's time for a retrospective. Trevor sends Judd, , a talented and tormented young painter, to serve as Malcolm's assistant and unofficial minder. When they are joined by a beautiful young student, their tense equilibrium is upset. In Ten Unknowns, Baitz portrays, in the words of Linda Winer of Newday, "a world conflicted with questions about the tyranny of art, fashion, and quality, about the benefits and blind spots in the outsider sensibility, about the warring American impulses for good and for meddling."

A companion to the Penguin book of World War 1 poetry, this anthology reflects how society itself was changed by war. It is divided thematically into the case for war, disillusion versus idealism, action versus stoicism and includes selections from the novels of war writers such as Robert Graves, Ernest Hemingway, Bertrand Russell, D.H. Lawrence, Erichmaria Remarque, Richard Aldington and and in a section entitled close quarters, letters from, among others, Wilfred Owen.

Available for the first time in paperback after being widely reviewed and discussed upon its hardcover publication, Historians in Trouble is investigative journalist and historian Jon Wiener's "incisive and entertaining" ( New Statesman ) account of several of the most notorious history scandals of the last few years. Focusing on a dozen key controversies ranging across the political spectrum and representing a wide array of charges, Wiener seeks to understand why some cases make the headlines and end careers, while others do not. He looks at the well publicized cases of Michael Bellesiles, the historian of gun culture accused of research fraud; accused plagiarists and "celebrity historians" Stephen Ambrose and Doris Kearns Goodwin; Pulitzer Prize winner Joseph J. Ellis, who lied in his classroom at Mount Holyoke about having fought in Vietnam; and the allegations of misconduct by Harvard's Stephan Thernstrom and Emory's Elizabeth Fox-Genovese, who nevertheless were appointed by George W. Bush to the National Council on the Humanities. As the Bancroft Prize-winning historian Linda Gordon wrote in Dissent, Wiener's "very readable book . . . reveal[s] not only scholarly misdeeds but also recent increases in threats to free debate and intellectual integrity."

We live in an Age of Anxiety. The events of modern life have overwhelmed the average homo sapiens until getting from Point A to Point B without being overcome by neuroses is a practical impossibility. Enter: the comic safety valve. Encyclopedia Neurotica is a delightful garden of the ills that beset modern man. Entries include excerpts from both popular and arcane published works, as well as original definitions, essential terms and the occasional cutting-edge concept, such as "celebriphilia, the pathological desire to sleep with a celebrity, suffered chiefly by groupies." Some samples from Encyclopedia Neurotica : --Abyss, the: the yawning unfathomable chasm of existential terror --Acquired Situational Narcissism: a condition characterized by gradiosity, lack of empathy, rage, isolation and substance abuse; mainly afflicts celebrities, who tend to be surrounded by enablers --Denial: unconscious defense mechanism that numbs anxiety by refusing to acknoweledge unpleasant realities --Manic Run: prolonged state of optimism, excitement and hyperactivity experienced as part of bipolar disorder

ABOUT THE BOOK Shortly before he published Walden; or Life in the Woods, Henry David Thoreau called ¿The library a wilderness of books.¿ He also noted that while Americans were ¿clearing the forest in our westward progress, we are accumulating a forest of books in our rear, as wild and unexplored as any of nature¿s primitive wildernesses.¿ In "A Terrible Beauty: the Wilderness of American Literature," Jonah Raskin takes a long close look at the forest of books that poets, novelists and essayists mapped and explored before and after Thoreau. The first work of cultural criticism to look back at writing in the United States from the perspective of the contemporary environmental crisis, Raskin offers insights for students, teachers and lovers of literature as well as for backpackers and hikers who have trekked across untrammeled forests, deserts and mountains. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Jonah Raskin, Phd, has taught American literature at Sonoma State University, the State University of New York at Stony Brook and as a Fulbright professor at the University of Antwerp and the University of Ghent in Belgium. The author of fifteen books, he earned his B.A. at Columbia College in New York, his M.A. at Columbia University and his Ph.D. at the University of Manchester, Manchester, England. He lives in northern California and has written for The San Francisco Chronicle, The L.A. Times, The Nation, The Redwood Coast Review and Catamaran.

"Joanna is in desperate need of $10,000, now or soon. No holds barred." Ernest Mayday, a best-selling British author living in a Hollywood Hills mansion with a beautiful masseuse, has everything that money can buy - except an idea for his next book. Then he replies to the personal ad placed by the mysterious, tantalizing Joanna. She needs money, fast, and will do anything to get it. Compromising a juror on a major fraud trial is just the beginning of an increasingly labyrinthine plot - a plot that Ernest realizes will make the perfect novel. But is Ernest observer or voyeur? When does fact end and fiction begin? What is the truth about the Reverend Abel Pile and the sinister Angel of Darkness? Suddenly Ernest finds he is no longer calling the shots - and the bullets are real.

"Happy Doll is a charming, if occasionally inexpert, private detective living just one sheer cliff drop beneath the Hollywood sign with his beloved half-Chihuahua half-Terrier, George. A veteran of both the Navy and LAPD, Doll supplements his meager income as a P.I. by working through the night at a local Thai spa that offers its clients a number of special services. Armed with his sixteen-inch steel telescopic baton, biting dry humor, and just a bit of a hero complex, the ex-cop sets out to protect the women who work there from clients who have trouble understanding the word "no." Doll gets by just fine following his two basic rules: bark loudly and act first. But when things get out-of-hand with one particularly violent patron, even he finds himself wildly out of his depth, and then things take an even more dangerous twist when an old friend from his days as a cop shows up at his door with a bullet in his gut. A Man Named Doll is more than just a fascinating introduction to one truly singular character, it is a highly addictive and completely unpredictable joyride through the sensuous and violent streets of LA." - Amazon.com