A practical study of non-standard tunings for the folk blues, jazz and rock guitarists for new sounds, new textures and a freedom in left-hand fingering.

Illustrations and accounts of the natives told from the perspective of the European travellers who first encountered them.

"Investigating the strange ways in which love, in spite of everything -- time, war, betrayal -- can last, Zweig tells the story of Ludwig, an ambitious young man from a modest background who falls in love with the wife of his rich employer. His love is returned, and the couple vow to live together, but then Ludwig is dispatched on business to Mexico, and while he is there the First World War breaks out. With travel and even communication across the Atlantic shut down, Ludwig makes a new life in the New World. Years later, however, he returns to Germany to find his beloved a widow and their mutual attraction as strong as ever. But is it possible for love to survive precisely as the impossible?"--Publisher's description.

Stella Adler examines the role of the actor and brings to life the plays from which all modern theater derives: Ibsen's Hedda Gabler, The Master Builder, An Enemy of the People, and A Doll's House; Strindberg's Miss Julie and The Father; Chekhov's The Seagull, Uncle Vanya, The Cherry Orchard, and Three Sisters. Adler discusses the ideas behind these plays and explores the world of the playwrights and the history - both familial and cultural - that informed their work. She illumines not only the dramatic essence of each play but its subtext as well, continually asking questions that deepen one's understanding of the work and of the human spirit. --

"In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another--and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry of the present. Burt moves seamlessly from Shakespeare and other classics to the contemporary poetry circulated on Tumblr and Twitter. She challenges the assumptions that many of us make about 'poetry, ' whether we think we like it or think we don't, in order to help us cherish--and distinguish among--individual poems. A masterful guide to a sometimes confounding genre, Don't Read Poetry will instruct and delight ingénues and cognoscenti alike"--

Stalin's reign of terror in the Soviet Union has been called 'the other Holocaust'. During the Stalin years, it is thought that more innocent men, women and children perished than in Hitler's destruction of the European Jews. Many millions died in Stalin's Gulag of torture prisons and forced-labour camps, yet others survived and were freed after his death in 1953. This book is the story of the survivors. Long kept secret by Soviet repression and censorship, it is now told by renowned author and historian Stephen F. Cohen, who came to know many former Gulag inmates during his frequent trips to Moscow over a period of thirty years. Based on first-hand interviews with the victims themselves and on newly available materials, Cohen provides a powerful narrative of the survivors' post-Gulag saga, from their liberation and return to Soviet society, to their long struggle to salvage what remained of their shattered lives and to obtain justice. Spanning more than fifty years, "The Victims Return" combines individual stories with the fierce political conflicts that raged, both in society and in the Kremlin, over the victims of the terror and the people who had victimized them. This compelling book will be essential reading for anyone interested in Russian history.--Publisher's description

A hilarious collection of the many articles written by Stephen Fry for magazines, newspapers and radio. It includes selected wireless essays of Donald Trefusis, the ageing professor of philology brought to life in Fry's novel The Liar , and the best of Fry's weekly column for the Daily Telegraph . Perfect to dip into but just as enjoyable to read cover to cover, this book, perhaps more than any other, shows the breadth of Fry's interests and the depth of his insight. He remains a hilarious writer on whatever topic he puts his mind to.

Adrian Healey loves to lie. He lies all the time. Every minute, every moment. Worse, he does it wonderfully, imaginatively, brilliantly. He lies to buck the System, to express his contempt for convention, but mostly because he just plain likes to. It's fun, and so much more challenging. It is high camp. One creates when one prevaricates. "Doesn't everyone think the way I think?" says Adrian of his various inventions. Like the pornographic novel by Charles Dickens, his career as a Piccadilly "rent-boy" hireable by the hour, his stressful work as a drug "mule" smuggling illegal substances. He has (as his Cambridge tutor observed) "a fine brain, but a dreadful mind." Already in his public school career, marked by privilege and pederasty, he had lost the ability to differentiate between simple truth and his elaborate fictions. The Liar is as wicked and witty, as unspeakably (and unquotably) funny as its protagonist narrator - and as irresistible as its multi-talented author, Stephen Fry. Mr. Fry's credits grow daily. He is the star of a film entitled Peter's Friends, and of Masterpiece Theater's television series Jeeves and Wooster. He is half of the Fry and Laurie comedy team, he has written a play called Latin and the book for the musical Me and My Girl, and he is a weekly columnist for the London Daily Telgraph. He is also now the author of the #1 English bestseller, The Liar, which spent several months at the very top position on the British charts. In the literary firmament it has been identified as somewhere between Oscar Wilde and Saki.

Stephen Fry's breathtakingly outrageous debut novel is by turns eccentric, shocking, brilliantly comic and achingly romantic. Adrian Healey loves to lie. He does it all the time. Every minute, every moment. And worse, he does it wonderfully, imaginatively, brilliantly. He lies to buck the system, to express his contempt for convention, but mostly because he just plain likes to. It's fun; it's high camp. He invents a lost pornographic novel by Charles Dickens, and for himself a career as a Piccadilly rent boy hireable by the hour. But Adrian's lies eventually bring realworld danger, as he finds himself caught up in the machinations of a shadowy network that puts his own life at risk. A dazzling, outrageous first novel that has delighted liars everywhere.

Throughout his remarkable career, Fry has been an engaging, eminently quotable man. This book is packed with the wisecracks and witticisms of a national treasure.

A brilliant new approach to the Constitution and courts of the United States by Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer.For Justice Breyer, the Constitution’s primary role is to preserve and encourage what he calls “active liberty”: citizen participation in shaping government and its laws. As this book argues, promoting active liberty requires judicial modesty and deference to Congress; it also means recognizing the changing needs and demands of the populace. Indeed, the Constitution’s lasting brilliance is that its principles may be adapted to cope with unanticipated situations, and Breyer makes a powerful case against treating it as a static guide intended for a world that is dead and gone. Using contemporary examples from federalism to privacy to affirmative action, this is a vital contribution to the ongoing debate over the role and power of our courts.

"Justice Breyer discusses what the Court must do going forward to maintain that public confidence and argues for interpreting the Constitution in a way that works in practice. He forcefully rejects competing approaches that look exclusively to the Constitution's text or to the eighteenth-century views of the framers. Instead, he advocates a pragmatic approach that applies unchanging constitutional values to ever-changing circumstances -- an approach that will best demonstrate to the public that the Constitution continues to serve us well."--Book jacket.

"In this original, far-reaching and timely book, Justice Stephen Breyer examines the work of SCOTUS in an increasingly interconnected world, a world in which all sorts of public and private activity--from the conduct of national security policy to the conduct of international trade--obliges the Court to consider and understand circumstances beyond America's borders. At a time when ordinary citizens may book international lodging directly through online sites like Airbnb, it has become clear that judicial awareness can no longer stop at the water's edge"--

A NOVEL OF AN IGNOMINIOUS FALL, THE RISE TO INFAMY, AND LIFE AFTER BOTH. • It is the summer of 1998, and Stephen Glass is a young magazine journalist whose work is gaining more and more acclaim -- until a rival magazine tells Glass's editor that it suspects one of his stories is fabricated. As his editor sorts out the truth, Glass is busy inventing it -- spinning rich and complex blends of fact and fiction, and exploiting the gray world in between. But Glass is caught. His fabulism is uncovered and his career instantly unravels. Worse, his editor learns that it's not the first time. Soon, a long history of invention, passed off as journalism, emerges. Glass suddenly becomes a household name -- an emblem of hubris and a flashpoint for Americans' distrust and dislike of the press. The media is consumed with the story: Once the young man who had been known for mastering the "takedown" article, Glass now becomes the one every journalist wants to take even further down. Once the hunter, Glass becomes the hunted -- the story of the year. Glass responds to this agonizing public scrutiny with a self-imposed exile, first near Chicago with his family and then in the anonymous suburbs of Washington, D.C. There, he begins a long personal struggle with his misdeeds, working out his own answers to the questions of why he fabricated, how he can learn to stop lying, and whether, at age twenty-five, he has destroyed his life irrevocably. Glass encounters a world far stranger than his own fabrications -- one populated by eccentric coworkers, ailing animals, angry masseuses, sexy librarians, competitive bingo players, synchronized swimmers, a soulful stripper, and a mysterious guardian angel who dresses only in purple. Meanwhile, Glass is chased by marauding journalists whose desperation and ruthlessness manage to match even his own. As he dodges his pursuers, Glass grasps at straws only to find that, wondrously, they sometimes hold. Despite himself, he rediscovers the Judaism he'd left far behind in Hebrew school, and falls helplessly in love with a young woman who turns out to have her own shameful past. In the end, The Fabulist is as much about family, friendship, religion, and love -- about getting through somehow, even when it seems impossible -- as it is about reality and fantasy. At once hilarious and harrowing, The Fabulist is one of the year's most provocative novels.

Stephen Greenblatt's Renaissance Self-fashioning is a study of sixteenth-century life and literature that spawned a new era of scholarly inquiry. Greenblatt examines the structure of selfhood as evidenced in major literacy figures of the English Renaissance- More, Tyndale, Wyatt, Spenser, Marlowe, and Shakespeare- and finds that in the early modern period new questions surrounding the nature of identity heavily influenced the literature of the era. Now a classic text in literary studies, Renaissance Self-Fashioning continues to be of interest to students of the Renaissance, English literature, and the new historicist tradition. This edition is enhanced with the addition of a preface by the author on the book's creation and influence.

Choosing My Religion is a luminous memoir, crafted with the eye of a journalist and the art of a novelist by New York Times Magazine writer and editor Stephen J. Dubner. By turns comic and heartbreaking, it tells the story of a family torn apart by religion, sustained by faith, and reunited by truth.

Two years ago, Stephen J. Dubner wrote a cover story for the New York Times Magazine called "Choosing My Religion." It became one of the most widely discussed articles in the magazine's history. Turbulent Souls, the book that grew out of that article, is an intimate memoir of a man in search of a Jewish heritage he never knew he had. It is also a loving portrait of his parents. Stephen Dubner's family was as Catholic as they come. His devout parents attended mass at every opportunity and named their eight children after saints. Stephen, the youngest child, became an altar boy, studied the catechism, and learned the traditional rituals of the Church -- never suspecting that the religion he embraced was not his by blood. Turbulent Souls is Dubner's personal account of his family; tumultuous journey from Judaism to Catholicism -- and in his own case, back to Judaism -- and the effects, some tragic, some comic, of those spiritual transformations. His parents were Jews, born in Brooklyn to immigrant parents, but -- independent of each other and, indeed, before they met -- each converted to Christianity, only to be shunned by their families. After their marriage, they closed the door on Judaism so firmly that their children had no inkling that their background was far different from what it seemed: They didn't know, for instance, that their mother had a first cousin named Ethel Rosenberg, who was executed for treason in one of the most controversial cases of the cold war era. Stephen Dubner's is a story about discovery: of relatives he never knew existed, of family history he'd never learned, and of a faith he'd never thought of as his own and, in fact, knew nothing about. It's a fascinating, thoughtful, and thought-provoking exploration of a subject of intense interest to spiritually minded men and women everywhere.

In characteristic form, Gould weaves the ideas of some of Western society's greatest thinkers, from Bacon to Galileo to E.O. Wilson, with the uncelebrated ideas of lesser-known yet pivotal intellectuals. He uses the ideas of these men to undo an assumption born in the 17th century and continuing to this day, that science and the humanities stand in opposition. In the title and throughout the book he uses a metaphor drawn from Erasmus and a more obscure 16th century scholar named Konrad Gesner (an illustrator of the animal kingdom) of the hedgehog - who goes after one thing at a measured pace, systematically investigating all; the Fox - skilled at many things, intuitive and fast; and the magister's pox - a censure from the Catholic Church involved in Galileo's downfall: a metaphor which illustrates the different ways of responding to knowledge - from a scientific, humanistic and fearful way. He argues that in fact each of them should borrow from each other and thereby improve their own given disciplines. Gould then delves into a fiery discussion of the notion of consilience first put forward by E.O. Wilson, which argues that scientific method (specifically reductionism) is supreme,