From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, an outstanding array of short fiction that surveys the terrain between the illusory and the ordinary and reveals the terrors and wonders reflected in the funhouse mirrors of our dreams―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee "He is a treasure-house of story, and we are lucky to have him." --Stephen King Spanning the realms of dark imagination, Smoke and Mirrors surveys the terrain between the illusory and the ordinary, treating readers to a gift of wonder and delight from one of the most unique literary artists of our time. The miraculous inventions contained herein - stories, novellas, and poems - reveal Gaiman to be a writer of immense talent and sophisticated invention. In his deft hands, magic is no mere illusion, but a powerful means of illumination, revelation, and reflection on what it means to be human. Poignant and haunting, humorous and unorthodox, Smoke and Mirrors is an outstanding array of short fiction from one of the world's most distinguished literary masters.

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, an astonishing collection of short fiction that stretches the boundaries of imagination, probes the depths of human experience, and reveals how the ordinary and the fantastical are intertwined―one of ten classic Gaiman works repackaged with elegant original watercolor art by acclaimed artist Henry Sene Yee Fragile Things showcases the distinctive storytelling genius that has made Neil Gaiman one of the most admired literary artists of our time. The thirty-two gems of prose and verse in this astonishing collection stretch the imagination and engage the intellect even as they illuminate the vagaries of human experience. Whether he's conjuring a mysterious traveling circus, exploring the rarefied tastes of an exclusive epicurean club, or visiting a strangely altered Victorian England, Gaiman reveals how the ordinary and the fantastical are transmutable and intertwined. With breathtaking clarity, Fragile Things illumines Gaiman's brilliance as well as his terrifyingly entertaining dark sense of humor. By turns delightful, disturbing, and diverting, this volume is a gift of enchantments that will startle the senses and stir the soul.

National Book Award-winning author Jonathan Kozol presents his shocking account of the American educational system in this stunning New York Times bestseller, which has sold more than 250,000 hardcover copies.

Coming in May 2024: A stunning repackage of the third novel in the New York Times bestselling Bone Season series. Following a bloody battle against foes on every side, Paige Mahoney has risen to the dangerous position of Underqueen, ruling over London's criminal population. But, having turned her back on Jaxon Hall and with vengeful enemies still at large, the task of stabilizing the fractured underworld has never seemed so challenging. Little does Paige know that her reign may be cut short by the introduction of Senshield, a deadly technology that spells doom for the clairvoyant community and the world as they know it . . .

“Beryl Satter's Family Properties is really an incredible book. It is, by far, the best book I've ever read on the relationship between blacks and Jews. That's because it hones in on the relationship between one specific black community and one specific Jewish community and thus revels in the particular humanity of all its actors.” —Ta-Nehisi Coates, The Atlantic Part family story and part urban history, a landmark investigation of segregation and urban decay in Chicago -- and cities across the nation The "promised land" for thousands of Southern blacks, postwar Chicago quickly became the most segregated city in the North, the site of the nation's worst ghettos and the target of Martin Luther King Jr.'s first campaign beyond the South. In this powerful book, Beryl Satter identifies the true causes of the city's black slums and the ruin of urban neighborhoods throughout the country: not, as some have argued, black pathology, the culture of poverty, or white flight, but a widespread and institutionalized system of legal and financial exploitation. In Satter's riveting account of a city in crisis, unscrupulous lawyers, slumlords, and speculators are pitched against religious reformers, community organizers, and an impassioned attorney who launched a crusade against the profiteers—the author's father, Mark J. Satter. At the heart of the struggle stand the black migrants who, having left the South with its legacy of sharecropping, suddenly find themselves caught in a new kind of debt peonage. Satter shows the interlocking forces at work in their oppression: the discriminatory practices of the banking industry; the federal policies that created the country's shameful "dual housing market"; the economic anxieties that fueled white violence; and the tempting profits to be made by preying on the city's most vulnerable population. Family Properties: Race, Real Estate, and the Exploitation of Black Urban America is a monumental work of history, this tale of racism and real estate, politics and finance, will forever change our understanding of the forces that transformed urban America. "Gripping . . . This painstaking portrayal of the human costs of financial racism is the most important book yet written on the black freedom struggle in the urban North."—David Garrow, The Washington Post

As a child growing up in Manhattan, William Helmreich played a game with his father called "Last Stop." They would pick a subway line, ride it to its final destination, and explore the neighborhood. Decades later, his love for exploring the city is as strong as ever.Putting his feet to the test, he decided that the only way to truly understand New York was to walk virtually every block of all five boroughs-an astonishing 6,000 miles. His journey took him to every corner of Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, the Bronx, and Staten Island. Helmreich spoke with hundreds of New Yorkers from every part of the globe and all walks of life. He finds that to be a New Yorker is to struggle to understand the place and to make a life that is as highly local as it is dynamically cosmopolitan.Truly unforgettable, The New York Nobody Knows will forever change how you view the world's greatest city.

In this powerful and culminating work about a group of inner-city children he has known for many years, Jonathan Kozol returns to the scene of his previous prize-winning books, and to the children he has vividly portrayed, to share with us their fascinating journeys and unexpected victories as they grow into adulthood. For nearly fifty years, Jonathan has pricked the conscience of his readers by laying bare the savage inequalities inflicted upon children for no reason but the accident of being born to poverty within a wealthy nation. But never has his intimate acquaintance with his subjects been more apparent, or more stirring, than in Fire in the Ashes , as Jonathan tells the stories of young men and women who have come of age in one of the most destitute communities of the United States. Some of them never do recover from the battering they undergo in their early years, but many more battle back with fierce and often jubilant determination to overcome the formidable obstacles they face. As we watch these glorious children grow into the fullness of a healthy and contributive maturity, they ignite a flame of hope, not only for themselves but also for our society.

Rachel and Her Homeless Families In America [paperback] Kozol, Jonathan [Feb 01, 1989]

A new 30th Anniversary paperback edition of an award-winning classic. Winner of the National Book Award, 1976 World of Our Fathers traces the story of Eastern Europe's Jews to America over four decades. Beginning in the 1880s, it offers a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, and shows how the immigrant generation tried to maintain their Yiddish culture while becoming American. It is essential reading for those interested in understanding why these forebears to many of today's American Jews made the decision to leave their homelands, the challenges these new Jewish Americans faced, and how they experienced every aspect of immigrant life in the early part of the twentieth century. This invaluable contribution to Jewish literature and culture is now back in print in a new paperback edition, which includes a new foreword by noted author and literary critic Morris Dickstein.

Jonathan Kozol's books have become touchstones of the American conscience. In Ordinary Resurrections, he spends four years in the South Bronx with children who have become his friends at a badly underfunded but enlightened public school. A fascinating narrative of daily urban life, Ordinary Resurrections gives a human face to poverty and racial isolation, and provides a stirring testimony to the courage and resilience of the young. Sometimes playful, sometimes jubilantly funny, and sometimes profoundly sad, these are sensitive children—complex and morally insightful—and their ethical vitality denounces and subverts the racially charged labels that the world of grown-up expertise too frequently assigns to them. Yet another classic case of unblinking social observation from one of the finest writers ever to work in the genre, this is a piercing discernment of right and wrong, of hope and despair—from our nation's corridors of power to its poorest city streets.

Award-winning journalist Ben Joravsky vividly brings to life all the richness and subtlety of the experiences of Arthur Agee and William Gates, two gifted urban hoopsters determined to make it to the NBA, in this intimate, suspenseful, and heart-wrenching adaptation of the award-winning, commercially successful film documentary. 25 photos.

From the co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, a captivating portrait of contemporary New York City through six speakers of little-known and overlooked languages, diving into the incredible history of the most linguistically diverse place ever to have existed on the planet Half of all 7,000-plus human languages may disappear over the next century and--because many have never been recorded--when they're gone, it will be forever. Ross Perlin, a linguist and co-director of the Manhattan-based non-profit Endangered Language Alliance, is racing against time to map little-known languages across the most linguistically diverse city in history: contemporary New York. In Language City , Perlin recounts the unique history of immigration that shaped the city, and follows six remarkable yet ordinary speakers of endangered languages deep into their communities to learn how they are maintaining and reviving their languages against overwhelming odds. Perlin also dives deep into their languages, taking us on a fascinating tour of unusual grammars, rare sounds, and powerful cultural histories from all around the world. Seke is spoken by 700 people from five ancestral villages in Nepal, a hundred of whom have lived in a single Brooklyn apartment building. N'ko is a radical new West African writing system now going global in Harlem and the Bronx. After centuries of colonization and displacement, Lenape, the city's original Indigenous language and the source of the name Manhattan ("the place where we get bows"), has just one fluent native speaker, bolstered by a small band of revivalists. Also profiled in the book are speakers of the Indigenous Mexican language Nahuatl, the Central Asian minority language Wakhi, and the former lingua franca of the Lower East Side, Yiddish. A century after the anti-immigration Johnson-Reed Act closed America's doors for decades and on the 400th anniversary of New York's colonial founding, Perlin raises the alarm about growing political threats and the onslaught of "killer languages" like English and Spanish. Both remarkable social history and testament to the importance of linguistic diversity, Language City is a joyful and illuminating exploration of a city and the world that made it.

Studio 54 was the icon of excess—a place where Andy, Mick, Bianca, and Elton lounged in the VIP section while patrons did drugs in the fabled unisex bathroom, and wannabes waiting for hours outside hoped to catch the eye of the nineteen-year-old doorman who was, for a brief moment, the ultimate gatekeeper of cool. The Last Party is the story not just of Studio 54 but of the whole Nightworld, vividly recalled by a writer and reveler who was there on opening night and on many, many nights thereafter. Anthony Haden-Guest takes us past the velvet rope, down onto the pounding dance floor, up into the polymorphously perverse balcony, and into owner Steve Rubell's office, where millions of dollars were surreptitiously skimmed from the golden goose. Vibrant, shocking, nonstop, and revealing, The Last Party is as packed with sparkle, scandal, and celebrity as Studio 54 itself.

Alfred Kazin burst onto the American literary scene in 1942, when his first book, "On Native Grounds," announced the arrival of an important new literary critic. "A Walker in the City," his second, signaled the other direction his career would follow: author of several intense, intimate, and lyrical memoirs. Years later he would admit how he struggled writing it. He thought he wanted to concentrate on New York itself, describing a series of walks around the city. But what emerged was the story of his own boyhood encounters with it, starting from Brownsville, the Brooklyn Jewish neighborhood of his birth, then stretching out to alluring, mysterious Manhattan and from there to the world. Each walk is simultaneously a journey out and a journey in: outward, from the neighborhood to the land beyond, the great, electric, canyoned streets of the city; inward, into his own soul, as it grows and falls in love with books and language and literature, with music and metaphysics and politics, with the city and the country and the world and rapturously tries to take them all in.

The universe of the mind is a limitless expanse of wonders, filled with worlds and secrets that cannot be fully explored within the pages of a single novel. Avid readers of science fiction have long appreciated the myriad joys of returning to fictional galaxies already experienced. In Far Horizons, a variable "Who's Who" of science fiction's most beloved and highly honored writers once again revisit the remariable worlds they created and made famous. Perhaps the greatest concentration of science fiction talent ever in one volume, this unprecedented masterpiece reopens vast empires of imagination and adventure to new explorations and appreciations. It is a major SF event, sure to bring unparalleled joy to the hearts of serious fans everywhere.

The Integral Urban House: Self Reliant Living in the City is a comprehensive guide to achieving a completely sustainable urban lifestyle by creating a mini-ecosystem where residents grow their own fruits and vegetables, raise chickens, rabbits, and fish, recycle 90% of their waste, solar heat their hot water, and use a variety of other alternative technologies-all on a 1/8-acre city lot. Long considered the bible of urban homesteading, this book is the result of four years of living with and refining the systems of the Integral Urban House in Berkeley, California-a collaborative project which combined the collective skills of the members of the Farallones Institute to develop a center for creating and testing experimental, ecologically stable and resource-conserving living systems. With its vision of an intimate connection between the urban habitat and ecological principles The Integral Urban House will inspire and empower people to act within their own communities to create places where they can live more sustainably. The Integral Urban House: Self-Reliant Living in the City is a magnificent, inspiring record of eco-technically effective intelligent human cooperation... This is magnificent news for humanity. We are on our way. -- R. Buckminster Fuller Civilized cities, nourishing food, renewable energy, closed nutrient cycles, -- these form the vision of this pioneering guidebook. With it we can start to build a new urban culture that is practical, sustainable, inviting and exciting. -- Amory Lovins

Through two award-winning National Public Radio documentaries, and now this powerful book, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman have made it their mission to be loud voices from one of this country's darkest places, Chicago's Ida B. Wells housing project. Set against the stunning photographs of a talented young photographer from the projects, Our America evokes the unforgiving world of these two amazing young men, and their struggle to survive unrelenting tragedy. With a gift for clear-eyed journalism, they tell their own stories and others, including that of the death of Eric Morse, a five-year-old who was dropped to his death from the fourteenth floor of an Ida B. Wells apartment building by two other little boys. Sometimes funny, often painful, but always charged with their dream of Our America, LeAlan Jones and Lloyd Newman reach out to grab your attention and break your heart.

Gossip is no trivial matter; despite its reputation, Epstein argues, it is an eternal and necessary human enterprise. Proving that he himself is a master of the art, Epstein serves up delightful mini-biographies of the Great Gossips of the Western World, along with many choice bits from his own experience. He also makes a powerful case that gossip has morphed from its old-fashioned best--clever, mocking, a great private pleasure--to a corrosive new-school version, thanks to the reach of the mass media and the Internet. Written in his trademark erudite and witty style, Gossip captures the complexity of this immensely entertaining subject.

The Faith and Doubt of Holocaust Survivors reveals the victims' frank and thought-provoking answers to searching questions about their experiences: Was the Holocaust God's will? Was there any meaning or purpose in the Holocaust? Was Israel worth the price six million had to pay? Did the experience in the death camps bring about an avowal of faith? A denial of God? A reaffirmation of religious belief? Did the Holocaust change beliefs about the coming of the Messiah, the Torah, the Jews as the chosen people, and the nature of God? Drawing on the responses of seven hundred survivors, Reeve Robert Brenner reveals the changes, rejections, reaffirmations, doubts, and despairs that have so profoundly affected the faith, practices, ideas, and attitudes of survivors, and, by extension, the entire Jewish people. Many survivors carried their deepest secrets and innermost beliefs silently, from internment to interment. But Brenner's quest provided the impetus for many survivors to end their silence about the past and come forth with their feelings. In poignant vignettes scattered throughout the book, their answers to these profound questions are offered, disclosing ardent, overpowering passions and sensibilities.

At each stage of their lives--from infant cribs to teen dropouts to welfare dependents to basement shelters for the elderly--the people of the underclass are shunned by the rest of the population, even by the working poor. The cycle is vicious: Underclass children get little help in their own homes (when they have homes); they are shoved aside at school until they drop out like their parents did; they are unable to find decent work without an education; they have children of their own for whom they cannot provide adequate care; and finally, they are dumped into human (but inhumane) warehouses for the not-quite-deceased. America cannot afford to do this to its poorest citizens; we cannot afford not to rescue the underclass. In the richest country on earth, the people of the underclass are not merely a problem, they are a scandal.