This ''darkly beautiful'' (Washington Post) novel has been hailed as Erickson's best.

On the same August day in 1969 that a crazed hippie ''family'' led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above Los Angeles, a young ex-communicated seminarian arrives with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift - ''the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies'' - tattooed on his head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cineaste but ''cineautistic,'' sleeping at night in the Roosevelt Hotel where he's haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith. Vikar has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: strange drugs that frighten him, a strange sexuality that consumes him, a strange music he doesn't understand. Over the course of the seventies and into the eighties, he pursues his obsession with film from one screening to the next and through a series of cinema-besotted conversations and encounters with starlets, burglars, guerrillas, escorts, teenage punks, and veteran film editors, only to discover a secret whose clues lie in every film ever made.

Hollis Henry never intended to work for global marketing magnate Hubertus Bigend again. But now she’s broke, and Bigend has just the thing to get her back in the game...

Milgrim can disappear in almost any setting, and his Russian is perfectly idiomatic—so much so that he spoke it with his therapist in the secret Swiss clinic where Bigend paid for him to be cured of his addiction...

Garreth doesn't owe Bigend a thing. But he does have friends from whom he can call in the kinds of favors powerful people need when things go sideways...

They all have something Bigend wants as he finds himself outmaneuvered and adrift, after a Department of Defense contract for combat-wear turns out to be the gateway drug for arms dealers so shadowy they can out-Bigend Bigend himself.

“Zero History is [Gibson’s] best yet, a triumph of science fiction as social criticism and adventure.”—BoingBoing.net

The war for survival of the planet Lusitania will be fought in the heart of a child named Gloriously Bright.

On Lusitania, Ender found a world where humans and pequininos and the Hive Queen could all live together; where three very different intelligent species could find common ground at last. Or so he thought.

Lusitania also harbors the descolada, a virus that kills all humans it infects, but which the pequininos require in order to become adults. The Startways Congress so fears the effects of the descolada, should it escape from Lusitania, that they have ordered the destruction of the entire planet, and all who live there. The Fleet is on its way, a second xenocide seems inevitable.

Xenocide is the third novel in Orson Scott Card's Ender Quintet.

A whimsical call-to-arms for the generation that came of age between the Baby Boomers and the Millennials furnishes a tribute to its significant cultural, technological, and political contributions, from Yahoo! and Lollapalooza to Nirvana and Woodstock '94.

Imagine a former French major getting vocabulary tips from her young children! That was the experience of Kristin Espinasse, an American who fell in love with a Frenchman and moved to his country to marry him and start a family. When her children began speaking the language, she found herself falling in love with it all over again. To relate the stories of her sometimes bumpy, often comic, and always poignant assimilation, she created a blog called "French Word a Day," drawing more admirers than she ever could have imagined.

With an approach that is as charming as it is practical, Espinasse shares her story through the everyday French words and phrases that never seem to make it to American classrooms. "Comptoir" ("counter") is a piece about the intricacies of grocery shopping in France, and "Linge" ("laundry") swoons over the wonderful scent the laundry has after being hung out in the French countryside while "Toquade" ("crush") tells of Espinasse's young son, who begins piling gel onto his hair before school each morning when he becomes smitten with a girl in class.

Steeped in French culture but experienced through American eyes, Words in a French Life will delight armchair travelers, Francophiles, and mothers everywhere.

Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet comprises four remarkable novels that explore social class in America and the inner lives of young Americans. Spanning from the Great Depression to the turbulent Vietnam War era, Wonderland is the epic account of Jesse Vogel, a boy who emerged from a family tragedy with his life spared but his world torn apart. Orphaned after watching his father murder his entire family, Jesse embarks on a personal odyssey that takes him from a Dickensian foster home to college and graduate school to the pinnacle of the medical profession. As an adult, Jesse must summon the strength to reach across the “generation gap” and rescue his endangered teenaged daughter, who has fallen into the drug-infused 1960s counterculture. 

Hailed by Library Journal as “the greatest of Oates’s novels,” Wonderland is the capstone of a magnificent literary excursion that plunges beneath the glossy surface of American life. 

Wonderland is the final novel in Joyce Carol Oates’s Wonderland Quartet. The books that complete this acclaimed series, A Garden of Earthly Delights, Expensive People, and them, are also available from the Modern Library.

From Publishers Weekly

Our review of Oates's 1971 masterpiece starring Jesse Vogel, reissued here with a new afterword, concluded: " 'Wonderland' is not a place from which one escapes unscathed but for those who care about the best in American fiction it must be visited.' "
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.

About the Author

Joyce Carol Oates is the author of more than 70 books, including novels, short story collections, poetry volumes, plays, essays, and criticism, including the national bestsellers We Were the Mulvaneys and Blonde. Among her many honors are the PEN/Malamud Award for Excellence in Short Fiction and the National Book Award. Oates is the Roger S. Berlind Distinguished Professor of the Humanities at Princeton University, and has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters since 1978.

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE STARRING JULIA ROBERTS, OWEN WILSON, AND JACOB TREMBLAY!

Over 6 million people have read the #1 New York Times bestseller WONDER and have fallen in love with Auggie Pullman, an ordinary boy with an extraordinary face. 

The book that inspired the Choose Kind movement.

I won't describe what I look like. Whatever you're thinking, it's probably worse. 

August Pullman was born with a facial difference that, up until now, has prevented him from going to a mainstream school. Starting 5th grade at Beecher Prep, he wants nothing more than to be treated as an ordinary kid—but his new classmates can’t get past Auggie’s extraordinary face. WONDER, now a #1 New York Times bestseller and included on the Texas Bluebonnet Award master list, begins from Auggie’s point of view, but soon switches to include his classmates, his sister, her boyfriend, and others. These perspectives converge in a portrait of one community’s struggle with empathy, compassion, and acceptance. 

"Wonder is the best kids' book of the year," said Emily Bazelon, senior editor at Slate.com and author of Sticks and Stones: Defeating the Culture of Bullying and Rediscovering the Power of Character and Empathy. In a world where bullying among young people is an epidemic, this is a refreshing new narrative full of heart and hope. R.J. Palacio has called her debut novel “a meditation on kindness” —indeed, every reader will come away with a greater appreciation for the simple courage of friendship. Auggie is a hero to root for, a diamond in the rough who proves that you can’t blend in when you were born to stand out. 

Join the conversation: #thewonderofwonder

All essays, poems, parables, and stories are handwritten and edited by the author. All artwork is hand-drawn by the author. The book is dedicated to seeking greater self understanding and growth of spiritual awareness.

A collection of powerful essays in spoken word form remembering September 11, 2001, by high school students who witnessed the tragedy unfold.

A New York Public Library Book for the Teen Age

“Profound.” —Booklist

“Moving.” —Publishers Weekly

“Rings with authenticity and resonates with power.” —School Library Journal

Tuesday, September 11, started off like any other day at Stuyvesant High School, located only a few blocks away from the World Trade Center.

The semester was just beginning, and the students, faculty, and staff were ready to start a new year. But within a few hours on that Tuesday morning, they would share an experience that would transform their lives—and the lives of all Americans.

These powerful essays by the students of Stuyvesant High School remember those who were lost and those who were forced to witness this tragedy. Here, in their own words, are the firsthand stories of a day we will never forget.

The theories of Wealthy Achievers are reasonably well known, yet practiced by few. The neural freeways that declare,"buy it now, pay for it later" or "spenders have more fun than savers" are so clear and compelling that true wisdom to the contrary appears like some dirt track off to the side. We notice it, we hesitate momentarily, but we speed on by - it would just be too difficult to slow down, indicate and turn onto a new and unexplored back road. This book is an attempt to stand at the intersection and wave madly at the passing traffic in an attempt to convince them that what they really seek is to be discovered here on the quiet lane, rather than on the frenzied freeway.

"WHAT HAPPENED THIS AFTERNOON IS TOO TERRIBLE TO WRITE. . . . PLEASE, GOD, LET WILL LIVE. AND, PLEASE, GOD, FORGIVE ME." 

All Will Ames ever wanted to do was farm. But when he's injured in a farm accident, Will is left without a leg -- and without his future. 

There's no place on a farm for a cripple. And so, after a long winter of healing, Will and his sister Cassie, who blames herself for the accident, go to stay in town with their older sister and her husband. There, as Maine becomes a state, Will learns that perhaps even without his leg, there's another, brighter future in store for him. And Cassie, too, learns that maybe, in the changing world of 1820, Will isn't the only one with the chance at a different, exciting future. . . .

Every winter, straight-laced, Ivy League bound Evan looks forward to a visit from Lucy, a childhood pal who moved away after her parent's divorce. But when Lucy arrives this year, she's changed. The former "girl next door" now has chopped dyed black hair, a nose stud, and a scowl. But Evan knows that somewhere beneath the Goth, "Old Lucy" still exists, and he's determined to find her... even if it means pissing her off.

Garden State meets Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist in this funny and poignant illustrated novel about opposites who fall in love.

"Perfectly crafted. . . . [These] stories expand of their own accord, lingering in the mind the way intense light lingers in the retina."  --Los Angeles Times

"Animals and landscapes have not had this weight, this precision, in American fiction since Hemingway's young heroes were fishing the streams of upper Michigan and Spain." --San Francisco Chronicle

A flock of great blue herons descending through a snowstorm to the streets of New York. . . . A river in Nebraska disappearing mysteriously. . . . A ghostly herd of buffalo that sings a song of death. . . . A mystic who raises constellations of stones from the desert floor. . . . All these are to be found in Winter Count, the exquisite and rapturous collection by the National Book Award-winning author of Arctic Dreams.

In these resonant and unpredictable stories Barry Lopez proves that he is one of the most important and original writers at work in America today. With breathtaking skill and a few deft strokes he produces painfully beautiful scenes. Combining the real with the wondrous, he offers us a pure vision of people alive to the immediacy and spiritual truth of nature.

"Powerful. . . . [Lopez] can steal your breath away." --Minneapolis Tribune

"Richly allusive, moving, compassionate, these stories celebrate the web of nature that holds the world together." --The Philadelphia Inquirer

What started as a friendly conversation between a young girl, Theresa Longworth, and an army officer, William Charles Yelverton, on a steamer bound from France to England in 1852 would culminate nearly a decade later in one of the biggest public scandals the era had witnessed, with enormous implications for society at large. Seized upon by the Victorian press, the trials to legitimize Longworth's marriage to Yelverton before the law courts of Ireland, Scotland, and England brought to the fore several of the most disconcerting matters in the Victorian era: the inadequacies of female education, prejudice against single women, and problems with marriage law.

When Theresa Yelverton emerged victorious from her legal battles, she was paraded through Dublin's streets like a queen. Her victory, though, was short-lived, as she learned that life as a single woman--even the life of a well-known writer and traveler, as she became--would always be hard. Theresa Yelverton became an unwitting harbinger of the turmoil of her era and evoked timeless fears and fascinations: the fantasy of romance, the grip of obsession, the plight of unrequited love, the fear of abandonment. Chloe Schama brilliantly recaptures an ordinary woman caught up in an extraordinary affair, catapulted into fame and notoriety, forcing her society to confront some of its most unsettling issues.

"No one does magical realism quite like McLemore, and this third novel, laced with slow-burning suspense, folklore, romance, and spun together with exquisite, luxuriant prose, proves it.,,, Sheer magic: fierce, bright, and blazing with possibility."― Booklist (starred)

Love grows such strange things.

Anna-Marie McLemore's debut novel The Weight of Feathers garnered fabulous reviews and was a finalist for the prestigious YALSA Morris Award, and her second novel, When the Moon was Ours, was longlisted for the 2016 National Book Award for Young People's Literature. Now, in Wild Beauty, McLemore introduces a spellbinding setting and two characters who are drawn together by fate―and pulled apart by reality.

For nearly a century, the Nomeolvides women have tended the grounds of La Pradera, the lush estate gardens that enchant guests from around the world. They’ve also hidden a tragic legacy: if they fall in love too deeply, their lovers vanish. But then, after generations of vanishings, a strange boy appears in the gardens.

The boy is a mystery to Estrella, the Nomeolvides girl who finds him, and to her family, but he’s even more a mystery to himself; he knows nothing more about who he is or where he came from than his first name. As Estrella tries to help Fel piece together his unknown past, La Pradera leads them to secrets as dangerous as they are magical in this stunning exploration of love, loss, and family.

About the Author

ANNA-MARIE MCLEMORE was born in the foothills of theSan Gabriel Mountains and grew up hearing la llorona in the Santa Anawinds. She is the author of William C. Morris Debut Award Finalist The Weight of Feathers, Stonewall Honor Book When the Moon Was Ours, and Wild Beauty.

A fourth-generation insomniac, Patricia Morrisroe decided that the only way she’d ever conquer her lifelong sleep disorder was by becoming an expert on the subject. So, armed with half a century of personal experience and a journalist’s curiosity, she set off to explore one of life’s greatest mysteries: sleep. Wide Awake is the eye-opening account of Morrisroe’s quest—a compelling memoir that blends science, culture, and business to tell the story of why she—and forty million other Americans—can’t sleep at night.             

Over the course of three years of research and reporting, Morrisroe talks to sleep doctors, drug makers, psychiatrists, anthropologists, hypnotherapists, “wake experts,” mattress salesmen, a magician, an astronaut, and even a reindeer herder. She spends an uncomfortable night wired up in a sleep lab. She tries “sleep restriction” and “brain music therapy.” She buys a high-end sound machine, custom-made ear plugs, and a “quiet” house in the country to escape her noisy neighbors in the city. She attends a continuing medical education course in Las Vegas, where she discovers that doctors are among the most sleep-deprived people in the country. She travels to Sonoma, California, where she attends a Dream Ball costumed as her “dream self.” To fulfill a childhood fantasy, she celebrates Christmas Eve two hundred miles north of the Arctic Circle, in the famed Icehotel tossing and turning on an ice bed. Finally, after traveling the globe, she finds the answer to her insomnia right around the corner from her apartment in New York City. 

A mesmerizing mix of personal insight, science and social observation, Wide Awake examines the role of sleep in our increasingly hyperactive culture. For the millions who suffer from sleepless nights and hazy caffeine-filled days, this humorous, thought-provoking and ultimately hopeful book is an essential bedtime companion. It does, however, come with a warning: Reading it will promote wakefulness.

The classic anime Wicked City is based on a series of novels by master horror writer Hideyuki Kikuchi. Tor/Seven Seas is pleased to present these novels to the North American audience for the first time, featuring cover art by Christian McGrath (The Dresden Files).

The Black Guard, whose job it is to protect the boundary between our mortal world and the demonic Dark World, has succeeded in preserving the tenuous peace treaty between the two worlds, averting an all-out war. Now a new threat from the Dark World terrorizes humanity, a monster that invades people's dreams and causes them to commit murder.

Black Guard agents Taki, a hardboiled human, and his sexy demon partner, Makie, must work alongside legendary Black Guard agent Miyuki if they are to defeat the creature and save the world.

Like author Hideyuki Kikuchi's well-known and critically-acclaimed Vampire Hunter D novels (Dark Horse), Wicked City is an epic ten-volume tale of supernatural horror and high-octane action.

“I can imagine few more enjoyable ways of thinking than to read this book.”―Sarah Bakewell, New York TimesBook Review, front-page review

Tackling the “darkest question in all of philosophy” with “raffish erudition” (Dwight Garner, New York Times), author Jim Holt explores the greatest metaphysical mystery of all: why is there something rather than nothing? This runaway bestseller, which has captured the imagination of critics and the public alike, traces our latest efforts to grasp the origins of the universe. Holt adopts the role of cosmological detective, traveling the globe to interview a host of celebrated scientists, philosophers, and writers, “testing the contentions of one against the theories of the other” (Jeremy Bernstein, Wall Street Journal). As he interrogates his list of ontological culprits, the brilliant yet slyly humorous Holt contends that we might have been too narrow in limiting our suspects to God versus the Big Bang. This “deft and consuming” (David Ulin, Los Angeles Times) narrative humanizes the profound questions of meaning and existence it confronts.

"Bohm is a tremendously exciting thinker, and this is undoubtedly a book of the first importance." - Colin Wilson

David Bohm was one of the foremost scientific thinkers and philosophers of our time. Although deeply influenced by Einstein, he was also, more unusually for a scientist, inspired by mysticism. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s he made contact with both J. Krishnamurti and the Dalai Lama whose teachings helped shape his work. In both science and philosophy, Bohm's main concern was with understanding the nature of reality in general and of consciousness in particular. In this classic work he develops a theory of quantum physics which treats the totality of existence as an unbroken whole. Writing clearly and without technical jargon, he makes complex ideas accessible to anyone interested in the nature of reality.

Two eleven-year-old sleuths crack a case about the disappearance of a baseball coach in this humourous and offbeat middle-grade mystery, third in Martha Freeman's popular series. After their last success, Alex and Yasmeen made a pact to stop solving mysteries. However, when Alex's baseball coach, a patriotic war veteran nicknamed Uncle Sam, goes missing, it's hard for the young detectives to resist. Soon the two are tracking down clues involving porta-potties, lawn care chemicals, and secret baseball scouts. Will Alex and Yasmeen get to the bottom of the mystery before the summer is over?

An award-winning literary author enters the world of magical realism with her World Fantasy Award-winning novel of a remarkable woman in post-apocalyptic Africa.

In a post-apocalyptic Africa, the world has changed in many ways; yet in one region genocide between tribes still bloodies the land. A woman who has survived the annihilation of her village and a terrible rape by an enemy general wanders into the desert, hoping to die. Instead, she gives birth to an angry baby girl with hair and skin the color of sand. Gripped by the certainty that her daughter is different—special—she names her Onyesonwu, which means "Who fears death?" in an ancient language.

It doesn't take long for Onye to understand that she is physically and socially marked by the circumstances of her conception. She is Ewu—a child of rape who is expected to live a life of violence, a half-breed rejected by her community. But Onye is not the average Ewu. Even as a child, she manifests the beginnings of a remarkable and unique magic. As she grows, so do her abilities, and during an inadvertent visit to the spirit realm, she learns something terrifying: someone powerful is trying to kill her.

Desperate to elude her would-be murderer and to understand her own nature, she embarks on a journey in which she grapples with nature, tradition, history, true love, and the spiritual mysteries of her culture, and ultimately learns why she was given the name she bears: Who Fears Death.

The New York Times Bestseller, with a new preface from the author

“This estimable book rides into the summer doldrums like rural electrification. . . . It deals in the truths that matter.”—Dwight Garner, The New York Times

“This eye-opening investigation into our country’s entrenched social hierarchy is acutely relevant.”—O, The Oprah Magazine

“White Trash will change the way we think about our past and present.”
—T. J. Stiles, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Custer’s Trials

In her groundbreaking  bestselling history of the class system in America, Nancy Isenberg, #4 on the 2016 Politico 50 list, takes on our comforting myths about equality, uncovering the crucial legacy of the ever-present, always embarrassing—if occasionally entertaining—poor white trash.

“When you turn an election into a three-ring circus, there’s always a chance that the dancing bear will win,” says Isenberg of the political climate surrounding Sarah Palin. And we recognize how right she is today. Yet the voters that put Trump in the White House have been a permanent part of our American fabric, argues Isenberg.

The wretched and landless poor have existed from the time of the earliest British colonial settlement to today's hillbillies. They were alternately known as “waste people,” “offals,” “rubbish,” “lazy lubbers,” and “crackers.” By the 1850s, the downtrodden included so-called “clay eaters” and “sandhillers,” known for prematurely aged children distinguished by their yellowish skin, ragged clothing, and listless minds.

Surveying political rhetoric and policy, popular literature and scientific theories over four hundred years, Isenberg upends assumptions about America’s supposedly class-free society––where liberty and hard work were meant to ensure real social mobility. Poor whites were central to the rise of the Republican Party in the early nineteenth century, and the Civil War itself was fought over class issues nearly as much as it was fought over slavery. Reconstruction pitted poor white trash against newly freed slaves, which factored in the rise of eugenics–-a widely popular movement embraced by Theodore Roosevelt that targeted poor whites for sterilization. These poor were at the heart of New Deal reforms and LBJ’s Great Society; they haunt us in reality TV shows like Here Comes Honey Boo Boo and Duck Dynasty. Marginalized as a class, white trash have always been at or near the center of major political debates over the character of the American identity.

We acknowledge racial injustice as an ugly stain on our nation’s history. With Isenberg’s landmark book, we will have to face the truth about the enduring, malevolent nature of class as well.

Zadie Smith’s dazzling debut caught critics grasping for comparisons and deciding on everyone from Charles Dickens to Salman Rushdie to John Irving and Martin Amis. But the truth is that Zadie Smith’s voice is remarkably, fluently, and altogether wonderfully her own.

"Astonishing...Smith writes sharp dialogue for every age and race--and she's funny as hell." --Newsweek

At the center of this invigorating novel are two unlikely friends, Archie Jones and Samad Iqbal. Hapless veterans of World War II, Archie and Samad and their families become agents of England’s irrevocable transformation. A second marriage to Clara Bowden, a beautiful, albeit tooth-challenged, Jamaican half his age, quite literally gives Archie a second lease on life, and produces Irie, a knowing child whose personality doesn’t quite match her name (Jamaican for “no problem”). Samad’s late-in-life arranged marriage (he had to wait for his bride to be born), produces twin sons whose separate paths confound Iqbal’s every effort to direct them, and a renewed, if selective, submission to his Islamic faith. Set against London’ s racial and cultural tapestry, venturing across the former empire and into the past as it barrels toward the future, White Teeth revels in the ecstatic hodgepodge of modern life, flirting with disaster, confounding expectations, and embracing the comedy of daily existence. 

White Tears is a ghost story, a terrifying murder mystery, a timely meditation on race, and a love letter to all the forgotten geniuses of American music and Delta Mississippi Blues.


"An incisive meditation on race, privilege and music. Spanning decades, this novel brings alive the history of old-time blues and America’s racial conscience."—Rabeea Saleem, Chicago Review of Books

Two twenty-something New Yorkers. Seth is awkward and shy. Carter is the glamorous heir to one of America's great fortunes. They have one thing in common: an obsession with music. Seth is desperate to reach for the future. Carter is slipping back into the past. When Seth accidentally records an unknown singer in a park, Carter sends it out over the Internet, claiming it's a long lost 1920s blues recording by a musician called Charlie Shaw. When an old collector contacts them to say that their fake record and their fake bluesman are actually real, the two young white men, accompanied by Carter's troubled sister Leonie, spiral down into the heart of the nation's darkness, encountering a suppressed history of greed, envy, revenge, and exploitation.

Resounding praise for Hari Kunzru and White Tears

"White Tears is distinguished by a knowledge of blues at its deepest, a gift for observation at its most penetrating and stretches of plain old marvelous writing, some swallowing up the pages around them the way a single song . . . swallows up the side of an album. . . . Kunzru brings a canny and original insight to his American subject. . . . [His] awareness and discernment have particular value in an America of the moment where nothing less than the country’s meaning is at stake.”—Steve Erickson, The New York Times Book Review
 
"White Tears is a book that everyone should be reading right now. . . . The reverberations of [this book] echo long after it's done. Part ghost story, part travelogue, White Tears is a drugged-out, spoiled-rotten treatise on race, class and poverty of the soul."—Claire Howorth, TIME
 
"[White Tears is] a novel that's as brave as it is brutal, and it lets nothing and nobody off the hook. . . . Stunning [and] audacious . . . an urgent novel that's as challenging as it is terrifying. . . . completely impossible to put down . . . [Kunzru’s] writing is propulsive, clear and bright, whether he's describing an old blues song or a shocking act of violence. . . . [White Tears] will shock you, horrify you, unsettle you, and that's exactly the point."—Michael Schaub, NPR
 
"[A] truly impressive novel. . . . White Tears is Kunzru’s best book yet."—Anthony Domestico, The Boston Globe
 
"Captivating. . . . Kunzru’s graceful writing is exquisitely attuned to his material. . . . [White Tears is] neither a clever Time and Again story of time travel nor a tricky Westworld sort of past-present parallel. White Tears is a profoundly darker and more complex story of a haunting that elucidates the iniquitous history of white appropriation of black culture."—Katharine Weber, The Washington Post
 
"Simply extraordinary. . . . Kunzru is a master storyteller and this is both a thrillingly written ghost story and an exploration of race conflict in America which is surely one of the best books you will read this year. Don’t miss it."—Alice O’Keeffe, The Bookseller (Book of the Month pick)

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner
New York Times Bestseller
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
A Washington Post Notable Nonfiction Book of the Year
A Boston Globe Best Book of 2016
A Chicago Review of Books Best Nonfiction Book of 2016

From the Civil War to our combustible present, White Rage reframes our continuing conversation about race, chronicling the powerful forces opposed to black progress in America--now in paperback with a new afterword by the author, acclaimed historian Carol Anderson.

As Ferguson, Missouri, erupted in August 2014, and media commentators across the ideological spectrum referred to the angry response of African Americans as “black rage,” historian Carol Anderson wrote a remarkable op-ed in The Washington Post suggesting that this was, instead, "white rage at work. With so much attention on the flames," she argued, "everyone had ignored the kindling."

Since 1865 and the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, every time African Americans have made advances towards full participation in our democracy, white reaction has fueled a deliberate and relentless rollback of their gains. The end of the Civil War and Reconstruction was greeted with the Black Codes and Jim Crow; the Supreme Court's landmark 1954 Brown v. Board of Education decision was met with the shutting down of public schools throughout the South while taxpayer dollars financed segregated white private schools; the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and Voting Rights Act of 1965 triggered a coded but powerful response, the so-called Southern Strategy and the War on Drugs that disenfranchised millions of African Americans while propelling presidents Nixon and Reagan into the White House, and then the election of America's first black President, led to the expression of white rage that has been as relentless as it has been brutal.

Carefully linking these and other historical flashpoints when social progress for African Americans was countered by deliberate and cleverly crafted opposition, Anderson pulls back the veil that has long covered actions made in the name of protecting democracy, fiscal responsibility, or protection against fraud, rendering visible the long lineage of white rage. Compelling and dramatic in the unimpeachable history it relates, White Rage will add an important new dimension to the national conversation about race in America.

Past and present collide as Special Agent Pendergast uncovers mysterious connections between a string of 19th century bear attacks in a Colorado mining town, a fabled, long-lost Sherlock Holmes story, and a deadly present-day arsonist.

In 1876, in a mining camp called Roaring Fork in the Colorado Rockies, eleven miners were killed by a rogue grizzly bear. Corrie Swanson has arranged to examine the miners' remains. When she makes a shocking discovery, town leaders try to stop her from exposing their community's dark and bloody past.

Just as Special Agent Pendergast of the FBI arrives to rescue his protege, the town comes under siege by a murderous arsonist who-with brutal precision-begins burning down multimillion-dollar mansions with the families locked inside. Drawn deeper into the investigation, Pendergast discovers a long-lost Sherlock Holmes story that may be the key to solving both the mystery of the long-dead miners and the modern-day killings as well.

Now, with the ski resort snowed in and under savage attack-and Corrie's life suddenly in grave danger-Pendergast must solve the enigma of the past before the town of the present goes up in flames.

The #1 New York Times bestselling author of the Stone Barrington series delivers a riveting novel of one man’s desperate war against the richest and most ruthless drug cartel in the world.

“Terrific! A top-notch thriller.”—New York Daily News

“A gripping thriller...a taut story that brings attention to one of the most vicious plagues to hit mankind...when the book is concluded, there remains the unsettling question of just how much is fiction and how much is fact.”—San Diego Union-Tribune

Tech millionaire Wendell “Cat” Catledge has taken two years off to sail around the world with his wife and eighteen-year-old daughter. And he’s never been happier—until an impromptu stop for repairs and supplies in Santa Marta, Colombia, turns into a disaster. His wife and daughter are sent to a watery grave, but Cat—though shot—survives...

Now as Cat struggles to put the pieces of his life back together, one phone call will change everything—and send him back to Colombia on a vengeance-fueled journey through its deadly drug towns. One faint voice in the night that says...“Daddy.” 

More Praise for Stuart Woods

“Stuart Woods is a no-nonsense, slam-bang storyteller.”—Chicago Tribune

“A world-class mystery writer...I try to put Woods’s books down and I can’t.”—Houston Chronicle

“Mr. Woods, like his characters, has an appealing way of making things nice and clear.”—The New York Times

“Woods certainly knows how to keep the pages turning.”—Booklist

That was the last thing Klaus had to say before we left J.C.' s diner to go our separate ways. On my way home, I decided I would drive by my grandparents' home. Every once in a while I'll do that, even though it's very painful to realize that they're gone now and that house belongs to someone else- a total stranger. When I come to the house, I park in front and just sit there, recalling that during the Prohibition Era this house was a blind pig and my grandmother was the proprietress. As a young boy, I would walk the three miles from my house just to sit on the front porch with "ma" so I could listen to her tell stories about the "old days". It's been thirty years since I've been inside that house, which was a second home to me when I was growing up. I have a feeling that if I were to go inside now, that my grandfather would still be sitting there in his favorite chair wearing nothing but his BVDs (the kind with the back flap that buttons up) reading "True Detective" or "Field and Stream." I am tempted to walk up the front steps and ring the doorbell, but I don't dare. 

Not far here was a little pond and a garbage dump. In the summers of my childhood, I'd go down to the pond and catch tadpoles and pollywogs, or I'd walk over to the dump and scrounge around for hidden treasures amidst the trash. Say, what's happening to me? Maybe I'm dying. No? Then why is my whole life- beginning with my earliest memories- suddenly passing before my eyes? 

It's my birthday, I'm five-years-old old and I'm sitting on a wooden pony on the fifth floor of Hudson's Department Store in downtown Detroit where I'll be getting my first professional haircut. Later that same day, my mother takes me to Sanders for a Hot Fudge Sunday. Cut to that little pond I mentioned. I've been catching pollywogs with a strainer and putting them in a jar when a big kid comes up to me and orders me to leave. I refuse and he wrestles me to the ground, demanding that I say uncle. When I refuse to say uncle, he gives me a good pounding, then takes that jar of mine and empties its contents back into the pond. I don't cry, but holding back the tears, I vow to myself that I'll get him back some day. But I never do. 

So many things from my childhood have disappeared, like that pond, for instance, which is no longer there, and the garbage dump, and the creek where we fished for carp and the bridge that spanned it- all of that's been gone for years. Gone, too, are the vacant lots where we played pick up baseball in the summer, and the woods where we had bonfires in the fall, roasting marshmallows over the fire while warming ourselves. Now that I think of it, my grade school is gone- torn down years ago to make way for a Farmer Jack's. And the schoolyard where we held our marble tournaments before and after school (knuckles down, no hunching) and played kick ball and dodge ball- that schoolyard where I had so much fun- buried and paved-over into a parking lot- gone. Gone the way of the sheeny-man who came into our neighborhood riding an antique horse that clop, clop clopped down our street pulling a wagon full of junk while the sheeny blew his shrill-sounding horn to let the neighborhood know that he had arrived. Gone too, the ice man who carried big blocks of ice with silver tongs for our ice box; and gone- the man who delivered the coal that went rumbling down the coal shoot and into the coal bin, a fascinating place in its own right when you're still young enough to appreciate such things as coal bins All that's gone. 

Within walking distance of my grandmother's house is the movie theater. I'm six and I'm standing in a long line with all the other kids holding a quarter in my hand: the price of admission back then. For a mere twenty-five cents you've gained entrance to that darkened theater to watch three movies, a newsreel, a serial, (Flash Gordon was my favorite.), cartoons and coming attractions. Seven years later, in that same theater, I sit down next to a strange girl and ask her if she would like to neck with me, and she consents, taking my hand in hers and leaning her head on my shoulder. (Necking wasn't really allowed, and if you weren't careful, a very official-looking usherette, who wore a uniform with gold buttons down the front and epaulettes on the shoulders, would shine her flashlight on you.) The last time I drove by the Lincoln Park Show it was advertising itself on the marquee as Adult Entertainment. 

The Depression having ended by the time I was born, my earliest memories begin around the time of World War II. My mother is sitting down at the kitchen table placing little green stamps in her ration book. Once the book is full, she'll go to a redemption center and have the stamps redeemed for money to buy food with. That was the year we planted a victory garden in the vacant lot next to our house. In a similar vein, the kids on our my block had paper drives and collected scrap metal. It was all part of the war effort, for as young boys we were learning how to be patriotic and to love the flag and "the country for which it stands"- America. As a matter of fact, my very first lesson in patriotism came in the form of a warning from the big kids on my block never to let the American flag touch the ground or I'd have to burn it- just one of a number of taboos I learned as a child similar to, but nowhere near as fearful as, "step on a crack and break you mother's back'. 

Where are they now?- my comic book collection and those hundreds and hundreds of matchbooks that I picked out of gutters and found in empty fields on the way home from school. And why? Because, as a kid of nine, I found the endless variety of match covers fascinating. What happened to my Lionel train- the one I woke up to find underneath the Christmas tree, my Red Ryder be-be gun and my American Flyer bike?- where are they now? 

At that age, my indoor world was a world of tinker toys, erector sets, and games- all kinds of games: hockey, basketball, football and my favorite, APBA baseball,- and the radio. Every Sunday, after church, my dad would buy a paper from the paperboy, and when we got home, I would do is spread out the comic section on the living room floor, then turn on the radio and listen to the Sunday comics being read over the air. During the week, when I get home from school, the first thing I do is turn on the radio and listen to my favorite programs: Jack Armstrong, All-American boy, Captain Midnight, (I wear my Captain Midnight decoder ring that glows in the dark), Sergeant Preston of the Yukon, and broadcast from WXYZ, our very own Lone Ranger. Hi-o Silver, away. In the evening was Baby Snooks, The Great Gildersleeve, Inner Sanctum, Lights Out, My Friend Irma, Bulldog Drummond, The Shadow, Mr. Keane, Tracer of Lost Persons, Name that Tune, Mr. I.Q., Life with Luigi, and another local favorite, The Green Hornet. 

My outdoor world was the streets, the vacant lots, the fields and the alleys of my neighborhood. In the street we played hockey in the winter and touch football in the fall; in fields and vacant lots we played pick up baseball and built our underground fort where we slept out on hot summer nights playing Hearts and Crazy Eights by candlelight, or we climbed up the rope ladder to our tree house where, with our binoculars, we could spy on all our neighbors. Alleys were for alley-picking and for war games played with cap pistols, be-be guns, and sling shots. We made walkie-talkies out of old tin cans and string, kites using clothes line, parachutes, and model airplanes. In the vacant lot next to my house we played cork ball- if you ask me, the greatest game ever invented. You could play cork ball using a large bobber or an ordinary bottle cork for a ball and a broomstick handle for a bat. A ball that landed in the alley was a triple, on the other side of the alley, a home run.. 

Item: our alleys were paved with cinders back then. The White Street gang lines up on one side, the Garfield Street gang on the other. There's going to be a rock fight. Before you know what's happening, the sky is filled with rocks. You throw, you duck, you throw another rock and then you duck and then something happens- your face is burning and throbbing. You've been hit. My god, you could have lost your eye. You could cry, but you don't. You are a casualty in a rock fight and you will carry a scar beneath your eye for the rest of your life, and you didn't cry- you are a hero. That night, after your father comes home from work, you get your first good licking. In bed that night, you pull the covers over your head and listen to your favorite radio programs before you fall asleep. 

I'm back in the real world again, saddened by the sight of my grandmother's house. Whoever lives there now has let in fall into disrepair. No, I wouldn't want to go inside; it would depress me to see how everything would be different. No, I'll go now. I turn on the engine and head for home. I wonder as I drive past the familiar landmarks of my youth how time has changed so much, transforming Main Street into block after block of blighted buildings. Where there was once an ice cream parlor, a barbershop, and a shoe repair, there are now ugly abandoned or boarded-up buildings. Our two dime stores: Niesner's and Woolworth's, and Winkleman's, a classy women's clothing store, are now a dumpy-looking Dollar Store, a Temporary Jobs Office, and windowless Community Mental Health Center. Cunningham's, with its lunch counter where you could sit and have a chicken salad sandwich and a cup of coffee while you waited for your bus, is gone, and Sanders closed its doors ten years ago. 

Last week I went with J.C. on a delivery run down near the docks in River Rouge and saw the Columbia, one of the two Bob-Lo boats, in dry dock. It's being restored. All the same, there will be no more picnics on the island because Bob-Lo Island, with its roller coaster, its dance hall and its many amusement rides, was sold to private developers and everything was torn down. At one time we had four such amusement parks; now there are none. Gone are the penny arcades of my youth, the slots where for a penny you could get sepia-colored pictures of ballplayers and boxers, movie stars, wrestlers and cowboys. All that's gone. But most tragic was the demolition of Hudson's, as thousands lined-up to watch the spectacle of this great landmark implode into a huge pile of rubble. 

When I think of all that's been lost, I am saddened. One magnificent railway station demolished, the other, Michigan Central, an empty hulk. Now that all of its windows have been busted out, it's nothing more than a vacant shell of a building. And those lavish movie palaces of a bygone era, almost all them gone- closed or destroyed. The great burlesque houses, like the famous Gayety and The Esquire- they, too, have vanished, as have those magnificent ballrooms, the Grande and the Vanity; those proud hotels, the Sheraton Cadillac and the Fort Shelby; and finally, the Vernors' plant- the first one, the one located at the foot of Woodward Avenue where you caught the Bob-Lo boat way back when. I believe it's been more than fifty years since they tore it down. A local product, Vernor's has the distinction of being the first soda pop in America. Today, it is owned by one of America's largest conglomerates: the Pepsi Cola Company. 

I remember the day the carnival came to town and seeing the boy with webbed feet, the bearded lady and the man who had a baby growing out of his stomach. Until the day I die, I'll never forget that man with the baby. Of all the freak shows I've seen, that's the one I'll never forget. How on earth, this six-year-old wondered (as he stood inside that stuffy tent with the smell of sawdust in his nostrils, holding on to his daddy's hand) could a man have a baby growing out of his stomach? How did it happen? That was in the city of Ecorse some fifty years ago on the fourth of July. I remember it well, especially watching the fireworks from atop the Ferris wheel, a burst of sound- boom- then splashes of color lighting up the sky, appearing in an instant, lingering for a moment, then fading away into the dark 

A light goes on inside the house. I turn on my engine and drive off, but before going directly home, I take the overpass that connects suburbia with Detroit. Reaching the highest point of the overpass, I look out at the cityscape, all aglow and spread out like a magic carpet of light. Directly below- the refinery, with its eternal flame; then farther out, the Ambassador Bridge with its colorful beads of light, strung along the bridge from one side- the American side- to the other- the Canadian side; and then, at the farthest point of vision, the mills and factories bordering the river, their myriad lights; candles glowing in the dark, their smoke stacks; vertical canons, sending up ghostly wisps of smoke into the night sky -light to ward-off the coming darkness of a fascistic America ruled by powerful and impersonal corporations in league with a government indifferent to the dreams and aspirations of its people, the working people of America. We cannot let this happen; this relentless juggernaut has to be stopped. If we don't stop it and stop it soon, before it is too late (if it's not already too late), the lights will go out all across America and darkness will cover the land.

FROM NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR AMY TAN, A MEMOIR ON HER LIFE AS A WRITER, HER CHILDHOOD, AND THE SYMBIOTIC RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN FICTION AND EMOTIONAL MEMORY

In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan is at her most intimate in revealing the truths and inspirations that underlie her extraordinary fiction. By delving into vivid memories of her traumatic childhood, confessions of self-doubt in her journals, and heartbreaking letters to and from her mother, she gives evidence to all that made it both unlikely and inevitable that she would become a writer. Through spontaneous storytelling, she shows how a fluid fictional state of mind unleashed near-forgotten memories that became the emotional nucleus of her novels. 

Tan explores shocking truths uncovered by family memorabilia—the real reason behind an IQ test she took at age six, why her parents lied about their education, mysteries surrounding her maternal grandmother—and, for the first time publicly, writes about her complex relationship with her father, who died when she was fifteen. Supplied with candor and characteristic humor, Where the Past Begins takes readers into the idiosyncratic workings of her writer’s mind, a journey that explores memory, imagination, and truth, with fiction serving as both her divining rod and link to meaning. 

Jimmy lives in Rowlesburg, West Virginia, during the 1940s. He does all the things boys do in the small mountain town: plays a mean game of football, pulls the unforgettable Halloween prank with his friends in 'the Platoon,' and promises to head off into the woods on the first day of hunting season-- no matter what. He also knows his father belongs to a secret society, and is determined to uncover the mysteries behind it! But it is a midnight encounter with a train that shows Jimmy the man his father really is.

Newcomer Fran Cannon Slayton's powerful first novel captures the serendipity of boyhood by shining a spotlight on the peak adventures of Jimmy's life. But at its heart, this is a story about a boy and his father in a time when trains reigned supreme.

"When the Whistle Blows is reminiscent of classic tales by Jack London, William Golding and Robert Louis Stevenson, yet carries the remarkable, fresh voice of its author. Fran Cannon Slayton should be extremely proud of this, her debut novel."--Ellen Hopkins, author of Crank and Identical.

In the vein of psychological thrillers like We Were Liars, Girl on the Train, and Beware That Girl, bestselling author Caroline Cooney’s JANIE series delivers on every level. Mystery and suspense blend seamlessly with issues of family, friendship and love to offer an emotionally evocative thrill ride of a read. 

As Janie Johnson glanced at the face of the ordinary little girl on the milk carton, she was overcome with shock. She recognized that little girl—it was she. How can it possibly be true? But it is.

From Publishers Weekly

The sequel to The Face on the Milk Carton explores the trauma of a kidnapped adopted child returned to her birth parents. "The power and nature of love is wrenchingly illustrated," wrote PW in a starred review. Ages 12-up.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From School Library Journal

Grade 7-10-- Cooney's The Face on the Milk Carton (Bantam, 1990) involved a 15-year-old girl who discovers she had been kidnapped when she was 3. Those left hanging by the ambiguous ending to that story will want to read this sequel in which Janie goes to live with her biological parents and four siblings. Although all of the family members are eager to include her, she's determined to remain emotionally aloof. Finally, Janie asserts her desire to return to her adopted family, and her biological parents love her enough to let her go. The strength of this book is that all of the parties are easy to empathize with. They are well-rounded characters with quirks and annoying qualities, yet all have compassion for "the other guy," even while feeling their own pain. The suspense centers around the question of which family needs Janie more and which she will choose. There is no clear answer to her dilemma since both love her and have suffered through no fault of their own. While Janie ultimately puts her own feelings first by choosing the family that is "real" to her, the stage is set for future changes of heart and perhaps another sequel. Meanwhile, this book won't gather dust on the shelf. --Jacqueline Rose, Southeast Regional Library, NC
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc. 

About the Author

Caroline B. Cooney is the bestselling author of teen suspense, mystery, and romance novels that have sold over 15,000,000 copies and are published in several languages. Of all her books, she is best known for the young adult novel The Face on the Milk Carton that has sold over 3,000,000 copies and was made into a television movie.

Caroline grew up in Greenwich, Connecticut, and spent most of her life on the shoreline of that state. She currently resides in South Carolina. She enjoys spending time with her grandchildren, playing piano, walking near her home, pottery, jewelry-making, and, of course, reading

In his latest book, What Young India Wants, Chetan Bhagat asks hard questions, demands answers and presents solutions for a better, more prosperous India.

Why do our students regularly commit suicide? Why is there so much corruption in India? Can t our political parties ever work together? Does our vote make any difference at all? We love our India, but shouldn't some things be different? All of us have asked these questions at some time or the other. So does Chetan Bhagat, India's most loved writer, in What Young India Wants, his first book of non-fiction. What Young India Wants is based on Chetan Bhagat's vast experience as a very successful writer and motivational speaker. In clear, simple prose, and with great insight, he analyses some of the complex issues facing modern India, offers solutions and invites discussion on them. And, at the end, he asks this important question: Unless we are all in agreement on what it is going to take to make our country better, how will things ever change? If you want to understand contemporary India, the problems that face it, and want to be a part of the solution, What Young India Wants is the book for you.