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Although we think of early monks as master concentrators, a life of mindfulness did not, in fact, come to them easily. As historian Jamie Kreiner demonstrates in The Wandering Mind, their attempts to stretch the mind out to God-to continuously contemplate the divine order and its ethical requirements-were all-consuming, and their battles against distraction were never-ending. Delving into the experiences of early Christian monks living in the Middle East, around the Mediterranean, and throughout Europe from 300 to 900 CE, Kreiner shows that these men and women were obsessed with distraction in ways that seem remarkably modern. At the same time, she suggests that our own obsession is remarkably medieval. Ancient Greek and Roman intellectuals had sometimes complained about distraction but it was early Christian monks who waged an all-out war against it. The stakes could not have been higher: they saw distraction as a matter of life and death.Even though the world today is vastly different from the world of the early Middle Ages, we can still learn something about our own distractedness by looking closely at monks' strenuous efforts to concentrate. Drawing on a trove of sources that the monks left behind, Kreiner reconstructs the techniques they devised in their lifelong quest to master their minds-from regimented work schedules and elaborative metacognitive exercises to physical regimens for hygiene, sleep, sex and diet. She captures the fleeting moments of pure attentiveness that some monks managed to grasp, and the many times when monks struggled and failed and went back to the drawing board. Blending history and psychology, The Wandering Mind is a witty, illuminating account of human fallibility and ingenuity that bridges a distant era and our own.

The familiar story of civil rights goes like this: once, America's legal system shut Black people out and refused to recognize their rights, their basic human dignity, or even their very lives. When lynch mobs gathered, police and judges often closed their eyes, if they didn't join in. For Black people, law was a hostile, fearsome power to be avoided whenever possible. Then, starting in the 1940s, a few brave lawyers ventured south, bent on changing the law. Soon, ordinary African Americans, awakened by Supreme Court victories and galvanized by racial justice activists, launched the civil rights movement.In Before the Movement, acclaimed historian Dylan C. Penningroth brilliantly revises the conventional story. Drawing on long-forgotten sources found in the basements of county courthouses across the nation, Penningroth reveals that African Americans, far from being ignorant about law until the middle of the twentieth century, have thought about, talked about, and used it going as far back as even the era of slavery. They dealt constantly with the laws of property, contract, inheritance, marriage and divorce, of associations (like churches and businesses and activist groups), and more. By exercising these "rights of everyday use," Penningroth demonstrates, they made Black rights seem unremarkable. And in innumerable subtle ways, they helped shape the law itself-the laws all of us live under today.Penningroth's narrative, which stretches from the last decades of slavery to the 1970s, partly traces the history of his own family. Challenging accepted understandings of Black history framed by relations with white people, he puts Black people at the center of the story-their loves and anger and loneliness, their efforts to stay afloat, their mistakes and embarrassments, their fights, their ideas, their hopes and disappointments, in all their messy humanness. Before the Movement is an account of Black legal lives that looks beyond the Constitution and the criminal justice system to recover a rich, broader vision of Black life-a vision allied with, yet distinct from, "the freedom struggle."

In her international bestseller SPQR, Mary Beard told the thousand-year story of ancient Rome, from its slightly shabby Iron Age origins to its reign as the undisputed hegemon of the Mediterranean. Now, drawing on more than thirty years of teaching and writing about Roman history, Beard turns to the emperors who ruled the Roman Empire, beginning with Julius Caesar (assassinated 44 BCE) and taking us through the nearly three centuries-and some thirty emperors-that separate him from the boy-king Alexander Severus (assassinated 235 CE).Yet Emperor of Rome is not your typical chronological account of Roman rulers, one emperor after another: the mad Caligula, the monster Nero, the philosopher Marcus Aurelius. Instead, Beard asks different, often larger and more probing questions: What power did emperors actually have? Was the Roman palace really so bloodstained? What kind of jokes did Augustus tell? And for that matter, what really happened, for example, between the emperor Hadrian and his beloved Antinous? Effortlessly combining the epic with the quotidian, Beard tracks the emperor down at home, at the races, on his travels, even on his way to heaven.Along the way, Beard explores Roman fictions of imperial power, overturning many of the assumptions that we hold as gospel, not the least of them the perception that emperors one and all were orchestrators of extreme brutality and cruelty. Here Beard introduces us to the emperor's wives and lovers, rivals and slaves, court jesters and soldiers, and the ordinary people who pressed begging letters into his hand-whose chamber pot disputes were adjudicated by Augustus, and whose budgets were approved by Vespasian, himself the son of a tax collector.With its finely nuanced portrayal of sex, class, and politics, Emperor of Rome goes directly to the heart of Roman fantasies (and our own) about what it was to be Roman at its richest, most luxurious, most extreme, most powerful, and most deadly, offering an account of Roman history as it has never been presented before.

For decades, Frank X Walker has reclaimed essential American lives through his path-breaking historical poetry: from Medgar Evers in Turn Me Loose, winner of the NAACP Award; to York, the enslaved explorer who joined the Lewis and Clark expedition, in Buffalo Dance, winner of the Lillian Smith Book Award. In this stirring new collection, he reimagines the experiences of Black Civil War soldiers-including his own ancestors-who enlisted in the Union Army in exchange for emancipation. Moving chronologically from antebellum Kentucky through Reconstruction, Walker braids the voices of the United States Coloured Troops with their family members, as well as slave-owners and prominent historical figures-including Frederick Douglas, Abraham Lincoln and Magaret Garner-into a wide-ranging series of "persona poems" imbued with atmospheric imagery and brimming with indomitable spirit. Evoking the pride and perseverance of formerly enslaved General Charles Young, Walker hums: "I, am America's promise, my mother's song, / and the reason my father had every right to dream."

No one played like Jesse Ed Davis. One of the most sought-after guitarists of the late 1960s and '70s, Davis appeared alongside the era's greatest stars-John Lennon and Mick Jagger, B.B. King and Bob Dylan-and contributed to dozens of major releases, including numerous top-ten albums and singles, and records by artists as distinct as Johnny Cash, Taj Mahal and Cher.But Davis, whose name has nearly disappeared from the annals of rock and roll history, was more than just the most versatile session guitarist of the decade. A multitalented musician who paired bright flourishes with soulful melodies, Davis transformed our idea of what rock music could be and, crucially, who could make it. At a time when few other Indigenous artists appeared on concert stages, radio waves, or record store walls, in a century often depicted as a period of decline for Native Americans, Davis and his Kiowa, Comanche, Cheyenne, Seminole and Mvskoke relatives demonstrated new possibilities for Native people.Weaving together more than a hundred interviews with Davis's bandmates, family members, friends and peers-among them Jackson Browne, Bonnie Raitt and Robbie Robertson-Washita Love Child powerfully reconstructs Davis's extraordinary life and career, taking us from his childhood in Oklahoma to his first major gig backing rockabilly star Conway Twitty, and from his dramatic performance at George Harrison's 1971 Concert for Bangladesh to his years with John Trudell and the Grafitti Man band. In Davis's story, a post-Beatles Lennon especially emerges as a kindred soul and creative partner. Yet Davis never fully recovered from Lennon's sudden passing, meeting his own tragic demise just eight years later.With a foreword by former poet laureate Joy Harjo, who collaborated with Davis near the end of his life, Washita Love Child thoroughly and finally restores the "red dirt boogie brother" to his rightful place in rock history, cementing his legacy for generations to come.

Countless books, news reports, and opinion pieces have announced the impending arrival of artificial intelligence, with most claiming that it will upend our world, revolutionizing not just work but society overall. Yet according to political philosopher and historian David Runciman, we've actually been living with a version of AI for 300 years because states and corporations are robots, too. In The Handover, Runciman explains our current situation through the history of these "artificial agents" we created to rescue us from our all-too-human limitations-and demonstrates what this radical new view of our recent past means for our collective future.From the United States and the United Kingdom to the East India Company, Standard Oil, Facebook, and Alibaba, states and corporations have gradually, and then much more rapidly, taken over the planet. They have helped to conquer poverty and eliminate disease, but also unleashed global wars and environmental degradation. As Runciman demonstrates, states and corporations are the ultimate decision-making machines, defined by their ability to make their own choices and, crucially, to sustain the consequences of what has been chosen. And if the rapid spread of the modern state and corporation has already transformed the conditions of human existence, new AI technology promises the same.But what happens when AI interacts with other kinds of artificial agents, the inhuman kind represented by states and corporations? Runciman argues that the twenty-first century will be defined by increasingly intense battles between state and corporate power for the fruits of the AI revolution. In the end, it is not our own, human relationship with AI that will determine our future. Rather, humanity's fate will be shaped by the interactions among states, corporations, and thinking machines.With clarity and verve, The Handover presents a brilliantly original history of the last three centuries and a new understanding of the immense challenges we now face.

The 1976 publication of Peter Hujar's Portraits in Life and Death, with an introduction by Susan Sontag, "was and remains one of the most somberly beautiful and influential photography collections of its era" (Holland Cotter, senior art critic of The New York Times). When Hujar passed away in 1987, his work was relatively unknown except for a small following. The importance and artistic mastery of Hujar's photography, its tender gravity and intimacy, became recognised and canonical only after his death. The republication of this collection is composed of the original introduction by Susan Sontag and preceded by a new foreword by Benjamin Moser, with photographs presented in two sequences. A stirring ode to the flourishing downtown scene of the 1970s, this collection remains a deeply moving artefact of post-Stonewall New York City.

Nothing has brought English soccer more immediately into the American mainstream than Ted Lasso, which captivated the nation in thirty-four episodes over three seasons. But before there was Jason Sudeikis's lovable and, at first, hapless AFC Richmond, there was Watford Football Club, a team from the outskirts of London with barely enough fans to fill its stands-and which, in the mid-1970s, was languishing in 92nd place at the bottom of the last division of the English Football League. That is, until rock superstar Elton John-who, with his dad, had followed the team as a boy-bought the lowly franchise and, with legendary manager Graham Taylor, transformed the luckless football club into a top-seeded Premier League team. Inspiring, funny, and ultimately heartbreaking, Watford Forever recalls the improbably tender relationship between Elton John and Taylor, a straight-talking former fullback, who together beat the odds and their personal demons to save a club and a struggling community.

Few legal cases in American history are as riveting as the controversy surrounding the will of Virginia Senator John Randolph (1773-1833), which-almost inexplicably-freed all 383 of his slaves in one of the largest and most publicised manumissions in American history. So famous is the case that Ta-Nehisi Coates has used it to condemn Randolph's cousin, Thomas Jefferson, for failing to free his own slaves. With this ground-breaking investigation, historian Gregory May now reveals a more surprising story, showing how madness and scandal shaped John Randolph's wildly shifting attitudes toward his slaves-and how endemic prejudice in the North ultimately deprived the freedmen of the land Randolph had promised them. Sweeping from the legal spectacle of the contested will through the freedmen's dramatic flight and horrific reception in Ohio, A Madman's Will is an extraordinary saga about the alluring promise of freedom and its tragic limitations.

First glimpsed riding on the back of a boy's motorcycle, fourteen-year-old Czeslawa comes to life in this mesmerizing novel by Lily Tuck, who imagines her upbringing in a small Polish village before her world imploded in late 1942. Stripped of her modest belongings, shorn, and tattooed number 26947 on arriving at Auschwitz, Czeslawa is then photographed. Three months later, she is dead.How did this happen to an ordinary Polish citizen? This is the question that Tuck grapples with in this haunting novel, which frames Czeslawa's story within the epic tragedy of six million Poles who perished during the German occupation. A decade prior to writing The Rest Is Memory, Tuck read an obituary of the photographer Wilhelm Brasse, who took more than 40,000 pictures of the Auschwitz prisoners. Included were three of Czeslawa Kwoka, a Catholic girl from rural southeastern Poland. Tuck cut out the photos and kept them, determined to learn more about Czeslawa, but she was only able to glean the barest facts: the village she came from, the transport she was on, that she was accompanied by her mother and her neighbors, her tattoo number, and the date of her death. From this scant evidence, Tuck's novel becomes a remarkable kaleidoscopic feat of imagination, something only our greatest novelists can do."Beautifully written, all the while instilling a sense of horror" (Susanna Moore), Tuck's language swirls about, yet not a word is out of place. The subtly rotating images tumble out at us, accelerating as we learn about Czeslawa's tragic stay in Auschwitz, the lives of real people such as the barbaric Commandant Rudolf Höss; his unconscionable wife, Hedwig; the psychiatrist and child rescuer Janusz Korczak; and the mordant Polish short story writer Tadeusz Borowski. Although we are certain of Czeslawa's fate, we have no choice but to keep turning the pages, thoroughly mesmerized by Tuck's near otherworldly prose.In Lily Tuck's hands, The Rest Is Memory becomes an unforgettable work of historical reclamation that rescues an innocent life, one previously only recalled by a stark triptych of photographs.

Why do Donald Trump, Tucker Carlson and much of the far Right so explicitly admire the murderous and incompetent Russian dictator Vladimir Putin? Why is Ron DeSantis drawing from Victor Orbán's illiberal politics for his own policies as governor of Florida-a single American state that has more than twice the population of Orbán's entire nation, Hungary?In America Last, Jacob Heilbrunn, a highly respected observer of the American Right, demonstrates that the infatuation of American conservatives with foreign dictators-though a striking and seemingly inexplicable fact of our current moment-is not a new phenomenon. It dates to the First World War, when some conservatives, enthralled with Kaiser Wilhelm II, openly rooted for him to defeat the forces of democracy. In the 1920s and 1930s, this affinity became even more pronounced as Hitler and Mussolini attracted a variety of American admirers. Throughout the Cold War, the Right evinced a fondness for autocrats such as Francisco Franco and Augusto Pinochet, while some conservatives wrote apologias for the Third Reich and for apartheid South Africa. The habit of mind is not really about foreign policy, however. As Heilbrunn argues, the Right is drawn to what it perceives as the impressive strength of foreign dictators, precisely because it sees them as models of how to fight against liberalism and progressivism domestically.America Last is a guide for the perplexed, identifying and tracing a persuasion-or what one might call the "illiberal imagination"-that has animated conservative politics for a century now. Since the 1940s, the Right has railed against communist fellow travellers in America. Heilbrunn finally corrects the record, showing that dictator worship is an unignorable tradition within modern American conservatism-and what it means for us today.

The Divine Comedy is the precursor of modern literature, and Clive James's translation-decades in the making-gives us the entire epic as a single, coherent, and compulsively readable lyric poem. For the first time ever in an English translation, James makes the bold choice of switching from the terza rima composition of the original Italian-a measure that strains in English-to the quatrain. The result is "rhymed English stanzas that convey the music of Dante's triple rhymes" (Edward Mendelson). James's translation reproduces the same wonderful momentum of the original Italian that propels the reader along the pilgrim's path from Hell to Heaven, from despair to revelation.

No, it's not a joke! First published in 1994, Knitting With Dog Hair taught a generation of readers how to gather, spin and knit dog hair into wearable garments of all kinds, from Malamute mittens to Collie caps. Defying incredulity, the book became a cult sensation, featured in The New York Times, The Wall Street Journal and even People. This thirtieth-anniversary edition does more than just shed light on what had previously been an obscure practice: in expanded form, it provides tip-filled, easy-to-use advice on:.How to harvest, clean and store your pooch's fur..How to modify your patterns to accommodate pet-spun yarn..How to find experienced pet-hair spinners.With "an extensive catalogue raisonne of the various breeds" (The New York Times) and several handy patterns, this illustrated guide is the creative answer to that vexing shedding problem. As the saying goes, you can't teach an old dog new tricks-but you can knit its hair.

The Pulitzer Prize-winning American lyricist Ira Gershwin (1896-1983) has been hailed as one of the masters of the Great American Songbook-songs written largely for Broadway and Hollywood from the 1920s to the 1950s. Now, in the first full-length biography devoted to his life, Ira Gershwin steps out at last from the long shadow cast by his younger and more famous brother George.It's a life with a sharp dividing line; we witness Ira's transformation by George's death at thirty-eight. From carefree dreamer and successful lyricist, he becomes guardian of his brother's legacy and manager of complex family dynamics, even while continuing to practise his craft with composers like Harold Arlen and Jerome Kern.Drawing on extensive archival sources and often using Ira's own words, Michael Owen offers a rich portrait of the modest man who penned the words to many of America's best-loved songs.

Written in Cho Nam-joo's signature razor-sharp prose, Miss Kim Knows follows eight women as they confront how gender shapes and orders their lives. A woman is born. A woman is filmed in public without consent. A woman is gaslit. A woman is discriminated against at work. A woman grows old. A woman becomes famous. A woman is hated, and loved, and then hated again. As with Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982, these microcosmic stories prove eerily relatable under Cho Nam-joo's precise, unveiled gaze, offering another captivating read from an essential voice in fiction."There is mischief and glee to be found in these pages, along with the kind of laughter that sets two women over 50 rolling in snow with tears streaming down their frozen cheeks and the aurora borealis dancing above them." -Hephzibah Anderson, The Guardian

Part love story, part instruction manual, part spiritual journey, Dante's "little book", the Vita Nuova, has had a profound and far-reaching influence on global culture and is considered by many to be the perfect expression of the medieval ideal of courtly love, as well as an essential precursor to Dante's sublime poetic apotheosis, the Divine Comedy.Now Joseph Luzzi, celebrated author of books about Italian literature and culture and a lifelong lover and teacher of Dante's poetry, gives us a version of the Vita Nuova that is fresh, contemporary and approachable-as vital and vivid as Dante's original Tuscan dialect-rendered in a voice that will entice a new generation of readers to swoon over one of the most heartbreaking stories of unfulfilled love in all of world literature.

Quarterlife is a groundbreaking portrait of a nation on the cusp of a new age. A group of young people converge in Mumbai after an election brings the divisive Bharat Party to power: Naren, a jaded Wall Street consultant lured home by the promise of "better days," is accompanied by Amanda, a restless New Englander eager to live her ideals through a social impact fellowship in a slum. Meanwhile, Naren's brother Rohit, the charismatic talent scout, sets out to explore his roots in the countryside and falls in with the fiery young men that drive the Hindu nationalist machine. As they each come to grips with the new India, their journeys coalesce into a riveting milieu characterized by brutal debates and desires as fraught as they are compulsive. The result is an ever-widening chorus that feeds into a festive night when all of Mumbai is on the streets-and the simmering unrest erupts.Quarterlife is as sweeping as it is intimate. With grace and precision, Devika Rege lays bare the moral and psychological roots of political belief in a time of reckoning for democracies worldwide. No one is spared, not even the writer. An urgent and prismatic debut, Quarterlife announces Rege as an evocative new voice in fiction and an author who is unafraid to test the limits of what the novel can achieve.

Visionary director Yuval Sharon has been celebrated as one of the world's most innovative opera impresarios, yet he has never adhered to traditional form, observing that most operas "suffer the dull edge of routine in unimaginative and woefully under-rehearsed productions". Sharon seeks to disrupt conventions by urging the performance of opera in "non-spaces" like parking lots; amplifying voices; and even performing classic works in reverse order. Surveying the role of opera in America and drawing on his experiences from Berlin to Los Angeles, Sharon lays out his vision for an "anti-elite opera", which celebrates the imagination and challenges the status quo. Refusing to believe that opera is dying, Sharon maintains that opera has always existed in a perpetual cycle of death and rebirth. Engaging and accessible, A New Philosophy of Opera, with its advocacy of opera as an "enchanted space" and its revolutionary message, promises to be one of the liveliest opera books in years.

How do social movements arise, wield power and decline? Renowned scholar Linda Gordon investigates these questions in a ground-breaking work, narrating the stories of many of America's most influential twentieth-century social movements. Beginning with the turn-of-the-century settlement house movement, Gordon then scrutinises the 1920s Ku Klux Klan and its successors, the violent American fascist groups of the 1930s. Profiles of two Depression-era movements follow-the Townsend campaign that brought us Social Security and the creation of unemployment aid. Proceeding then to the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott, which inspired the civil rights movement and launched Martin Luther King Jr.'s career, the narrative barrels into the 1960s-70s with Cesar Chavez's farmworkers' union. The concluding chapter illumines the 1970s women's liberation movement through the dramatic story of the Boston-area organisations Bread and Roses and the Combahee River Collective. Separately and together, these seven chapters animate American history, reminding us of the power of collective activism.

Along the glittering coast of southern France, among a jungle of olive trees and aloes, a white villa rose from an earthen terrace. Eileen, a new architect previously known for her elegant chairs and furniture, built it as a haven for her and her lover; she realized each detail, designing the villa around their movements and habits. When the outspoken Le G, a founder of Modernist architecture, first laid eyes on the house, he could see his influence in the sleek lines. Affronted and impassioned, he took a paintbrush to the villa's clean, white walls . . .Now, Le G is in the final week of his life. He has spent the last thirty years infiltrating Eileen's house, erasing her presence and forgetting her name. But finally, the tide has come in, and Eileen is called back to her beloved coastline, where both artists will contend with the transformative power of memory.Inspired by the real-life collision of Irish designer Eileen Gray and famed Swiss architect Le Corbusier, and the extraordinary place that bound them, Jane Alison boldly reimagines a now-infamous feud into a lushly poetic and mesmerizing novel of power, predation, and obsession.

The racers-an Italian prince and his chauffeur, a French racing driver, a con man, and several rival journalists-battle over steep inclines, through narrow mountain passages, and across the arid Gobi Desert. Competitors endure torrential rain and choking dust. There are barely any roads, and petrol is almost impossible to find. A global audience of millions follows each twist and turn, devouring reports telegraphed from the course.More than its many adventures, the Peking-to-Paris Motor Challenge took place on the precipice of a new world. As the twentieth century dawned, imperial regimes in China and Russia were crumbling, paving the way for the rise of communist ones. The electric telegraph was rapidly transforming modern communication, and with it, the news media, commerce, and politics. Suspended between the old and the new, the Peking-to-Paris, as best-selling historian Kassia St. Clair writes, became a critical tipping point.A gripping, immersive narrative of the race, The Race to the Future sets the drivers' derring-do (and occasional cheating) against the backdrop of a larger geopolitical and technological race to the future. Interweaving events from the fall of the Qing dynasty to the departure of the horse economy and the rise of gendered marketing, St. Clair shows how the Peking-to-Paris provided an impetus for profound social, cultural, and industrial change, while masterfully capturing the mounting tensions between nations and empires-all building up to the cataclysmic event that changed everything: the First World War."Consistently mind-boggling, often funny, and occasionally hair-raising" (Philip Ball), The Race to the Future is the incredible true story of the quest against the odds that propelled us along the road to modernity.

When the twelve-year-old daughter of a British carpenter pulled some strange-looking bones from the country's southern shoreline in 1811, few people dared to question that the Bible told the accurate history of the world. But Mary Anning had in fact discovered the "first" ichthyosaur, and over the next seventy-five years-as the science of paleontology developed, as Charles Darwin posited radical new theories of evolutionary biology, and as scholars began to identify the internal inconsistencies of the Scriptures-everything changed. Beginning with the archbishop who dated the creation of the world to 6 p.m. on October 22, 4004 BC, and told through the lives of the nineteenth-century men and women who found and argued about these seemingly impossible, history-rewriting fossils, Impossible Monsters reveals the central role of dinosaurs and their discovery in toppling traditional religious authority, and in changing perceptions about the Bible, history, and mankind's place in the world.

Blending poetry and prose, music, and genealogy, Jive Poetic's Skip Tracer is a memoir structured as a "hybrid sound system" (complete with "records," "tracks," "decks," and "channels"), expertly curated to convey the complexity of Blackness in the Americas. In this ancestral and cultural excavation, Jive conducts archival and oral-history research into his family's connections to Jamaica, Panama, Brazil, and Cuba to explore the impact of culture, environment, and family on first- and second-generation Black Americans in the United States. He also traces the profound influence that hip-hop, soul, R&B, reggae, and other popular musical genres have had on him-all the while performing a dynamic re-creation of his legendary onstage persona on the page. A raw and affecting indictment of police violence and racism in the United States, Skip Tracer is also a searingly honest exploration of personal identity, power, and privilege-all expressed in the unmistakable language, rhythm, and style that characterizes Jive's live performances.

In 2011, Syrians took to the streets demanding freedom. Brutal government repression transformed peaceful protests into one of the most devastating conflicts of our times, killing hundreds of thousands and displacing millions. The Home I Worked to Make takes Syria's refugee outflow as its point of departure. Based on hundreds of interviews conducted across more than a decade, it probes a question as intimate as it is universal: What is home? With gripping immediacy, Syrians now on five continents share stories of leaving, losing, searching, and finding (or not finding) home. Across this tapestry of voices, a new understanding emerges: home, for those without the privilege of taking it for granted, is both struggle and achievement. Recasting "refugee crises" as acts of diaspora-making, The Home I Worked to Make challenges readers to grapple with the hard-won wisdom of those who survive war and to see, with fresh eyes, what home means in their own lives.

Writing as Lemony Snicket, Daniel Handler has led several generations of young readers into that special and curious space of being hopelessly lost, and joyfully finding yourself, in the essential strangeness of literature. The wondrous and perilous journey of the Baudelaire orphans sprung from the author's own path, from his childhood discovery of Baudelaire's poetry through the countless peculiarities of his pursuit of a literary life-abject failure and startling success, breakthrough and breakdown, concordance and controversy-lit along the way by the books and culture he loved best.At once a personal memoir and a literary exploration, a how-to book and a critical inquiry, a sequence of stories and a series of events, And Then? And Then? What Else? is a book not just for anyone curious about the creator of Lemony Snicket, but for anyone who loved books when they were a child, and still loves them now.

Our society is obsessed with achievement. Young people are pushed toward the next test or the "best" grammar school, high school, or college they can get into. Adults push themselves toward the highest-paying, most prestigious jobs, seeking promotions and public recognition. As Adam Gopnik points out, the result is not so much a rat race as a rat maze, with no way out. Except one: to choose accomplishment over achievement. Achievement, Gopnik argues, is the completion of the task imposed from outside. Accomplishment, by contrast, is the end point of an engulfing activity one engages in for its own sake. From stories of artists, philosophers, and scientists to his own fumbling attempts to play Beatles songs on a guitar, Gopnik demonstrates that while self-directed passions sometimes do lead to a career, the contentment that flows from accomplishment is available to each of us. A book to read and return to at any age, All That Happiness Is offers timeless wisdom against the grain.

Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Hero and Alone, tells the story of the First World War not in any conventional way but through the intertwined lives of the soldier poets who came to describe it best, and indeed to symbolize the war's tragic arc and lethal fury.His epic narrative begins with Rupert Brooke, "the handsomest young man in England" and perhaps its most famous young poet in the halcyon days of the Edwardian Age, and ends five years later with Wilfred Owen, killed in action at twenty-five, only one week before the armistice. With bitter irony, Owen's mother received the telegram informing her of his death on November 11, just as church bells tolled to celebrate the war's end.Korda's dramatic account, which includes anecdotes from his own family history, not only brings to life the soldier poets but paints an unforgettable picture of life and death in the trenches, and the sacrifice of an entire generation. His cast of characters includes the young American poet Alan Seeger, who was killed in action as a private in the French Foreign Legion; Isaac Rosenberg, whose parents had fled czarist anti-Semitic persecution and who was killed in action at the age of twenty-eight before his fame as a poet and a painter was recognised; Robert Graves and Siegfried Sassoon, whose friendship and friendly rivalry endured through long, complicated private lives; and, finally, Owen, whose fame came only posthumously and whose poetry remains some of the most savage and heartbreaking to emerge from the cataclysmic war.As Korda demonstrates, the poets of the First World War were soldiers, heroes, martyrs, victims, their lives and loves endlessly fascinating-that of Rupert Brooke alone reads like a novel, with his journey to Polynesia in pursuit of a life like Gauguin's and some of his finest poetry written only a year before his tragic death. Muse of Fire is at once a portrait of their lives and a narrative of a civilisation destroying itself, among the rubble, shadows, and the unresolved problems of which we still live, from the revival of brutal trench warfare in Ukraine and in the Middle East.