For years, Mitford?s Father Tim Kavanagh has transcribed into his dog-eared journals words of wisdom, faith, and encouragement gleaned from favorite thinkers.

Indeed, A Continual Feast contains lively ideas, common sense, profound wisdom, and plain good humor from the likes of C. S. Lewis, Emily Dickinson, William Blake, Helen Keller, G. K. Chesterton, and Will Rogers. To name but a few.

Want to know a surefire way to read someone?s true character?

Check out what Goethe has to...

From an acclaimed novelist, an emotionally complex and riveting story of suspicion, innocence, and regret

When a mail bomb explodes in the campus office next door, Lee, an Asian American math professor at a second-tier university in the Midwest, comes under suspicion. The authorities believe he may be the infamous ?brain bomber,? an elusive terrorist whose primary targets are prominent scientists and mathematicians.

In the midst of campus tumult and grief over the sta...

Old age in America is not what it used to be

In 1994 New York Times writer Dudley Clendinen?s mother?a Southern matron of iron will but creaking bones?sold her house and moved to Canterbury Tower, a geriatric apartment building with full services and a nursing wing in Tampa Bay. There she landed in a microcosm of the New Old Age. Canterbury was filled not just with old Tampa neighbors but also with strangers from across the country. Wealthy, middle class, or barely aflo...

The first ever collection of Rumpole Christmas stories- just in time for the holidays

A Rumpole Christmas is a collection of five holiday stories-never before published in book form- depicting the Old Bailey Hack at his lovable best. In "Rumpole and Father Christmas," the English barrister encounters a familiar-looking Santa who he thinks is a thief. In "Rumpole's Slimmed Down Christmas," he goes to a new-age spa when "She who must be obeyed" insists that he lose a few p...

The tremendously dishy life of one of the most admired and lively literary figures today

Novelist, playwright, and barrister Sir John Mortimer has led an extraordinarily rich and daring life, privately and professionally, much of it in the public eye. His own writings, from the play A Voyage Round My Father to his wildly popular books in the Rumpole series, to his three acclaimed volumes of autobiography, and his screenplay for Brideshead Revisited, have rewarded r...

Farsighted and fascinating predictions for a new world order in which America is no longer number one

The world is now at a hinge moment in its history, according to veteran international correspondent Paul Starobin. A once-dominant America has reached the end of its global ascendancy, and the question of what will come next, and how quickly, is not completely clear. Already the global economic crisis, in exposing the tarnished American model of unfettered free-market capitalism...

A charming yet scathing portrait of young adulthood at the opening of the twenty-first century, All the Sad Young Literary Men charts the lives of Sam, Mark, and Keith as they overthink their college years, underthink their love lives, and struggle through the encouragement of the women who love and despise them to find a semblance of maturity, responsibility, and even literary fame.

Heartbroken in his university town, Mark tries to focus his attention on his graduate work on t...

The history and politics of American Indians? unique constitutional status from a renowned scholar

Few Americans know that Indian tribes have a legal status unique among America?s distinct racial and ethnic groups: They are also sovereign governments that engage in governmental relations with Congress. The self-rule of Native tribes long predates the founding of the United States, and that peculiar status has led to legal and political disputes?with vast sums of money hanging ...

Breaking news, fresh gossip, tiny scandals, trumped-up crises?every day we are distracted by a culture that rings our doorbell and runs away. Stories spread wildly and die out in mere days, to be replaced by still more stories with ever shorter life spans. Through the Internet the news cycle has been set spinning even faster now that all of us can join the fray: anyone on a computer can spread a story almost as easily as The New York Times, CNN, or People. As media amateurs grow...

A funny and heartwarming novel about a down-on-his-luck writer who finally finds success and love

Steven Kearney is a bumbling, overweight writer who has produced thousands of pages of novels, plays, and poems?not a single one of which has ever been published. After being thrown out of his Manhattan apartment, Kearney is offered a position as playwright-in-residence for three months at the Creedemore Historical Society in Colorado, who want him to write and direct a historical ...

The commonplace view of Cuba's prerevolutionary business establishment as a corrupt kleptocracy is revised in this intriguing history of the Bacardi rum company and its involvement in Cuban politics. NPR correspondent Gjelten (Sarajevo Daily) paints the 146-year-old distiller, once an icon of Cuban industry, as a model corporate citizenâ??efficient, innovative, socially responsible and union-tolerant. Its leaders were pillars of nationalist politics, he contends: company president Emil...

The bestselling author reveals how the U.S. financial sector has hijacked our economy and put America?s global future at risk

In American Theocracy, Kevin Phillips warned us of the perilous interaction of debt, financial recklessness, and the increasing cost of scarce oil. The current housing and mortgage debacle is proof once more of Phillips?s prescience, and only the first harbinger of a national crisis. In Bad Money, Phillips describes the consequences of our misguid...

Starred Review. Niebuhr, the former religion reporter for the New York Times, is now a professor at Syracuse University. This makes his book immensely valuable: he has the careful scholarship of an academic, but the communication expertise of a journalist skilled at getting to the personal heart of a story. Not long after 9/11, Niebuhr set out to find and tell the largely untold stories of those who are involved in interreligious dialogue: why do they do it? what do they gain from it? ...

A president has been overthrown by a military coup in a nameless country in an unspecified era. The president?s barber, chef, and portraitist are imprisoned, with many others, in a remote palace in the hills high above the city center. Before the coup, these three men worked with unquestioning loyalty, serving the president in seemingly benign jobs. Now, forced to serve the country?s new leader, they begin to reconsider their role in the old regime.

In simple, elegant prose Blood ...

The former White House counsel faults Republican mismanagement for the current state of the government

John Dean has become one of the most trenchant and respected commentators on the current state of American politics and one of the most outspoken and perceptive critics of the administration of George W. Bush in his New York Times bestsellers Conservatives Without Conscience and Worse Than Watergate.

In his eighth book, Dean takes the broadest an...

In his vivid and charming memoir, novelist and screenwriter George (Hip Hop America) recounts incidents from an eventful life that has ranged from a tough upbringing by his single mother in Brooklyn in the 1960s to a career of assorted writing gigs in music journalism, television and film. Early in the book, George captures the anxieties of an intelligent child in a dangerous neighborhood, finding solace in his mother's soul records, screenings of Planet of the Apes and Hemingwa...

A deeply funny and affecting memoir about a great escape from a childhood of poverty

Joe Queenan?s acerbic riffs on movies, sports, books, politics, and many of the least forgivable phenomena of pop culture have made him one of the most popular humorists and commentators of our time. In Closing Time Queenan turns his sights on a more serious and personal topic: his childhood in a Philadelphia housing project in the early 1960s. By turns hilarious and heartbreaking, Closing Ti...

A journey through twenty years of politics with one of the most revered news analysts of our time

Daniel Schorr, an institution at CBS for decades and a twenty-year mainstay of NPR, is a legend in journalism. Come to Think of It is the first selection of Schorr?s observations on politics and American life from the years 1990 to the present?a peerless commentary on the history of our time. Schorr?s essays reveal him as a master of pithy, get-to-the-point analysis, whethe...

?In this stunning treatise on the transnational global city, philosopher and cultural critic Kingwell (Better Living) meditates on how the architecture of the modern city must cater efficiently yet aesthetically to a combination of basic human requirements??the cemetery within the city doubling as a park; the prison or madhouse as public architecture; the toilet within the house; the dump or recycling center within the city limits??and how the city in turn is an extension and embodimen...

Grimes?s beloved Andi Oliver returns, on the run from her past

In this stunning sequel to Grimes?s beloved Biting the Moon, young Andi Oliver is an amnesiac and drifter who awoke in a Santa Fe bed and breakfast with a man?s belongings tossed about the room. Adopting a name from the initials on her backpack, Andi moves from one waitress job to the next, from Idaho to North Dakota.

It is in Dakota that she is hired at Klavan?s, a massive pigfarming facility that ...

One journalist?s riveting?and surprisingly hopeful?in-the-trenches look at Alzheimer?s, the disease that claimed her mother?s life

Like many loved ones of Alzheimer?s sufferers, Lauren Kessler was devastated by the ravaging disease that seemed to turn her mother into another person before claiming her life altogether. To deal with the pain of her loss, and to better understand the confounding aspects of living with a disease that afflicts four and a half million people every y...

A witty, tender novel about the travails of old middle age, from a Booker finalist

Desmond Bates is a recently retired linguistics professor vexed by his encroaching deafness and at loose ends in his personal life. Without the purposeful routine of the academic year, he finds his role reduced to that of escort and house-husband while his wife?s late-flowering career as the owner of a home design store flourishes. The monotony of his days is relieved only by wearisome journeys to...

A lyrical and romantic story of love, fate and family

In the high desert of the American southwest during the summer of 1982, the Finley family is awaiting the arrival of the baby boy they're due to adopt. Oliver, just seven, is eager for another playmate to join him and his sister in their idyll of swimming pools, climbing trees, and playing tag. But one hot afternoon, Dr. Finley dies suddenly and everything changes. Mrs. Finley, newly widowed, decides she cannot proceed wi...

The #1 New York Times bestselling author provides a shocking analysis of the crisis in Pakistan and the renewed radicalism threatening Afghanistan and the West.

Ahmed Rashid is ?Pakistan?s best and bravest reporter? (Christopher Hitchens). His unique knowledge of this vast and complex region allows him a panoramic vision and nuance that no Western writer can emulate.

His book Taliban first introduced American readers to the brutal regime that hijacked Afghan...

A new work of fiction by the Nobel Prize?winning author of Disgrace

In this brilliant new work of fiction, J. M. Coetzee once again breaks new literary ground with a book that is, in the words of its main character, ?a response to the present in which I find myself.? Diary of a Bad Year takes on the world of politics?a new topic for Coetzee?and explores the role of the writer in our times with an extraordinary moral compass.

At the center of the book is ...