Coleman Silk is a respected professor at a New England college who suddenly finds his life unraveling after a comment he makes about some African-American students is misinterpreted as a racial slur. As the scandal heats up, Nathan Zuckerman, a writer researching a biography of Silk, begins to dig deeply into Silk's life. Eventually, matters are made worse when Coleman's affair with a young married janitor named Faunia Farley is exposed. But amid...

"An informative, smart, and very amusing narrative about how influential Greeks and Greek culture have been on the rest of the world, from art to architecture to literature to politics to love"--Provided by publisher.

A revelatory history of Antwerp-from its rise to a world city to its fall in the Spanish Fury-by the New York Times Notable author of The Edge of the World. As Europe emerged from decades of religious warfare, the Age of Exploration began to flower in the middle of the 16th century. It was then that Antwerp grew from a modest port town into a city where the trade of the whole world would converge. As the city entered its "Golden Age," Antwerp became...

In 1962, Jackie Hart moves from Boston to Florida, with her family. Wanting something fulfilling to do, she starts a reading club and hosts a local late-night radio show as "Miss Dreamsville." The conservative, segregated town loves Miss Dreamsville, but doesn't know what to make of Jackie. Her book club welcomes everyone - even a black woman, a gay man, and a convict - who found there what had so far eluded them: a place in the world.

"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...

"Spanning a variety of disciplines, from religion, philosophy, and political thought, to cultural criticism, social theory, and the arts, Ideas That Made America: A Brief History shows how ideas have been major forces in American history, driving movements such as transcendentalism, Social Darwinism, conservatism, and postmodernism"--

"The House of Twenty Thousand Books is journalist Sasha Abramsky's elegy to the vanished intellectual world of his grandparents, Chimen and Miriam, and their vast library of socialist literature and Jewish history. A rare book dealer and self-educated polymath who would go on to teach at Oxford and consult for Sotheby's, Chimen Abramsky drew great writers and thinkers like Isaiah Berlin and Eric Hobsbawm to his north London home; his library grew...

""It was probably because I was so often taken away from Cambridge when I was young that I loved it as much as I did . . ." " So begins this novel-from-life by the best-selling author of "Girl, Interrupted, " an exploration of memory and nostalgia set in the 1950s among the academics and artists of Cambridge, Massachusetts. London, Florence, Athens: Susanna, the precocious narrator of "Cambridge, " would rather be home than in any of these places....