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Bombshell is a feminist nuclear thriller set twenty-five years after the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, in which an alienated young Russian woman born in its shadow undertakes a road trip across the U.S., waging a guerrilla war against the nuclear industry and leaving in her wake a trail of destruction and assassinations. Obsessed with would-be Warhol assassin Valerie Solanas, Varyushka Cash recreates her atomic past through escalating violence and her one true goal: an assault on the Indian Point nuclear plant on the bank of the Hudson River. All along she is relentlessly pursued by the CIA, eager to capture Varyushka on charges of domestic terrorism. The cat-and-mouse chase leads to a final showdown in a decimated and irradiated New York, there on the cusp of a frightening new future.The initial draft of Bombshell was completed five months before the Fukushima catastrophe, written from the author’s morbid suspicion that the twenty-fifth anniversary of catastrophe at Chernobyl, Pripyat, and beyond would be marked by an echo in the present, shadowed by the real threat present in our unguarded and deteriorating nuclear facilities. Bombshell is a combustible and commercial step forward by one of our most creative and intellectual writers today.

"I haven't tasted chocolate for over ten years and now I'm walking down the street unwrapping a Kit Kat. Remember when Kate Moss said, 'Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels'? She's wrong: chocolate does. For Christmas I'm giving myself a fresh start. I have to get some extra pounds of weight under my belt; I want to make next year the year that everything changes. " At the age of 32, after ten years of hiding from the truth, Emma Woolf finally decided it was time to face the biggest challenge of her life. Addicted to hunger, exercise and control, she was juggling a full-blown eating disorder with a successful career, functioning on an apple a day. Having met the man of her dreams (and wanting a future and a baby together), she decided it was time to stop starving and start living. And as if that wasn't enough pressure, Emma also agreed to chart her progress in a weekly column for The Times. Honest, hard-hitting and yet romantic, "An Apple a Day" is a manifesto for the modern generation to stop starving and start living. This compelling, life-affirming true story is essential reading for anyone affected by eating disorders (whether as a sufferer or ally), anyone interested in health and social issues - and for medical and health professionals.

Following divorce, Fraser resolves to stay in the small mountain town where her son's father lives, but it soon proves too claustrophobic. She finds relief a world away in a small house up a winding road tucked so far into the forest one forgets it is technically still in town. It's in this small and remote forest house, both buffered and enveloped by endless wilderness, where she slowly rebuilds. The life she carves out for herself and son Dylan is harsh at times and lyrical at others. The physical landscape feeds her--with its trees and animals, firewood, barbed wire and rugged unforgiving demands--while her internal self brims over with favorite passages culled from beloved books...and also with immense guilt about pulling her son into the confusing and messy reality of divorce. Of course, it is complicated reflection, as our lives often are. No moment of reveling goes unpunished by self-reproach: how dare she be happy for the quiet afforded her when Dylan is with his dad. Is it okay to be happy? Shouldn't she be sadder? And her past is not past at all. Her history and the history of her family are very much alive in her, and memories crop-up unbidden, providing hints of explanation, that both prop her up and damn her. It is when all these gremlins hound her that she turns to what is outside her door. This is a literary gem for anyone who has navigated the treacherous waters of loss and rebuilt a life, for those who love an expanse of sky, and for those who carry books in their mind.

Like Jhumpa Lahriri, Monica Ali and Arundhati Roy, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala has long captured the Western-Indian experience. In this expansive story collection, Jhabvala continues her lifelong meditation on East and West. Set in India, England, and New York City, "A Lovesong for India" reveals what unites us across oceans, cultures, and lifetimes. Remarkable and unwavering, this collection is the hallmark of Jhabvala's celebrated career and a testament to her "balance, subtlety, wry humor, and beauty" -"The New York Times"

"Radical, before it meant a person who advocates strong political reform, meant getting to the root of things, the origin. It comes from the Latin radix, radicis,, meaning radish, a root vegetable."—BK LorenThese meditative essays range in subjects from a transcendental encounter with a pack of coyotes ironically juxtaposed with her neighbor's claim that nature "has gone out of vogue," to Loren's mother's slow yet all–encompassing deterioration from Parkinson's, and the unexpected way the Loma Prieta earthquake eroded her depression by offering the author a sense of her small place in a wild and worthwhile world.Loren has an empathetic and gentle approach to the world. In detailing the intricacies of human relationships and consciousness—fear of death and time, cooperation born of clashing viewpoints, tradition's beauty even when destructive, a love of language, a sense of loss amid the fast–paced materialistic world—she peels back the film of popular thinking in order to expose herself to the secrets so few of us ever see.

Of the many freedoms we enjoy in modern society, none is more intoxicating or socially disruptive than the possibility that there might be alternatives to traditional marriage, and no one has shown us how to use this freedom better than the celebrities and artists whose unconventional relationships were evidence of creativity and individuality. But what do their stories tell us? What does the work of art do for an artist as a lover? And how do an artists' affairs both emerge from and influence their creativity? "The Love Lives of the Artists" tells the stories of artists who saw the open relationship as the fulfillment of their art. Certainly, some used their open relationships to torture themselves and others; but some were able to 'put up with a good deal of contradictory nonsense, ' as Georgia O'Keeffe put it--suffering nervous breakdowns or drug and alcohol addictions, along with jealous torments--in order to preserve creative connections to what seemed 'clear and bright and wonderful' in their artist lovers. In this engrossing examination, Daniel Bullen sheds light on the love lives of Lou Andreas-Salome and Rainer Maria Rilke; Alfred Stieglitz and Georgia O'Keeffe; Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir; Diego Rivera and Frida Kahlo, and Henry Miller and Anais Nin. Following these artists through their artistic development--from their early relationships to their commitments and subsequent affairs--we can see their relationships as rebellions against modern culture and bourgeois morality, but they also show us the rare fulfillment of creative freedom and shared understanding.

On June 1st, 1914, Una O'Shaughnessy sends a postcard home from a Cornish seaside town. "Back in two weeks," she promises. But seven months later, she still has not returned to Ireland, and she sends another postcard, this one signed "Una," "Michael," "Rene (!)." "The Past" is the story of Rene, this unexpected child, as told by her own child as he searches for the truth about his parents' mysterious and romantic history. Through the reminiscences of his mother's friend, the pieces of the past begin to fit together into a delicate mosaic of the truth. What really happened in that seaside town? Why does the past seem to hold so many secrets? Set over twenty-five years, travelling from Cornwall to Dublin and the Irish Provinces, "The Past" is a beautiful novel of love and longing, created by one of the preeminent artists of our time.

John Barth stays true to form in "Every Third Thought," written from the perspective of a character Barth introduced in his short story collection "The Development." George I. Newett and his wife Amanda Todd lived in the gated community of Heron Bay Estates until its destruction by a fluke tornado. This event, Newett notes, occurred on the 77th anniversary of the 1929 stock market crash, a detail that would appear insignificant if it were not for several subsequent events. The stress of the tornado's devastation prompts the Newett-Todds to depart on a European vacation, during which George suffers a fall on none other than his 77th birthday, the first day of autumn (or more cryptically, fall). Following this coincidence, George experiences the first of what is to become five serial visions, each appearing to him on the first day of the ensuing seasons, and each corresponding to a pivotal event in that season of his life. As the novel unfolds, so do these uncanny coincidences, and it is clear that, as ever, Barth possesses an unmatched talent in balancing his characteristic style and wit with vivid, page-turning storytelling.

After years of living in exile, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn returned to Russia in 1994 and published a series of eight powerfully paired stories. These groundbreaking works--interconnected and juxtaposed using an experimental method Solzhenitsyn referred to as "binary"--join Solzhenitsyn's already available fiction as some of the most powerful literature of the twentieth century. With Soviet and post-Soviety life as their focus, these stories weave and shift inside their shared setting, illuminating the Russian experience under the Soviet regime. In "The Upcoming Generation," a professor promotes a dull but proletarian student purely out of good will. Years later, the same professor finds himself arrested and, in a striking twist of fate, his student becomes his interrogator. In "Nastenka," two young women with the same name lead routine, ordered lives--until the Revolution exacts radical change on them both. The most eloquent and acclaimed opponent of government oppression, Solzhenitsyn was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1970, and his work continues to receive international acclaim. Available for the first time in English, "Apricot Jam and Other Stories" is a striking example of Solzhenitsyn's singular style and only further solidifies his place as a true literary giant.

"What happens to a regular guy who dopes? Surprised to learn that pro athletes aren't the only ones taking performance-enhancing substances, journalist Andrew Tilin goes in search of the average juicing Joe, hoping to find a few things out: Why would normal people take these substances? Where do folks get them? Does the stuff really work? But these controversial drugs often silence their users, and so his queries might have gone unanswered had Tilin not looked in the mirror and succumbed to curiosity. Soon wielding syringes, this forty-something husband and father of two children becomes the doper next door. During his yearlong odyssey, Tilin is transformed. He becomes stronger, hornier, and aggressive. He wades into a subculture of doping physicians, real estate agents, and aging women who believe that Tilin's type of legal "hormone replacement therapy" is the key to staying young--and he often agrees. He also lives with the price paid for renewed vitality, worrying about his health, marriage, and cheating ways as an amateur bike racer. And all along the way, he tells us what doping is really like--empowering and scary. "--

"39 women take on the ultimate pop-culture icon."--P. [4] of cover.

Using the colorful diaries of a sixteenth-century merchant as a narrative guide, "Empires of Food" vividly chronicles the fate of people and societies for the past 12,000 years through the foods they grew, hunted, traded, and ate--and offers fascinating, and devastating, insights into what to expect in years to come. In energetic prose, agricultural expert Evan D.G. Fraser and journalist Andrew capture the flavor of places as disparate as ancient Mesopotamia and imperial Britain, taking us from the first city in the once-thriving Fertile Crescent to today's overworked breadbaskets and rice bowls in the United States and China. Cities, culture, art, government, and religion were founded on the creation and exchange of food surpluses. Complex societies were built by shipping grain up rivers and into the stewpots of history's generations. But evenutally, inevitably, the crops fail, the fields erode, or the temperature drops, and the center of power shifts. Cultures descend into dark ages of poverty, famine, and war.A fascinating, fresh history told through the prism of the dining table, "Empires of Food" offers a grand scope and a provocative analysis of the world today, indispensable in this time of global warming and food crises.

Henry Brusett is the only one who can explain the mysterious death of Calvin Teague. He's the only one who truly knows how the young man came to be bloodied and lifeless on his land in Montana's vast backcountry. But Henry won't say anything. Henry never wanted much more than a family and his days spent as a sawyer deep in the wilderness. But by middle-age Henry is divorced, disabled, and isolated on a remote plot of land in Montana. After years of self-imposed loneliness, Henry meets Karen, who's half his age and knows nothing but her own willful solitude. Their union is the unlikeliest of bonds, a mix of comfort and guilt for Henry who believes he's too old for Karen. But it's also the spark of his undoing, a decision that leads him toward one of his greatest regrets.

Judas Iscariot is the historical symbol of betrayal. But what really happened at the Garden of Gethsemane? What really compelled Judas to hang himself from a tree? "I, Judas" reimagines Iscariot's relationship to Jesus Christ and explores Judas's orchestration of the elaborate con of the divinity of Jesus Christ, subverting the legend of Judas as he inhabits some of our most notorious literary and historic figures in their darkest hours. Custer, Sexton, Van Gogh: These famous suicides converge through the figure of Judas in a cutting-edge piece of fiction that exposes the dangers of seeking universal truths in myth.

Original Skin is at times a scientific study, remarking on the biological magic behind the human body's largest organ. At others it becomes an anthropological survey, dissecting separate societies' attitudes towards bare bodies, and the motives behind cultural rituals such as tattoos.