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The long-awaited paperback edition of Selected Poems, revised and updated with more than forty new poems never before published in English2011 marks the centenary year of one of the twentieth century's most important poets, Nobel laureate Czeslaw Milosz. To mark the occasion, Anthony Milosz has translated into English the last poems his father wrote, granting readers new insight into the work of an unparalleled master of the form. Life opened for Czeslaw Milosz with the clash of civilizations in northeastern Europe. What unfolded around him was a century of catastrophe and madness: two world wars, revolutions, invasions, and the murders of tens of millions of people. In the thick of this upheaval, wide awake and in awe of living, Milosz tried to understand both history and the moment, with humble respect for the suffering of each individual. He wrote masterful poetry infused with a tireless spirit and a penetrating insight into fundamental human dilemmas and the staggering yet simple truth that ?to exist on the earth is beyond any power to name.?

The only novel by avant-garde literary star Jane Bowles, the highly influential wife of legendary writer Paul Bowles, Two Serious Ladies is a modernist cult classic, mysterious, profound, anarchic, and funny, that follows two "respectable" women as they descend into debauchery?updated with an introduction by Claire Messud, bestselling author of The Emperor's Children and The Woman Upstairs.Christina Goering, eccentric and adventurous, and Frieda Copperfield, anxious but enterprising, are two serious ladies who want to live outside of themselves. Old friends, each will take a surprising path in search of salvation: during a visit to Panama, Mrs. Copperfield abandons her husband, finding solace in a relationship with a teenage prostitute; while Miss Goering, a wealthy spinster, pursues sainthood via sordid encounters with the basest of men. At the end the two women meet again, each radically altered by her experience.

A groundbreaking and candid novel-in-real-time, considered a cult classic, from one of America's most celebrated poetsIn this breathtakingly inventive autobiographical novel, Eileen Myles transforms her life into a work of art. Told in her audacious and singular voice made vivid and immediate in her lyrical language, Chelsea Girls cobbles together memories of Myles's 1960s Catholic upbringing with an alcoholic father, her volatile adolescence, her unabashed "lesbianity," and her riotous pursuit of survival as a poet in 1970s New York.Suffused with alcohol, drugs, and sex; evocative in its depictions of the hardscrabble realities of a young artist's life; with raw, flickering stories of awkward love, humor, and discovery, Chelsea Girls is a funny, cool, and intimate account of a writer's education, and a modern tale of how one young female writer managed to shrug off the chains of the rigid cultural identity meant to define her.

There is no "you" consciously making decisions. So how do we make decisions? How can we have free will if we don't pull the levers on our own behavior? What moral and legal implications follow if we don't have free will? Who's in Charge? is a primer for a new era in the understanding of human behavior that ranges across neuroscience, psychology, ethics, and the law with a light touch but profound implications.

A madcap new novel from Jonas Jonasson, author of the #1 internationally bestselling The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared and The Girl Who Saved the King of SwedenA gangster, a vicar, and a receptionist walk into a bar . . .Killer-for-hire Anders is fresh out of prison and trying to keep his head down when he meets two unlikely new business partners at a 1-star hotel: one, an atheist former Protestant vicar fired from her church, and the other the hotel's receptionist, the ruined grandson of an ex-millionaire. Together they cook up an idea for an enterprising venture involving Swedish gangsters that is set to make them all a fortune?until, all of a sudden and to everyone's surprise, Anders finds Jesus. The perfect plan?if it weren't for Hitman Anders's curiosity about the meaning of it all. In conversations with the vicar, he turns to Jesus and, against all odds, Jesus answers him! Anders's sudden interest in religion might be good for his soul, but it's not good for business, and the vicar and the receptionist have to find a new plan, quick.As wildly funny and unexpected as Jonasson's previous bestselling novels, Hitman Anders and the Meaning of It All is a zany, feel-good adventure story, tenderly and hilariously exploring belief, redemption, and the fact that it's never too late to start again.

Each of the six stories in Your Duck Is My Duck, Deborah Eisenberg's first collection since 2006, has the heft and complexity of a novel. With her own inexorable but utterly unpredictable logic and her almost uncanny ability to conjure the strange states of mind and emotion that constitute our daily consciousness, Eisenberg pulls us as if by gossamer threads through the lives of her characters.In Eisenberg's world, the forces of money, sex, and power cannot be escaped, and the force of history, whether confronted or denied, cannot be evaded. No one writes better about time, tragedy and grief, and the indifferent but beautiful universe around us.

Frances Price?tart widow, possessive mother, and Upper East Side force of nature?is in dire straits, beset by scandal and impending bankruptcy. Her adult son, Malcolm, is no help, mired in a permanent state of arrested development. And then there's the Prices' aging cat, Small Frank, who Frances believes houses the spirit of her late husband, an infamous litigator whose gruesome tabloid death rendered Frances and Malcolm social outcasts.Putting penury and pariahdom behind them, the family decides to cut their losses and head for the exit. One ocean voyage later, the curious trio land in their beloved Paris, the City of Lights serving as a backdrop not for love or romance, but self-destruction and economic ruin?to riotous effect.Bestselling author Patrick deWitt has returned with a darkly comic novel?a one-of-a-kind ?tragedy of manners,? a brilliant send-up of high society, and a moving mother-son caper.

Padgett Powell has been regarded as unique and one of the most exciting writers today. The New York Times calls him "a master of voice, a generator of absolutely particular, original, hilarious human sounds."'You & Me is a conversation, apparently on a porch, between two men who may be difficult to grasp. They move together in aimless, convenient debate, coming to conclusions that don't conclude but to positions that may not finally be so aimless. They disagree to agree. They are smart, not smart; fools, not fools.You & Me will take you on a tantalizing journey. Confounding, engaging fiction for everyone who loved The Interrogative Mood. Poignant, hilarious, opaque, diamond-clear, Padgett Powell's new novel offers unusual delights.

Jj Ferguson has returned home to Pinewood, North Carolina, to build his dream house and to pursue his high school sweetheart, Ava. But as he reenters his former world, where factories are in decline and the legacy of Jim Crow is still felt, he's startled to find that the people he once knew and loved have changed just as much as he has. Ava is now married and desperate for a baby, though she can't seem to carry one to term. Her husband, Henry, has grown frustrated by the demise of the furniture industry, which has stripped the area of jobs. And Ava's mother, Sylvia, meddles in the lives of those around her, trying to fill the void left by her absent son. JJ's return quickly stirs up the entire town, as the ostentatious wealth he's attained forces everyone to consider the cards they've been dealt. Can they reorient their lives to align with their wishes rather than their current realities? Or are they all already resigned to the rhythms of the particular lives they lead?

This new era offers the promise of immensely powerful machines, but it also reframes a question first raised more than half a century ago, when the intelligent machine was born. Will we control these systems, or will they control us? In this sweeping history of the complicated and evolving relationship between humans and computers, Markoff traces the different ways developers have addressed this fundamental tension between man and machine and the ethical quandaries raised as the pace of technological change accelerates dramatically. We are on the brink of the next stage of the computer revolution, and robots have already begun to transform modern life. Designers must draw a bright line between what is human and what is machine. We must decide to design ourselves into our future?or risk being excluded from it altogether.

This brilliantly imagined debut tells the story of Flora 717, a devout young worker bee who finds herself in possession of a deadly secretFlora 717 is a sanitation worker, a member of the lowest caste in her orchard hive, where work and sacrifice are the highest virtues and worship of the beloved Queen the only religion. But Flora is not like other bees. With circumstances threatening the hive's survival, her curiosity is regarded as a dangerous flaw, but her courage and strength are assets. She is allowed to feed the newborns in the royal nursery and then to become a forager, flying alone and free to collect nectar and pollen. A feat of bravery grants her access to the Queen's inner sanctum, where she discovers mysteries about the hive that are both profound and ominous.But when Flora breaks the most sacred law of all?daring to challenge the Queen's preeminence?enemies abound, from the fearsome fertility police who enforce the hive's strict social hierarchy to the high priestesses jealously wedded to power. Her deepest instincts to serve and sacrifice are now overshadowed by a greater power: a fierce maternal love that will bring her into conflict with her conscience, her heart, and her society?and lead her to perform unthinkable deeds.Thrilling, suspenseful, and spectacularly imaginative, The Bees and its dazzling young heroine will forever change the way you look at the world outside your window.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times bestselling author of Less and Less is Lost The Impossible Lives of Greta Wells is a rapturously romantic story of a woman who finds herself transported to the ?other lives? she might have lived.After the death of her beloved twin brother and the abandonment of her long-time lover, Greta Wells undergoes electroshock therapy. Over the course of the treatment, Greta finds herself repeatedly sent to 1918, 1941, and back to the present. Whisked from the gas-lit streets and horse-drawn carriages of the West Village to a martini-fueled lunch at the Oak Room, in these other worlds, Greta finds her brother alive and well?though fearfully masking his true personality. And her former lover is now her devoted husband...but will he be unfaithful to her in this life as well? Greta Wells is fascinated by her alter egos: in 1941, she is a devoted mother; in 1918, she is a bohemian adulteress.In this spellbinding novel by Andrew Sean Greer, each reality has its own losses, its own rewards; each extracts a different price. Which life will she choose as she wrestles with the unpredictability of love and the consequences of even her most carefully considered choices?

Deep in the rugged Appalachians of North Carolina lies the cove, a dark, forbidding place where spirits and fetches wander, and even the light fears to travel. Or so the townsfolk of Mars Hill believe?just as they know that Laurel Shelton, the lonely young woman who lives within its shadows, is a witch.Then it happens?a stranger appears, carrying nothing but a silver flute and a note explaining that his name is Walter and he is mute?and Laurel experiences true companionship and happiness for the first time.But Walter harbors a secret that could destroy everything. In a time of uncertainty, when fear and danger reign, Laurel and Walter will discover that love alone may not be enough to protect them.

As seen on NBC Nightly News, CBS Evening News, The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer, CNN, MSNBC, and in the Boston Globe, New York Times, and USA TodayIt is perhaps the most memorable event of the twentieth century: the assassination of president John F. KennedyWithin seven weeks of president Kennedy's assassination in November 1963, Jacqueline Kennedy received more than 800,000 condolence letters. Two years later, the volume of correspondence would exceed 1.5 million letters. For the next forty-six years, the letters would remain essentially untouched.Now, in her selection of 250 of these astonishing letters, historian Ellen Fitzpatrick reveals a remarkable human record of that devastating moment, of Americans across generations, regions, races, political leanings, and religions, in mourning and crisis. Reflecting on their sense of loss, their fears, and their hopes, the authors of these letters wrote an elegy for the fallen president that captured the soul of the nation.

Alcohol. Lithium. Buddhist chanting. To quiet the voices in her mind, Sylvia Harris tried all of them. Her bipolar depression brought on bouts of erratic behavior and unsettling delusions. It led her to look for love in all the wrong places and to create a family she had difficulty caring for. But it was at the nadir of her twenty-year battle with this devastating illness that Harris found redemption in the least likely of places?an equine ranch outside Orlando, Florida. Written with an unflinching eye toward her weaknesses and a reverent wonder at the healing power of horses, Long Shot is Harris's tale of perseverance in which an underdog in life becomes a champion on the track and her Thoroughbred becomes a beacon of hope.

Finally returned to print, Joyce Carol Oates's lost classic: the satirical, often surreal, and beautifully plotted Gothic romance that follows the exploits of the audacious Zinn sisters, whose nineteenth-century pursuit of adventurous lives turns a lens on contemporary American culture When their sister is plucked from the shores of the Bloodsmoor River by an eerie black-silk hot air balloon that sails in through a clear blue sky, the lives of the already extraordinary Zinn sisters are radically altered. The monstrous tragedy splinters the family, who must not only grapple with the mysterious and shameful loss of their sister and daughter but also seek their way forward in the dawn of a new era?one that includes time machines, the spirit world, and the quest for women's independence.Breathlessly narrated in the Victorian style by an unnamed narrator who is herself shocked and disgusted by the Zinn sisters' sexuality, impulsivity, and rude rejection of the mores of the time, the novel is a delicious filigree of literary conventions, "a novel of manners" in the tradition of Austen, Dickens, and Alcott, which Oates turns on its head. Years ahead of its time, A Bloodsmoor Romance touches on murder and mayhem, ghosts and abductions, substance abuse and gender identity, women's suffrage, the American spiritualist movement, and sexual aberration, as the Zinn sisters come into contact with some of the nineteenth century's greatest characters, from Mark Twain to Oscar Wilde.Pure Oates in its mordant wit, biting assessment of the American landscape, and virtuosic transformation of a literary genre we thought we knew, A Bloodsmoor Romance is a compelling, hilarious, and magical antiromance, a Little Women wickedly recast for the present day.

Celeste Price is twenty-six years old, beautiful, smart, married to a handsome man with money, and starting a new job as a junior high school teacher in suburban Tampa. Yet she harbors a dark secret. She is driven by a singular sexual obsession?fourteen-year-old boys. As the school year begins, Celeste has chosen and seduced the naive Jack Patrick, a quiet, thoughtful boy in awe of his teacher. But when her lustful frenzy begins to spiral out of control, the insatiable Celeste bypasses each hurdle with swift thinking and shameless determination.

A riveting follow-up to Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal's account of the most memorable missions of the Mossad, No Mission Is Impossible sheds light on some of the most harrowing, nail-biting operations of the Israeli Special Forces In No Mission Is Impossible, Michael Bar-Zohar and Nissim Mishal depict in electrifying detail major battles, raids in enemy territory, and the death- defying commando missions of the Israeli Special Forces. The stories are often of victories, but sometimes also of immense failures, and they run side by side with the accounts of the lives and accomplishments of some of Israel's most prominent figures. Captivating and eye-opening, No Mission Is Impossible is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how these crucial missions shaped Israel, and the world at large.

1941. Loyal Ledford works the swing shift at the Mann Glass factory in Huntington, West Virginia. He courts Rachel, the boss's daughter, a company nurse with coal black hair. But when Pearl Harbor is attacked, Ledford, like so many young men of his time, sets his life on a new course.Upon his return from service in the war, Ledford starts a family with Rachel but chafes under the authority at Mann Glass. He is a lost man, disconnected from the present and haunted by his violent past, until he meets his cousins the Bonecutter brothers. Their land, mysterious, elemental Marrowbone Cut, calls to Ledford, and it is there that The Marrowbone Marble Company is slowly forged. Over the next two decades, the factory grounds become a vanguard of the civil rights movement and a home for those intent on change. Such a home inevitably invites trouble, and Ledford must fight for his family.Returning to the West Virginia territory of his critically acclaimed novel, The Ballad of Trenchmouth Taggart, Glenn Taylor recounts the transformative journey of a man and his community.

To err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origins of the universe to how to load the dishwasher. In Being Wrong, journalist Kathryn Schulz explores why we find it so gratifying to be right and so maddening to be mistaken. Drawing on thinkers as varied as Augustine, Darwin, Freud, Gertrude Stein, Alan Greenspan, and Groucho Marx, she shows that error is both a given and a gift?one that can transform our worldviews, our relationships, and ourselves.

A masterly collection of new stories from Russell Banks, acclaimed author of The Sweet Hereafter and Rule of the Bone, which maps the complex terrain of the modern American familyThe New York Times lauds Russell Banks as "the most compassionate fiction writer working today." Long celebrated for his unflinching, empathetic works that explore the unspoken but hard realities of contemporary culture, Banks now turns his keen intelligence and emotional acuity on perhaps his most complex subject yet: the shape of family in its many forms. Suffused with Banks's trademark lyricism and reckless humor, the twelve stories in A Permanent Member of the Family examine the myriad ways we try?and sometimes fail?to connect with one another, as we seek a home in the world. Moving between the stark beauty of winter in upstate New York and the seductive heat of Florida, A Permanent Member of the Family charts with subtlety and precision the ebb and flow of both the families we make for ourselves and the ones we're born into. One of our most acute and penetrating authors, Banks is a virtuosic writer whose stories are profoundly humane, deeply?and darkly?funny, and absolutely unforgettable.

Whiting Award-winning poet Paul Guest was twelve years old, racing down a hill on a too-big, ancient bicycle when he discovered he had no brakes. Trying to steer into anything that would slow him down, he hit a ditch, was thrown over the handlebars, and broke his neck. One More Theory About Happiness follows a boy into manhood, his path marked by a hard-earned acceptance and a biting sense of humor. In incisive and lyrical prose, Guest shows us that a body irrevocably changed can lead to a life fiercely cherished.

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning science writer Jonathan Weiner comes a fast-paced and astonishing scientific adventure story: has the long-sought secret of eternal youth at last been found?In recent years, the dream of eternal youth has started to look like more than just a dream. In the twentieth century alone, life expectancy increased by more than thirty years?almost as much time as humans have gained in the whole span of human existence. Today a motley array of scientists, researchers, and entrepreneurs believe that another, bigger leap is at hand?that human immortality is not only possible, but attainable in our own time. Is there genius or folly in the dreams of these charismatic but eccentric thinkers?In Long for This World, Jonathan Weiner, a natural storyteller and an intrepid reporter with a gift for making cutting-edge science understandable, takes the reader on a whirlwind intellectual quest to find out. From Berkeley to the Bronx, from Cambridge University to Dante's tomb in Ravenna, Weiner meets the leading intellectuals in the field and delves into the mind-blowing science behind the latest research. He traces the centuries-old, fascinating history of the quest for longevity in art, science, and literature, from Gilgamesh to Shakespeare, Doctor Faustus to "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."And he tells the dramatic story of how aging could be conquered once and for all, focusing on the ideas of those who believe aging is a curable disease. Chief among them is the extraordinary Aubrey de Grey, a garrulous Englishman who bears more than a passing resemblance to Methuselah (at 969 years, the oldest man in the Bible) and who is perhaps immortality's most radical and engaging true believer.A rollicking scientific adventure story in the grand manner of Oliver Sacks, Long for This World is science writing of the highest order and with the highest stakes. Could we live forever? And if we could...would we want to?