Bøger udgivet af Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR)

Sure to bring a smile to the faces of even the grumpiest readers, this laugh-out-loud picture book from #1 New York Times-bestselling author Jory John and internationally acclaimed illustrator Olivier Tallec is hilarious enough to come back to again and again.Attention, reader: You're going to LOVE this book!No, really, you are. It's got everything you could ever want: comedy, drama, action, heart. Plus-are you ready? It's got homework! Ahh yeah! And a trip to the best place ever, the dentist! Ahhhh yeahhh! Additionally-brace yourself-it's got raisins! Nature's candy. AHH YEAHHH! This book is so great, you won't be able to stop reading it. I DARE you not to have fun.

For fans of Casey McQuiston and Alice Oseman, a girl falls for her best friend's crush in Cupid's Revenge, a queer YA rom-com from Wibke Brueggemann that's equal parts hilarious and swoon-worthy.It was never Tilly's intention to fall in love, but Cupid will get you when you least expect it. That's exactly what happens when Tilly's best friend, Teddy, ropes Tilly into a plan to woo his dream girl, aspiring actress Katherine Cooper-Bunting. It turns out Teddy's not the only one who finds her dreamy.But Katherine is off-limits. The only thing more important than Tilly's feelings for someone she just met is not hurting Teddy, whose heart has been broken in the past.Though, avoiding temptation is easier said than done, as Teddy convinces Tilly to help him audition for a local play as a way to get to know Katherine better-a complete horror for someone who grew up in an artsy family but doesn't have a creative bone in her body. On top of dealing with her growing feelings for the girl she shouldn't like (but who may like her back), Tillie is still grieving a loss while navigating her grandfather's recent Alzheimer's diagnosis. So yeah, that's a lot for any sixteen-year-old to handle without Cupid's vengeful arrows getting involved.

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers."Instead of a chronicle, a person tends to manufacture legends when he relates the story of his life for others," Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories. Now, in his own memoir, the renowned author investigates what it might mean to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling.Taking his firmly imbedded memories-the "illuminated details" that give this work its title-as his starting point, Nádas dissects their contents using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings-all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. In order to weed out conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too-moving in concentric circles toward causes and circumstances, until their meaning and significance come to light.In a work that encompasses the tumultuous years of World War II and the Hungarian revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the events of a life and assembles them into a memoir of unusual insight and exceptional power. Hailed by Deborah Eisenberg as an "extraordinary writer," Nádas has confirmed his place among Europe's greatest living authors.

The magnum opus of one of Europe's greatest living writers."Instead of a chronicle, a person tends to manufacture legends when he relates the story of his life for others," Péter Nádas writes in his fiction masterpiece, Parallel Stories. Now, in his illuminating memoir, Shimmering Details, the renowned author investigates what it means to reconstruct a life without recourse to the techniques and embellishments of traditional storytelling.Taking his firmly imbedded memories-the "shimmering details" that give this work its title-as his starting point, Nádas dissects them using a method inspired by Freudian dream interpretation. Sounds, scenes, smells, feelings-all are probed for details that might allow him to reconstruct what happened, and when and where. In order to avoid conscious or unconscious distortions, he deconstructs the stories of others, too-moving in concentric circles toward cause and effect, until their meaning and significance come to light.In Shimmering Details, Volume I, Nádas probes the history of his family from the late 19th century to his birth in 1942 and beyond. In a work that encompasses World War II and the Hungarian Revolution, Nádas traces the hidden connections between the seemingly random events of a life and assembles them into a memoir like no other.

"Stunningly realized . . . Exquisite . . . A spellbinding novel about the high price of betrayal-of others, and oneself." -Maaza Mengiste, author of The Shadow King, shortlisted for the Booker PrizeThe hotly anticipated new novel by David Diop, winner of the International Booker Prize.Paris, 1806. The renowned botanist Michel Adanson lies on his deathbed, the masterwork to which he dedicated his life still incomplete. As he expires, the last word to escape his lips is a woman's name: Maram.The key to this mysterious woman's identity is Adanson's unpublished memoir of the years he spent in Senegal, concealed in a secret compartment in a chest of drawers. Therein lies a story as fantastical as it is tragic: Maram, it turns out, is none other than the fabled revenant. A young woman of noble birth from the kingdom of Waalo, Maram was sold into slavery but managed to escape from the Island of Gorée-a major embarkation point of the transatlantic slave trade-to a small village hidden in the forest. While on a research expedition in West Africa as a young man, Adanson hears the story of the revenant and becomes obsessed with finding her. Accompanied by his guide, he ventures deep into the Senegalese bush on a journey that reveals not only the savagery of the French colonial occupation but also the unlikely transports of the human heart.Written with sensitivity and narrative flair, David Diop's Beyond the Door of No Return is a love story like few others. Drawing on the richness and lyricism of Senegal's oral traditions, Diop has constructed a historical epic of the highest order.

Named a Most Anticipated Book by Vulture, The Millions, and Lit Hub"Comedy Book changes the way we talk about an art form that is more diverse and exciting than ever before." -Seth Meyers "A sharp, loving, well written exploration and analysis of the art form that makes us smile, helps us relate, and is perpetually mysterious." -Jenny SlateFrom a beloved comedy critic, a wisecracking, heartfelt, and overdue chronicle of comedy's boom-and its magic.Comedy is king. From multimillion-dollar TV specials to sold-out stand-up shows and TikTok stardom, comedy has never been more popular, democratized, or influential. Comedians have become organizing forces across culture-as trusted as politicians and as fawned-over as celebrities-yet comedy as an art form has gone under-considered throughout its history, even as it has ascended as a cultural force.In Comedy Book, Jesse David Fox-the country's most definitive voice in comedy criticism and someone who, in his own words, "enjoys comedy maybe more than anyone on this planet"-tackles everything you need to know about comedy. Weaving together history and analysis, Fox unravels the genre's political legacy through an ode to Jon Stewart, interrogates the divide between highbrow and lowbrow via Adam Sandler, and unpacks how marginalized comics create spaces for their communities. Along the way, Fox covers everything from comedy in the age of political correctness and Will Smith's slap to the right wing's relationship with comedy and, for Fox, comedy's ability to heal personal tragedy.With memorable cameos from Jerry Seinfeld, Dave Chappelle, John Mulaney, Ali Wong, Kate Berlant, and countless others, Comedy Book is an eye-opening education in how to engage with our most omnipresent art form, a riotous history of American pop culture, and a love letter to laughter.

Garner gathers a literary chorus to capture the joys of reading and eating in this comic, personal classic. Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for me, simply gone together. The book you're holding is a product of these combined gluttonies.Dwight Garner, the beloved New York Times critic and the author of Garner's Quotations, serves up the intertwined pleasures of books and food. The product of a lifetime of obsessively reading, eating, and every combination therein, The Upstairs Delicatessen: On Eating, Reading, Reading About Eating, and Eating While Reading is a charming, emotional memoir, one that only Garner could write. In it, he records the voices of great writers and the stories from his life that fill his mind as he moves through the sections of the day and of this book: breakfast, lunch, shopping, the occasional nap, drinking, and dinner.Through his lifelong infatuation with these twin joys, we meet the man behind the pages and the plates, and a portrait of Garner, eager and insatiable, emerges. He writes with tenderness and humor about his mayonnaise-laden childhood in West Virginia and Naples, Florida (and about his father's famous peanut butter and pickle sandwich), his mind-opening marriage to a chef from a foodie family ("Cree grew up taking leftover frog legs to school in her lunch box"), and the words and dishes closest to his heart. This is a book to be savored, though it may just whet your appetite for more.

The first full biography of America's most renowned economist.Milton Friedman was, alongside John Maynard Keynes, the most influential economist of the twentieth century. His work was instrumental in the turn toward free markets that defined the 1980s, and his full-throated defenses of capitalism and freedom resonated with audiences around the world. It's no wonder the last decades of the twentieth century have been called "the Age of Friedman"-or that analysts have sought to hold him responsible for both the rising prosperity and the social ills of recent times.In Milton Friedman, the first full biography to employ archival sources, the historian Jennifer Burns tells Friedman's extraordinary story with the nuance it deserves. She provides lucid and lively context for his groundbreaking work on everything from why dentists earn less than doctors, to the vital importance of the money supply, to inflation and the limits of government planning and stimulus. She traces Friedman's longstanding collaborations with women, including the economist Anna Schwartz, as well as his complex relationships with powerful figures such as Fed Chair Arthur Burns and Treasury Secretary George Shultz, and his direct interventions in policymaking at the highest levels. Most of all, Burns explores Friedman's key role in creating a new economic vision and a modern American conservatism. The result is a revelatory biography of America's first neoliberal-and perhaps its last great conservative.

The Boy from Kyiv is the life story of Alexei Ratmansky, the most celebrated ballet choreographer of our time. Alexei Ratmansky is transforming ballet for the twenty-first century. An artist of daring imagination, the choreographer has created breathtakingly original works for the world's most revered companies. He has fashioned a singular approach to balletic storytelling that bridges the space between narrative and abstraction and heightens ambiguity and surprise on the stage. He has boldly restored great centuries-old ballets to their former glory, combining archival research with his own choreographic genius to retrieve detail and color once lost to the ages. And above all, he is renowned for fusing the Western and Eastern ballet traditions, and for drawing on the visual arts, literature, music, film, and beyond with inspired vim, to forge a style that is vibrant, eclectic, and utterly new: one that promises to leave an indelible mark on this venerable art form.But before Ratmansky was the artistic director of the Bolshoi Ballet, the resident choreographer at American Ballet Theatre, the artist in residence at New York City Ballet, and generally, as The New Yorker has it, "the most sought-after man in ballet," he was just a boy from Kyiv, sneaking into the ballet at night, concocting his own juvenile adaptations of novels and stories, and dreaming up new possibilities for bodies in motion.In The Boy from Kyiv, the first biography of this groundbreaking artist, the celebrated dance writer Marina Harss takes us behind the curtain to reveal Ratmansky's fascinating life, from his Soviet boyhood through his globe-spanning career. Over a decade in the making, this biography arrives at a pivotal moment in Ratmansky's journey, one that has seen him painfully and publicly break ties with Russia, the country in which he made his name, in solidarity with his native Ukraine, and take on a new challenge at the storied New York City Ballet. Told with the lyricism, drama, and verve that befit its subject, The Boy from Kyiv is a riveting account of this major artist's ascent to the peaks of his field, a mesmerizing study of creativity in action, and a triumphant testament to ballet's enduring vitality.

The sequel to Erin Beaty's buzzworthy YA medieval fantasy-thriller Blood and Moonlight, Silence and Shadow is full of swoony romance, dangerous magick, and murder-perfect for fans of Kerri Maniscalco and Mary E. Pearson. After confronting a killer and fleeing her home to be with each other, Cat and Simon arrive in the sprawling city of Londunium pretending to be a newly married couple, but don't expect to keep up the ruse for long. Cat looks forward to honing her healing magick at the local Selanae university, but instead finds a council of ruthless leaders threatening to erase her non-Selanae "husband's" memories to protect their secrets. Terrified to lose him, Cat takes desperate steps to keep him safe. But when a string of mutilated bodies turns up in the woods outside the city, and Simon is recruited to profile the killer, Cat is pulled back into a world of murder, mayhem, and magick-one that threatens to swallow her, and everything she loves, whole.

From critically acclaimed author-illustrator Joowon Oh comes a poignant picture book about the special bonds between a girl and her foster dogs, with heartwarming messages of compassion, selflessness, and finding a home-in each other.One day, Ruth and her mom are in the park and see a pet adoption fair. Ruth is drawn to a cute little dog, but they are moving soon and can't adopt. However, they can foster for a couple of months, and that's how they wind up with Ginger. Then Daisy. Then Cody, a special-needs dog with injured hind legs. Can Ruth help Cody find his forever home?Lucky Dogs is a vibrant and charming story about three adorable dogs down on their luck and a girl with a big heart who wants to save them. Each hello is a delight as these furry friends teach our young heroine how to overcome her worries and be joyful, curious, and brave.

*An Instant New York Times Bestseller*The Secret Garden meets A Wrinkle in Time in Greenwild: The World Behind the Door, the first book in the most extraordinary new fantasy series.Open the door to a spellbinding world where the wilderness is alive and a deep magic rises from the earth itself . . .Eleven-year-old Daisy Thistledown is on the run. Her mother has been keeping big, glittering secrets, and now she has vanished. Daisy knows it's up to her to find Ma-but someone is hunting her across London. Someone determined to stop her from discovering the truth.So when Daisy flees to safety through a mysterious hidden doorway, she can barely believe her eyes-she has stepped out of the city and into another world. This is the Greenwild. Bursting with magic and full of amazing natural wonders, it seems too astonishing to be true. But not only is this land of green magic real, it holds the key to finding Daisy's mother. And someone wants to destroy it. Daisy must band together with a botanical genius, a boy who can talk with animals, and a spunky cat to uncover the truth about who she really is. Only then can she channel the power that will change her whole world . . . and save the Greenwild itself.

Nathan Go's taut meditation on forgiveness and regret is told in the indelible voice of a Filipino chauffeur nearing the end of his life.After suffering a serious heart injury, Lito Macaraeg reaches out to his estranged son-a journalist who lives in the United States, far from his father's Manila nursing home-to promise him a scoop: the story of a secret meeting between Imelda Marcos and Corazon Aquino. Imelda, best known for her excessive shoe collection, was the flamboyant wife of the late Philippine dictator; Corazon was the wife of the opposition politician who was allegedly killed by the Marcoses. An unassuming housewife, Corazon rose up after her husband's death to lead the massive rallies that eventually toppled the Marcos dictatorship.Lito was Corazon's personal driver for many years, and her only companion on the journey from Manila to Baguio City to meet Imelda. Throughout the long drive, Lito's loyalty to his employer is pitted against his own moral uncertainty about her desire to forgive Imelda. But as Lito unspools his tale about two women whose choices shaped their country's history, his own story, and failings, slowly come to light. He delves into his past: his neglectful father, who joined a Communist guerrilla movement; their life in a mountain encampment headed by a charismatic priest; and Lito's struggles with poverty and ambition. In the end, it is Lito himself who must contemplate the meaning and possibility of forgiveness.In Forgiving Imelda Marcos, Nathan Go weaves a deeply intimate novel of alternative history that explores power and powerlessness, the nature of guilt, and what we owe to those we love.

A literary legend's engaging review of his career, stressing the work he never completed, and why.Over seven decades, John McPhee has set a standard for literary nonfiction. Assaying mountain ranges, bark canoes, experimental aircraft, the Swiss Army, geophysical hot spots, ocean shipping, shad fishing, dissident art in the Soviet Union, and an even wider variety of other subjects, he has consistently written narrative pieces of immaculate design.In Tabula Rasa, Volume 1, McPhee looks back at his career from the vantage point of his desk drawer, reflecting wryly upon projects he once planned to do but never got around to-people to profile, regions he meant to portray. There are so many examples that he plans to go on writing these vignettes, an ideal project for an old man, he says, and a "reminiscent montage" from a writing life. This first volume includes, among other things, glimpses of a frosty encounter with Thornton Wilder, interrogative dinners with Henry Luce, the allure of western Spain, criteria in writing about science, fireworks over the East River as seen from Malcolm Forbes's yacht, the evolving inclinations of the Tower of Pisa, the islands among the river deltas of central California, teaching in a pandemic, and persuading The New Yorker to publish an entire book on oranges. The result is a fresh survey of McPhee's singular planet.

A startling new portrait of George Eliot, the beloved novelist and a rare philosophical mind who explored the complexities of marriage.In her mid-thirties, Marian Evans transformed herself into George Eliot-an author celebrated for her genius as soon as she published her debut novel. During those years she also found her life partner, George Lewes-writer, philosopher, and married father of three. After "eloping" to Berlin in 1854, they lived together for twenty-four years: Eliot asked people to call her "Mrs Lewes" and dedicated each novel to her "Husband." Though they could not legally marry, she felt herself initiated into the "great experience" of marriage-"this double life, which helps me to feel and think with double strength." The relationship scandalized her contemporaries yet she grew immeasurably within it. Living at once inside and outside marriage, Eliot could experience this form of life-so familiar yet also so perplexing-from both sides. In The Marriage Question, Clare Carlisle reveals Eliot to be not only a great artist but also a brilliant philosopher who probes the tensions and complexities of a shared life. Through the immense ambition and dark marriage plots of her novels, we see Eliot wrestling-in art and in life-with themes of desire and sacrifice, motherhood and creativity, trust and disillusion, destiny and chance. Carlisle's searching new biography explores how marriage questions grow and change, and joins Eliot in her struggle to marry thought and feeling.Includes black-and-white images

An epic middle-grade memoir about sisterhood and coming-of-age in the three years leading up to the Bosnian Genocide. Three Summers is the story of five young cousins who grow closer than sisters as ethnic tensions escalate over three summers in 1980s Bosnia. They navigate the joys and pitfalls of adolescence on their family's little island in the middle of the Una River. When finally confronted with the harsh truths of the adult world around them, their bond gives them the resilience to discover and hold fast to their true selves.Written with incredible warmth and tenderness, Amra Sabic-El-Rayess takes readers on a journey that will break their hearts and put them back together again.

The intellectual autobiography of Mario Vargas Llosa, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature.From its origins, the liberal doctrine has represented the most advanced forms of democratic culture, and it is what has most defended us from the inextinguishable "call of the tribe." This book hopes to make a modest contribution to that indispensable project.In The Call of the Tribe, Mario Vargas Llosa surveys the readings that have shaped the way he thinks and has viewed the world over the past fifty years. The Nobel laureate, "tireless in his quest to probe the nature of the human animal" (Marie Arana, The Washington Post), maps out the liberal thinkers who helped him develop a new body of ideas after the great ideological traumas of his disenchantment with the Cuban Revolution and his alienation from the ideas of Jean-Paul Sartre, the author who most inspired Vargas Llosa in his youth.The works of Adam Smith, José Ortega y Gasset, Friedrich A. Hayek, Karl Popper, Raymond Aron, Isaiah Berlin, and Jean-François Revel helped the author enormously during those uneasy years. They showed him another school of thought, one that placed the individual before the tribe, nation, class, or party and defended freedom of expression as a fundamental value for the exercise of democracy. The Call of the Tribe documents Vargas Llosa's engagement with their work and charts the evolution of his personal ideology.

A laugh-out-loud retelling of The Three Little Pigs, The Three Little Guinea Pigs is perfect for fans of fairytales and guinea pigs alike. This clever story by prolific children's book author Erica S. Perl and dynamic illustrator Amy Young makes a perfect read-aloud and includes nonfiction backmatter with additional fun facts about guinea pigs.Once upon a time there were three little pigs... three little guinea pigs!Their names were Rosie, Minty, and Pumpkin. They lived with their mama in a cozy little house.Then they bid her a fond farewell and set off on their own. So far, so good....But what will they do if a hungry fox comes along?Will they go wheek, wheek, wheek all the way home?Or can they find a way to save their fluffy behinds?

In this stand-alone middle-grade novel set in the same world as A Dog-Friendly Town, Josephine Cameron delivers a mystery full of prime-time puppers, Houdini-inspired whodunits, and a reminder that puzzles are best solved with a little teamwork.Eleven-year-old Rondo McDade is starting to feel left out. His older brother, Epic, is heading into high school, and his younger sister, Elvis, is always mad at him. His parents keep pushing him out of their dog-friendly bed and breakfast, the Perro del Mar, and into the company of the new kid in town while a famous TV show films on location at the Perro. It's an important week for the town, and everyone knows Rondo has a history of causing trouble. Even if he doesn't mean to.But when canine actors start to disappear, including Carmelito's most beloved celebrity doggo, Pico Boone, Rondo is sure he knows who did it. Can he win back his family's trust and crack the case before Pico is lost forever?

Finalist for the 2023 Joyce Carol Oates PrizeA new collection of stories by David Means, a visionary "master of the form" (The Observer). Two nurses meet in the hospital parking lot to share a cigarette. They flirt and imagine a future together. They tell stories of patients lost and patients saved, of the darkest corners of human suffering and the luminous moments that break through, even here, in the shadow of death.In David Means's virtuosic new collection, time unfolds in unexpected ways: a single, quiet moment swells with the echoes of a widower's complicated marriage; a dachshund, given a new name and a new life by a new owner, catches the scent of the troubled man who previously abandoned her; young lovers become old; estranged couples return to their vows; and those who have died live on in perpetuity in the memories of those whom they touched. The stories in this collection-which have won the O. Henry Prize and the Pushcart Prize, and have been featured in The Best American Short Stories-confirm the promise of a writer who "believes in the power of stories to rescue and redeem people" (Max Liu, Financial Times).A revelatory meditation on trauma and catharsis, isolation and communion, Two Nurses, Smoking reflects the dislocations and anguish of our age, as well as the humanity and humor that buoy us.

"An essential account of America's greatest sculptor . . . [A] magnum opus." -Marjorie Perloff, The Times Literary SupplementThe landmark biography of the inscrutable and brilliant David Smith, the greatest American sculptor of the twentieth century. David Smith, a pioneer of Abstract Expressionism, did more than any other sculptor of his era to bring the plastic arts to the forefront of the American scene. Central to his project of reimagining sculptural experience was challenging the stability of any identity or position-Smith sought out the unbounded, unbalanced, and unexpected, creating works of art that seem to undergo radical shifts as the spectator moves from one point of view to another. So groundbreaking and prolific were his contributions to American art that by the time Smith was just forty years old, Clement Greenberg was already calling him "the greatest sculptor this country has produced." Michael Brenson's David Smith: The Art and Life of a Transformational Sculptor is the first biography of this epochal figure. It follows Smith from his upbringing in the Midwest, to his heady early years in Manhattan, to his decision to establish a permanent studio in Bolton Landing in upstate New York, where he would create many of his most significant works-among them the Cubis, Tanktotems, and Zigs. It explores his at times tempestuous personal life, marked by marriages, divorces, and fallings-out as well as by deep friendships with fellow artists like Helen Frankenthaler and Robert Motherwell. His wife Jean Freas described him as "salty and bombastic, jumbo and featherlight, thin-skinned and Mack Truck. And many more things." This enormous, contradictory vitality was true of his work as well. He was a bricoleur, a master welder, a painter, a photographer, and a writer, and he entranced critics and attracted admirers wherever he showed his work. With this book, Brenson has contextualized Smith for a new generation and confirmed his singular place in the history of American art.

"I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise is like an exquisite string of pearls: the perfect balance of elegance, style, design, and beauty. This book is inspiring, spirited, and totally absorbing." -Diane von FurstenbergThe story of Bunny Mellon, the great landscape and interior designer, becomes a revelatory exploration of extreme wealth in the American century. Bunny Mellon, whose life was marked by astonishing good fortune as well as tragedy and scandal, remains a singular figure in the annals of American design. She had her finger on the pulse of American culture and possessed a rare, once-in-a-generation sense of style and grace. Her most celebrated work-the White House Rose Garden, designed during the presidency of John F. Kennedy-demonstrated how formal restraint and the sparing use of color could be deployed to maximal effect. Later, her understated landscape design for the Kennedy grave site at Arlington National Cemetery changed the face of American public memorials.Mellon was a famously private person, and many of her greatest achievements remained concealed from public view. Her rarely seen gardens and domestic interiors at eight different properties on three continents became legends and models. At Oak Spring Farm in Virginia, the bibliographic riches of her Garden Library were twinned with the expansive flowering gardens lying below the Edward Larrabee Barnes-designed building. At her home on Nantucket, she pruned back the landscape to reveal the elemental forms of nature. Mellon also ranked as one of the great art collectors of her era, encouraging her husband Paul to use his family's vast wealth to acquire hundreds of nineteenth-century French paintings, many of which were donated to the National Gallery of Art. Her own tastes ranged from Mark Rothko to Richard Diebenkorn-in quantity.In I'll Build a Stairway to Paradise, Mac Griswold-who knew Mellon personally-delves into her subject's closely guarded personal archives to construct an unrivaled portrait of a woman as complex and multifaceted as the gardens and homes on which she left her mark. Mellon tested the anodyne 1950s model of woman-as-wife-as-mother by getting a divorce, admitting candidly to her first husband that she wanted a richer one. She imperiously traded old friends for new and ultimately used her reputation, her connections, and above all her money to help fund John Edwards's short-lived presidential campaign. She led an American version of a royal court that, over the years, included Jackie Kennedy, Hubert de Givenchy, and I. M. Pei.How Mellon's character, style, and taste developed together to produce her greatest accomplishments-private and public-is the real subject of this biography.

A Wall Street Journal and Times Literary Supplement Book of the Year | Long-listed for the Plutarch AwardA bold new biography of the legendary painter John Singer Sargent, stressing the unruly emotions and furtive desires that drove his innovative work and defined the transatlantic, fin de siècle culture he inhabited. A great American artist, John Singer Sargent is also an abiding enigma. While dressing like a businessman and crafting a highly respectable persona, he scandalized viewers on both sides of the Atlantic with the frankness and sensuality of his work. He charmed the nouveaux riches as well as the old money, but he reserved his greatest sympathies for Bedouins, Spanish dancers, and the gondoliers of Venice. At the height of his renown in Britain and America, he quit his lucrative portrait-painting career to concentrate on allegorical murals with religious themes-and on nude drawings of male models that he kept to himself.In The Grand Affair, the historian Paul Fisher offers a vivid life of the buttoned-up artist and his unbuttoned work. Sargent's nervy, edgy portraits exposed illicit or dark feelings in himself and his sitters-feelings that high society on both sides of the Atlantic found fascinating and off-putting. Fisher traces Singer's life from his wandering trans-European childhood to the salons of Paris, and the scandals and enthusiasms he caused, and on to London. There he mixed with eccentrics and aristocrats, and the likes of Henry James and Oscar Wilde, while at the same time forming a close relationship with a lightweight boxer who became his model, valet, and traveling partner. In later years, Sargent met up with his friend and patron Isabella Stewart Gardner around the world and devoted himself to a new model, the African American elevator operator and part-time contortionist Thomas McKeller, who would become the subject of some of Sargent's most daring and powerful work.Illuminating Sargent's restless itinerary, Fisher explores the enigmas of fin de siècle sexuality and art, fashioning a biography that grants the man and his paintings new and intense life.

"Pankaj Mishra transforms a visceral, intimate story of one man's humble origins into a kaleidoscopic portrait of a society bedazzled by power and wealth-what it means on a human level, and what it costs. Run and Hide is a spectacular, illuminating work of fiction." -Jennifer Egan, author of Manhattan BeachGrowing up in a small railway town, Arun always dreamed of escape. His acceptance to the prestigious Indian Institute of Technology, enabled through great sacrifice by his low-caste parents, is seemingly his golden ticket out of a life plagued by everyday cruelties and deprivations. At the predominantly male campus, he meets two students from similar backgrounds. Unlike Arun-scarred by his childhood, and an uneasy interloper among go-getters-they possess the sheer will and confidence to break through merciless social barriers. The alumni of IIT eventually go on to become the financial wizards of their generation, working hard and playing hard from East Hampton to Tuscany-the beneficiaries of unprecedented financial and sexual freedom. But while his friends play out Gatsby-style fantasies, Arun fails to leverage his elite education for social capital. He decides to pursue the writerly life, retreating to a small village in the Himalayas with his aging mother. Arun's modest idyll is one day disrupted by the arrival of a young woman named Alia, who is writing an exposé of his former classmates. Alia, beautiful and sophisticated, draws Arun back to the prospering world where he must be someone else if he is to belong. When he is implicated in a terrible act of violence committed by his closest friend from IIT, Arun will have to reckon with the person he has become. Run and Hide is Pankaj Mishra's powerful story of achieving material progress at great moral and emotional cost. It is also the story of a changing country and global order, and the inequities of class and gender that map onto our most intimate relationships.