Chicago is one of America's most iconic, historic, and fascinating cities, as well as a major travel destination. For Alex Kotlowitz, an accidental Chicagoan, it is the perfect perch from which to peer into America's heart. It's a place, as one historian has said, of "messy vitalities," a stew of contradictions: coarse yet gentle, idealistic yet restrained, grappling with its promise, alternately sure and un...
View More...

An unexpected, energetic look at world history on sea and land from the bestselling author of Salt and The Basque History of the World

Cod, Mark Kurlansky's third work of nonfiction and winner of the 1999 James Beard Award, is the biography of a single species of fish, but it may as well be a world history with this humble fish as its recurring main character. Cod, it turns out, is the reason Europeans set sail across the Atlantic, and it is the only reason they could. What did the Vikings eat in icy Greenland and on the five expeditions to America recorded ...
View More...

Advice on writing and on life from an acclaimed bestselling author:
"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my fath...
View More...

"Quicksand and Passing are novels I will never forget. They open up a whole world of experience and struggle that seemed to me, when I first read them years ago, absolutely absorbing, fascinating, and indispensable."--Alice Walker

"Discovering Nella Larsen is like finding lost money with no name on it. One can enjoy it with delight and share it without guilt." --Maya Angelou

"A hugely influential and insightful writer." --The New York Times

"Larsen's heroines are complex, restless, figures, whose hungers and frustrations will haunt every s...
View More...

When a former client jumps naked from a Boston landmark, Private Investigator Patrick Kenzie wants to know why. Once a perky young woman in love with life, her suicide is the final fall in a spiral of self-destruction.

What Kenzie discovers is a sadistic stalker who targeted the woman and methodically drove her to her death - a monster that the law can't touch. But Kenzie can. He and his former partner, Angela Gennaro, will fight a mind-twisting battle against the psychopath, even as he turns tricks on them...

Prayers for Rain is another superior thriller from Dennis Le...
View More...

We are all worried about wasting time. Especially in the West, we have created a frenzied lifestyle in which the twenty--four hours of each day are carved up, dissected, and reduced down to ten minute units of efficiency. We take our iPhones and laptops with us on vacation. We check email at restaurants or our brokerage accounts w...
View More...