In this elegant set of stories, three modern women are touched in different ways by the paintings of Henri Matisse. In "Medusa's Ankles," a distinguished translator visits a hair salon hoping to regain a hint of her youthful looks. Hung on the wall before her is one of Matisse's iconic portraits. In "Art Works," the three inhabitants of one household-a generous wife, her petulant husband, and their regal housekeeper-make very different artists. And...

A sublime comedy of contemporary manners, this is the novel Jane Austen might well have written had she lived in twenty-first- century California. Nothing ever moves in a straight line in Karen Joy Fowler's fiction, and in her latest, the complex dance of modern love has never been so devious or so much fun. Six Californians join to discuss Jane Austen's novels. Over the six months they meet, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER. Pulitzer Prize winner Jhumpa Lahiri brilliantly illuminates the immigrant experience and the tangled ties between generations. Namesake is a fine-tuned, intimate, and deeply felt novel of identity from "a writer of uncommon elegance and poise." (The New York Times)

Meet the Ganguli family, new arrivals from Calcutta, trying their best to become Americans even as they pine for home. The name they...

In 32 lectures, 45 minutes each, Prof. Greenberg discusses 31 of the world's greatest orchestral woks.

When Rachel Cohen's father died and before she gave birth to her first child, she turned to Jane Austen to make sense of her new reality. Simultaneously grief-stricken and buoyed by the birth of her daughter, reading Austen became Cohen's refuge and her ballast. She was able to reckon with difficult questions about mourning, memorializing, living in a household, paying attention to the world, reading, writing, and imagining through the novels. It...