Set in nineteenth-century Macao, a wealthy aging merchant with no heirs and no spouse becomes obsessed with a tale about a rich man who gives a poor sailor a small sum of money to impregnate his wife.

Jo Gillespie is a policewoman whose detective husband is killed in the line of duty while working undercover on a case. Her coworkers expect her to stay out of the investigation, but when alarming information about her husband comes to light, Jo loses faith in her police family and sets out to find the killer herself. Along the way she learns of the many dark secrets surrounding her husband, his colleagues, and the criminals they were investigating....

"Courageous, insightful and candid thoughts on malady and mortality from one of our most celebrated writers"--Provided by the publisher. On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour, Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. Over the next eighteen months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture. Hitchens poignantly describes the torments...

"A beautiful and utterly original novel about making art, love, and children during the twilight of an empire Ben Lerner's first novel, Leaving the Atocha Station, was hailed as "one of the truest (and funniest) novels. of his generation" (Lorin Stein, The New York Review of Books), "a work so luminously original in style and form as to seem like a premonition, a comet from the future" (Geoff Dyer, The Observer). Now, his second novel departs from...

"With Calypso, Sedaris sets his formidable powers of observation toward middle age and mortality. Make no mistake: these stories are very, very funny--it's a book that can make you laugh 'til you snort, the way only family can. Sedaris's powers of observation have never been sharper, and his ability to shock readers into laughter unparalleled. But much of the comedy here is born out of that vertiginous moment when your own body betrays you and you...

An award-winning documentary filmmaker, Shelby Apple is obsessed with reimagining the full story of the Learned Man-a prehistoric man whose remains are believed to be the link between Africa and ancient Australia. From Vietnam to northern Africa and the Australian Outback, Shelby searches for understanding of this enigmatic man from the ancient past, unaware that the two men share a great deal in common. Some 40,000 years in the past, the Learned...

One ordinary man's quest to become a serious man. Physics professor Larry Gopnik can't believe his life: his wife is leaving him for his best friend, his unemployed brother won't move off the couch, someone is threatening his career, his kids are a mystery and his neighbor is tormenting him by sunbathing nude. Struggling to make sense of it all, Larry consults three different rabbis and their answers lead him on a twisted journey of faith, family,...

"A fresh, fierce, and timely meditation on data, pain, time, and the limited capacity of literature to comprehend life and death in a sensate and vulnerable body." --

"Ever since Eva Saulitis began her whale research in Alaska in the 1980s, she has been drawn deeply into the lives of a single extended family of endangered orcas struggling to survive in Prince William Sound. Over the course of a decades-long career spent observing and studying these whales, and eventually coming to know them as individuals, she has, sadly, witnessed the devastation wrought by the Exxon Valdez oil spill of 1989--after which not a...

"The entire world knows Michael J. Fox as Marty McFly, the teenage sidekick of Doc Brown in Back to the Future; as Alex P. Keaton in Family Ties; as Mike Flaherty in Spin City; and through numerous other movie roles and guest appearances on shows such as The Good Wife and Curb Your Enthusiasm. Diagnosed at age 29, Michael is equally engaged in Parkinson's advocacy work, raising global awareness of the disease and helping find a cure through The Michael...