Harper Perennial

The Shakespeare Guide to Italy: Then and Now

by Richard Paul Roe

Richard Paul Roe spent more than twenty years traveling the length and breadth of Italy on a literary quest of unparalleled significance.

Using the text from Shakespeare’s ten “Italian Plays” as his only...

The Delicate Prey: And Other Stories

by Paul Bowles

Exemplary storles that reveal the blzarre, the dlsturblng, the perllous, and the wlse ln other clvlllzatlons -- from one of Amerlca's most lmportant wrlters of the twentleth century.

The Marbled Swarm

by Dennis Cooper

The Marbled Swarm is Dennis Cooper’s most haunting work to date. In secret passageways, hidden rooms, and the troubled mind of our narrator, a mystery perpetually takes shape—and the most compelling clue...

The Darling: A Novel

by Russell Banks

Set in Liberia and the United States from 1975 through 1991, The Darling is the story of Hannah Musgrave, a political radical and member of the Weather Underground.

Hannah flees America for West Africa, where...

The Angel on the Roof: The Stories of Russell Banks

by Russell Banks

With The Angel on the Roof, Russell Banks offers readers an astonishing collection of thirty years of his short fiction, revised especially for this volume and highlighted by the inclusion of nine new stories...

The Sweet Hereafter

by Russell Banks

In The Sweet Hereafter, Russell Banks tells a story that begins with a school bus accident. Using four different narrators, Banks creates a small-town morality play that addresses one of life's most agonizing...

Practical Jean

by Trevor Cole

Jean Vale Horemarsh is content, for the most part, with the small-town life she’s built: a semi-successful career as a ceramics artist, a close collection of women friends (aside from that terrible falling-out...

Rule of the Bone: A Novel

by Russell Banks

When we first meet him, Chappie is a punked-out teenager living with his mother and abusive stepfather in an upstate New York trailer park. During this time, he slips into drugs and petty crime. Rejected by...

Cloudsplitter: A Novel

by Russell Banks

A triumph of the imagination and a masterpiece of modern storytelling, Cloudsplitter is narrated by the enigmatic Owen Brown, last surviving son of America's most famous and still controversial political terrorist...

Nothing: A Memoir of Insomnia

by Blake Butler

One of the most acclaimed young voices of his generation, Blake Butler now offers his first work of nonfiction: a deeply candid and wildly original look at the phenomenon of insomnia.

Invoking scientific data,...

The Myth of Moral Justice

by Thane Rosenbaum

We are obsessed with watching television shows and feature films about lawyers, reading legal thrillers, and following real-life trials. Yet, at the same time, most of us don't trust lawyers and hold them and...

The Making of a Philosopher

by Colin Mcginn

Part memoir, part study, The Making of a Philosopher is the self–portrait of a deeply intelligent mind as it develops over a life on both sides of the Atlantic.

The Making of a Philosopher follows Colin McGinn...

The Golems of Gotham

by Thane Rosenbaum

Many years have passed since Oliver Levin -- a bestselling mystery writer and a lifetime sufferer from blocked emotions -- has given any thought to his parents, Holocaust survivors who committed suicide. But...

Let it Come Down: A Novel

by Paul Bowles

In Let It Come Down, Paul Bowles plots the doomed trajectory of Nelson Dyar, a New York bank teller who comes to Tangier in search of a different life and ends up giving in to his darkest impulses. Rich in descriptions...

The Perfect Machine: Building the Palomar Telescope

by Ronald Florence

Almost a half-century after is completion, the 200-inch Palomar telescope remains an unparalleled combination of vast scale and microscope detail. As huge as the Pantheon of Rome and as heavy as the Statue of...

The Mind

by John Brockman

Who am “I”?

How is happiness achieved?

What is the key to memory?

How do babies become adults?

Is personality determined?

What function do emotions serve?

Are we hardwired to be moral?

The mind is a riddle that...

Culture: Leading Scientists Explore Civilizations, Art, Networks, Reputation, and the Online Revolution

by John Brockman

Why do civilizations rise and fall?

What are the origins and purpose of art?

How does technology shape society?

Did culture direct human evolution?

Is the Internet an agent of democracy or dictatorships?

An immensely...

Two for Sorrow

Josephine Tey #3

by Nicola Upson

They were the most horrific crimes of a new century: the murders of newborn innocents for which two British women were hanged at Holloway Prison in1903. Decades later, mystery writer Josephine Tey has decided...

Stasiland: Stories from Behind the Berlin Wall

Samuel Johnson Prize 2004

by Anna Funder

In 1989, the Berlin Wall fell; shortly afterward the two Germanys reunited, and East Germany ceased to exist. Anna Funder’s bestselling Stasiland brings us extraordinary tales of real lives in the former East...

The Life of Andrew Jackson

National Book Award for Non-Fiction 1984

by Robert V. Remini

Robert V. Remini's prize-winning, three-volume biography Life of Andrew Jackson won the National Book Award on its completion in 1984 and is recognized as one of the greatest lives of a U.S. President. In this...