Jesse Browner leads the way back through Western civilization, from a present-day poker game where Browner's devastatingly delicious sandwiches leave the best players penniless, to the ancient Greeks, whose gods punished or exalted the mortals according to their excellence as hosts. On the way, we visit Hitler at his summer home, Gertrude Stein in Paris and Lady Ottoline Morrell in England, Audubon in nineteeth-century America, Louis XIV at Versailles, and the Roman emperors, for whom clas...

A literary exploration that seeks to answer the question: Have I lived the life I intended?Based on an essay he wrote for Poets & Writers magazine, Jesse Browner, a novelist who finds himself torn between his creative calling and a full-time job in the civil service, asks hard questions about the choices life imposes on us, and our tendency to believe in a parallel, alternative existence where we might have felt more fulfilled, more free, more true to ourselves. He wonders: Is the ...

The memoirs of renowned Buddhist monk Matthieu Ricard and his extraordinary journey toward inner freedom and compassion in action.Matthieu Ricard began his spiritual transformation at the age of twenty-one, in Darjeeling, India, when he met Tibetan teacher Kangyur Rinpoche, who deeply impressed the young man with his extraordinary quality of being. In Notebooks of a Wandering Monk, Ricard tells the simple yet extraordinary story of his journey and the rema...

A.D. 66: Having been falsely implicated in a plot to assassinate the emperor Nero, Titus Petronius has a choice: await the executioner at dawn, or die a noble Roman death by his own hand. Deciding that his will be a suicide like no other the world has ever seen, he summons a small circle of intimate friends to his magnificent villa on the enchanting Tyrrhenian coast of southern Italy. There, over the course of a balmy autumn's night, Petronius throws the party of a lifetime. As they feast ...

After the fall of Troy, an eleven-year-old boy sets off for the razed city when his father and sister vanish into the war zone; this "gorgeously drawn" novel offers an intimate vision of the most storied war in history, as seen through the eyes of a child. (Laird Hunt)His family farm and the surrounding community now emptied by war, young Hani embarks on an epic quest – assisted by a brooding yet brilliant donkey – to find his lost sister in the ruins of Troy. Some...

French Academician and Nazi sympathiser, Paul-Jean Husson, writes a letter to his local SS officer in the autumn of 1942.Tormented by an illicit passion for Ilse, his German daughter-in-law, Husson has taken a decision that will devastate several lives, including his own.The letter explains why. It is a dramatic and sometimes harrowing story that begins in the years leading up to the war, when the Academician's gilded existence starts to unravel. Husson's confession is a startling picture ...

After the fall of Troy, an eleven-year-old boy sets off for the razed city when his father and sister vanish into the war zone; this "gorgeously drawn" novel offers an intimate vision of the most storied war in history, as seen through the eyes of a child. (Laird Hunt)His family farm and the surrounding community now emptied by war, young Hani embarks on an epic quest – assisted by a brooding yet brilliant donkey – to find his lost sister in the ruins of Troy. Some...

**A fascinating biographical novel of America's must successful bank robber, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Tender Bar.★ "Electrifying." —Booklist (starred review)**Willie Sutton was born in the Irish slums of Brooklyn in 1901, and he came of age at a time when banks were out of control. Sutton saw only one way out and only one way to win the girl of his dreams. So began the career of America's most successful bank robber. Durin...

Selected as one of World Literature Today's 75 Notable Translations of 2013Spanning five turbulent decades in Iranian history, from before the 1979 revolution, through the Islamic Republic, and up to the present, The Book of Fate is a powerful story of friendship and passion, fear and hope.A teenager in pre-revolutionary Tehran, Massoumeh is an average girl, passionate about learning. On her way to school she meets a local man and falls in...

Beena and Sadhana are sisters who share a bond that could only have been shaped by the most unusual of childhoods — and by shared tragedy. Orphaned as teenagers, they have grown up under the exasperated watch of their Sikh uncle, who runs a bagel shop in Montreal's Hasidic community of Mile End. Together, they try to make sense of the rich, confusing brew of values, rituals, and beliefs that form their inheritance. Yet as they grow towards adulthood, their paths begin to diverge. Beena cat...

In this true story, Armande Martel, a young nun from Quebec, is arrested by the Germans in 1940 during a stay at her religious order’s mother house in Brittany. She spends the war years in a German concentration camp. After her return to Canada, she leaves the Church, finds the love of her life in Montreal, and adopts Lise Dion.Growing up, Lise is familiar with only a few facts of her mother’s past. It’s when she clears her mother’s small apartment after her death that Lise Dion di...

Afghan-American Nadia Hashimi's literary debut novel is a searing tale of powerlessness, fate, and the freedom to control one's own fate that combines the cultural flavor and emotional resonance of the works of Khaled Hosseini, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Lisa See.In Kabul, 2007, with a drug-addicted father and no brothers, Rahima and her sisters can only sporadically attend school, and can rarely leave the house. Their only hope lies in the ancient custom of bacha posh, which allows young ...