Modernist and contemporary literature are marked by a preoccupation with time, specifically with the passage of time characterized by starts and stops and suspended states of waiting. Acclaimed novelist Tom McCarthy brings out a temporal pattern, a subliminal convention of a certain fringe of modernism that works both in and against the canon of modernist literature in works by Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, Maurice Blanchot, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, a...

Brought to you by Penguin.Bodies in motion. Birds, bees and bobsleighs. What is the force that moves the sun and other stars? Where's our fucking airplane? What's inside Box 808, and why does everybody want it?Deep within the archives of time-and-motion pioneer Lillian Gilbreth lies a secret. Famous for producing solid light-tracks that captured the path of workers' movements, Gilbreth helped birth the era of mass observation and big data. ...

If you visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, you might be surprised to see frames without any paintings in them. This isn’t a mistake—museum officials hope to someday return the artwork that was stolen from the museum to these frames. In the early morning hours after St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, a guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum was tricked into allowing a pair of thieves disguised as police officers to enter the building. The thieves used duct ...

Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015Meet U. – a talented and uneasy figure currently pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London. His employers advise everyone from big businesses to governments, and, to this end, expect their 'corporate anthropologist' to help decode and manipulate the world around them – all the more so now that a giant, epoch-defining project is in the offing.Instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meander...

Myles Donne is certain of nothing except that he can never return to Oxford. Two years ago, as a much-admired Jesuit at the threshold of prestige and possibility, he made two irredeemable mistakes: he fell in love with the perfect woman and then killed her in a motorcycle accident. Shattered, he lost his faith, left the priesthood, abandoned his career and decamped to his birthplace in Colorado, where he’s been working in a hardware store, languishing in ignominious limbo. When he receives...

A brilliant and troubled jurist becomes a double agent, taking him into the dark heart of the systems that govern our world'A novel of tremendous intelligence and poetry' Chloe Aridjis, author of Booker-longlisted The Shadow of the ObjectBenjamin Stanton is a decorated Gulf War veteran and star jurist in Europe’s highest court. But when he meets the enigmatic Pirotti, his allegiance begins to shift. Introduced to pills his new hand...

When Virginia Dare was born in Roanoke Colony in 1587, her birth was probably heralded as a new beginning, not just for the tiny baby but for the entire colony. She was the first child of English parents to be born in what English settlers called the “New World.” But three years later, Virginia, her parents, and all other members of the Roanoke colony had disappeared. History is silent about their fate. The story of Virginia Dare and her fellow settlers is a famous one that is still studie...

Since her untimely death in 1973, Ingeborg Bachmann has come to be regarded as one of the twentieth century's most important writers. Unpacking a single Bachmann poem, novelist Tom McCarthy latches onto two of its central terms – the eponymous threshold and ledger – and takes off on a line of flight: through the work of Franz Kafka, David Lynch, Anne Carson, Sappho and Shakespeare.Can writing be understood as an experience of the threshold, a limit- or boundary-state? A condition of ecstas...

Top golfing instructor Jim McLean uses rare film footage of Ben Hogan to break down the greatest swing of all timeGolf legend Ben Hogan had the perfect golf swing, but how exactly it worked has long been a mystery?until now. Using footage from three never-before analyzed films of Hogan at his very best, Jim McLean analyzes the crucial motions of Hogan's entire golf swing and shows you how to integrate his mechanics into your own game. You'll study Hogan's blend of ...

Snow Leopards: Biodiversity of the World: Conservation from Genes to Landscapes is the only comprehensive work on the biology, behavior, and conservation status of the snow leopard, a species that has long been one of the least studied, and hence poorly understood, of the large cats. Breakthroughs in technologies and methodologies to study this elusive cat have come rapidly, including non-invasive genetics, camera traps, and GPS-satellite collaring. The book begins with chapters on the gen...

J. G. Ballard's collected nonfiction from 1962 to 2007, mapping the cultural obsessions, experiences, and insights of one of the most original minds of his generation.J. G. Ballard was a colossal figure in English literature and an imaginative force of the twentieth century. Alongside seminal novels—from the notorious Crash (1973)to the semi-autobiographical Empire of the Sun (1984)—Ballard was a sought-after reviewer and commentator, publishing j...

The searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy's masterpiece. A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don't know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the ...