Listen...A set of signals has been pulsing, repeating, modulating in the airspace of literature...This essay is an invitation to listen to those signals, as they travel through and shape the work of Aeschylus and Ovid, Rilke, Conrad, Burroughs, Joyce and others. To retune our idea of what a writer does, of what the very act of writing 'is'. To rethink literature itself along the lines of transmission and reception, signal and noise...Listen: two times. I repeat...

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. ...

The American horse is "a canvas on which we’ve painted American identity.”For the more than two million horse owners in the United States and the countless others who dream of riding, here is a collection offering the best writing about horses from America’s best writers. “Horse Whisperer” Buck Brannaman, New York Time’s best-seller Melinda Roth, and a dozen other writers offer engaging stories that will if not keep you in the saddle at least have you read...

Great American Shipwreck Stories is a magnificent collection of gripping accounts of a ship's encounter with a great whale or an overwhelming monsoon or a disastrous passage through the Straits of Magellan, leading to a wreck and a crew's harrowing plight for survival on the open seas or on a desert island. Capturing all the elements of ancient and powerful tragedy, this book is chockful of thrilling tales of survival - as well as a frightful examination of man's darkest impulses - which a...

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 ...

Heroism and valor in the sky!* A new title in the relaunch of our successful Greatest Stories Ever Told franchise.* Air combat has captured the imaginations of people since the fighter plane was first introduced during WWI.* Stories of aces such as Eddy Rickenbacker and Captain Baron Manfred Von Richthofen have become staples of books and movies as well as the stuff of legend.In The Greatest Air Combat Stories Ever Told, the editor has pulled together some o...

Few people would want to test their mettle in an ice-encrusted boat with an Arctic explorer, sail the Straits of Magellan with Joshua Slocum, or watch with Owen Chase as an angry whale sends his ship to the bottom, thousands of miles from the nearest land. But it's quite another thing to read these true accounts while settled into a favorite chair.Slocum and Chase persevered in the face of travails that would have given Job pause. Their stoic accounts are stronger and more dramatic...

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...

Created for adventure addictsA carefully curated collection of adventure classicsA Lyons American classicFresh, new series designThere has never been a more exciting collection of stories that celebrate the indomitable spirit of the American character. These accounts all have one thing in common: They capture the grit and spirit of adventure that made America what it is today.

Exciting rescue stories on the high seas!The Coast Guard’s rescue personnel are second to none, and Coast Guard air and sea rescue missions have been the subjects of celebrated newspaper accounts, books, and movies, including The Perfect Storm.The Coast Guard is one of the nation's five military services, which exist to defend and preserve the United States. In The Greatest Coast Guard Rescue Stories Ever Told, the editor has pulled together some of the finest writings abou...

In The Greatest Medal of Honor Stories Ever Told, editor Tom McCarthy has pulled together some of the finest writings about heroes awarded the highest military honor that capture readers imaginations. The one thing the heroes in this collection have in common—from the bloody battlefields of the Civil War through the lonely mountains of Afghanistan—is uncommon valor. Each of the men in these stories had the courage to calmly stare death in the face and move on—to do what they had to because...