China is emerging as a new superpower in science and technology, reflected in the success of its spacecraft and high-velocity Maglev trains. While many seek to understand the rise of China as a technologically-based power, the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s may seem an unlikely era to explore for these insights. Despite the widespread verdict of the Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution as an unmitigated disaster for China, a number of recent scholars have called for re-examining Maoist ...

Time travel meets baseball in this “grand adventure” about a modern-day reporter who witnesses the birth of America’s favorite pastime (The Washington Times)Contemporary reporter Sam Fowler is stuck in a dull job and a failing marriage when he is suddenly transported back to the summer of 1869. After a wrenching period of adjustment, he feels rejuvenated by his involvement with the nation’s first pro baseball team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings. But America...

In this sequel to the best-selling If I Never Get Back, Sam Fowler manages to break into the past once again—but this time it’s 1875. Gripped by an economic depression, America is a darker place. Again Sam falls in with ballplayers, but spins off on his own seeking the whereabouts of Caitlin, the woman he loves. His knight-like, hazardous quest forces him to ride the rails with tramps, deal with starving miners and the desperate Molly Maguires, work in a Saratoga casino, and ventu...

Set in the golden age of baseball, Havana Heat transports readers to 1911 America, where real-life pitcher Luther "Dummy" Taylor is trying to work his arm back into fighting shape. Though deaf, Taylor helped lead John McGraw's New York Giants to the pennant, winning 115 games between 1900 and 1908. But an injury relegates him to the minors, and he dreams of one last shot at the big leagues while on a barnstorming trip to Cuba.There, while he faces off against the tough Hav...

No one but Stephen King could tell this story about the darkness at the heart of the unknown and our compulsion to investigate the unexplained. With echoes of Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon and the work of Graham Greene, one of the world's great storytellers presents a surprising tale that explores the nature of mystery itself...On an island off the coast of Maine, a man is found dead. There's no identification on the body. Only the dogged work of a...

From the #1 New York Times**-bestselling author of** The Lincoln Highway and A Gentleman in Moscow**, a “sharply stylish” (Boston Globe) book about a young woman in post-Depression era New York who suddenly finds herself thrust into high society—now with over one million readers worldwide**On the last night of 1937, twenty-five-year-old Katey Kontent is i...

Winner of the PEN/Malamud Award, Airships is a "strong, original, tragic and funny" story collection of "the creative Southern tradition" (Alfred Kazin).One of the most revered short story collections of the past fifty years, Airships remains a vital text in the history of the American short story. The award-winning contemporary classic features twenty wildly original, exuberant, often hilarious stories that celebrate the universal peculiarities of the new...

Nominated for the National Book Award, Barry Hannah’s brilliant debut offers “a fresh angle on the great American subject of growing up” (John Updike).Roiling with love and torment, lunacy and desire, hilarity and tenderness, Geronimo Rex is the bildungsroman of an unlikely hero. Reared in gloomy Dream of Pines, Louisiana, whose pines have long since yielded to paper mills, Harry Monroe is ready to take on the world. Inspired by the great ...

China's decade-long Great Proletarian Cultural Revolution shook the politics of China and the world. Even as we approach its fiftieth anniversary, the movement remains so contentious that the Chinese Communist Party still forbids fully open investigation of its origins, development, and conclusion. Drawing upon a vital trove of scholarship, memoirs, and popular culture, this Very Short Introduction illuminates this complex, often obscure, and still controversial movement. Moving b...

China today is never out of the news: from international finance to human rights controversies, global coverage of its rising international presence, and the Chinese 'economic miracle'. It seems to be a country of contradictions: a peasant society with some of the world's most futuristic cities, heir to an ancient civilization that is still trying to find a modern identity. This Very Short Introduction offers the reader an entry to understanding the world's most populous nation, g...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE“All the King’s Men, the best American political novel ever written, is generally read as a cautionary tale about how power poisons slowly, like arsenic, or cynicism. But it’s also a fable about history, and why, like poetry, it’s so hard to write it fast." -Jill LeporeRobert Penn Warren’s masterpiece follows the career of Willie Stark, a back-country lawyer whose idealism is overcome by his lust for pow...

From the author of The Glass Castle and Hang the Moon—“Walls vividly depicts her astonishing, resilient grandmother with a lightness of touch that is plainspoken yet heartfelt” (Chicago Tribune). This unforgettable true-life novel tells the story of an indomitable woman whose remarkable life unfolded across the American West.“Those old cows knew trouble was coming before we did.” So begins the story of Lily Casey Smith, Jeannette Walls’s ...