"From the bestselling author of ALL YOU CAN EVER KNOW comes a searing memoir of class, inequality, and grief-a daughter's search to understand the lives her adoptive parents led, the life she forged as an adult, and the lives she's lost. In this country, unless you attain extraordinary wealth, you will likely be unable to help your loved ones in all the ways you'd hoped. You will learn to live with the specific, hollow guilt of those who leave hardship...

Bill McKibben - award-winning author, activist, educator - is fiercely curious. "I'm curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity." Like so many of us, McKibben grew up believing - knowing - that the United States was the greatest country on earth. As a teenager, he cheerfully led American Revolution tours in Lexington, Massachusetts. He sang "Kumbaya" at church. And with the remarkable...

"In 1177 B.C., marauding groups known only as the "Sea Peoples" invaded Egypt. The pharaoh's army and navy managed to defeat them, but the victory so weakened Egypt that it soon slid into decline, as did most of the surrounding civilizations. After centuries of brilliance, the civilized world of the Bronze Age came to an abrupt and cataclysmic end. Kingdoms fell like dominoes over the course of just a few decades. No more Minoans or Mycenaeans. No...

"The definitive biography of the world's most popular novel. Putting a century of scholarship on one of the world's most enduring popular novels into accessible, narrative form, this new approach to a classic of world literature is written for a wide general readership. Packed full of information about the book's origins and later career on stage and screen, The Novel of the Century brings to life the extraordinary story of how Victor Hugo managed...

"A powerful new novel from the Whiting Award-winning author of Loner and The Love Song of Jonny Valentine. In 1996, the unnamed narrator in Teddy Wayne's Apartment is attending the MFA program at Columbia on his father's dime and living in an illegal sublet of a rent-stabilized apartment. Feeling guilty about his good fortune, the narrator offers his spare bedroom--rent-free--to Billy, a handsome, talented classmate from a working-class family in...

"The residents of Haven, Wisconsin, have dined on the Fine Chao restaurant's delicious Americanized Chinese food for thirty-five years, content to ignore any unsavory whispers about the family owners. Whether or not Big Leo Chao is honest, or his wife, Winnie, is happy, their food tastes good and their three sons earned scholarships to respectable colleges. But when the brothers reunite in Haven, the Chao family's secrets and simmering resentments...

"Twenty-four hours. That's all it takes for the lives of two young people to be changed forever. Alex Chin has the world on a plate. A football hero and homecoming king with plenty of scholarship offers, his future looks bright. His tutor, Samantha Dixon, is preparing to graduate high school at the top of her class. She plans to turn her NASA internship into a career. When a football accident lands Alex in the hospital, his world is turned upside...

"Growing up in Yakima, Washington, Noé Álvarez worked at an apple-packing plant alongside his mother, who "slouched over a conveyor belt of fruit, shoulder to shoulder with mothers conditioned to believe this was all they could do with their lives." A university scholarship offered escape, but as a first-generation Latino college-goer, Álvarez struggled to fit in. At nineteen, he learned about a Native American/First Nations movement called the...

"Wes Moore's remarkable bestseller The Other Wes Moore ends when Wes completes his journey from a fatherless delinquent to college graduate and heads off to Oxford on a Rhodes Scholarship. But what happens next? Next, he had to figure out the answer to the question: What is your work? More than finding a job, he had to find the work he was meant to do. For the next decade, Wes traced a path through some of the most fascinating and high-pressure workspaces...

"A brilliant, funny, generation-defining memoir about the double bind of crafting perfect adversity narratives for highly selective institutions, while fumbling through the far murkier reality of actual life in foster care and inpatient mental health treatment As a child, Emi Nietfeld was caught between a hoarder mother who got her put on antipsychotic medication, but was also the only person to believe she was exceptional, and a state system exemplified...