Author: A. N. Wilso
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: elizabeth, times
Number of Pages: 496
Published: 2009-12-22
List price: $30.00
ISBN-10: 0374228205
ISBN-13: 9780374228200

When Queen Elizabeth II was crowned in 1953, many proclaimed the start of a new Elizabethan Age. Few had any inkling, however, of the stupendous changes that would occur over the next fifty years, both in Britain and around the world. In Our Times, A. N. Wilson takes the reader on an exhilarating journey through postwar Britain. With his acute eye not just for the broad social and cultural sweep but also for the telling detail, he brilliantly distills half a century of unprecedented social and political change. Here are the defining events and characters of the modern age, from the Suez crisis

Author: Denis Johnson
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: novel, smoke, tree
Number of Pages: 624
Published: 2007-09-04
List price: $27.00
ISBN-10: 0374279128
ISBN-13: 9780374279127

Once upon a time there was a war . . . and a young American who thought of himself as the Quiet American and the Ugly American, and who wished to be neither, who wanted instead to be the Wise American, or the Good American, but who eventually came to witness himself as the Real American and finally as simply the Fucking American. That’s me.This is the story of Skip Sands--spy-in-training, engaged in Psychological Operations against the Vietcong--and the disasters that befall him thanks to his famous uncle, a war hero known in intelligence circles simply as the Colonel. This is also the s

Author: Derek Walcott
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: testament, arkansas
Number of Pages: 128
Published: 1988-09-01
List price: $15.00
ISBN-10: 0374520992
ISBN-13: 9780374520991

Walcott’s eight collection of poems is divided into two parts -- "There," verse evoking the poet’s native Carribbean, and "Elsewhere."

Author: Eric G. Wilso
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: melancholy, praise, happiness
Number of Pages: 176
Published: 2008-01-22
List price: $20.00
ISBN-10: 0374240663
ISBN-13: 9780374240660

Americans are addicted to happiness. When we’re not popping pills, we leaf through scientific studies that take for granted our quest for happiness, or read self-help books by everyone from armchair philosophers and clinical psychologists to the Dalai Lama on how to achieve a trouble-free life: Stumbling on Happiness; Authentic Happiness: Using the New Positive Psychology to Realize Your Potential for Lasting Fulfillment; The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living. The titles themselves draw a stark portrait of the war on melancholy. More than any other generation, Americans of today believ

Author: Ishmael Beah
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: soldier, memoirs, way
Number of Pages: 229
Published: 2008-08-05
List price: $12.00
ISBN-10: 0374531269
ISBN-13: 9780374531263

My new friends have begun to suspect I haven’t told them the full story of my life.“Why did you leave Sierra Leone?”“Because there is a war.”“You mean, you saw people running around with guns and shooting each other?”“Yes, all the time.”“Cool.”I smile a little.“You should tell us about it sometime.”“Yes, sometime.”This is how wars are fought now: by children, hopped-up on drugs and wielding AK-47s. Children have become soldiers of choice. In the more than fifty conflicts going on worldwide, it is estimated that there are some 300,000 child sol

Authors:Alejo Carpentier,  Harriet de Onis, Edwidge Da
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: novel, world, kingdom
Number of Pages: 190
Published: 2006-05-16
List price: $14.00
ISBN-10: 0374530114
ISBN-13: 9780374530112

A few years after its liberation from the brutality of French colonial rule in 1803, Haiti endured a period of even greater brutality under the reign of King Henri-Christophe, who was born a slave in Grenada but rose to become the first black king in the Western Hemisphere. In prose of often dreamlike coloration and intensity, Alejo Carpentier records the destruction of the black regime—built on the same corruption and contempt for human life that brought down the French while embodying the same hollow grandeur of false elegance, attained only through slave labor—in an orgy of voodoo, race

Author: Seamus Heaney
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Keywords: poems, circle, district
Number of Pages: 96
Published: 2007-04-03
List price: $14.00
ISBN-10: 0374530815
ISBN-13: 9780374530815

District and Circle inhabits the eerie new conditions of a menaced twenty-first century. In their haunted, almost visionary clarity, the poems assay the weight and worth of what has been held in the hand and in the memory. Scenes from a childhood spent far from the horrors of World War II are colored by a strongly contemporary sense that “Anything can happen,” and other images from the dangerous present—a fireman’s helmet, a journey on the Underground, a melting glacier—are fraught with this same anxiety. But the volume, which includes some “found prose” poems and translations, o