An immersive account of the New Deal project that created state-by-state guidebooks to America, in the midst of the Great Depression -- and employed some of the biggest names in American letters. The plan was as idealistic as it was audacious -- and utterly unprecedented. Take thousands of hard-up writers and put them to work charting a country on the brink of social and economic collapse, with the aim of producing a series of guidebooks to the then...

At twenty-eight, David Bell is the American dream come true. He has fought his way to the top, surviving office purges and scandals to become a top television executive. David's world is made up of the images that flicker across America's screens, the fantasies that enthrall America's imagination. And then the dream--and the dream-making--become a nightmare. At the height of his success, David sets out to rediscover reality.

In 1921, Françoise Frenkel--a Jewish woman from Poland--fulfills a dream. She opens La Maison du Livre, Berlin's first French bookshop, attracting artists and diplomats, celebrities and poets. The shop becomes a haven for intellectual exchange as Nazi ideology begins to poison the culturally rich city. In 1935, the scene continues to darken. First come the new bureaucratic hurdles, followed by frequent police visits and book confiscations. Françoise's...

""Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?" Published for the first time as a standalone volume, Virginia Woolf's short, impassioned essay, How Should One Read a Book? celebrates the enduring importance of great literature. In this timeless manifesto on the written word, rediscover the joy of reading and the power of a good book to change the world....

"In this follow-up to the acclaimed New York Times bestseller Chesapeake Requiem, Earl Swift rediscovers the final three Apollo Moon landings, arguing that these overlooked missions-distinguished by the use of the revolutionary Lunar Roving Vehicle-were the pinnacle of human exploration"--

"Since the beginning of time, humankind has looked upon nature and seen the divine. In the writings of the great thinkers across religions, the natural world inspires everything from fear, to awe, to tranquil contemplation; God, or however one defined the sublime, was present in everything. Yet today, even as we admire a tree or take in a striking landscape, we rarely see nature as sacred. In this short but deeply powerful book, the best-selling historian...

"At age fifty-five, Meg's life is too filled with loss for her to remember what magic feels like. All she has left is a yard brimming with plants that are wilting in the scorching Iowa summer--and a bone-deep feeling that she's through with living. Meg has something else too: a bottle of mysterious pills, given to her years ago by an empathetic doctor. He promised that they would offer her dying mother a quick, painless end in exactly twenty days....

Thirty years have passed since Greta left Marchmont Hall, a grand and beautiful house nestled in the hills of rural Monmouthshire. But when she returns to the Hall for Christmas, at the invitation of her old friend David Marchmont, she has no recollection of her past association with it - the result of a tragic accident that has blanked out more than two decades of her life. Then, during a walk through the wintry landscape, she stumbles across a grave...

"This intimate account offers a new, unexpected understanding of the artist's work and of the vibrant Surrealist art scene in the 1930s. In 1939, devastated after the revelation that her husband had had an affair with her sister, Frida Kahlo left her home in Mexico and headed for Paris to rebuild her life and rediscover her art. Now, for the first time, this missing part of Kahlo's story is brought to light in exquisite detail. Marc Petitjean takes...