From John Robbins, a new edition of the classic that awakened the conscience of a nation. Since the 1987 publication of Diet for a New America, beef consumption in the United States has fallen a remarkable 19%. While many forces are contributing to this dramatic shift in our habits, Diet for a New America is considered to be one of the most important. Diet for a New America is a startling examination of the food we currently buy and eat in the United States, and the astounding moral, economic, and emotional price we pay for it. In Section I, John Robbins takes an extraordinary look at our dependence on animals for food and the inhumane conditions under which these animals are raised. It becomes clear that the price we pay for our eating habits is measured in the suffering of animals, a suffering so extreme and needless that it disrupts our very place in the web of life. Section II challenges the belief that consuming meat is a requirement for health by pointing our the vastly increased rate of disease caused by pesticides, hormones, additives, and other chemicals now a routine part of our food production. The author shows us that the high health risk is unnecessary, and that the production, preparation, and consumption of food can once again be a healthy process. In Section III, Robbins looks at the global implications of a meat-based diet and concludes that the consumption of the resources necessary to produce meat is a major factor in our ecological crisis. Diet for a New America is the single most eloquent argument for a vegetarian lifestyle ever published. Eloquently, evocatively, and entertainingly written, it is a cant put down book guaranteed to amaze, infuriate, but ultimately educate and empower the reader. A pivotal book nominated for the Pulitzer Prize for Non-Fiction in 1987.

A mesmerizing collection from the US Poet Laureate whose work is “as intense and elliptical as [Emily] Dickinson, as buoyant and rueful as [Robert] Frost” (J. D. McClatchy, American Poet). In granting the prestigious Ruth Lilly Prize to Kay Ryan, Poetry magazine editor Christian Wiman wrote that “[she] can take any subject and make it her own. Her poems—which combine extreme concision and formal expertise with broad subjects and deep feeling—could never be mistaken for anyone else’s. Her work has the kind of singularity and sustained integrity that are very, very rare.” Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Kay Ryan’s poems are “Fabergé eggs, tiny, ingenious devices that inevitably conceal some hidden wonder.” The Niagara River is full of such hidden gems. Bafflingly effective, the poems in this collection seem too brief and blithe to pack so much wallop. Their singular music makes it clear why her poetry has been featured everywhere from the Sunday funnies to New York subways to plaques at the zoo to the pages of The New Yorker and The Paris Review (Salon). “Empathic and wryly unforgiving of the human condition, the poems [in The Niagara River] are equal parts pith and punch. The effect is bracing.” —Publishers Weekly

“A poetry collection that marries wit and wisdom more brilliantly than any I know” by the Pulitzer Prize–winning former US Poet Laureate (Jane Hirshfield, author of Come, Thief). Filled with wry logic and a magical, unpredictable musicality, Kay Ryan’s poems continue to generate excitement with their frequent appearances in The New Yorker and other leading periodicals. Say Uncle, Ryan’s fifth collection, is filled with the same hidden connections, the same slyness and almost gleeful detachment that has delighted readers of her earlier books. Compact, searching, and oddly beautiful, these poems, in the words of internationally acclaimed poet and writer Dana Gioia, “take the shape of an idea clarifying itself.” “The first thing you notice about her poems is an elbow-to-the-ribs playfulness.” —San Francisco Chronicle “The short lines and quick images—almost snapshots—are elemental. Ryan puts them together, then pulls them apart, and twists them in playful fashion, as though she were an alchemist with a modern experimental attitude . . . Truly short-line, one-stanza (for the most part) wonders: full-brained poems in a largely half-brained world.” —Kirkus Reviews “Witty, charming, serious and delightful . . . her tight structures, odd rhymes and ethical judgments place her more firmly in the tradition of Marianne Moore and, latterly, Amy Clampitt. Those poets, though, wrote many kinds of poems: Ryan, in this volume, writes just one kind. It is, however, a kind worth looking out for—well crafted, understated, funny and smart.” —Publishers Weekly

The growth and demise of a love affair is chronicled in Salter's portrait of the relationship between a young Yale dropout and the provincial French girl who becomes his mistress.

This novel is a frank and vivid account of sexual awakening. A young woman spending her summer holiday in a seaside town is drawn towards an inevitable sexual encounter with the butcher she is working for. This volume also contains the stories Lucie's Long Voyage and The Fatal Bodice

By the New York Times bestselling author of The Bone Clocks • Now a major motion picture • Shortlisted for the Man Booker PrizeIncludes a new Afterword by David MitchellA postmodern visionary and one of the leading voices in twenty-first-century fiction, David Mitchell combines flat-out adventure, a Nabokovian love of puzzles, a keen eye for character, and a taste for mind-bending, philosophical and scientific speculation in the tradition of Umberto Eco, Haruki Murakami, and Philip K. Dick. The result is brilliantly original fiction as profound as it is playful. In this groundbreaking novel, an influential favorite among a new generation of writers, Mitchell explores with daring artistry fundamental questions of reality and identity.Cloud Atlas begins in 1850 with Adam Ewing, an American notary voyaging from the Chatham Isles to his home in California. Along the way, Ewing is befriended by a physician, Dr. Goose, who begins to treat him for a rare species of brain parasite. . . . Abruptly, the action jumps to Belgium in 1931, where Robert Frobisher, a disinherited bisexual composer, contrives his way into the household of an infirm maestro who has a beguiling wife and a nubile daughter. . . . From there we jump to the West Coast in the 1970s and a troubled reporter named Luisa Rey, who stumbles upon a web of corporate greed and murder that threatens to claim her life. . . . And onward, with dazzling virtuosity, to an inglorious present-day England; to a Korean superstate of the near future where neocapitalism has run amok; and, finally, to a postapocalyptic Iron Age Hawaii in the last days of history.But the story doesn’t end even there. The narrative then boomerangs back through centuries and space, returning by the same route, in reverse, to its starting point. Along the way, Mitchell reveals how his disparate characters connect, how their fates intertwine, and how their souls drift across time like clouds across the sky.As wild as a videogame, as mysterious as a Zen koan, Cloud Atlas is an unforgettable tour de force that, like its incomparable author, has transcended its cult classic status to become a worldwide phenomenon.Praise for Cloud Atlas “[David] Mitchell is, clearly, a genius. He writes as though at the helm of some perpetual dream machine, can evidently do anything, and his ambition is written in magma across this novel’s every page.”—The New York Times Book Review “One of those how-the-holy-hell-did-he-do-it? modern classics that no doubt is—and should be—read by any student of contemporary literature.”—Dave Eggers “Wildly entertaining . . . a head rush, both action-packed and chillingly ruminative.”—People “The novel as series of nested dolls or Chinese boxes, a puzzle-book, and yet—not just dazzling, amusing, or clever but heartbreaking and passionate, too. I’ve never read anything quite like it, and I’m grateful to have lived, for a while, in all its many worlds.”—Michael Chabon “Cloud Atlas ought to make [Mitchell] famous on both sides of the Atlantic as a writer whose fearlessness is matched by his talent.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Taking kitchen science to a whole new (molecular) level, Hervé This is changing the way France---and the world—cooks.”—Gourmet Bringing the instruments and experimental techniques of the laboratory into the kitchen, Hervé This—international celebrity and founder of molecular gastronomy—uses recent research in the chemistry, physics, and biology of food to challenge traditional ideas about cooking and eating. What he discovers will entertain, instruct, and intrigue cooks, gourmets, and scientists alike.Molecular Gastronomy is filled with practical tips, provocative suggestions, and penetrating insights. This begins by reexamining and debunking a variety of time-honored rules and dictums about cooking and presents new and improved ways of preparing a variety of dishes from quiches and quenelles to steak and hard-boiled eggs. Looking to the future, This imagines new cooking methods and proposes novel dishes. A chocolate mousse without eggs? A flourless chocolate cake baked in the microwave? Molecular Gastronomy explains how to make them. This also shows us how to cook perfect French fries, why a soufflé rises and falls, how long to cool champagne, when to season a steak, the right way to cook pasta, how the shape of a wine glass affects the taste of wine, why chocolate turns white, and how salt modifies tastes. “A captivating little book.”—Economist “This book, praiseworthy for its scientific rigor, will hold a special appeal for anyone who relishes the debunking of culinary myths.”—Saveur “Will broaden the way you think about food.”—The New York Sun “A wonderful book . . . it will appeal to anyone with an interest in the science of cooking.”—O Chef

"From his tortured childhood in the poverty of prewar Berlin - starving, stealing, perpetually frostbitten - his conscription, at age sixteen, into the German army in the last year of World War II, and on through his rise to international stardom as a film actor, Kinski carried with him a personal hell: an unendurable sense of isolation ameliorated only through acting and sex. Acting would raise him from squalid poverty to international celebrity. It would send him from Old World Europe to fast-and-loose Hollywood, from the back lots of Hong Kong's movie factories to the deepest jungles of Africa. To maintain his lifestyle and satiate his creative needs, he appeared in more than 160 films, anything from schlock Hollywood comedies to classics such as Aguirre and Fitzcarraldo. His Casanovian pursuit of sex, beginning as a child with his sister and on through countless liaisons - from Moroccan prostitutes to the rich and famous - is chronicled in graphic detail."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize New York Times Bestseller A New York Times Notable Book and a Washington Post, Time, Oprah Magazine, Newsweek, Chicago Tribune, and Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2018 "The best novel ever written about trees, and really just one of the best novels, period." —Ann Patchett The Overstory, winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, is a sweeping, impassioned work of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, Richard Powers’s twelfth novel unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

An international literary phenomenon, The Elementary Particles is a frighteningly original novel–part Marguerite Duras and part Bret Easton Ellis-that leaps headlong into the malaise of contemporary existence.Bruno and Michel are half-brothers abandoned by their mother, an unabashed devotee of the drugged-out free-love world of the sixties. Bruno, the older, has become a raucously promiscuous hedonist himself, while Michel is an emotionally dead molecular biologist wholly immersed in the solitude of his work. Each is ultimately offered a final chance at genuine love, and what unfolds is a brilliantly caustic and unpredictable tale.Translated from the French by Frank Wynne.

Translated from the French by C.K. Scott Moncrieff. With an Introduction by Ingrid Wassenaar. Marcel Proust (1871-1922) spent the last fourteen years of his life writing 'A la recherche du temps perdu'. It is an intimate epic, an excavation of the self and a comedy of manners by turns and all at once. Proust is the twentieth century Dante, presenting us with a unique, unsettling picture of ourselves as jealous lovers and unmitigated snobs, frittering our lives away, with only the hope of ar and a possible salvation. He offers us a form of redemption for a sober and secular age. Scott Moncrieff's delightful translation was for many years the only access to Proust in English. A labour of love that took him nearly as many years as Proust spent writing the original, Moncrieff's translation strives to capture the extraordinary blend of muscular analysis with poetic reverie that typifies Proust's style. It remains a justly famous classic of translation. Originally published in seven parts, Wordsworth Editions are unique in offering the complete work in two volumes. Please note, this book is in Crown Quarto format, and therefore has a higher price than the rest of the World Literature series at $29.95 AUTHOR: Marcel Proust (1871-1922) is generally considered the greatest French novelist of the twentieth century. His reputation derives almost exclusively from the importance of his multi-volume novel 'Remembrance of Things Past'. His novel is founded on his powers of meticulous recollection and his ability to shape those memories into an account of one man's search for his past.

THIS ORANGE INHERITANCE EDITION OF Revolutionary Road IS PUBLISHED IN ASSOCIATION WITH THE ORANGE PRIZE FOR FICTIONBooks shape our lives and transform the way we see ourselves and each other. The best books are timeless and continue to be relevant generation after generation. Vintage Classics asked the winners of The Orange Prize for Fiction which books they would pass onto the next generation and why. Lionel Shriver chose Revolutionary Road.This is the story of Frank and April Wheeler, a bright, beautiful, and talented couple whose empty suburban life is held together by the dream that greatness is only just round the corner. With heartbreaking compassion and clarity, Richard Yates shows how Frank and April mortgage their hopes and ideals, betraying in the end not only each other, but their own best selves. 'I can't think of a better novel to hand on to readers growing up today than Revolutionary Road' Lionel Shriver

“[Rechy’s] tone rings absolutely true, is absolutely his own. . . . He tells the truth, and tells it with such passion that we are forced to share in the life he conveys. . . . This is a most humbling and liberating achievement.”—James Baldwin When John Rechy’s explosive first novel appeared in 1963, it marked a radical departure in fiction, and gave voice to a subculture that had never before been revealed with such acuity. It earned comparisons to Genet and Kerouac, even as Rechy was personally attacked by scandalized reviewers. Nevertheless, the book became an international bestseller, and fifty years later, it has become a classic. Bold and inventive in style, Rechy is unflinching in his portrayal of one hustling “youngman” and his search for self-knowledge within the neon-lit world of hustlers, drag queens, and the denizens of their world, as he moves from El Paso to Times Square, from Pershing Square to the French Quarter. Now including never-seen original marked galley pages and an interview with the author, Rechy’s portrait of the edges of America has lost none of its power to move and exhilarate.

Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught in a struggle between instinct and thought, self and society, sexual gratification and family duty—even, in a sense, human hard-heartedness and divine Grace. Though his flight from home traces a zigzag of evasion, he holds to the faith that he is on the right path, an invisible line toward his own salvation as straight as a ruler’s edge.

Eric Packer is a twenty-eight-year-old multi-billionaire asset manager. We join him on what will become a particularly eventful April day in turn-of-the-twenty-first-century Manhattan. He's on a personal odyssey, to get a haircut. Sitting in his stretch limousine as it moves across town, he finds the city at a virtual standstill because the President is visiting, a rapper's funeral is proceeding, and a violent protest is being staged in Times Square by anti-globalist groups. Most worryingly, Eric's bodyguards are concerned that he may be a target . . . An electrifying study in affectlessness, infused with deep cynicism and measured detachment; a harsh indictment of the life-denying tendencies of capitalism; as brutal a dissection of the American dream as Wolfe's Bonfire or Ellis's Psycho, Don DeLillo's Cosmopolis is a caustic prophecy all too quickly realized.

THE ACCLAIMED FULLY REVISED EDITION OF THE SCOTT MONCRIEFF AND KILMARTIN TRANSLATIONIn the two novels - The Captive and The Fugitive - contained in this volume, Proust's narrator is living in his mother's apartment in Paris with his lover, Albertine. However, this is far from an idyllic state of affairs. His obsessive love for her means that their relationship is shadowed by jealousy and headed for tragedy.

Critics believe The Brothers Karamazov is the last cry of Fyodor Dostoyevsky. This passionate philosophical novel is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature. The Brothers Karamazov is Dostoevsky’s deepest contemplation of human existence, which has heavily influenced the existentialist movement lead by Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus in the middle of twentieth century. A complex structure of the novel features motifs of crime, justice, and redemption through suffering that help Dostoevsky develop his major themes including the conflict between faith and doubt, the burden of free will, and the pervasiveness of moral responsibility. The author's unmatched manner of exploring psychology of his protagonists has influenced many thinkers including Sigmund Freud, who called The Brothers Karamazov ‘the most magnificent novel ever written’. Pretty illustrations by Dmitrii Rybalko provide you with new impressions from reading this legendary story.

Notes from the Underground is a novella by Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Notes is considered by many to be the first existentialist novel. It presents itself as an excerpt from the rambling memoirs of a bitter, isolated, unnamed narrator (generally referred to by critics as the Underground Man) who is a retired civil servant living in St. Petersburg. The first part of the story is told in monologue form, or the underground man's diary, and attacks emerging Western philosophy, especially Nikolay Chernyshevsky's What Is to Be Done?. The second part of the book is called "Àpropos of the Wet Snow", and describes certain events that, it seems, are destroying and sometimes renewing the underground man, who acts as a first person, unreliable narrator. Dostoyevsky again confronts the concept of free will and constructs a negative argument to validate free will against determinism in the character Kirillov's suicide in his novel The Demons. Notes from Underground marks the starting point of Dostoyevsky's move from psychological and sociological themed novels to novels based on existential and general human experience in crisis. War is described as people's rebellion against the assumption that everything needs to happen for a purpose, because humans do things without purpose, and this is what determines human history. The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche called Dostoevsky "the only psychologist, incidentally, from whom I had anything to learn."

One of the towering figures of Russian literature, Fyodor Dostoyevsky depicted with remarkable insight the depth and complexity of the human soul. In this literary classic, he focuses on Prince Myshkin — a nobleman whose gentle, child-like nature, and refusal to be offended by anything has earned him the nickname of "the idiot."Returning to Russia from Switzerland, where he underwent medical treatment for a number of years, Myshkin learns of his benefactor's death, finds himself heir to a large fortune, and without instigation, becomes entangled in the intrigues of a corrupt ruling class.A superb, panoramic view of 19th-century Russian manners, morals, and philosophy, The Idiot remains a provocative example of psychological realism.

A PBS Great American Read Top 100 Pick One Ring to rule them all, One Ring to find them, One Ring to bring them all and in the darkness bind them In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins. From Sauron's fastness in the Dark Tower of Mordor, his power spread far and wide. Sauron gathered all the Great Rings to him, but always he searched for the One Ring that would complete his dominion. When Bilbo reached his eleventy-first birthday he disappeared, bequeathing to his young cousin Frodo the Ruling Ring and a perilous quest: to journey across Middle-earth, deep into the shadow of the Dark Lord, and destroy the Ring by casting it into the Cracks of Doom. The Lord of the Rings tells of the great quest undertaken by Frodo and the Fellowship of the Ring: Gandalf the Wizard; the hobbits Merry, Pippin, and Sam; Gimli the Dwarf; Legolas the Elf; Boromir of Gondor; and a tall, mysterious stranger called Strider. This new edition includes the fiftieth-anniversary fully corrected text setting and, for the first time, an extensive new index. J.R.R. Tolkien (1892-1973), beloved throughout the world as the creator of The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings, and The Silmarillion, was a professor of Anglo-Saxon at Oxford, a fellow of Pembroke College, and a fellow of Merton College until his retirement in 1959. His chief interest was the linguistic aspects of the early English written tradition, but while he studied classic works of the past, he was creating a set of his own.

Edmond Dantes, the young and successful merchant sailor recently granted his own command by his dying captain Leclere, returns to Marseille to marry his fiancee Mercedes. Leclere, a supporter of the exiled Napoleon I, has charged Dantes to deliver two objects: a package to Marechal Bertrand (exiled with Napoleon Bonaparte on Elba), and a letter from Elba to an unknown man in Paris. On the eve of his wedding to Mercedes, Fernand (Mercedes' cousin and a rival for her affections) and Danglars (who is jealous of Dantes' rapid rise to captain) send an anonymous note accusing Dantes of being a Bonapartist traitor. Villefort, the deputy crown prosecutor in Marseille, while initially sympathetic to Dantes, destroys the letter from Elba when he discovers that it is addressed to his father who is a Bonapartist. In order to silence Dantes, he condemns him without trial to life imprisonment...