Winner of:
The Pulitzer Prize
The National Book Critics Circle Award
The Anisfield-Wolf Book Award
The Jon Sargent, Sr. First Novel Prize
A Time Magazine #1 Fiction Book of the Year

One of the best books of 2007 according to: The New York Times, San Francisco Chronicle, New York Magazine, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, Los Angeles Times, The Washington Post, People, The Village Voice, Time Out New York, Salon, Baltimore City Paper, The Christian Science Monitor, Booklist, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, New York Public Library, and many more...

Oscar is a sweet but disastrously overweight ghetto nerd who—from the New Jersey home he shares with his old world mother and rebellious sister—dreams of becoming the Dominican J.R.R. Tolkien and, most of all, finding love. But Oscar may never get what he wants. Blame the fukú—a curse that has haunted Oscar’s family for generations, following them on their epic journey from Santo Domingo to the USA. Encapsulating Dominican-American history, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao opens our eyes to an astonishing vision of the contemporary Ameri...
Continue Reading

THIS TITLE HAS BEEN UPDATED TO REFLECT THE 2016 MLA UPDATES! Our editorial team has updated this text based on content from The MLA Handbook, 8th Edition. Browse our catalog or contact your representative for a full listing of updated titles and packages, or to request a custom ISBN.

Pairing a best-selling argument text with a thematic reader, Everything’s an Argument with Readings teaches students to analyze the arguments that surround them every day and to create their own. The book starts with proven instructional content by composition luminaries Andrea Lunsford and John Ruszkiewicz, covering five core types of arguments. Revised based on feedback from its large and devoted community of users, the seventh edition offers a new chapter on multimedia argument and more than 35 readings across perspectives and genres, from academic essays and newspaper editorials to tweets and infographics.

The one real difference between the American press and the Soviet state newspaper Pravda was that the Russian people knew they were being lied to. To expose the lies our media tell us today, controversial journalist James O’Keefe created Project Veritas, an independent news organization whose reporters go where traditional journalists dare not. Their investigative work–equal parts James Bond, Mike Wallace, and Saul Alinsky―has had a consistent and powerful impact on its targets.

In American Pravda, the reader is invited to go undercover with these intrepid journalists as they infiltrate political campaigns, unmask dishonest officials and expose voter fraud. A rollicking adventure story on one level, the book also serves as a treatise on modern media, arguing that establishment journalists have a vested interest in keeping the powerful comfortable and the people misinformed.

The book not only contests the false narratives frequently put forth by corporate media, it documents the consequences of telling the truth in a world that does not necessarily want to hear it. O’Keefe’s enemies attack with lawsuits, smear campaigns, political prosecutions, and fal...
Continue Reading

"We've got some difficult days ahead," civil rights activist Martin Luther King, Jr., told a crowd gathered at Memphis's Clayborn Temple on April 3, 1968. "But it really doesn't matter to me now because I've been to the mountaintop. . . . And I've seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we as a people will get to the promised land."

These prophetic words, uttered the day before his assassination, challenged those he left behind to see that his "promised land" of racial equality became a reality; a reality to which King devoted the last twelve years of his life.

These words and others are commemorated here in the only major one-volume collection of this seminal twentieth-century American prophet's writings, speeches, interviews, and autobiographical reflections. A Testament of Hope contains Martin Luther King, Jr.'s essential thoughts on nonviolence, social policy, integration, black nationalism, the ethics of love and hope, and more.

Amazon.com Review

“A lively and inspiring guidebook for anyone who wants to make the jump from normal to extraordinary.”
―Tony Robbins, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Unshakeable and MONEY: Master the Game

An inspirational book that lays out the “Jump Curve”―four steps to wholeheartedly pursuing the career of your dreams―through experiences from a variety of people who have jumped and never looked back

When Mike Lewis was twenty-four and working in a prestigious corporate job, he eagerly wanted to leave and pursue his dream of becoming a professional squash player. But he had questions: When is the right time to move from work that is comfortable to a career you have only dared to dream of? How have other people made such a jump? What did they feel when making that jump―and afterward?

Mike sought guidance from others who had “jumped,” and the responses he got―from a banker who started a brewery, a publicist who became a Bishop, a garbage collector who became a furniture designer, and on and on―were so clear-eyed and inspiring that Mike wanted to share what he had learned with others who might be helped by tho...
Continue Reading

From Inc.com's most popular columnist, a counterintuitive - but highly practical - guide to finding and maintaining the motivation to achieve great things.

It's comforting to imagine that superstars in their fields were just born better equipped than the rest of us. When a co-worker loses 20 pounds, or a friend runs a marathon while completing a huge project at work, we assume they have more grit, more willpower, more innate talent, and above all, more motivation to see their goals through.

But that's not at actually true, as popular Inc.com columnist Jeff Haden proves. "Motivation" as we know it is a myth. Motivation isn't the special sauce that we require at the beginning of any major change. In fact, motivation is a result of process, not a cause. Understanding this will change the way you approach any obstacle or big goal.

Haden shows us how to reframe our thinking about the relationship of motivation to success. He meets us at our level - at the beginning of any big goal we have for our lives, a little anxious and unsure about our way forward, a little burned by self-help books and strategies that have failed us in the past - and ...
Continue Reading

A witty and addictively readable day-by-day literary companion.

At once a love letter to literature and a charming guide to the books most worth reading, A Reader's Book of Days features bite-size accounts of events in the lives of great authors for every day of the year. Here is Marcel Proust starting In Search of Lost Time and Virginia Woolf scribbling in the margin of her own writing, "Is it nonsense, or is it brilliance?" Fictional events that take place within beloved books are also included: the birth of Harry Potter’s enemy Draco Malfoy, the blood-soaked prom in Stephen King’s Carrie.

A Reader's Book of Days is filled with memorable and surprising tales from the lives and works of Martin Amis, Jane Austen, James Baldwin, Roberto Bolano, the Brontë sisters, Junot Díaz, Philip K. Dick, Charles Dickens, Joan Didion, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Keats, Hilary Mantel, Haruki Murakami, Flannery O’Connor, Orhan Pamuk, George Plimpton, Marilynne Robinson, W. G. Sebald, Dr. Seuss, Zadie Smith, Susan Sontag, Hunter S. Thompson, Leo Tolstoy, David Foster Wallace, and many more. The book also notes the days on which fa...
Continue Reading

In this eye-opening account, Cal Newport debunks the long-held belief that "follow your passion" is good advice.

Not only is the cliché flawed - pre-existing passions are rare and have little to do with how most people end up loving their work - but it can also be dangerous, leading to anxiety and chronic job hopping.

After making his case against passion, Newport sets out on a quest to discover the reality of how people end up loving what they do. Spending time with organic farmers, venture capitalists, screenwriters, freelance computer programmers, and others who admitted to deriving great satisfaction from their work, Newport uncovers the strategies they used and the pitfalls they avoided in developing their compelling careers.

Matching your job to a preexisting passion does not matter, he reveals. Passion comes after you put in the hard work to become excellent at something valuable, not before.

In other words, what you do for a living is much less important than how you do it.

With a title taken from the comedian Steve Martin, who once said his advice for aspiring entertainers was to "be so good they can't ignore you", Cal Newport...
Continue Reading

A has no friends. No parents. No family. No possessions. No home, even. Because every day, A wakes up in the body of a different person. A is able to access each person's memory, enough to be able to get through the day without parents, friends, and teachers realizing this is not their child, not their friend, not their student. Because it isn't. It's A. It's a lonely existence--until, one day, it isn't. A meets a girl named Rhiannon. And A falls for her after a perfect day together. But when night falls, it's over. Because A can never be the same person twice. But yet, A can't stop thinking about Rhiannon. She becomes A's reason for existing. So every day, in different bodies--of all shapes, sizes, backgrounds, and walks of life--A tries to get back to her and convince her of their love. But can their love transcend such an obstacle? Fans of David Levithan's books, from Boy Meets Boy to Nick & Norah's Infinite Playlist with Rachel Cohn, to Will Grayson, Will Grayson with John Green, will not want to miss this wholly unique love story.

"Gripping and superb. This book will steal the night from you." —Laurence Gonzales, author of Deep Survival

On January 17, 1913, alone and near starvation, Douglas Mawson, leader of the Australasian Antarctic Expedition, was hauling a sledge to get back to base camp. The dogs were gone. Now Mawson himself plunged through a snow bridge, dangling over an abyss by the sledge harness. A line of poetry gave him the will to haul himself back to the surface.

Mawson was sometimes reduced to crawling, and one night he discovered that the soles of his feet had completely detached from the flesh beneath. On February 8, when he staggered back to base, his features unrecognizably skeletal, the first teammate to reach him blurted out, "Which one are you?"

This thrilling and almost unbelievable account establishes Mawson in his rightful place as one of the greatest polar explorers and expedition leaders. It is illustrated by a trove of Frank Hurley’s famous Antarctic photographs, many never before published in the United States.

The 2018 edition of The New York Times Bestselling Guide.

PLAY BALL! The 23rd edition of this industry-leading baseball annual contains all of the important statistics, player predictions and insider-level commentary that readers have come to expect, along with significant improvements to several statistics that were created by, and are exclusive to, Baseball Prospectus, and an expanded focus on international players and teams.

Baseball Prospectus 2018 provides fantasy players and insiders alike with prescient PECOTA projections, which The New York Times called “the überforecast of every player’s performance.”

With more than 50 Baseball Prospectus alumni currently working for major-league baseball teams, nearly every organization has sought the advice of current or former BP analysts, and readers of Baseball Prospectus 2018 will understand why!

Visit www.baseballprospectus.com for year-round baseball coverage

From the creators of the hugely popular BBC quiz show QI, a brilliant sequel to their New York Times–best-selling 1,227 Quite Interesting Facts to Blow Your Socks Off.

Did you know?

• Wagner only ever wore pink silk underwear.

• There are 34,000 statues of Kim Il Sung in North Korea.

• There is a cult in Malaysia that worships a giant teapot.

• Earthworms have five hearts.

• Your eyebrows renew themselves every 64 days.

• Charles Darwin's tortoise Harriet died in 2006 at the age of 176.

Every fact in this magnificent little volume has been researched with punctilious care in order to bring you the truth in its purest form.

Chip and Dan Heath, the bestselling authors of Switch and Made to Stick, tackle one of the most critical topics in our work and personal lives: how to make better decisions.
　
   Research in psychology has revealed that our decisions are disrupted by an array of biases and irrationalities: We’re overconfident. We seek out information that supports us and downplay information that doesn’t. We get distracted by short-term emotions. When it comes to making choices, it seems, our brains are flawed instruments. Unfortunately, merely being aware of these shortcomings doesn’t fix the problem, any more than knowing that we are nearsighted helps us to see. The real question is: How can we do better?

   In Decisive, the Heaths, based on an exhaustive study of the decision-making literature, introduce a four-step process designed to counteract these biases. Written in an engaging and compulsively readable style, Decisive takes readers on an unforgettable journey, from a rock star’s ingenious decision-making trick to a CEO’s disastrous acquisition, to a single question that can often resolve thorny personal decisions.
Continue Reading

Product Description

"CHANGE OR DIE. What if you were given that choice? We're talking actual life and death now. Your own life and death. What if a well-informed, trusted authority figure said you had to make difficult and enduring changes in the way you think, feel, and act? If you didn't, your time would end soon—a lot sooner than it had to. Could you change when change mattered most?"

This is the question Alan Deutschman poses in Change or Die, which began as a sensational cover story by the same title for Fast Company. Deutschman concludes that although we all have the ability to change our behavior, we rarely ever do. In fact, the odds are nine to one that, when faced with the dire need to change, we won't. From patients suffering from heart disease to repeat offenders in the criminal justice system to companies trapped in the mold of unsuccessful business practices, many of us could prevent ominous outcomes by simply changing our mindset.

A powerful book with universal appeal, Change or Die deconstructs and debunks age-old myths about change and empowers us with three critical keys—relate, repeat, and reframe—to help us make important positive changes i...
Continue Reading

“Highly informative and entertaining…propels the reader light years beyond dull textbooks and Gone with the Wind.”
—San Francisco Chronicle

It has been 150 years since the opening salvo of America’s War Between the States. New York Times bestselling author Ken Davis tells us everything we never knew about our nation’s bloodiest conflict in Don’t Know Much About ® the Civil War—another fascinating and fun installment in his acclaimed series.

Amazon.com Review

From leading psychologist Dr. Kristin Neff comes a step-by-step guide explaining how to be more self-compassionate and achieve your dreams in life.

The relentless pursuit of high self-esteem has become a virtual religion - and a tyrannical one at that. Our ultracompetitive culture tells us we need to be constantly above average to feel good about ourselves, but there is always someone more attractive, successful, or intelligent than we are. And even when we do manage to grab hold of high self-esteem for a brief moment, we can't seem to keep it. Our sense of self-worth goes up and down like a ping-pong ball, rising and falling in lockstep with our latest success or failure.

Fortunately, there is an alternative to self-esteem that many experts believe is a better and more effective path to happiness: self-compassion. The research of Dr. Kristin Neff and other leading psychologists indicates that people who are compassionate toward their failings and imperfections experience greater well-being than those who repeatedly judge themselves. The feelings of security and self-worth provided by self-compassion are also highly stable, kicking in precisely when self-e...
Continue Reading

“Hilarious. . . . This book charmed my socks off.” ―Patricia O’Conner, New York Times Book Review

Mary Norris has spent more than three decades in The New Yorker's copy department, maintaining its celebrated high standards. Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.

Between You & Me features Norris's laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage―comma faults, danglers, "who" vs. "whom," "that" vs. "which," compound words, gender-neutral language―and her clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and always open-minded, she draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord's Prayer, as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster's groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world's only pencil-sharp...
Continue Reading

Meet Emily and Paul: The parents of two young children, Emily is the newly promoted VP of marketing at a large corporation while Paul works from home or from clients' offices as an independent IT consultant. Their lives, like all of ours, are filled with a bewildering blizzard of emails, phone calls, yet more emails, meetings, projects, proposals, and plans. Just staying ahead of the storm has become a seemingly insurmountable task.

In this book, we travel inside Emily and Paul's brains as they attempt to sort the vast quantities of information they're presented with, figure out how to prioritize it, organize it and act on it. Fortunately for Emily and Paul, they're in good hands: David Rock knows how the brain works-and more specifically, how it works in a work setting. Rock shows how it's possible for Emily and Paul, and thus the reader, not only to survive in today's overwhelming work environment but succeed in it-and still feel energized and accomplished at the end of the day.

Your Brain At Work explores issues such as:

- why our brains feel so taxed, and how to maximize our mental resources

- why it's so hard to focus, and how to ...
Continue Reading

The Professor and the Madman, masterfully researched and eloquently written, is an extraordinary tale of madness, genius, and the incredible obsessions of two remarkable men that led to the making of the Oxford English Dictionary -- and literary history. The compilation of the OED began in 1857, it was one of the most ambitious projects ever undertaken. As definitions were collected, the overseeing committee, led by Professor James Murray, discovered that one man, Dr. W. C. Minor, had submitted more than ten thousand. When the committee insisted on honoring him, a shocking truth came to light: Dr. Minor, an American Civil War veteran, was also an inmate at an asylum for the criminally insane.

This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

Amazon.com Review

Scott Adams has likely failed at more things than anyone you've ever met or anyone you've even heard of. So how did he go from hapless office worker and serial failure to the creator of Dilbert, one of the world's most famous syndicated comic strips, in just a few years? In How to Fail at Almost Everything and Still Win Big, Adams shares the strategy he has used since he was a teen to invite failure in, to embrace it, then pick its pocket.

No career guide can offer advice for success that works for everyone. As Adams explains, your best bet is to study the ways of others who made it big and try to glean some tricks and strategies that make sense for you. Adams pulls back the covers on his own unusual life and shares what he learned for turning one failure after another into something good and lasting. Adams reveals that he failed at just about everything he's tried, including his corporate career, his inventions, his investments, and his two restaurants. But there's a lot to learn from his personal story, and a lot of humor along the way. While it's hard for anyone to recover from a personal or professional failure, Adams discovered some unlikely truths th...
Continue Reading

Likened to the works of Faulkner and Dickens when it was first published 20 years ago, this extraordinarily accomplished debut novel is a brilliantly plotted story of forbidden love and piercing political drama, centered on the tragic decline of an Indian family in the state of Kerala, on the southernmost tip of India.

Armed only with the invincible innocence of children, the twins Rahel and Esthappen fashion a childhood for themselves in the shade of the wreck that is their family - their lonely, lovely mother Ammu (who loves by night the man her children love by day), their blind grandmother Mammachi (who plays Handel on her violin), their beloved uncle Chacko (Rhodes scholar, pickle baron, radical Marxist, bottom-pincher), their enemy Baby Kochamma (ex-nun and incumbent grandaunt), and the ghost of an imperial entomologist's moth (with unusually dense dorsal tufts).

When their English cousin and her mother arrive on a Christmas visit, the twins learn that things can change in a day. That lives can twist into new, ugly shapes, even cease forever. The brilliantly plotted story uncoils with an agonizing sense of foreboding and inevitability. Yet nothing pr...
Continue Reading

The Effortless Sous Vide Cookbook serves easy, everyday recipes for restaurant-quality meals

It’s easy to make perfectly cooked food with your sous vide, but finding the right recipes to do it night after night can be tricky. The Effortless Sous Vide Cookbook serves well-rounded, restaurant-quality meals for easy, everyday cooking. Featuring 140 no-fuss recipes, plus an overview of basic practices and new sous vide cooking techniques, The Effortless Sous Vide Cookbook transforms every kitchen into a Michelin-star restaurant.

The Effortless Sous Vide Cookbook includes:

• Over 140 Weeknight Recipes for making vegetables, fish and seafood, red meat, poultry, dessert, and even drinks!
• Sous Vide 101 covering the basic sous vide practices along with new techniques
• Quick Reference Guides featuring helpful charts to help you gage timing, temperature, and power to your model

Sous vide cookbook recipes include: Vegetable Halloumi Kebabs, Seared Wasabi Ahi Tuna, Rosemary Veal Chop, Peanut Chicken Satay, Duck Confit, Salted Caramel...
Continue Reading

Noted pastor/teacher John MacArthur takes you through the key aspects of the Bible in this guide for students. For all 66 books, key doctrines, highlighted people, geographic, historical, and cultural background, cross references, how Christ is pictured, character/attributes of God, explanations of key words and interpretive challenges will be examined.In addition, the guide will include:

• "Why I Believe the Bible"
• How to interpret each type of literature
• Charts, timelines, maps
• "Where to Find It" index of favorite passages and key Bible events, stories, and teachings
• Doctrinal studies (concise, with references and brief explanations)
• Index of people in the Bible
• Topical Index
• "How to Study the Bible" article

Product Description

Noted pastor/teacher John MacArthur takes you through the key aspects of the Bible in this guide for students. For all 66 books, key doctrines, highlighted people, geographic, historical, and cultural background, cross references, how Christ is pictured, character/attributes of God, explanations of key words and interpretive challenges will be examin...
Continue Reading

National Geographic's World map is the standard by which all other reference maps are measured. The World map is meticulously researched and adheres to National Geographic's convention of making independent, apolitical decisions based on extensive research using multiple authoritative source,

The Executive style World map uses an antique-style color palette and stunning shaded relief that provide a richness perfect for any decor. Drawn in the Winkel Tripel projection, distortions are minimized and unlike many other World maps, Greenland is show the same size as Argentina and not as the size of all of South America.

Thousands of place names are carefully and artistically placed on the map to maintain legibility even in the heavily populated ares of Europe, Asia and the Middle East. Details include clearly defined international boundaries, cities, physical features, rivers, and ocean floor features. Corner inset maps feature vegetation and land use, and population density as well as the north and south polar regions.

Poster sized maps make a perfect addition to any sized space. They are specially designed to maximize content in a smaller footprint...
Continue Reading

A New York Times bestseller and Oppenheim Toy Portfolio Gold Award winner, this updated and expanded encyclopedia explores more than 200 characters from the complete Star Wars™ saga.

Star Wars Character Encyclopedia: Updated and Expanded, the definitive guide to the people, aliens, and Droids™ of the Star Wars galaxy, is back, bigger and better than ever before, and packed with new Star Wars characters.

Want to know how tall Darth Vader is? Or where the ferocious Nexu comes from? Look no further than the Star Wars Character Encyclopedia: Updated and Expanded. With profiles on heroes, villains, and everyone in between, this handy guide is full of fun facts and intriguing information guaranteed to enthrall fans for hours on end.

© & TM 2016 LUCASFILM LTD. Used Under Authorization.

Reviews:

"...sharp, snappy...stunning." - StarWars.com

Bring the Marvel Universe home with this all-inclusive encyclopedia detailing little-known facts and information about more than 1,200 iconic Marvel characters.

Created in full collaboration with Marvel Comics, the Marvel Encyclopedia features new entries on the latest characters and teams, updated facts on existing ones including their latest looks and story lines, and expanded entries on major superheroes such as Spider-Man, Thor, and The Avengers. Special double-page features have also been added highlighting recent major crossover events in the Marvel Universe, such as Fear Itself, and the Marvel Now series.

The book is packed with comic book imagery and organized in an easy-to-find A-Z style. PopMatters.com says, "This coffee table volume is incredibly beautiful and presented in ways that online searching can't quite match."

The Marvel Encyclopedia is an essential book for new fans and for anyone who grew up loving the excitement, heroism, and humor if the Marvel Universe.

© 2016 MARVEL

Explore the world of LEGO® NINJAGO® and the characters and vehicles in this #1 New York Times bestseller that contains an exclusive Jay minifigure and 48 new pages.

Also a Wall Street Journal bestseller and a USA Today Best-Selling book, LEGO NINJAGO: Character Encyclopedia, Updated Edition is now expanded with brand-new LEGO NINJAGO minifigures and sets, making it the ultimate book for your little ninja.

Read each character's ninja file to learn what makes each one special and unique, and find out which weapon each ninja uses. From Ninja to Nindroids to Sky Pirates, each character has a brilliantly-photographed page filled with amazing facts and trivia, such as which minifigure is the rarest and which minifigure can be found in the most LEGO NINJAGO sets.

Join the Masters of Spinjitzu and discover the secrets of the vehicles, weapons, and locations that make up the LEGO NINJAGO world with LEGO NINJAGO: Character Encyclopedia, Updated Edition.

LEGO, the LEGO logo, NINJAGO, the Brick and Knob configuration and the Minifigure are trademarks of the LEGO Group. © 2016 The LEGO Group.
Produced by DK Publishing un...
Continue Reading

Danny loves dinosaurs! When he sees one at the museum and says, "It would be nice to play with a dinosaur," a voice answers, "And I think it would be nice to play with you." So begins Danny and the Dinosaur's wonderful adventures together. For Danny and his prehistoric playmate, even the most everyday activities become extraordinary, like finding a big-enough place to hide a dinosaur in a game of hide-and-seek. Kids will delight in Syd Hoff's charming, comical illustrations as they read about how Danny teaches a very old dinosaur some new tricks.

Originally published over 50 years ago, this beloved classic is a Level 1 I Can Read that is perfect for the beginning reader learning to sound out words and sentences.

Supports the Common Core Learning Standards

This is the perfect book for kids who love trucks. On the big, sturdy board pages, they'll discover bright, bold photographs of all different kinds of trucks, from farm trucks to fire trucks to construction vehicles. Each has their name written underneath, so that children can learn what they're called, build their truck vocabulary, and start to develop word and picture association.

Bright Baby Colors, ABC, Numbers
• Introduces three key first concepts: letters, number and colors
• Helps babies and toddlers to build their early vocabulary
• Large, colorful and sturdy format to withstand repeated learning fun