Bombay Smiles

Jaume Sanllorrente

Trade Paper, 173 pp., $12.00
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In 2003, Jaume Sanllorente was a young journalist leading an active and exciting life in Barcelona—no more idealistic than any other young professional. Then a travel agent convinced him to spend his vacation in India. Amazed by what he saw in the land of sacred cows and shocking poverty, Jaume was transformed.

That experience lead him to reconsider the world he lived in and to . . . [read more]

The Book Shopper

Murray Browne

Trade Paper, 224 pp., $14.95
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"Where is human nature so weak as in the bookstore?" —Henry Ward Beecher

The Book Shopper is a spirited and witty guide to the world of disheveled used bookstores and dusty basements where shelves sag under the burden of so many books. In the limitless sea of books, here's one that will make you laugh as it helps you find your way to titles and authors . . . [read more]

Boston Boy

Nat Hentoff

Trade Paper, 212 pp., $10.00
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Retail: $14.95. BACKLIST SALE PRICE $10.00

Boston Boy is Nat Hentoff's memoir of growing up in the Roxbury section of Boston in the 1930s and 1940s. He grapples with Judaism and anti-Semitism. He develops a passion for outspoken journalism and First Amendment freedom of speech. And he discovers his love of jazz music as he follows, and is befriended by . . . [read more]

Farewell to Salonica

Leon Sciaky

Trade Paper, 299 pp., $14.95
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A World of Sephardic Jews, Greek Orthodox, and Turkish Muslims in the early 1900s

At the crossroads of East and West, Salonica (now Thessaloniki) was an oasis in a swirl of conflicting powers and interests, a vibrant world of varied peoples, where Leon Sciaky grew up at the turn of the twentieth century. This Paul Dry Books rediscovered classic includes many photos courtesy o . . . [read more]

The Flight of Ikaros

Kevin Andrews

Trade Paper, 264 pp., $14.95
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"One of the great and lasting books about Greece." —Patrick Leigh Fermor

In 1947, at the age of twenty-three, Kevin Andrews received a Fulbright fellowship to study medieval fortresses in the Peloponnese. Andrews spent the long summers of 1948 to 1951 traveling through the region and the winters writing in Athens. This opportunity to travel through little-frequented ar . . . [read more]

Flotsam

John Stewart

Trade Paper, 212 pp., $16.95
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"John Stewart is a rare combination: an artist, an adventurer, a survivor of a prison camp, a great photographer and a rambunctious, rollicking prose writer. He's had marvelous, unlikely experiences everywhere from the fashion salons of New York to the wildest mountains of Asia. The soul presented in this book is like none you’ve ever met."—C. K. Williams

In these shim . . . [read more]

For Solo Violin

Aldo Zargani

Translated from the Italian by Marina Harss

Trade Paper, 326 pp., $10.00
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Retail: $15.95. BACKLIST SALE PRICE $10.00

In an extraordinary literary debut, Aldo Zargani reconstructs the lost world of his Jewish childhood during the perilous years 1938–45 when he and his family fled from Fascists and Nazis in northern Italy. His haunting memoir acquires a cinematic intensity as he crosscuts from the blood-red stone spires of Basel, . . . [read more]

Hotel Kid

Stephen Lewis

Also available in hardcover

Trade Paper, 214 pp., $12.95
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A Manhattan landmark for fifty years, the Taft in its heyday in the 1930s and '40s was the largest hotel in midtown, famed for the big band in its basement restaurant and the view of Times Square from its towers. As the son of the general manager, Stephen Lewis grew up in this legendary hotel, living with his parents and younger brother in a suite overlooking the Roxy Theater. His engaging memo . . . [read more]

An Invisible Country

Stephan Wackwitz

Translated from the German by Stephen Lehmann
Foreword by Wendy Lesser

Hardcover, 254 pp., $20.00
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Retail: $24.95. BACKLIST SALE PRICE $20.00

Stephan Wackwitz's family "never spoke about the fact that the scene of their childhood and the site of the century's greatest crime were separated by nothing more than a longish walk and barely a decade." With insight and wit, Wackwitz breaks this silence in An Invisible Country, a learned meditatio . . . [read more]

Lincoln's Quest for Union

Charles B. Strozier

Foreword by Geoffrey C. Ward

Trade Paper, 298 pp., $18.95
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In Lincoln's Quest for Union, Charles Strozier gives the most probing account available of Lincoln's inner life—from the time he was a young man in Illinois, just finding himself, through his ascent to the presidency when he guided the nation and articulated for the country the meaning of the Civil War. With the probity of an open-minded historian and the skills of a trained ther . . . [read more]

Matthew

Anne Crosby

Hardcover, 354 pp., $20.00
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Retail: $24.95. BACKLIST SALE PRICE $20.00

A mother's memoir celebrates the joys and demands of raising a Down syndrome child.

From the moment she held him in her arms, Anne Crosby had deep fears for her newborn son. Although the staff at the hospital in London paid no attention to her concerns, her instincts were correct: Matthew had Down synd . . . [read more]

Mitchell & Ruff

William Zinsser

Foreword by Albert Murray

Trade Paper, 191 pp., $14.95
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View the curriculum guide here.

Since 1955, Dwike Mitchell and Willie Ruff have been playing, teaching, and sharing jazz around the U.S. and around the world. William Zinsser, one of our finest chroniclers of American life, tells their story as he travels with the duo to China, to Davenport, Iowa, to New York City, an . . . [read more]

Rocky Stories

Michael Vitez

Photographs by Tom Gralish
Foreword by Sylvester Stallone

Oversized Paperback, 129 pp.
100 full color photographs, $20.00
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Retail: $22.95. BACKLIST SALE PRICE $20.00

Pulitzer Prize-winners Michael Vitez and Tom Gralish of the Philadelphia Inquirer spent a year visiting the Philadelphia Museum of Art to capture the stories of "Rocky runners," who come from all over the world to run up America's most famous steps—just as Sylvester Stallone did in Rockyread more]

A Russian Schoolboy

Sergei Aksakov

Translated by J. D. Duff

Trade Paper, 191, $11.95
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"The happiness of childhood is the Golden Age, and the recollection of it has power to move the old man's heart with pleasure and with pain. Happy the man who once possessed it and is able to recall the memory of it in later years!"

Thus Sergei Aksakov recalls the "magic world" of youth, as he portrays the delights and tumults of Russian country life at the turn of t . . . [read more]

Strange Relation

Rachel Hadas

Trade Paper, 250 pp., $16.95
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In 2004 Rachel Hadas's husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of sixty-one. Neurodegenerative ailments are a murky matter; it isn't clear even now whether George was suffering from Alzheimer's disease or frontotemporal dementia. Nor is it possible to determine when the illness began its slow, insidiou . . . [read more]

To a Distant Island

James McConkey

Introduction by Jay Parini

Trade Paper, 203 pp., $10.00
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Retail: $14.95. BACKLIST SALE PRICE $10.00

In 1890 Anton Chekhov—thirty years old and already a famous writer—left his home and family in Moscow to travel 6,500 miles across Russia, over frozen land and sea, by train, ferry, and troika, to visit the island of Sakhalin, a penal colony off the coast of Siberia.

What was Chekhov seeking by un . . . [read more]

The Verb 'To Bird'

Peter Cashwell

Also available in hardcover

Trade Paper, 273 pp., $16.95
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All around the world, birds are the subject of intense, even spiritual, fascination, but relatively few people see the word bird as a verb. Peter Cashwell is one who does, and with good reason: He birds (because he can't help it), and he teaches grammar (because he's paid to). An English teacher by profession and an avid birder by inner calling, Cashwell has written a whimsical and cri . . . [read more]

Who Loves You Like This

Edith Bruck

Translated from the Italian by Thomas Kelso

Trade Paper, 135 pp., $12.00
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Retail: $14.95. BACKLIST SALE PRICE $12.00

View the curriculum guide here.

"Edith Bruck tells the story of the 'Lager' with the inherent strength of a wounded animal and in confronting the unbearable sadness of it closes the account and does not surrender to the void. . . Unforgett . . . [read more]