“The damnedest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I’ve ever read. The original Harper’s article gave me the shivers, and this deeper dive is going to have me looking over my shoulder on every hike. Unputdownable." — Patton OswaltWith the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in...

From barometers to the famous BBC shipping forecast, we have – over the centuries – developed the means to predict, harness, and shield ourselves from what is happening in the atmosphere. Attitudes about the planet's weather, as well as about human identity, have thereby taken on new meanings. In an era of climatic anxiety, what weather is and how weather behaves have taken on additional currency. Benjamin Hale weaves together philosophy and anecdote into a many-faceted exploration of this...

Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. His untimely outburst...

A brief foray into a moral thicket, exploring why we should protect nature despite tsunamis, malaria, bird flu, cancer, killer asteroids, and tofu.Most of us think that in order to be environmentalists, we have to love nature. Essentially, we should be tree huggers—embracing majestic redwoods, mighty oaks, graceful birches, etc. We ought to eat granola, drive hybrids, cook tofu, and write our appointments in Sierra Club calendars. Nature's splendor, in other words,...

“Oddly beautiful and impossible to look away from” (Los Angeles Times), the stories in The Fat Artist are suffused with fear and desire, introducing us to a company of indelible characters reeling with love, jealousy, megalomania, and despair.In prose alternately stark, lush and hallucinatory, occasionally nightmarish and often absurd,the voices in Benjamin Hale’s The Fat Artist and Other Stories speak from the margins: a dominatr...

The 'Harvard Classics: All 71 Volumes' anthologizes a staggering breadth of literature, philosophy, and scientific thought, offering readers an unparalleled gateway into the intellectual legacies spanning millennia. Within this colossal collection, the themes of human endeavor, moral inquiry, and artistic expression pervade through various works, from the epics of Homer and Virgil to the intricate philosophies of Plato and Descartes. Each volume stands as a testament to humanity's quest fo...

Chess, the ancient strategy game, meets the latest, cutting-edge philosophy in this unique book. When 12 philosophers weigh in on one of the world's oldest and most beloved pastimes, the results are often surprising. Philosophical concepts as varied as phenomenology and determinism share the page with a treatise on hip-hop chess tactics and the question of whether Garry Kasparov is, in fact, a cyborg. Putting forth a remarkable array of different views on chess from philosophers with varie...

The Complete Harvard Classics, comprising a monumental anthology of 71 volumes, offers a remarkable journey through the annals of world literature and thought. This collection features an extensive array of literary styles, genres, and historical contexts; it captures the essence of human creativity and intellectual progress over centuries. With standout pieces from drama and philosophy to fiction and science, this compilation underscores the profound diversity of thought and expression ac...

“The damndest mixing of true crime, memoir, and maybe (?) ghost story I’ve ever read. The original Harper’s article gave me the shivers, and this deeper dive is going to have me looking over my shoulder on every hike. Unputdownable." — Patton OswaltWith the immediacy and extraordinary feeling for people and place of Under the Banner of Heaven and Say Nothing, a compelling true crime story about two young girls who went missing in ...

The 'Harvard Classics: All 71 Volumes' collection represents the pinnacle of literary anthologies, traversing the broad and rich landscape of human thought and creativity. Spanning various genres and styles, the compilation captures the profound diversities of intellectual discourse and artistic expression from antiquity to the nineteenth century. Among its highlights, readers will encounter philosophical treatises alongside poignant narratives, as timeless lyricism intermingles with scien...

Russell Banks, Temple Grandin, and other renowned writers contemplate animals—and the way our own species interacts with them.Conjunctions: 61, A Menagerie gathers essays, fiction, and poetry that imagine the world of our fellow beings, animals. Cultural mythologies and pantheons are populated with snakes, monkeys, cats, jackals, whales: a cast of characters whose stories reveal how complex and wildly contradictory our species' relationship with other anim...

Bruno Littlemore is quite unlike any chimpanzee in the world. Precocious, self-conscious and preternaturally gifted, young Bruno, born and raised in a habitat at the local zoo, falls under the care of a university primatologist named Lydia Littlemore. Learning of Bruno's ability to speak, Lydia takes Bruno into her home to oversee his education and nurture his passion for painting. But for all of his gifts, the chimpanzee has a rough time caging his more primal urges. His untimely outburst...