Off The Tracks: A Beatnik Family Journey is a coming of age novel set in the whorl of the early 1960s, when the first cracks in an idealized American life were revealing themselves. Kate, a resourceful eleven-year old girl craves home and security. Her mother Ellie falls in love with a Beatnik and adopts his alternative lifestyle in an attempt to create a new family unit. Hilarious, poignant and sad, the characters explore alternatives to conventional relationships and identities as they t...

**NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALISTNAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIMENAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MORE THAN 45 PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The New Yorker • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • The Atlantic • Ne...

Before Sex and the City there was Bridget Jones. And before Bridget Jones was The Artificial Silk Girl.In 1931, a young woman writer living in Germany was inspired by Anita Loos's Gentlemen Prefer Blondes to describe pre-war Berlin and the age of cinematic glamour through the eyes of a woman. The resulting novel, The Artificial Silk Girl, became an acclaimed bestseller and a masterwork of German literature, in the tradition of Christopher Isherwood's Berlin Stories and Bertolt Brec...

The rags to riches tale of a larger-than-life romance of over seven decadesMe & Issy is a love story about how a troubled and deprived child grew up and chanced to meet a man who worshipped her, brought her a fantasy life of four boys and extraordinary opulence — and banished her self-doubt. She in her turn was awestruck and mystified by his acumen and daring during his founding of the Four Seasons Hotels.Beginning with her childhood in North Toron...

From the beloved author of Comeback Love and Wherever There Is Light, comes “a sweeping tale full of humor and heartbreak” (Karin Tanabe, author of The Diplomat’s Daughter) about the life-changing journey of a young man who travels from New Jersey to Khrushchev’s Russia and the beaches of Southern France to discover long-hidden secrets about his heritage.In 1950s New Jersey, teacher Michael Daniels—or Misha Danielov to his doting Russian-...

Witty, wide-ranging stories of one man’s adventures in the world“Filled with pleasures . . . I enjoyed it immensely.” — Meg Wolitzer, New York Times–bestselling author of The InterestingsIn The Barefoot Bingo Caller, Antanas Sileika finds what’s funny and touching in the most unlikely places, from a bingo hall to the collapsing Soviet Union. He shares stories of his attempts to shake off his suburban, ethnic, folk...

A fierce and funny memoir of kitchen and bedroom from James Beard Award winner Betty FussellA survivor of the domestic revolutions that turned American television sets from Leave It to Beaver to The Mary Tyler Moore Show to Julia Child's The French Chef, food historian and journalist Betty Fussell has spotlighted the changes in American culture through food over the last half century in nearly a dozen books.In this witty and candid ...

A "wonderful memoir" of a woman's life as a fashion-magazine writer in 1950s and '60s New York ( Publishers Weekly).Mary Cantwell arrived in Manhattan one summer in the early 1950s with eighty dollars, a portable typewriter, a wardrobe of unsuitable clothes, a copy of The Poems of Gerard Manley Hopkins, a boyfriend she was worried might be involved with the Communists, and no idea how to live on her own. She moved to the Village because she had hea...

'I can't remember what it was like being born, but from what they used to tell me it seemed almost as if everything had been fine up to that point.'Standing in her family's two-bedroom flat in the Promised Land, a little girl realizes that once again she won't be getting a cat for her birthday. She's been wanting one ever since she was five – all the way back to when they were living in the refugee camp. In the East, her Grandma made cakes and kept rabbits; now ther...

Mothers of the 1950s were wasp-waisted, dutiful, serene, and tied to the kitchen with apron strings. Or so we thought. This collection of searing and startling poetry and prose unties the stereotype and reveals women who were strong, wild, talented, wise, mad, creative, desperate, angry, courageous, bitter, tenacious, reckless and beautiful, sometimes all at once. The fifty-six contributors from across Canada and the world include multi-award-winning poets, novelists, and essayists, as wel...

Yoko Tawada—winner of the National Book Award—presents three terrific new ghost stories, each named after a street in BerlinThe always astonishing Yoko Tawada here takes a walk on the supernatural side of the street. In "Kollwitzstrasse," as the narrator muses on former East Berlin's new bourgeois health food stores, so popular with wealthy young people, a ghost boy begs her to buy him the old-fashioned sweets he craves. She worries that sugar's still sugar—but why...

This story is more like a history rather than a memoir. It starts after WWI and outlines the changes in many European countries' social makeup, particularly in post-war Germany. Unemployment and staggering inflation where half a loaf of bread cost billions and two beers a mere one-hundred billion led to the rise of Adolf Hitler, an Austrian man. He promised work and bread and kept his promises. The following years brought a tremendous upswing in life but also carried Germany into WWII. Six...