An examination of WASP culture through the lives of some of its most prominent figures. Envied and lampooned, misunderstood and yet distinctly American, WASPs are as much a culture, socioeconomic and ethnic designation, and state of mind.Charming, witty, and vigorously researced, WASPS traces the rise and fall of this distinctly American phenomenon through the lives of prominent icons from Henry Adams and Theodore Roosevelt to George Santayana and John Jay...

In the early nineteenth century, a series of murders took place in and around London which shocked the whole of England. The appalling nature of the crimes—a brutal slaying in the gambling netherworld, the slaughter of two entire households, and the first of the modern lust-murders—was magnified not only by the lurid atmosphere of an age in which candlelight gave way to gaslight, but also by the efforts of some of the keenest minds of the period to uncover the gruesomest details of the kil...

Play Out the Match , Michael Knox's first published collection of poetry, is also an extended meditation on the idea of reconciliation. Vivid and lyrical, the poems make use of various voices, speakers, and landscapes to explore the surreptitious aspects of fear and indifference, tenderness and fragility. In Play Out the Match , dollar store cashiers, Scottish pub brawlers, lovers, and cowards create a broad and sympathetic world of otherness. Shifting viewpoints and lexicons weave across ...

With The North End Poems , his always vivid new collection, Michael Knox has further honed his lucid, accessible style. In the tradition of The Collected Works of Billy the Kid , Michael Ondaatje's classic book-length poem, this at once gritty and tender lyric sequence creates a desperate but surprising narrative that's reminiscent of David Adams Richards at his very best. Channeling the beliefs, passions, fears, friends and fights of Nick Macfarlane, a young steeltown warehouse worker, Kn...

OverviewIn this provocative reassessment of one of the most controversial figures of twentieth-century American politics, Michael Knox Beran shows how Bobby Kennedy was shaped by values of the aristocratic class to which he had been brought up to belong. He was one of them - until he realized that the welfare state they had helped to create at home and the empire they had helped to found abroad were undermining some of America's most cherished traditions. In denouncing the welfare s...

A heartbroken derelict. An abruptly idealistic executive. A father trying to reconnect with his daughters. Three men inhabiting the same neighbourhood with completely divergent lives come together in a collision that will leave each of them changed forever. In his debut novel, Michael Knox evokes, in cinematic prose, a glimpse of the complexity of the suburban, and a meditation on disaster and masculinity. Harshly Purring presents a poetic and brutal look at isolation and disaster, both se...

In the space of a single decade, three leaders liberated tens of millions of souls, remade their own vast countries, and altered forever the forms of national power:Abraham Lincoln freed a subjugated race and transformed the American Republic.Tsar Alexander II broke the chains of the serfs and brought the rule of law to Russia.Otto von Bismarck threw over the petty Teutonic princes, defeated the House of Austria and the last of the imperial Napoleons, and ...

"I have often wondered for what good end the sensations of Grief could be intended."-- Thomas JeffersonThomas Jefferson suffered during his life from periodic bouts of dejection and despair, shadowed intervals during which he was full of "gloomy forebodings" about what lay ahead.Not long before he composed the Declaration of Independence, the young Jefferson lay for six weeks in idleness and ill health at Monticello, paralyzed by a mysterious "malady." Similar lapse...

Though he was a great statesman, one of America's founding fathers, and the third president of the United States, Thomas Jefferson suffered from depression. In Jefferson's Demons, Michael Knox Beran examines episodes of melancholia in Jefferson's life. In particular, he focuses on the journey Jefferson made to Europe in 1787 to escape the depression that set in due to his tumultuous experience as governor of Virginia following the Revolution and his wife Martha's death. Beran's re...

A fascinating look at the O.J. Simpson murder trial from one of the original jurors.On June 12, 1994, Nicole Brown Simpson and Ronald Goldman were violently murdered, leading to the arrest and trial of former NFL player, O.J. Simpson. The " Trial of the Century" soon turned into a spectacle on both sides of the aisle— and in the jury box itself! In this personal account by a juror who was dismissed before the trial ended, Michael Knox provides a unique look— as bot...

From #1 New York Times bestselling author Christopher Andersen comes a vivid and unsparing yet sympathetic portrait of one of the most complex and enigmatic figures of our time: Charles, who has taken his place on the throne after being the oldest and longest-serving heir in British history.Since the day Charles Philip Arthur George was born, he has been groomed to be King. After more than seventy years of waiting, he finally ascends the throne.

**NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE—The #1 New York Times bestselling worldwide sensation with more than 18 million copies sold, hailed by The New York Times Book Review as “a painfully beautiful first novel that is at once a murder mystery, a coming-of-age narrative and a celebration of nature.”New York Times Readers Pick: 100 Best Books of the 21st Century**For years, rumors of the “Marsh Girl” have haunted Barkley Cove, a quiet town on the North Carol...