The American horse is "a canvas on which we’ve painted American identity.”For the more than two million horse owners in the United States and the countless others who dream of riding, here is a collection offering the best writing about horses from America’s best writers. “Horse Whisperer” Buck Brannaman, New York Time’s best-seller Melinda Roth, and a dozen other writers offer engaging stories that will if not keep you in the saddle at least have you read...

If you visit the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Massachusetts, you might be surprised to see frames without any paintings in them. This isn’t a mistake—museum officials hope to someday return the artwork that was stolen from the museum to these frames. In the early morning hours after St. Patrick’s Day in 1990, a guard at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Art Museum was tricked into allowing a pair of thieves disguised as police officers to enter the building. The thieves used duct ...

Tales of survival are as old as humanity! In Survival: True Stories, readers discover accounts of survival that required innovation, a thirst for adventure, and even a bit of brutality. Whether it's Shackleton on the frozen landscape of Antarctica or William Bligh and his loyal followers adrift in the Pacific after mutiny on the Bounty, survival is a fascinating topic for readers ages 9 to 12!Survival is the second book in the Murder & Mayhem series, whic...

Top golfing instructor Jim McLean uses rare film footage of Ben Hogan to break down the greatest swing of all timeGolf legend Ben Hogan had the perfect golf swing, but how exactly it worked has long been a mystery?until now. Using footage from three never-before analyzed films of Hogan at his very best, Jim McLean analyzes the crucial motions of Hogan's entire golf swing and shows you how to integrate his mechanics into your own game. You'll study Hogan's blend of ...

Listen...A set of signals has been pulsing, repeating, modulating in the airspace of literature...This essay is an invitation to listen to those signals, as they travel through and shape the work of Aeschylus and Ovid, Rilke, Conrad, Burroughs, Joyce and others. To retune our idea of what a writer does, of what the very act of writing 'is'. To rethink literature itself along the lines of transmission and reception, signal and noise...Listen: two times. I repeat...

A postmodern masterpiece about fraud and forgery by one of the most distinctive, accomplished novelists of the last century.The Recognitions is a sweeping depiction of a world in which everything that anyone recognizes as beautiful or true or good emerges as anything but: our world. The book is a masquerade, moving from New England to New York to Madrid, from the art world to the underworld, but it centers on the story of Wyatt Gwyon, the son of a New Engl...

Modernist and contemporary literature are marked by a preoccupation with time, specifically with the passage of time characterized by starts and stops and suspended states of waiting. Acclaimed novelist Tom McCarthy brings out a temporal pattern, a subliminal convention of a certain fringe of modernism that works both in and against the canon of modernist literature in works by Thomas Pynchon, J. G. Ballard, Maurice Blanchot, Thomas Mann, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, and William Faulkner, a...

Myles Donne is certain of nothing except that he can never return to Oxford. Two years ago, as a much-admired Jesuit at the threshold of prestige and possibility, he made two irredeemable mistakes: he fell in love with the perfect woman and then killed her in a motorcycle accident. Shattered, he lost his faith, left the priesthood, abandoned his career and decamped to his birthplace in Colorado, where he’s been working in a hardware store, languishing in ignominious limbo. When he receives...

U. is a 'corporate anthropologist' who, while working on a giant, epoch-defining project no one really understands, is also tasked with writing the Great Report on our society. But instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions.Is there a secret logic holding all these images together?...

Through a series of penetrating conversations originally published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Review of Books, Brad Evans and Natasha Lennard talk with a wide range of cutting edge thinkers--including Oliver Stone, Simon Critchley, and Elaine Scarry--to explore the problem of violence in everyday life, politics, culture, media, language, memory, and the environment. "To bring out the best of us," writes Evans, "we have to c...

When Virginia Dare was born in Roanoke Colony in 1587, her birth was probably heralded as a new beginning, not just for the tiny baby but for the entire colony. She was the first child of English parents to be born in what English settlers called the “New World.” But three years later, Virginia, her parents, and all other members of the Roanoke colony had disappeared. History is silent about their fate. The story of Virginia Dare and her fellow settlers is a famous one that is still studie...

Essays on literature, pop culture, and more from the cult novelist and critic Tom McCarthyFifteen brilliant essays written over as many years provide a map of the sensibility and critical intelligence of Tom McCarthy, one of the most original and challenging novelists at work today. Typewriters, Bombs, Jellyfish explores a wide range of subjects, from the weather considered as a form of media, to the paintings of Gerhard Richter and the movies of David Lyn...