**A blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island, where a conservation assignment becomes a moral reckoning.“An instant classic.” —The Washington Post • “Excellent ” —The New York Times • “Urgent and lyrical.” —NPR“Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected — a story for our times.”—Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter**Reeling from tragedy, former jazz musician–turned–schooltea...

**“Funny, bighearted...Miles specializes in giving fully rounded humanity to characters who might elsewhere be treated as stock figures...pitch-perfect.”— New York Times Book Review"Miles is a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him."— Los Angeles Review of BooksA profound new novel about a paralyzed young man’s unexplainable recovery—a stunning exploration of faith, scienc...

A " shrewd, funny, and sometimes devastating" novel about the things we desire and the things we throw away ( Entertainment Weekly).A New York Times Notable BookA highly inventive, corrosively funny story of our times, Want Not exposes three different worlds in various states of disrepair—a young freegan couple living off the grid in New York City; a once-prominent linguist, sacked at midlife by the dissolution of his marr...

A "thrilling . . . captivating" account of the most famous shipwreck before the Titanic—a tragedy that inspired an unforgettable masterpiece of Western art ( The Boston Globe).In June 1816, the Medusa set sail. Commanded by an incompetent captain, the frigate ran aground off the desolate West African coast. During the chaotic evacuation a privileged few claimed the lifeboats, while 147 men and one woman were herded aboard a makeshift raft...

Chronicling two-hundred years of glamour, intrigue, and hedonism, this rich and vivid history of the French Riviera features a vast cast of characters, from Pablo Picasso and Coco Chanel to Andre Matisse and James Baldwin.1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream....

Sometimes the planes don’t fly on time.Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter’s wedding when his flight is canceled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O’Hare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for ...

1835, Lord Brougham founded Cannes, introducing bathing and the manicured lawn to the wilds of the Mediterranean coast. Today, much of that shore has become a concrete mass from which escape is an exclusive dream. In the 185 years between, the stretch of seaboard from the red mountains of the Esterel to the Italian border hosted a cultural phenomenon well in excess of its tiny size.A mere handful of towns and resorts created by foreign visitors—notably English, Russian, and America...

**A blackly comic literary gem in which a broken man confronts a broken world on an uninhabited Pacific island, where a conservation assignment becomes a moral reckoning.“An instant classic.” —The Washington Post • “Excellent ” —The New York Times • “Urgent and lyrical.” —NPR“Beautifully weird, eerie, unexpected — a story for our times.”—Kevin Barry, author of The Heart in Winter**Reeling from tragedy, former jazz musician–turned–schooltea...

Established in 1703 by the sheer will of its charismatic founder, the homicidal megalomaniac Peter the Great, St. Petersburg's dazzling yet unhinged reputation was quickly cemented by the sadistic dominion of its early rulers. This city, in its successive incarnations—St. Petersburg, Petrograd, Leningrad and, once again, St. Petersburg—has always been a place of perpetual contradiction.It was a window to Europe and the Enlightenment, but so much of Russia’s unique glory was also created he...

**“Funny, bighearted...Miles specializes in giving fully rounded humanity to characters who might elsewhere be treated as stock figures...pitch-perfect.”— New York Times Book Review"Miles is a writer so virtuosic that readers will feel themselves becoming better, more observant people from reading him."— Los Angeles Review of BooksA profound new novel about a paralyzed young man’s unexplainable recovery—a stunning exploration of faith, scienc...

Bennie Ford, a fifty-three-year-old failed poet turned translator, is traveling to his estranged daughter’s wedding when his flight is cancelled. Stuck with thousands of fuming passengers in the purgatory of O’Hare airport, he watches the clock tick and realizes that he will miss the ceremony. Frustrated, irate, and helpless, Bennie does the only thing he can: he starts to write a letter. But what begins as a hilariously excoriating demand for a refund soon becomes a cris de coeur of a lif...

This book explores the material religion of contemporary Shimla, a vibrant postcolonial city, famed for its colonial heritage, set against the backdrop of the North-Western Himalayas. Jonathan Miles-Watson demonstrates that this landscape is able to peacefully reconcile the apparent tensions of faith, heritage and identity in a way that unseats traditional theories of religion, politics and heritage. It presents a mystery that is written in space through time; the key to unlocking this mys...