Do survival instincts have anything to do with our architectural choices - our liking for a certain room, a special stairway, a plaza in a particular city? In this engaging study Grant Hildebrand discusses ways in which architectural forms emulate some archetypal settings that humans have found appealing - and useful to survival - from ancient times to the present. Speculating ...(展开全部)

A yet-untranslated essay collection on the importance of critical thought, from one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of the 1990s. Wang Xiaobo’s Pleasure of Thinking is an essay collection as riotous as it is contemplative. Between rollicking anecdotes about living between the East and West and serious musings on the intellectual situations at home and abroad, Xiaobo exami...(展开全部)

A yet-untranslated essay collection on the importance of critical thought, from one of the foremost Chinese intellectuals of the 1990s. Wang Xiaobo’s Pleasure of Thinking is an essay collection as riotous as it is contemplative. Between rollicking anecdotes about living between the East and West and serious musings on the intellectual situations at home and abroad, Xiaobo exami...(展开全部)

Nowa Ruda is a small town in Silesia, a region that has at times been part of Poland, Germany, and the former Czechoslovakia. When the narrator of Olga Tokarczuk's House of Day, House of Night moves into the area, she discovers that everyone - and everything - has a story. With the help of Martha, her enigmatic neighbor, she collects these stories, and what emerges is the messa...(展开全部)

A novel about the rich stories of small places, from the Nobel Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of The Books of Jacob and Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead. A woman settles in a remote Polish village where she knows no one. It has few inhabitants, but it teems with the stories of the living and the dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that...(展开全部)

The town of Nowa Ruda and its surrounding countryside is a place of shifting identities. Polish now, it has been German, Czech and Austro-Hungarian among other nationalities in the past.Here, at the hear of Europe, where borders move and languages and their speakers come and go, ordinary ives arenot as simple as they appear. When the narrator and her husband settle in the area,...(展开全部)

From the acclaimed author of The Drowning People (“A literary sensation” — The New York Times Book Review) and Natural Elements (“A magnum opus” — The New Yorker ), an opulent, romantic coming-of-age drama set at the height of Europe’s belle époque, written in the grand tradition with a lightness of touch that is wholly modern and original. The novel opens in Amsterdam...(展开全部)

'The adventures of adolescence had taught Piet Barol that he was extremely attractive to most women and to many men. He was old enough to be pragmatic about this advantage...' It is 1907. The belle epoque is in full swing. Piet Barol has escaped the drabness of the provinces for the grandest mansion in Amsterdam. As tutor to the son of Europe's wealthiest hotelier, he learns ...(展开全部)

'They cut her hair before they dragged her to the place of sacrifice. Her mouth was gagged to stop her cursing her father, her cowardly, two-tongued father. Nonetheless, they heard her muffled screams.' On the day of his daughter's wedding, Agamemnon orders her sacrifice. His daughter is led to her death, and Agamemnon leads his army into battle, where he is rewarded with glori...(展开全部)

THE BESTSELLING POLITICAL THRILLER THAT INTRODUCED THE SCHEMING FRANCIS URQUHART - THE MOST MEMORABLE POLITICIAN OF THE LAST DECADE Francis Urquhart is Chief Whip. He has his hands on every secret in politics - and is willing to betray them all to become Prime Minister. Mattie Storin is a tenacious young political correspondent. She faces the biggest challenge of her life when ...(展开全部)