Cathy O'Neil

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Texas

How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy

Longlisted for the National Book Award New York Times Bestseller A former Wall Street quant sounds an alarm on the mathematical models that pervade modern life -- and threaten to rip apart our social fabric We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives--where we go to school, whether we get a car loan, how much we pay for health insurance--are being made not by humans, but by mathematical models. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules, and bias is eliminated. But as Cathy O'Neil reveals in this urgent and necessary book, the opposite is true. The models being used today are opaque, unregulated, and uncontestable, even when they're wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination: If a poor student can't get a loan because a lending model deems him too risky (by virtue of his zip code), he's then cut off from the kind of education that could pull him out of poverty, and a vicious spiral ensues. Models are propping up the lucky and punishing the downtrodden, creating a "toxic cocktail for democracy." Welcome to the dark side of Big Data. Tracing the arc of a person's life, O'Neil exposes the black box models that shape our future, both as individuals and as a society. These "weapons of math destruction" score teachers and students, sort r sum s, grant (or deny) loans, evaluate workers, target voters, set parole, and monitor our health. O'Neil calls on modelers to take more responsibility for their algorithms and on policy makers to regulate their use. But in the end, it's up to us to become more savvy about the models that govern our lives. This important book empowers us to ask the tough questions, uncover the truth, and demand change. -- Longlist for National Book Award (Non-Fiction) -- Goodreads, semi-finalist for the 2016 Goodreads Choice Awards (Science and Technology) -- Kirkus, Best Books of 2016 -- New York Times, 100 Notable Books of 2016 (Non-Fiction) -- The Guardian, Best Books of 2016 -- WBUR's "On Point," Best Books of 2016: Staff Picks -- Boston Globe, Best Books of 2016, Non-Fiction

Weapons of Math Destruction

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Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

The Sound and the Fury

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Nine Stories

A finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction and the Story Prize, the first ever collection of "dazzlingly told" (The New York Times) short stories--now available as a trade paperback.

Set in Greece, the Caribbean, Manhattan, a white-collar prison and outer space, this "small masterpiece of short fiction" (USA Today) is a mesmerizing introduction to Don DeLillo's iconic voice. In "Creation," a couple at the end of a cruise somewhere in the West Indies can't get off the island--flights canceled, unconfirmed reservations, a dysfunctional economy. In "Human Moments in World War III," two men orbiting the earth, charged with gathering intelligence and reporting to Colorado Command, hear the voices of American radio, from a half century earlier. In the title story, Sisters Edgar and Grace, nuns working the violent streets of the South Bronx, confirm the neighborhood's miracle, the apparition of a dead child, Esmeralda.

Nuns, astronauts, athletes, terrorists and travelers, the characters in The Angel Esmeralda propel themselves into the world and define it. These nine stories describe an extraordinary journey of one great writer whose prescience about world events and ear for American language changed the literary landscape.

The Angel Esmeralda

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Stein's most famous work; one of the richest and most irreverent biographies ever written.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

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Stories

In this thought-provoking and playful short story collection, David Foster Wallace nudges at the boundaries of fiction with inimitable wit and seductive intelligence.

Wallace's stories present a world where the bizarre and the banal are interwoven and where hideous men appear in many guises. Among the stories are 'The Depressed Person,' a dazzling and blackly humorous portrayal of a woman's mental state; 'Adult World,' which reveals a woman's agonized consideration of her confusing sexual relationship with her husband; and 'Brief Interviews with Hideous Men,' a dark, hilarious series of imagined interviews with men on the subject of their relations with women.

Wallace delights in leftfield observation, mining the absurd, the surprising, and the illuminating from every situation. This collection will enthrall DFW fans, and provides a perfect introduction for new readers.

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

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NATIONAL BESTSELLER * "Part horror tale, part mystery, part romance ... utterly fantastic."--O, The Oprah Magazine * The bestselling, award-winning author of A Visit from the Goon Squad brilliantly conjures a world from which escape is impossible and where the keep--the tower, the last stand--is both everything worth protecting and the very thing that must be surrendered in order to survive.

Two cousins, irreversibly damaged by a childhood prank, reunite twenty years later to renovate a medieval castle in Eastern Europe. In an environment of extreme paranoia, cut off from the outside world, the men reenact the signal event of their youth, with even more catastrophic results.

And as the full horror of their predicament unfolds, a prisoner, in jail for an unnamed crime, recounts an unforgettable story that seamlessly brings the crimes of the past and present into piercing relation.

The Keep

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A Novel

WINNER OF THE 2019 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION NATIONAL BESTSELLER “Electrifying” (People) • “Masterly” (The Guardian) • “Dramatic and memorable” (The New Yorker) • “Magic” (TIME) • “Ingenious” (The Financial Times) • "A gonzo literary performance” (Entertainment Weekly) • “Rare and splendid” (The Boston Globe) • “Remarkable” (USA Today) • “Delicious” (The New York Times) • “Book groups, meet your next selection" (NPR) In an American suburb in the early 1980s, students at a highly competitive performing arts high school struggle and thrive in a rarified bubble, ambitiously pursuing music, movement, Shakespeare, and, particularly, their acting classes. When within this striving “Brotherhood of the Arts,” two freshmen, David and Sarah, fall headlong into love, their passion does not go unnoticed—or untoyed with—by anyone, especially not by their charismatic acting teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The outside world of family life and economic status, of academic pressure and of their future adult lives, fails to penetrate this school’s walls—until it does, in a shocking spiral of events that catapults the action forward in time and flips the premise upside-down. What the reader believes to have happened to David and Sarah and their friends is not entirely true—though it’s not false, either. It takes until the book’s stunning coda for the final piece of the puzzle to fall into place—revealing truths that will resonate long after the final sentence. As captivating and tender as it is surprising, Susan Choi's Trust Exercise will incite heated conversations about fiction and truth, and about friendships and loyalties, and will leave readers with wiser understandings of the true capacities of adolescents and of the powers and responsibilities of adults.

Trust Exercise

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Light in August

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A Boy's Will and North of Boston

A collection of two of Robert Frost's most celebrated poems in their original form: A Boy's Will and North of Boston.
 
The publication of A Boy's Will (1913) and North of Boston (1914) marked the debut of Robert Frost as a major talent and established him as the true poetic voice of New England. Four of his volumes would win the Pulitzer Prize before his death in 1963, and his body of work has since become an integral part of the American national heritage.
 
This is the only edition to present these two classics in their original form. A Boy's Will introduced readers to Frost's unmistakable poetic voice, and in North of Boston, we find two of his most famous poems, "Mending Wall" and "The Death of the Hired Man." With an introduction by distinguished critic and Amherst professor William H. Pritchard and an afterword by poet and critic Peter Davison, this centennial edition stands as a complete and vital introduction to the work of the quintessential modern American poet.

Poems by Robert Frost

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Now an HBO series starring Kathryn Hahn! “Light, zingy, and laugh-out-loud funny” (People), the New York Times bestselling novel about sex, love, and identity as seen through the eyes of a middle-aged woman and her college freshman son. A forty-six-year-old divorcee whose beloved only child has just left for college, Eve Fletcher is struggling to adjust to her empty nest. One night she receives a text from an anonymous number that says, “U R my MILF!” Over the months that follow, that message comes to obsess Eve. While leading her all-too-placid life—serving as Executive Director of the local senior center and taking a community college course on Gender and Society—Eve can’t curtail her own interest in a porn website that features the erotic exploits of ordinary, middle-aged women like herself. Before long, Eve’s online fixations begin to spill over into real life, revealing new romantic possibilities that threaten to upend her quiet suburban existence. Meanwhile, miles away at the state college, Eve’s son Brendan—a jock and aspiring frat boy—discovers that his new campus isn’t nearly as welcoming to his hard-partying lifestyle as he had imagined. Only a few weeks into his freshman year, Brendan is floundering in a college environment that challenges his white-dude privilege and shames him for his outmoded, chauvinistic ideas of sex. As the New England autumn turns cold, both mother and son find themselves enmeshed in morally fraught situations that come to a head on one fateful November night. “The sweetest and most charming novel about pornography addiction and the harrowing issues of sexual consent that you will probably ever read” (The New York Times Book Review), Mrs. Fletcher is a timeless examination of sexuality, identity, parenthood, and the big clarifying mistakes people can make when they’re no longer sure of who they are or where they belong. “Tom Perrotta’s latest might just be his best” (NPR).

Mrs. Fletcher

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"YouTube Mastermind" Orion Carloto turns raw emotion into powerful, digestible verse in her debut collection of poetry. Flux is a somber narrative, an ode to change, a collection of poetry and prose written from the many states of grief over a broken heart. With original illustrations by artist Katie Roberts, Orion Carloto creates a dream world for the brokenhearted and paints a whimsical picture around the themes of love, loss, solitude, depression, sex, nostalgia, and unrequited romance. Flux takes readers through a raw and sorrowful journey of each and every bitter moment of heartbreak. Forewarning, Flux is best read with a warm cup of coffee in hand.

Flux

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Collection of short first-person poems about relationships.

Whiskey Words and a Shovel I

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Poems

In Invention of the Wilderness, Bruce Bond explores the wilderness as a spiritual, psychological, and ecological realm?a territory that, depending on our tolerances and affections, calls out for order, exploitation, expansion, or preservation. Although to talk of ?inventing? the wilderness seems paradoxical, the book seeks to reclaim the etymological root of ?invention? as a ?venturing in.? To invent a wilderness is to go inward by way of attentive engagement in the natural world, to affirm and liberate imaginative expression as no mere mirror of nature, but a force of it. At times meditative and melancholic, though also vibrant and full of life, Invention of the Wilderness proposes an embodied and reflective way of being in the world.

Invention of the Wilderness

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Shift Work gathers a chorus from the storytelling working classes of the Upper South. In narrative poems made of sinewy, Whitmanesque lines, Bobby C. Rogers composes portraits of dwellers in the small towns, unincorporated communities, and hard-edged cities they have flown to, always packing their past with them, an inheritance as ephemeral as vapor, made mostly of memory even as it was being lived.

Shift Work

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Light at the Seam, a new collection from North Carolina poet Joseph Bathanti, is an exploration of mountaintop removal in southern Appalachian coal country. The volume illuminates and champions often invisible people residing, in a precarious moment in time, on the glorious, yet besieged, Appalachian earth. Their call to defend it, as well as their faith that the land will exact its own reckoning, constitutes a sacred as well as existential quest. Rooted in social and restorative justice, Light at the Seam contemplates the earth as fundamentally sacramental, a crucible of awe and mystery, able to regenerate itself and its people even as it succumbs to them. More than mere cautionary tale, this is a volume of hope and wonder.

Light at the Seam

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Dispatches from an over-Traveled Italy

Twenty-seven years in the making, Terra Cognita chronicles the author?s continual travels?and problematic (if still, at times, ecstatic) encounters?in the ?bel paese.? Across nine richly evocative essays, Chad Davidson investigates the seemingly never-ending fascination that travelers have with Italy.

As much a meditation on what home and away mean as it is a travel memoir, Terra Cognita finds literary predecessors such as Dante and Italo Calvino crowding in alongside more accustomed sights from travel shows, Hollywood films, and tourist guides. Though each essay departs from a particular location in Italy and remains rooted in the author?s own history there, the book ultimately becomes less about those places and more about the placelessness any such journey can engender, how?even after flying across an ocean and landing in a foreign country?we are still hopelessly and fully ourselves.

Terra Cognita

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#paperback #norton #anthology #literature

English

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1974 - 1945

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#paperback #norton #literature #anthology

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1865-1914

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#paperback #literature #norton #anthology

Read by more than 2.5 million students over 30 years, The Norton Anthology of American Literature sets the standard and remains an unmatched value.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature

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The Thinking Person's Guide to Writing in the 21st Century

"Pinker has a lot of ideas and sometimes controversial opinions about writing and in this entertaining and instructive book he rethinks the usage guide for the 21st century. Don't blame the internet, he says, good writing has always been hard. It requires imagination, taking pleasure in reading, overcoming the difficult we all have in imaging what it's like to not know something we do know."--Publisher information.

The Sense of Style

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#paperback #faulkner #fiction #classic #americana 

Design manuscript, setting copy, four galley proofs, page proof, blue line and two reproduction proofs for the corrected edition of the novel edited by Noel Polk.

Brave New World

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#paperback #poems #contemporary #charlesbukowski #poetry 

New Poems

One of the most recognizable poets of the last century, Charles Bukowski is simultaneously a common man and an icon of urban depravity. He uses strong, blunt language to describe life as he lives it, and through it all charts the mutations of morality in modern America.

Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way is a treasure trove of confessional poetry written towards then end of Bukowski's life.  With the overhang of failing health and waning fame, he reflects on his travels, his gambling and drinking, working, not working, sex and love, eating, cats, and more.

Sifting Through is Bukowski at his most meditative - published posthumously, it's completely non-performative, and gets to the heart of Bukowski's lifelong pursuit of natural language and raw honesty.

We recommend you read this as Bukowski wrote: by sifting through the madness for what hits you as the word, the line, the way.

Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way

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Tor Classics are affordably-priced editions designed to attract the young reader. Original dynamic cover art enthusiastically represents the excitement of each story. Appropriate "reader friendly" type sizes have been chosen for each title--offering clear, accurate, and readable text. All editions are complete and unabridged, and feature Introductions and Afterwords.

This edition of War of the Worlds includes a Introduction, Biographical Note, and Afterword by James Gunn.

They came form outer space--Mars, to be exact.

With deadly heat-rays and giant fighting machine they want to conquer Earth and keep humans as their slaves.

Nothing seems to stop them as they spread terror and death across the planet. It is the start of the most important war in Earth's history.

And Earth will never be the same.

Browse by categories

Cathy O'Neil

Weapons of Math Destruction

William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury

Don DeLillo

The Angel Esmeralda

Gertrude Stein

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas

David Foster Wallace

Brief Interviews with Hideous Men

Jennifer Egan

The Keep

Susan Choi

Trust Exercise

William Faulkner

Light in August

Robert Frost; William H. Pritchard (Introduction by); Peter Davison (Afterword by)

Poems by Robert Frost

Tom Perrotta

Mrs. Fletcher

Orion Carloto

Flux

R. H. Sin

Whiskey Words and a Shovel I

Bruce Bond

Invention of the Wilderness

Bobby C. Rogers; Dave Smith (Series edited by)

Shift Work

Joseph Bathanti

Light at the Seam

Chad Davidson

Terra Cognita

Patricia B. Wallace (Editor); Nina Baym (General Editor); Wayne Franklin (Editor); Philip F. Gura (Editor); Jerome Klinkowitz (Editor); Arnold Krupat (Editor); Robert S. Levine (General Editor); Mary Loeffelholz (Editor); Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Editor)

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1974 - 1945

Patricia B. Wallace (Editor); Nina Baym; Wayne Franklin (Editor); Philip F. Gura; Jerome Klinkowitz; Arnold Krupat (Editor); Robert S. Levine; Mary Loeffelholz (Editor); Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Editor)

The Norton Anthology of American Literature, 1865-1914

Patricia B. Wallace (Editor); Nina Baym (General Editor); Wayne Franklin (Editor); Philip F. Gura (Editor); Jerome Klinkowitz (Editor); Arnold Krupat (Editor); Robert S. Levine (General Editor); Mary Loeffelholz (Editor); Jeanne Campbell Reesman (Editor)

The Norton Anthology of American Literature

Steven Pinker

The Sense of Style

William Faulkner; William Faulkner

The Sound and the Fury

Aldous Huxley

Brave New World

Charles Bukowski

Sifting Through the Madness for the Word, the Line, the Way

H. G. Wells

The War of the Worlds

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