William Faulkner

Heavy Paperback (2 to 4 lbs)

In prose of biblical grandeur and feverish intensity, William Faulkner reconstructed the history of the American South as a tragic legend of courage and cruelty, gallantry and greed, futile nobility and obscene crimes. No single volume better conveys the scope of Faulkner's vision than The Portable Faulkner .

The Portable Faulkner

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Mark E. Eberhart

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Understanding the World by the Way It Comes Apart

Did you know-- - It took more than an iceberg to sink the Titanic. - The Challenger disaster was predicted. - Unbreakable glass dinnerware had its origin in railroad lanterns. - A football team cannot lose momentum. - Mercury thermometers are prohibited on airplanes for a crucial reason. - Kryptonite bicycle locks are easily broken. "Things fall apart" is more than a poetic insight--it is a fundamental property of the physical world. Why Things Break explores the fascinating question of what holds things together (for a while), what breaks them apart, and why the answers have a direct bearing on our everyday lives. When Mark Eberhart was growing up in the 1960s, he learned that splitting an atom leads to a terrible explosion--which prompted him to worry that when he cut into a stick of butter, he would inadvertently unleash a nuclear cataclysm. Years later, as a chemistry professor, he remembered this childhood fear when he began to ponder the fact that we know more about how to split an atom than we do about how a pane of glass breaks. In Why Things Break, Eberhart leads us on a remarkable and entertaining exploration of all the cracks, clefts, fissures, and faults examined in the field of materials science and the many astonishing discoveries that have been made about everything from the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger to the crashing of your hard drive. Understanding why things break is crucial to modern life on every level, from personal safety to macroeconomics, but as Eberhart reveals here, it is also an area of cutting-edge science that is as provocative as it is illuminating.

Why Things Break

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Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

A Dyslexic Traitor, an Unbreakable Code, and the FBI's Hunt for America's Stolen Secrets

Before Edward Snowden's infamous data breach, the largest theft of government secrets was committed by an ingenious traitor whose intricate espionage scheme and complex system of coded messages were made even more baffling by his dyslexia. His name is Brian Regan, but he came to be known as The Spy Who Couldn't Spell.

In December of 2000, FBI Special Agent Steven Carr of the bureau's Washington, D.C., office received a package from FBI New York- a series of coded letters from an anonymous sender to the Libyan consulate, offering to sell classified United States intelligence. The offer, and the threat, were all too real. A self-proclaimed CIA analyst with top secret clearance had information about U.S. reconnaissance satellites, air defense systems, weapons depots, munitions factories, and underground bunkers throughout the Middle East.

Rooting out the traitor would not be easy, but certain clues suggested a government agent with a military background, a family, and a dire need for money. Leading a diligent team of investigators and code breakers, Carr spent years hunting down a dangerous spy and his cache of stolen secrets.

In this fast-paced true-life spy thriller, Yudhijit Bhattacharjee reveals how the FBI unraveled Regan's strange web of codes to build a case against a man who nearly collapsed America's military security.

The Spy Who Couldn't Spell

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Gregory D. Sumner

A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels

In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the quintessential American writer’s profound engagement with the "American Dream" in its various forms. Sumner gives us a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American Dream: grandiose ambition, unbridled material success, rugged individualism, and "winners" over "losers." Instead of a celebration of these values, we read and share Vonnegut’s outrage, his brokenhearted empathy for those who struggle under the ethos of survival-of-the-fittest in the frontier mentality—something he once memorably described as "an impossibly tough-minded experiment in loneliness." Heroic and tragic, Vonnegut’s novels reflect the pain of his own life’s experiences, relieved by small acts of kindness, friendship, and love that exemplify another way of living, another sort of human utopia, an alternative American Dream, and the reason we always return to his books.

Unstuck in Time

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David Baron

A Nation's Epic Race to Catch the Shadow of the Moon and Win the Glory of the World

This epic story of a nineteenth century celestial drama will enthrall listeners, as the first coast to coast total solar eclipse in 99 years plunges America into darkness.

American Eclipse

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Raymond Chandler

In His Own Words

Told through Chandler's novels, short stories and letters, a rare glimpse into the life of "the man with no home" reveals what it was like to be a writer of "hard-boiled" fiction, discusses the work of his contemporaries and reveals his Hollywood relationships. 20,000 first printing.

The World of Raymond Chandler

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Aaron James

An Aquatic Inquiry into a Life of Meaning

From the bestselling author of Assholes: A Theory, a book that--in the tradition of Shopclass as Soulcraft, Barbarian Days and Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance--uses the experience and the ethos of surfing to explore key concepts in philosophy.

The existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre once declared "the ideal limit of aquatic sports . . . is waterskiing." The avid surfer and lavishly credentialed academic philosopher Aaron James vigorously disagrees, and in Surfing with Sartre he intends to expound the thinking surfer's view of the matter, in the process elucidating such philosophical categories as freedom, being, phenomenology, morality, epistemology, and even the emerging values of what he terms "leisure capitalism." In developing his unique surfer-philosophical worldview, he draws from his own experience of surfing and from surf culture and lingo, and includes many relevant details from the lives of the philosophers, from Aristotle to Wittgenstein, with whose thought he engages. In the process, he'll speak to readers in search of personal and social meaning in our current anxious moment, by way of doing real, authentic philosophy.

Surfing with Sartre

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Oliver Sacks

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

And Other Clinical Tales

Clinical tales, case history, neurological disorders, author of Awakening and a Leg to stand on Oliver Sacks.

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

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Robert Poole

How Man First Saw the Earth

Earthrise tells the remarkable story of the first photographs of Earth from space and the totally unexpected impact of those images. The Apollo “Earthrise” and “Blue Marble” photographs were beamed across the world some forty years ago. They had an astounding effect, Robert Poole explains, and in fact transformed thinking about the Earth and its environment in a way that echoed throughout religion, culture, and science. Gazing upon our whole planet for the first time, we saw ourselves and our place in the universe with new clarity.

Poole delves into new areas of research and looks at familiar history from fresh perspectives. With intriguing anecdotes and wonderful pictures, he examines afresh the politics of the Apollo missions, the challenges of whole Earth photography, and the story of the behind-the-scenes struggles to get photographs of the Earth put into mission plans. He traces the history of imagined visions of Earth from space and explores what happened when imagination met reality. The photographs of Earth represented a turning point, Poole contends. In their wake, Earth Day was inaugurated, the environmental movement took off, and the first space age ended. People turned their focus back toward Earth, toward the precious and fragile planet we call home.

Earthrise

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Jeffrey Meyers

Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe

The 1956 wedding of Marilyn Monroe and Arthur Miller surprised the world. The Genius and the Goddess presents an intimate portrait of the prelude to and ultimate tragedy of their short marriage. Distinguished biographer Jeffrey Meyers skillfully explores why they married, what sustained them for five years, and what ultimately destroyed their marriage and her life.

The greatest American playwright of the twentieth century and the most popular American actress both complemented and wounded one another. Marilyn craved attention and success but became dependent on drugs, alcohol, and sexual adventures. Miller experienced creative agony with her.  Their marriage coincided with the creative peak of her career, yet private and public conflict caused both of them great anguish.

Meyers has crafted a richly nuanced dual biography based on his quarter-century friendship with Miller, interviews with major players of stage and screen during the postwar Hollywood era, and extensive archival research. He describes their secret courtship. He also reveals new information about the effect of the HUAC anti-Communist witch-hunts on Miller and his friendship with Elia Kazan. The fascinating cast of characters includes Marilyn's co-stars Sir Laurence Olivier, Yves Montand, Montgomery Clift, and Clark Gab≤ her leading directors John Huston, Billy Wilder, and George Cuk∨ and her literary friends Dame Edith Sitwell, Isak Dinesen, Saul Bellow, and Vladimir Nabokov.

Meyers offers the most in-depth account of the making and meaning of The Misfits. Written by Miller for Monroe, this now-classic film was a personal disaster. But Marilyn remained Miller's tragic muse and her character, exalted and tormented, lived on for the next forty years in his work.

The Genius and the Goddess

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Dean Koontz

After stumbling upon a mysterious rag doll on his doorstep, Tommy Phan finds himself hunted in his own home, as the doll begins to grow into a monster that is determined to kill him. Reprint.

Tick Tock

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Ballantine #37407, second printing, July 1992

Caspar, The Lost Continent 

The Land That Time Forgot

Second Collection from ‘Unknown’ magazine, stories by Theodore Sturgeon, Alfred Bester, Cleve Cartmill, Jane Rice and Issac Asimov. 

Browse by categories

William Faulkner

The Portable Faulkner

Mark E. Eberhart

Why Things Break

Yudhijit Bhattacharjee

The Spy Who Couldn't Spell

Gregory D. Sumner

Unstuck in Time

David Baron

American Eclipse

Raymond Chandler

The World of Raymond Chandler

Aaron James

Surfing with Sartre

Oliver Sacks

The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat

Robert Poole

Earthrise

Jeffrey Meyers

The Genius and the Goddess

Dean Koontz

Tick Tock

Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Land That Time Forgot

Multiple

The Unknown 5 (R-962)

Bob Flaws

The Secret of Chinese Pulse Diagnosis

Edgar Rice Burroughs

Pirates of Venus

Edgar Rice Burroughs

The Lost Continent

John Wyndham

The Day of the Triffids

Roald Dahl

Kiss Kiss (French) 1962

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