Houghton: 1009 books

Witty, “utterly compelling” short stories about Jewish men of a certain age, by the New York Times–bestselling author of Snobbery (San Francisco Chronicle Book Review). Set in Chicago and populated by characters ranging from lawyers and professors to scrap metal dealers, this collection...

Three “sly, self-knowing, and hilarious” novellas from the highly acclaimed author of The Lost Language of Cranes (The New York Times). Here are three novellas of escape and exile, touching and funny and at times calculatedly outrageous. In “Saturn Street,” a disaffected LA screenwriter...

The pioneering and still essential text on semantics, urging readers to improve human communication and understanding with precise, concrete language. In 1938, Stuart Chase revolutionized the study of semantics with his classic text, The Tyranny of Words. Decades later, this eminently useful...

One of the Believer’s Best Books of the Year: One woman’s journey through that awkward period between being born and dying. A modern odyssey about trying to find one’s home in the world, this collection of wickedly funny and offbeat vignettes touches upon quantum physics; the Donner Party;...

The “remarkable” story of the grass-roots movement that freed millions of Jews from the Soviet Union (The Plain Dealer). At the end of World War II, nearly three million Jews were trapped inside the USSR. They lived a paradox—unwanted by a repressive Stalinist state, yet forbidden to...

Winner of the John Burroughs Medal: An “admission ticket to a secret corner of the world” (Bill McKibben). Naturalist David Carroll has dedicated his life to art and to wetlands. He is as passionate about swamps, bogs, vernal ponds, and the creatures who live in them as most of us are about...

National Book Award Finalist: “Wickersham has journeyed into the dark underworld inside her father and herself and emerged with a powerful, gripping story.” —The Boston Globe One winter morning in 1991, Joan Wickersham’s father shot himself in the head. The father she loved would never...

From the prize-winning poet: “A stunning volume . . . A master of the understatement, Matthews is wryly philosophical and self-deprecating.” —Booklist When William Matthews died, the day after his fifty-fifth birthday, America lost one of its most important poets, one whose humor...

A collection from “one of the few contemporary poets who really knew how to make the vernacular sing” (Library Journal). In this collection of poems completed shortly before his death, William Matthews seems to be looking his last on all things lovely: music, food and wine, love. In the...

An ex-astronaut investigates a string of potential murders in this novel by the Kafka Prize–winning author of Solaris. Vacation is supposed to be relaxing. But while traveling in Naples, several American tourists die in a most macabre and unusual way: committing suicide in a fit of madness....

The author of The Seven Storey Mountain explores the mysticism of Saint John of the Cross. The only thing that can save the world from complete moral collapse is a spiritual revolution. . . . The desire for unworldliness, detachment, and union with God is the most fundamental expression of...

“A merry satire about the smart, moneyed, and demanding retirees living in a gated community . . . Scintillating on the surface and churning with danger below” (Booklist). From a National Book Award–winning author, this is a collection of “nine darkly comic stories set in a gated community...

An Israeli professor and an Arab student join forces in a witty novel that “tells a simple story about a region that complicates all it touches” (The New Yorker). Yochanan Rivlin, a professor at Haifa University, is a man of boundless and often naïve curiosity. His wife, Hagit, a district...

Example in this ebook   CHAPTER I.    THE VAGARIES OF GENIUS. “Great minds are bravely eccentric; they scorn the beaten track.”—Goldsmith. In the city of Tours, in whose gabled streets there lingers still some memory of la belle Impéria, Honoré de Balzac...