Jim Rockford is an ex-con who has an instinct for solving cases. He is as cool as his Pontiac Firebird. From his mobile home in Malibu, this wisecracking private eye takes on the cases of the lost and the dispossessed. His cases usually turn out to be more difficult and dangerous than he initially imagines, and he often ends up in situations over his head.

"An intimate portrait of the iconic playwright, actor, and director Sam Shepard, whose wide-ranging and enduring body of work places him at the center of the American canon, from an award-winning biographer. True West is the story of an American icon, a lasting portrait of Sam Shepard as he really was, revealed by those who knew him best. This sweeping biography charts Shepard's long and complicated journey from a small town in southern California...

"The animating idea of The 1619 Project is that our national narrative is more accurately told if we begin not on July 4, 1776, but in late August of 1619, when a ship arrived in Jamestown bearing a cargo of twenty to thirty enslaved people from Africa. Their arrival inaugurated a barbaric and unprecedented system of chattel slavery that would last for the next 250 years. This is sometimes referred to as the country's original sin, but it is more...

"After being rescued from the Mediterranean, Hakim and his son reach European soil, full of hope. But before they can get to France, they face a new series of challenges: overcrowded detention centers, run-ins with border police, and a persistent xenophobia that seems to follow them almost everywhere they go. Will Hakim's determination and the kindness of strangers be enough to carry him to the end of his journey and reunite his family? By turns heart-warming...

"The God Wars destroyed the city of Alikand. Now, a century and a half and a great many construction contracts later, Agdel Lex rises in its place. Dead deities litter the surrounding desert, streets shift when people aren't looking, a squidlike tower dominates the skyline, and the foreign Iskari Rectification Authority keeps strict order in this once-independent city--while treasure seekers, criminals, combat librarians, nightmare artists, angels,...

"A new essay collection by the noted Polish poet For Adam Zagajewski--one of Poland's great poets--the project of writing, whether it be poetry or prose, is an occasion to advance what David Wojahn has characterized as his "restless and quizzical quest for self-knowledge." Slight Exaggeration is an autobiographical portrait of the poet, arranged not chronologically but with that same luminous quality that distinguishes Zagajewski's spellbinding poetry--an...

The Hum of the World is an invitation to contemplate what would happen if we heard the world as attentively as we see it. Balancing big ideas with playful wit and lyrical prose, this imaginative volume identifies the role of sound in Western experience as the primary medium in which the presence and persistence of life acquire tangible form. The positive experience of aliveness is not merely in accord with sound, but inaccessible, even inconceivable,...

Professor Marshall C. Eakin of Vanderbilt University delivers twenty-four lectures examining both the unity and diversity in the early history of the Americas. He discusses how Christopher Columbus's voyage to the Americas in 1492 created a collision between three distinct peoples and cultures, European, African, and Native-American, and gave birth to the distinctive identity of the Americas today.