"Influenced by the mysterious place gingerbread holds in classic children's stories, beloved novelist Helen Oyeyemi invites readers into a delightful tale of a surprising family legacy, in which the inheritance is a recipe. Perdita Lee may appear to be your average British schoolgirl; Harriet Lee may seem just a working mother trying to penetrate the school social hierarchy; but there are signs that they might not be as normal as they think they are....

"The sociologist and political scientist Frances Fox Piven and her late husband Richard Cloward have been famously credited by Glenn Beck with devising the Cloward/Piven Strategy," a world view responsible, according to Beck, for everything from creating a culture of poverty" and fomenting violent revolution" to causing global warming and the recent financial crisis. Called an enemy of the people," over the past year Piven has been subjected to an...

Barrett Miller has done the unthinkable. He's touched the Source - "used magic" as most would call it - and now finds himself on the run from the Few who hoard it for themselves. The witch Mrs. Putnam and her daughter Cate bring him to a trailer park in Pismo Beach to meet a spry, greying maintenance man named Ambrose. The old man's mysterious past holds the key to unlocking Barrett's powers as well as his true purpose, which, according to an ancient...

In 1620, separatists from the Church of England set sail across the Atlantic aboard the Mayflower. Understanding themselves as spiritual pilgrims, they left to preserve their liberty to worship God in accordance with their understanding of the Bible. There exists, however, an alternative, more dispiriting version of their story. In it, the Pilgrims are religious zealots who persecuted dissenters and decimated the Native peoples through warfare and...

"Jane Austen's six novels, published toward the end of her short life, represent a body of work that is as brilliant as it is compact. Her earlier writings have routinely been dismissed as mere juvenilia, or stepping stones to mature proficiency and greatness. Austen's first biographer described them as "childish effusions." Was he right to do so? Can the novels be definitively separated from the unpublished works? In Jane Austen, Early and Late,...

Although many of its stories originated centuries ago in the Middle East, the 1001 Nights is regarded as a classic of world literature by virtue of the seminal French and English translations produced in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Supporting the suspicion that the story collection is more Parisian than Persian, some of its most famous tales, including the stories of Aladdin and Ali Baba, appear nowhere in the original sources. Yet as...

"In the late 1950s, as America prepared for the Civil War centennial, two very old men lay dying. Albert Woolson, 109 years old, slipped in and out of a coma at a Duluth, Minnesota, hospital, his memories as a Yankee drummer boy slowly dimming. Walter Williams, at 117 blind and deaf and bedridden in his daughter's home in Houston, Texas, no longer could tell of his time as a Confederate forage master. The last of the Blue and the Gray were drifting...

"Helen Jukes is entering her thirties and feeling disconnected and trapped by her office job. Then, for good luck, she is given a colony of honeybees. According to folklore, a colony, freely given, brings good fortune, and the author embarks on an emotional, rewarding journey during the course of a year as she cares for these wondrous beings and learns the art of beekeeping." --

Tablets, smart phones, and social networks all promise better opportunities to connect and stay connected. Yet what they really do is replace face-to-face interactions and disguise our growing inability to trust others. According to recent surveys, at any given moment, sixty million Americans, 20 percent of the population, feel sufficiently isolated to report that loneliness is a major source of unhappiness. Have we arrived at a new kind of consciousness...