Bücher der Reihe P.S.

A twenty-two-year-old perennial virgin, Englishman Grant Stoddard didn't know what to do with his life in America?until he won an X-rated online contest, the prize being intercourse with an infamous married sex columnist. He consequently wound up delivering mail at Nerve.com but accidentally found his calling as a gonzo sex reporter who would try any and every lurid activity his crafty coworkers devised?from offering himself up as man-bait at a hard-core gay bar to attending an elite orgy, to being a hapless participant in a sexual home invasion?all the while wishing he could be safely tucked in bed.Working Stiff is the humble, hilarious, and delightfully salacious fish-into-water story of a young man who followed his heart?and other organs?into places where few would dare to venture.

A classic of psychology and eating disorders, now reissued with an important and perhaps controversial new afterword by the author, Wasted is New York Times bestselling author Marya Hornbacher's highly acclaimed memoir that chronicles her battle with anorexia and bulimia.Vivid, honest, and emotionally wrenching, Wasted is the story of how Marya Hornbacher willingly embraced hunger, drugs, sex, and death?until a particularly horrifying bout with anorexia and bulimia in college forever ended the romance of wasting away.In this updated edition, Hornbacher, an authority in the field of eating disorders, argues that recovery is not only possible, it is necessary. But the journey is not easy or guaranteed. With a new ending to her story that adds a contemporary edge, Wasted continues to be timely and relevant.

When Consuelo Vanderbilt's grandfather died, he was the richest man in America. Her father soon started to spend the family fortune, enthusiastically supported by Consuelo's mother, Alva, who was determined to take the family to the top of New York society?forcing a heartbroken Consuelo into a marriage she did not want with the underfunded Duke of Marlborough. But the story of Consuelo and Alva is more than a tale of enterprising social ambition, Gilded Age glamour, and the emptiness of wealth. It is a fascinating account of two extraordinary women who struggled to break free from the world into which they were born?a world of materialistic concerns and shallow elitism in which females were voiceless and powerless?and of their lifelong dedication to noble and dangerous causes and the battle for women's rights.

Eleanor Merritt, a do-gooding American family-planning worker, was drawn to Kenya to improve the lot of the poor. Unnervingly, she finds herself falling in love with the beguiling Calvin Piper despite, or perhaps because of, his misanthropic theories about population control and the future of the human race. Surely, Calvin whispers seductively in Eleanor's ear, if the poor are a responsibility they are also an imposition.Set against the vivid backdrop of shambolic modern-day Africa?a continent now primarily populated with wildlife of the two-legged sort?Lionel Shriver's Game Control is a wry, grimly comic tale of bad ideas and good intentions. With a deft, droll touch, Shriver highlights the hypocrisy of lofty intellectuals who would "save" humanity but who don't like people.

A provocative and eye-opening memoir, High Price will change the way we think about addiction, poverty, and race, as well as our policies on drugs.As Columbia University's first tenured African American professor in the sciences, groundbreaking neuroscientist Carl Hart has redefined our understanding of addiction. His controversial landmark research goes beyond the hype of the antidrug movement to shed new light on common ideas about race, poverty, and drugs, and to explain why current policies are failing.In High Price, Hart recalls his personal story?and though he escaped neighborhoods that were entrenched in systemic poverty, he has not turned his back on them. But balancing his former street life with his achievements today has not been easy?a struggle he reflects on publicly for the first time here.

The definitive history of the Samurai, by acclaimed author of Ninja: 1,000 Years of the Shadow Warrior"One could ask for no better storyteller or analyst than John Man." --Simon Sebag Montefiore, author of Jerusalem: The Biography The inspiration for the Jedi knights of Star Wars and the films of Akira Kurosawa, the legendary Japanese samurai have captured modern imaginations. Yet with these elite warriors who were bound by a code of honor called Bushido--the Way of the Warrior--the reality behind the myth proves more fascinating than any fiction. In Samurai, celebrated author John Man provides a unique and captivating look at their true history, told through the life of one man: Saigo Takamori, known to many as "the last samurai." In 1877 Takamori led a rebel army of samurai in a heroic "last stand" against the Imperial Japanese Army, who sought to end the "way of the sword" in favor of firearms and modern warfare. Man's thrilling narrative brings to life the hidden world of the samurai as never before.

After decades of service and years of watching her family's troubles splashed across the tabloids, Britain's Queen is beginning to feel her age. An unexpected opportunity offers her relief: an impromptu visit to a place that holds happy memories?the former royal yacht, Britannia, now moored near Edinburgh. Hidden beneath a skull-emblazoned hoodie, the limber Elizabeth (thank goodness for yoga) walks out of Buckingham Palace and heads for King's Cross to catch a train to Scotland. But a colorful cast of royal attendants has discovered her missing. In uneasy alliance a lady-in-waiting, a butler, an equerry, a girl from the stables, a dresser, and a clerk from the shop that supplies Her Majesty's cheese set out to bring her back before her absence becomes a national scandal.Comic and poignant, fast-paced and clever, Mrs Queen Takes the Train tweaks the pomp of the monarchy, going beneath its rigid formality to reveal the human heart of the woman at its center.

Soon to featured in the Ken Burns documentary The U.S. and the Holocaust, airing on PBS in fall 2022A New York Times Notable Book - Winner of the National Jewish Book Award - Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award - A Los Angeles Times Book Prize Finalist"A gripping detective story, a stirring epic, a tale of ghosts and dark marvels, a thrilling display of scholarship, a meditation on the unfathomable mystery of good and evil, a testimony to the enduring power of the ancient archetypes that haunt one Jewish family and the greater human family, The Lost is as complex and rich with meaning and story as the past it seeks to illuminate. A beautiful book, beautifully written."--Michael ChabonIn this rich and riveting narrative, a writer's search for the truth behind his family's tragic past in World War II becomes a remarkably original epic--part memoir, part reportage, part mystery, and part scholarly detective work--that brilliantly explores the nature of time and memory, family and history.The Lost begins as the story of a boy who grew up in a family haunted by the disappearance of six relatives during the Holocaust--an unmentionable subject that gripped his imagination from earliest childhood. Decades later, spurred by the discovery of a cache of desperate letters written to his grandfather in 1939 and tantalized by fragmentary tales of a terrible betrayal, Daniel Mendelsohn sets out to find the remaining eyewitnesses to his relatives' fates. That quest eventually takes him to a dozen countries on four continents and forces him to confront the wrenching discrepancies between the histories we live and the stories we tell. And it leads him, finally, back to the small Ukrainian town where his family's story began, and where the solution to a decades-old mystery awaits him.Deftly moving between past and present, interweaving a world-wandering odyssey with childhood memories of a now-lost generation of immigrant Jews and provocative ruminations on biblical texts and Jewish history, The Lost transforms the story of one family into a profound, morally searching meditation on our fragile hold on the past. Deeply personal, grippingly suspenseful, and beautifully written, this literary tour de force illuminates all that is lost, and found, in the passage of time.

Heather Barbieri follows her acclaimed Gaelic-tinged drama The Lace Makers of Glenmara with the resonant tale of a woman who, in the wake of scandal, flees to a remote Maine island to reconnect with her past--and to come to terms with the childhood tragedy that has haunted her for a lifetime.Set on the rugged New England coast, Barbieri's The Cottage at Glass Beach strikes the perfect balance between high lit and mainstream women's fiction, infusing a potent and unforgettable love story with unforgettable characters that will remain with you long after the final chapter. Richly evocative, Barbieri's narrative of intimacy, struggle, and redemption will call out to readers of Joanne Harris, Alice Hoffman, and other modern masters of drama.

In this brilliant collection, Tessa Hadley showcases beautifully her formidable talent for writing domestic fiction that rises about the genre to become literary art.?Filled with exquisitely calibrated gradations and expressions of class, conducted with symphonic intensity and complexity.... Extraordinarily well-made.??New York Times Book ReviewMarried Love is a masterful collection of short fiction from one of today's most accomplished storytellers. These tales showcase the qualities for which Tessa Hadley has long been praised: her humor, warmth, and psychological acuity; her powerful, precise, and emotionally dense prose; her unflinching examinations of family relationships.Here are stories that range widely across generations and classes, exploring the private and public lives of unforgettable characters: a young girl who haunts the edges of her parents' party; a wife released by the sudden death of her film-director husband; an eighteen-year-old who insists on marrying her music professor, only to find herself shut out from his secrets.Hadley evokes worlds that expand in the imagination far beyond the pages, capturing domestic dramas, generational sagas, wrenching love affairs and epiphanies, and distilling them to remarkable effect.

Two young men are swimming naked in an Adirondack lake when they hear a motor, a car appears, and two women get out, one with an orange scarf around her head. It's 1936: New York is suffering through the Great Depression, frightening things are happening in Europe, and Artie Saltzman and Harold Abramovitz, friends since their Brooklyn childhood, are unsure about everything?jobs, lefty politics, women. After this time in the mountains, nothing will be quite the same. From World War II to the McCarthy-era witch hunts, through work, marriages, and life with children, Artie and Harold turn to each other, whether for solace or another good argument. And when Artie's daughter Brenda comes of age during the 1960s, her struggles with jobs, love, and friendship in yet another period of political turmoil recall Artie and Harold's youth.A sweeping yet intimate novel about people who never stop loving one another despite everything life throws at them, When We Argued All Night illuminates a friendship over more than sixty-five years, as the twentieth century gives way to the changed yet recognizable times in which we live.

Exploring the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial impostors across several centuries and cultures, Carmela Ciuraru plumbs the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame.Only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll could a shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford feel free to let his imagination run wild. The "three weird sisters" from Yorkshire?the Brontës?produced instant bestsellers that transformed them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Bored by her aristocratic milieu, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing baroness rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays under the name George Sand. Highly accessible and engaging, these provocative stories reveal the complex motives of writers who harbored secret identities?sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. Part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, Nom de Plume is an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity.

A New Yorker Best Book of the YearIn the dying days of a brutal civil war in Bangladesh, Sohail Haque stumbles upon an abandoned building. Inside he finds a young woman whose story will haunt him for a lifetime to come.Almost a decade later, Sohail's sister, Maya, returns home after a long absence to find her beloved brother transformed. While Maya has stuck to her revolutionary ideals, Sohail has shunned his old life to become a charismatic religious leader. And when Sohail decides to send his son to a madrasa, the conflict between brother and sister comes to a devastating climax. The Good Muslim is an epic story about faith, family, the rise of religious fundamentalism, and the long shadow of war from prizewinning Bangladeshi novelist Tahmima Anam.

The Ruins of Us is a compelling, timely debut novel that explores the loneliness of expatriate life and the dangers of intolerance, as well as the things we'll do for love.More than two decades after moving to Saudi Arabia and marrying powerful Abdullah Baylani, American-born Rosalie learns that her husband has taken a second wife. That discovery plunges their family into chaos as Rosalie grapples with leaving the country, her life, and her family behind. Meanwhile, Abdullah and Rosalie's consuming personal entanglements blind them to the crisis approaching their sixteen-year-old son, Faisal, whose deepening resentment toward their lifestyle has led to his involvement with a controversial sheikh. When Faisal makes a choice that could destroy everything his embattled family holds dear, they all must confront difficult truths as they fight to preserve what remains of their world.The Ruins of Us is a timely story about intolerance, family, and the injustices we endure for love that heralds the arrival of an extraordinary new voice in contemporary fiction.

"Fire Season both evokes and honors the great hermit celebrants of nature, from Dillard to Kerouac to Thoreau--and I loved it."--J.R. Moehringer, author of The Tender Bar"[Connors's] adventures in radical solitude make for profoundly absorbing, restorative reading."--Walter Kirn, author of Up in the AirPhillip Connors is a major new voice in American nonfiction, and his remarkable debut, Fire Season, is destined to become a modern classic. An absorbing chronicle of the days and nights of one of the last fire lookouts in the American West, Fire Season is a marvel of a book, as rugged and soulful as Matthew Crawford's bestselling Shop Class as Soulcraft, and it immediately places Connors in the august company of Edward Abbey, Annie Dillard, Aldo Leopold, Barry Lopez, and others in the respected fraternity of hard-boiled nature writers.

"Richard Horan has brought us a welcome view of America to defy the prevailing political and financial nastiness. This is a timely and important book."--Ted Morgan, author of Wilderness at Dawn"A lively visit with the dauntless men and women who operate America's family farms and help provide our miraculous annual bounty. Richard Horan writes with energy and passion."--Hannah Nordhaus, author of The Beekeeper's Lament"Horan's new book evocatively describes the peril and promise of family farms in America. I loved joining him on this journey, and so will you."--T.A. Barron, author of The Great Tree of AvalonIn Seeds, novelist and nature writer Richard Horan sought out the trees that inspired the work of great American writers like Faulkner, Kerouac, Welty, Wharton, and Harper Lee. In Harvest, Horan embarks upon a serendipitous journey across America to work the harvests of more than a dozen essential or unusual food crops--and, in the process, forms powerful connections with the farmers, the soil, and the seasons.

They were born on the same day, in the same small New Hampshire hospital?but Ruth Plank and Dana Dickerson are different in nearly every way.Ruth is an artist, a romantic with a rich, passionate, imaginative life?the fifth daughter born to a gentle, caring farmer and his stolid wife. Raised by a pair of capricious drifters, Dana is a scientist and realist whose faith is firmly planted in the natural world. From the 1950s to the present, the lives of the ?birthday sisters? parallel and oddly intersect, as each struggles to find her place in a world in which she has never truly felt she belonged. Sharing little except a birth date?and a love for Dana's wild and beautiful older brother, Ray?two virtual strangers will travel alternate paths winding through first love, first sex, marriage, parenthood, divorce, and tragic loss...until both are forced to reevaluate themselves and each other when past secrets and forgotten memories unexpectedly come to light.

From #1 international bestselling author Ami McKay comes The Virgin Cure, the story of a young girl abandoned and forced to fend for herself in the poverty and treachery of post-Civil War New York City.McKay, whose debut novel The Birth House made headlines around the world, returns with a resonant tale inspired by her own great-great-grandmother's experiences as a pioneer of women's medicine in nineteenth-century New York.One summer night in Lower Manhattan in 1871, twelve-year-old Moth is pulled from her bed and sold as a servant to a finely dressed woman. Knowing that her mother is so close while she is locked away in servitude, Moth bides her time until she can escape, only to find her old home deserted and her mother gone without a trace. Moth must struggle to survive alone in the murky world of the Bowery, a wild and lawless enclave filled with thieves, beggars, sideshow freaks, and prostitutes.She eventually meets Miss Everett, the proprietress of an "Infant School," a brothel that caters to gentlemen who pay dearly for "willing and clean" companions--desirable young virgins like Moth. She also finds friendship with Dr. Sadie, a female physician struggling against the powerful forces of injustice. The doctor hopes to protect Moth from falling prey to a terrible myth known as the "virgin cure"--the tragic belief that deflowering a "fresh maid" can cleanse the blood and heal men afflicted with syphilis--which has destroyed the lives of other Bowery girls.Ignored by society and unprotected by the law, Moth dreams of independence. But there's a high price to pay for freedom, and no one knows that better than a girl from Chrystie Street.In a powerful novel that recalls the evocative fiction of Anita Shreve, Annie Proulx, and Joanne Harris, Ami McKay brings to light the story of early, forward-thinking social warriors, creating a narrative that readers will find inspiring, poignant, adventure-filled, and utterly unforgettable.

From the critically acclaimed author of Proof of Heaven comes an unforgettable tale that asks the question "Are there angels among us?"Sean Magee is a firefighter?a hero who risks his own life to save others, running into dangerous situations few have the courage to dare. While fighting a horrific blaze, Sean becomes trapped by flames and is nearly overcome by smoke. Just when it seems that all is lost, he's led to a window, by what he swears is divine intervention. And then he jumps . . .. . . into a new life. For years, Sean has shut down his feelings, existing in a state of emotional numbness. Coming through that fire, he knows he can no longer be that man whose heart is closed to the world. But before he can face his future, he must confront his past and everyone in it: the family, the friends, the woman?and the love?he carelessly left behind.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Orphan Train comes a novel about buried secrets and the redemptive power of forgiveness.Cassie Simon is a struggling artist living in New York City. When she receives a call from a magistrate in Sweetwater, TN, telling her she has inherited sixty acres of land from her grandfather, whom she never knew, she takes it as a sign: it's time for a change. She moves into the house where her mother, Ellen, was born--and where she died tragically when Cassie was three.From the moment she arrives in Sweetwater, Cassie is overwhelmed by the indelible mark her mother's memory had left behind. As she delves into the thicket of mystery that surrounds her mother's death, Cassie begins to understand the desperate measures the human heart is capable of.

Edgar Kellogg has always yearned to be popular. When he leaves his lucrative law career for a foreign correspondent post in a Portuguese backwater with a homegrown terrorist movement, Edgar recognizes Barrington Saddler, the disappeared reporter he's replacing, as the larger-than-life character he longs to emulate. Yet all is not as it appears. Os Soldados Ousados de Barba?"The Daring Soldiers of Barba" ?have been blowing up the rest of the world for years in order to win independence for a province so dismal and backward that you couldn't give the rathole away. So why, with Barrington vanished, do incidents claimed by the "SOB" suddenly dry up? A droll, playful novel, The New Republic addresses terrorism with a deft, tongue-in- cheek touch while also pressing a more intimate question: What makes particular people so magnetic, while the rest of us inspire a shrug?

Deep in the rugged Appalachians of North Carolina lies the cove, a dark, forbidding place where spirits and fetches wander, and even the light fears to travel. Or so the townsfolk of Mars Hill believe?just as they know that Laurel Shelton, the lonely young woman who lives within its shadows, is a witch.Then it happens?a stranger appears, carrying nothing but a silver flute and a note explaining that his name is Walter and he is mute?and Laurel experiences true companionship and happiness for the first time.But Walter harbors a secret that could destroy everything. In a time of uncertainty, when fear and danger reign, Laurel and Walter will discover that love alone may not be enough to protect them.