A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice
One of LitHub's Most Anticipated Books of 2020
An expansive, radiant, and genre-defying investigation into bonding—and how we are shaped by forces we cannot fully know
Is love a force akin to gravity? A kind of invisible fabric which enables communications through space and time? Artist Harry Dodge finds himself contemplating such questions as his father declines from dementia and he rekindles a bewildering but powerful relationship with his birth mother. A meteorite Dodge orders on eBay becomes a mysterious catalyst for a reckoning with the vital forces of matter, the nature of consciousness, and the bafflements of belonging.
Structured around a series of formative, formidable coincidences in Dodge’s life, My Meteorite journeys with stylistic bravura from Barthes to Blade Runner, from punk to Pale Fire. It is a wild, incandescent book that creates a literary universe of its own. Blending the personal and the philosophical, the raw and the surreal, the transgressive and the heartbreaking, Harry Dodge revitalizes our world, illuminating the magic just under the surface of daily life.

What do Pokemon Go and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein have in common? Why do some businesses survive, and others fail at the first sign of change? What gives the human brain the edge over computers?

The answer- Elastic Thinking. It's an ability we all possess, and one that we can all learn to hone in order to succeed, at work and in our everyday lives.

Here Mlodinow, whose own flexible thinking has taken him from physics professor to TV scriptwriter and bestselling author, takes us on a revelatory exploration of how elasticity works. He draws on cutting-edge neuroscience to show how, millennia ago, our brains developed an affinity for novelty. He discovers how flexible thinking enabled some of the greatest artists and innovators to create paradigm shifts. He investigates the organisations that have demonstrated an elastic ability to adapt to new technologies. And he shows you how you can test your brain power.

With deft, picturesque prose, Aubrey presents biographical sketches for an intriguing and colorful parade of statesmen, poets, philosophers, and scientists, including Walter Raleigh, Francis Bacon, William Shakespeare, John Milton, Thomas Hobbes, and Rene Descartes, as well as a host of lesser known but equally fascinating figures. This anecdotal, gossipy collection brings to life the tumultuous world of Elizabethan and Stuart England and its revolutions in politics, science and morality. At the same time, Aubrey revels in the sheer variety of human nature and in the detailed, intimate, and sometimes scandalous aspects of his subjects' lives. An antiquarian, Aubrey began his collection as source material for his friend Anthony Wood's histories of Oxford University. In this new edition, more faithful to the original text than previous versions, Brief Lives emerges as a revolution in the art of English biography, a mixture of entertainment and erudition, and a lively portrait of an age.

Written in Paris in the early 1950s, this book created controversy in its analysis of 'modern' society that had allowed itself to be hypnotized by socio-political doctrines, and to accept totalitarian terror on the strength of a hypothetical future.

"White Noise" tells the story of Jack Gladney and his wife Babette who are both afraid of death. Jack is head of Hitler studies at the College-on-the-Hill. His colleague Murray runs a seminar on car crashes. Together they ponder the instances of celebrity death from Elvis to Marilyn to Hitler. Through the brilliant and often very funny dialogue between Jack and Murray, DeLillo exposes our common obsessions with mortality and delineates Jack and Babette's touching relationship and their biggest fear - who will die first?

Despite the billions spent on prescription anti-depressant drugs and psychotherapy, people everywhere continue to grapple with depression. James Gordon, one of the nation's most respected psychiatrists, now offers a practical and effective way to get unstuck. Drawing on forty years of pioneering work, <i>Unstuck</i> is Gordon's seven-stage program for relief through food and nutritional supplements; Chinese medicine; movement, exercise, and dance; psychotherapy, meditation, and guided imagery; and spiritual practice. The result is a remarkable guide that puts the power to change in the hands of those ready to say "no" to suffering and drugs and "yes" to hope and happiness.

In this wide-ranging anthology of Sufi writings, Idries Shah, who was one of Sufism's leading exponents, offers a broad selection of poetry, contemplations, letters, lectures, and teaching stories that together form an illuminating introduction to this unique body of thought. <br />Sufism, the mystical aspect of Islam, has had a dynamic and lasting effect on the literature of that religion. Its teachings, often elusive and subtle, aim at the perfecting and completing of the human mind. In contrast to certain other beliefs and philosophies, Sufism is continually evolving and progressing and is consequently always relevant to the contemporary world. <br /> "His work is as exciting as a good novel"--<i>The Times Literary Supplement</i>

<b>The Farming of Bones</b> begins in 1937 in a village on the Dominican side of the river that separates the country from Haiti. Amabelle Desir, Haitian-born and a faithful maidservant to the Dominican family that took her in when she was orphaned, and her lover Sebastien, an itinerant sugarcane cutter, decide they will marry and return to Haiti at the end of the cane season. However, hostilities toward Haitian laborers find a vitriolic spokesman in the ultra-nationalist Generalissimo Trujillo who calls for an ethnic cleansing of his Spanish-speaking country. As rumors of Haitian persecution become fact, as anxiety turns to terror, Amabelle and Sebastien's dreams are leveled to the most basic human desire: to endure. Based on a little-known historical event, this extraordinarily moving novel memorializes the forgotten victims of nationalist madness and the deeply felt passion and grief of its survivors.

<b>The true, behind-the-scenes history of the people who built Silicon Valley and shaped Big Tech in America </b><br /><br />Long before Margaret O'Mara became one of our most consequential historians of the American-led digital revolution, she worked in the White House of Bill Clinton and Al Gore in the earliest days of the commercial Internet. There she saw firsthand how deeply intertwined Silicon Valley was with the federal government--and always had been--and how shallow the common understanding of the secrets of the Valley's success actually was. Now, after almost five years of pioneering research, O'Mara has produced the definitive history of Silicon Valley for our time, the story of mavericks and visionaries, but also of powerful institutions creating the framework for innovation, from the Pentagon to Stanford University. It is also a story of a community that started off remarkably homogeneous and tight-knit and stayed that way, and whose belief in its own mythology has deepened into a collective hubris that has led to astonishing triumphs as well as devastating second-order effects.<br /><br />Deploying a wonderfully rich and diverse cast of protagonists, from the justly famous to the unjustly obscure, across four generations of explosive growth in the Valley, from the forties to the present, O'Mara has wrestled one of the most fateful developments in modern American history into magnificent narrative form. She is on the ground with all of the key tech companies, chronicling the evolution in their offerings through each successive era, and she has a profound fingertip feel for the politics of the sector and its relation to the larger cultural narrative about tech as it has evolved over the years. Perhaps most impressive, O'Mara has penetrated the inner kingdom of tech venture capital firms, the insular and still remarkably old-boy world that became the cockpit of American capitalism and the crucible for bringing technological innovation to market, or not.<br /><br />The transformation of big tech into the engine room of the American economy and the nexus of so many of our hopes and dreams--and, increasingly, our nightmares--can be understood, in Margaret O'Mara's masterful hands, as the story of one California valley. As her majestic history makes clear, its fate is the fate of us all.

They had nothing in common until love gave them everything to lose . . .

Louisa Clark is an ordinary girl living an exceedingly ordinary life—steady boyfriend, close family—who has barely been farther afield than their tiny village. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will has always lived a huge life—big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel—and now he’s pretty sure he cannot live the way he is.

Will is acerbic, moody, bossy—but Lou refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living.

A Love Story for this generation and perfect for fans of John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars, Me Before You brings to life two people who couldn’t have less in common—a heartbreakingly romantic novel that asks, What do you do when making the person you love happy also means breaking your own heart?

“Astonishing . . . Explores the vast underground legacy of our own desires. This is the must-read book of the year.” —Rene Denfeld, bestselling author of  The Child Finder<br /><br />A richly imagined debut novel about a traveling salesman and the small town he changes forever<br /><br />If someone offered you a magic elixir that could conjure any dream you wanted . . . would you take it?<br /><br />Traveling salesmen like Robert Owens have passed through Evie Dawson’s town before, but none of them offered anything like what he has to sell: dreams, made to order, with satisfaction guaranteed.<br /><br />Soon after he arrives, the community is shocked by the disappearance of Evie’s young son. The townspeople, shaken by the Dawson family’s tragedy and captivated by Robert’s subversive magic, begin to experiment with his dreams. And Evie, devastated by grief, turns to Robert for a comfort only he can sell her. But the dream peddler’s wares awaken in his customers their most carefully buried desires, and despite all his good intentions, some of them will lead to disaster.<br /><br />Gorgeously told through the eyes of Evie, Robert, and a broad cast of fully realized characters,  The Dream Peddler is an imaginative, moving novel of overcoming loss and reckoning with the longings we keep secret.

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Bringing the history of cosmology--from the Babylonians to Newton--to life in a masterly synthesis, Koestler shows how the modern world-view replaced the medieval world-view in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century.

Set in Moscow and Paris, Ouspensky's only full-length novel explores the theme of "eternal recurrence", a theory of time developed in Ouspensky's classic book A New Model of the Universe.

'Things are not simple but complex. If he bit Mr. Browning he bit her too. Hatred is not hatred; hatred is also love.'
Virginia Woolf's delightful biography of the poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning's spaniel, which asks what it means to be human - and to be dog.
One of 46 new books in the bestselling Little Black Classics series, to celebrate the first ever Penguin Classic in 1946. Each book gives readers a taste of the Classics' huge range and diversity, with works from around the world and across the centuries - including fables, decadence, heartbreak, tall tales, satire, ghosts, battles and elephants.

Returning to Reims is a breathtaking account of one man's return to the town where he grew up after an absence of thirty years. It is a frank, fearlessly personal story of family, memory, identity and time lost. But it is also a sociologist's view of what it means to grow up working class and then leave that class; of inequality and shifting political allegiances in an increasingly divided nation. A phenomenon in France and a huge bestseller in Germany, Didier Eribon has written the defining memoir of our times.