Fifteen years ago, Susan Morrow left her first husband, Edward Sheffield, an unpublished writer. Now, she's enduring middle class suburbia as a doctor's wife, when out of the blue she receives a package containing the manuscript of her ex-husband's first novel. He writes asking her to read the book; she was always his best critic, he says. As Susan reads, she is drawn into the fictional life of Tony Hastings, a math professor driving his family to...

At Christmas 1975 a group of Californian students experiment with LSD. One of them, Michael Quinn kidnaps the son of an English professor. When he is released from jail twenty years later, a mysterious young English woman named Joni Lascelles begins to ask questions that will unravel the past...

Though by profession a doctor (he coined the word anesthesia) Oliver Wendell Holmes (1809-1894) was one of the leading 19th century American poets and a member of the famous Saturday Club with Emerson, Longfellow, and Lowell. Coinciding with the 200th anniversary of his birth, here are his major poems, including Old Ironsides, and The Last Leaf.

Our ability to make choices is fundamental to our sense of ourselves as human beings, and essential to the political values of freedom-protecting nations. Whom we love; where we work; how we spend our time; what we buy; such choices define us in the eyes of ourselves and others, and much blood and ink has been spilt to establish and protect our rights to make them freely. Choice can also be a burden. Our cognitive capacity to research and make the...

Since America's founding, the US Supreme Court had issued a vast number of decisions on a staggeringly wide variety of subjects. And hundreds of judges have occupied the bench. Yet as Cass R. Sunstein, the eminent legal scholar and best-selling co-author of Nudge, points out, almost every one of the Justices fits into a very small number of types regardless of ideology: the hero, the soldier, the minimalist, and the mute. Heroes are willing to invoke...

"A new, beautifully illustrated translation of Felix Salten's celebrated novel Bambi-the original source of the beloved story. Most of us think we know the story of Bambi-but do we? The Original Bambi is an all-new, illustrated translation of a literary classic that presents the story as it was meant to be told. For decades, readers' images of Bambi have been shaped by the 1942 Walt Disney film-an idealized look at a fawn who represents nature's innocence-which...