Prolific, award-winning translator of classical and modern Japanese poetry Hiroaki Sato recorded his thoughts on American society in mainly two columns across 30-plus years, collected here for the first time. This anthology of over 60 of Sato's commentaries reflect the writer's wide-ranging erudition and his unsentimental views of both his native Japan and his adopted American homeland. Broadly he looks at the Pacific War and its aftermath and at war (and our love of it) in general, at the quirks and curiosities of the natural world exhibited by birds and other creatures, at friends and mentors who surprised and inspired, and finally at other writers and their works, many of them familiar-the Beats and John Ashbery, for example, and Mishima-but many others whose introduction is welcome. Sato is neither cheerleader nor angry expatriate. Remarkably clear-eyed and engaged with American culture, he is in the business of critical appraisal and translation, of taking words seriously, and of observing how well others write and speak to convey their own truths and ambitions.

More than 150 years after its initial publication, Bartlett's Familiar Quotations now enters its nineteenth edi tion. First compiled by John Bartlett, a bookseller in Cambridge, Massachusetts, as a commonplace book of only 258 pages, the original 1855 edition mainly featured selections from the Bible, Shakespeare, and the great English poets. Today, Bartlett's includes more than 20,000 quotes from roughly 4,000 con tributors. Spanning centuries of thought and culture, it remains the finest and most popular compendium of quotations ever assembled. While continuing to draw on timeless classi cal references, this edition also incorporates more than 3,000 new quotes from more than 700 new sources, including Alison Bechdel, Ta-Nehisi Coates, Pope Francis, Atul Gawande, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Hilary Mantel, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Claudia Rankine, Fred Rogers, Bernie Sanders, Patti Smith, and Malala Yousafzai. Bartlett's showcases the thoughts not only of renowned figures from the arts, literature, politics, science, sports, and business, but also of otherwise unknown individuals whose thought-provoking ideas have moved, unsettled, or inspired readers and listeners throughout the ages. Bartlett's makes searching for the perfect quote easy in three ways: alphabetically by author, chrono logically by the author's birth date, or thematically by subject. Whether one is searching for appropriate remarks for a celebration, comforting thoughts for a serious occasion, or simply to answer the question "Who said that?" Bartlett's offers readers and schol ars alike a stunning treasury of words that have influ enced

The Walworth family was the very symbol of virtue and distinction for decades, rising to prominence as part of the splendor of New York's aristocracy. When Frank Walworth travels to New York to "settle a family difficulty" by shooting his father at point blank range, his family must reveal their inner demons in a spectacular trial to save him from execution. The resulting testimony exposes a legacy of mania and abuse, and the stately reputation of the family crumbles in a Gothic drama which the "New York Tribune "called "sensational to the last degree."

"The Fall of the House of Walworth "gives us both the intimate history of a family torn apart by violent obsessions, and a rich portrait of the American social worlds in which they moved. In the tradition of Edith Wharton, this is a riveting true story which "rival s] the most extravagant Gothic novels of the day" ("The Chicago Tribune)."

From one of the most original writers now at work, an expansive, learned, and utterly charming reverie on what it means to be lost in a book. . Louis Menand, writing in The New Yorker , called Geoffrey O'Brien's The Phantom Empire "a prose poem about the pleasures and distractions of movie-watching," "an ambitiously literary attempt to write about the [mystery of the] medium as though it were a dream the author had just awakened from." Now, in The Browser's Ecstasy , O'Brien has written a prose poem about reading, a playful, epigrammatic nocturne upon the dream-state one falls into when "lost in a book," upon the uncanny, trancelike pleasure of making silent marks on paper utter sounds inside one's head. We call The Browser's Ecstasy a "Meditation on Reading," but like any truly original book-and especially the short book that goes both far and deep-it resists easy summary and classification. As Luc Sante once wrote, "The density of O'Brien's work makes word count irrelevant as an index of substance; he is seemingly capable of compressing entire encyclopedias into his parenthetical asides. I defy you to name any precedent for what he does. He's a school unto himself."

The Phantom Empire is a brilliant, daring, and utterly original book that analyzes (even as it exemplifies) the effect that the image saturation of a hundred years of moving pictures have had on human culture and consciousness.

Dashiell Hammett, Mickey Spillane, James M. Cain, Raymond Chandler, Jim Thompson, David Goodis ... these are a few of the masters of noir responsible for the great lurid paperbacks of the thirties, forties, and fifties. With titles like "The Big Sleep, Kiss Tomorrow Goodbye, "and "Street of the Lost, "with racy cover lines like "My gun-butt smashed his skull!" and "Ruthless terror ripped away the mask that hid cold fear," and with some of the most extraordinary cover illustrations ever to grace American literature, these paperbacks held the ingredients of American nightmares. In "Harboiled America"--lavishly illustrated with 135 paperback covers, and expanded with new material on Thompson, Goodis, and others--Geoffrey O'Brien masterfully explores the art, history, and ideas of the American paperback.