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.

In "Bardic Deadlines," writer and editor Geoffrey O'Brien collects twenty of his essays on poetry that originally appeared in the "Voice Literary Supplement" and the "New York Review of Books," O'Brien surveys an array of some of the most striking and innovative poets to emerge in recent decades, including Susan Howe, August Kleinzahler, Clark Coolidge, Nathaniel Mackey, Gustaf Sobin, and Michael O'Brien. Discussions of contemporary work are juxtaposed with considerations of other traditions going as far back as the second-century Chinese anthology "The Songs of the South" and the Sanskrit master Kalidasa, traditions considered highly relevant to current practice.
There are engaging, in-depth portraits of the work of poets John Clare, Hugh MacDiarmid, Emily Bronte, Kenji Miyazawa, and Frank O'Hara, among others. There is also an exploration of the poetics of Walt Whitman that highlights themes addressed throughout the collection: the physicality and musicality of language, the spatial dimension of poetry, the intimate bond between poet and reader, and the secret and often obsessive strategies by which the poet hides secrets in plain sight and enlists the reader in the making of the poem. Each essay focuses on poetry as experience that impinges on basic questions of identity and being.
Geoffrey O'Brien is the author of a number of nonfiction books and poetry collections, including "Hardboiled America: Lurid Paperbacks and the Masters of Noir," "Floating City: Selected Poems 1978-1995," and "The Hudson Mystery," and a fictional work, "The Times Square Story," He is editor-in-chief of the Library of America.

" . . . so this picture we're talking about is The Times Square Story this is New York, show biz, crossroads of the world, entertainment capital, international center for scope and variety and pacing, everything open after midnight, not just a bunch of dumb gangsters pushing people around, this one has jazz, exotic nightlife, hipster talk, blacks tights, psychoanalysis . . . " Imagine Damon Runyon on speed, with a graduate degree in cultural studies and access to the world's most extensive video archive of low-budget exploitation films, and you'll get some idea of the ultra-hip mind-movie that is Geoffrey O'Brien's The Times Square Story. It evokes the one-time glitter, the glamour, and the grunge of this fabled piece of real estate before it became Disneyfied - its grind houses and strip joints and freak shows and novelty stores and night clubs and peep shows and fleabag hotels. The Times Square Story also celebrates the world of below-the-line filmmaking as the kid, the producer, the broken-down actor, and Miss Columbus 1952 struggle to bring Fury of Macumba to the big screen-their artistic impulses crippled by financial reality and human frailty. With more than fifty evocative photographs from the golden era of this mythic patch of asphalt, The Times Square Story is a roller-coaster ride through gaudy, seedy, glorious cultural territory.