Award Winning Books

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an intriguing and unconventional biography about one of the Bible's most elusive figures Tradition has it that King Solomon knew everything there was to know--the mysteries of nature, of love, of God himself--but what do we know of...

Celluloid Activist is the biography of gay-rights giant Vito Russo, the man who wrote The Celluloid Closet: Homosexuality in the Movies, commonly regarded as the foundational text of gay and lesbian film studies and one of the first to be widely read. But Russo...

From the McDonald s hot coffee case to the cattle ranchers beef with Oprah Winfrey, from the old English "Assize of Bread" to current nutrition labeling laws, what we eat and how we eat are shaped as much by legal regulations as by personal...

B-Day, as it came to be known, finally arrived. It was a Friday. A school day. I identified with Cinderella as I watched Dad get ready for work. Holster, check. Gun, check. Billy club, check. Handcuffs, check. . . . Saturday morning I got...

In 1931, a 12-year-old boy shot and killed the sheriff of Asotin, Washington. The incident stunned the small town and a mob threatened to hang him. Both the crime and Herbert Niccolls's eventual sentence of life imprisonment at the Washington State Penitentiary in Walla...

A biography of an important but largely forgotten nineteenth-century scientist whose work helped lay the foundation of modern neuroscience.Emil du Bois-Reymond is the most important forgotten intellectual of the nineteenth century. In his own time (1818-1896) du Bois-Reymond grew famous in his native Germany...

Vietnam, January, 1968. As the citizens of Hue are preparing to celebrate Tet, the start of the Lunar New Year, Nha Ca arrives in the city to attend her father's funeral. Without warning, war erupts all around them, drastically changing or cutting short their...

David Wagoner has won the acclaim of his peers and been compared with some of the most gifted poets in the English language: Emily Dickinson, James Wright, Robert Frost, Theodore Roethke. The Antioch Review has ascribed to him a"profoundly earthbound sanity," while Publishers Weekly...

Toward the end of the Mesopotamian Epic of Gilgamesh King Gilgamesh laments the untimely death of his comrade Enkidu, "my friend whom I loved dearly." Similarly in the Bible, David mourns his companion, Jonathan, whose "love to me was wonderful, greater than the love...

In the early 1960s, the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater was a small, multi-racial company of dancers that performed the works of its founding choreographer and other emerging artists. By the late 1960s, the company had become a well-known African American artistic group closely...

Hasidism, a kabbalah-inspired movement founded by Israel Ba'al Shem Tov (c1700-1760), transformed Jewish communities across Eastern and East Central Europe. In Men of Silk, Glenn Dynner draws upon newly discovered Polish archival material and neglected Hebrew testimonies to illuminate Hasidism's dramatic ascendancy in the...

A delightful introduction to opera, Bravo! Brava! A Night at the Opera teaches elementary school children what opera is by showing how it is made. "Who writes the words?", "Who makes an opera happen? "Who is backstage?"--these questions and more are answered with easy-to-understand...

At seventeen, Dru gets involved with the latest high school stunt--leaping between deadly cliffs into the ocean far below. Things get out of hand as manipulative relationships and resulting jealousies cause more students to risk their lives. "It's Bunting's acknowledgment of the allure of...

Trying something new is never easy. Like walking, for instance. But aren't you sick of sitting on your bottom day in and day out? Hasn't lying around all the time become a little bit boring? This handy guide, both practical and inspirational, is here...

The world's first Zen Buddhist paranormal romance?published to coincide with Halloween One of the most progressive writers at work today, Victor Pelevin's comic inventiveness has won him comparisons to Kafka, Calvino, and Gogol, and Time has described him as a ?psychedelic Nabokov for the...

Set in Canada and the battlefields of France and Belgium, Three-Day Road is a mesmerizing novel told through the eyes of Niska--a Canadian Oji-Cree woman living off the land who is the last of a line of healers and diviners--and her nephew Xavier.At the...

When Roberto sneaks off to see a movie in his Italian village, he has no idea that life as he knows it is over. German soldiers raid the theater, round up the boys in the audience, and pack them onto a train. After a...

Jordan is going to join a gang. But just as he's about to start his future with the Cobras, his past calls him back. Way back--to the nineteenth-century, where he meets his ancestors and gets a bitter taste of what life was like for...

Winner of the 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry.Practical Gods is the eighth collection by Carl Dennis, a critically acclaimed poet and recent winner of one of the most prestigious poetry awards, the Ruth Lilly Prize. Carl Dennis has won acclaim for wise, original, and...

Momo has always wanted a Lhasa terrier--a dog like the ones the Buddhist priests hold sacred in their temples. And her dream is realized when a trader brings Pempa to her parents' tea house. But after a band of robbers steals the valuable dog...