A single city woman meets Mr. Right-he has amber eyes and a wily heart. There's only one catch . . . he has four legs and a tail.
Relatively indifferent to the natural world, allergic to dogs, and happily independent, writer Louise Bernikow never had a pet and knew nothing about caring for one. But one day while running along Manhattan's Hudson River, she came across an abandoned boxer. He had a gimpy leg and a dim past, but Bernikow instantly, bewilderingly, did the one thing her mother always warned her not to do-she brought the strange male home.
Here is the comical and offbeat...

In the year 999, when Ben Attar, a Moroccan Jewish merchant, takes a second wife, he commits an act whose unforeseen consequences will forever alter his family, his relationships, his business-his life. In an attempt to forestall conflict and advance his business interests at the same time, Ben Attar undertakes his annual journey to Europe with both his first wife and his new wife. The trip is the beginning of a profound human drama whose moral conflicts of fidelity and desire resonate with those of our time. Yehoshua renders the medieval world of Jewish and Christian culture and trade with...

Snow Mountain Passage is a powerful retelling of our most dramatic pioneer story--the ordeal of the Donner Party. Through the eyes of James Frazier Reed, one of the group's leaders, and the imagined "Trail Notes" of his daughter Patty, we journey along with the ill-fated group determined, at all costs, to make it to the California territory.
James Reed is a proud, headstrong, yet devoted husband and father. As he and his family travel in the "Palace Car," a huge, specially built--and ultimately cumbersome--covered wagon, they thrill to new sights and cope with conflict and constant...

In France, on the eve of the Revolution, a young man named Claude Page sets out to become the most ingenious and daring inventor of his time. In the course of a career filled with violence and passion, Claude learns the arts of enameling and watchmaking from an irascible, defrocked abbe, apprentices himself to a pornographic bookseller, and applies his erotic erudition to the seduction of the wife of an impotent wigmaker. But it is Claude's greatest device-a talking mechanical head-that both crowns his career and leads to an execution as tragic as that of Marie Antoinette, and far more...

Beyond the techniques and training, baseball begins with one player facing another and the psychological battle that they wage-the head game. In his critically acclaimed and bestselling new book, Roger Kahn presents the story of this supreme war of wits and the people who changed the course of baseball by playing, what he calls, chess at 90 miles an hour. In The Head Game, Kahn investigates not only grips, tactics, and physics, but also the intelligence, maturity, and competitive fire that has inspired some of the greatest hurlers in history.
By covering renowned pitchers and...

Don Juan, the -Seducer of Seville, - originated as a hero-villain of Spanish folk legend, is a famous lover and scoundrel who has made more than a thousand sexual conquests. One of Moliere's best-known plays, Don Juan was written while Tartuffe was still banned on the stages of Paris, and shared much with the outlawed play. Modern directors transform Don Juan in every new era, as each director finds something new to highlight in this timeless classic. Richard Wilbur's flawless translation will be the standard for generations to come, as have his translations of Moliere's other plays. Witty,...

An adventure into the heart of Nothing by bestselling author K. C. Cole.
Once again, acclaimed science writer K. C. Cole brings the arcane and acad-
emic down to the level of armchair scientists in The Hole in the Universe,
an entertaining and edifying search for nothing at all. Open the newspaper
on any given day and you will read of a newly discovered planet, star, and
so on. Yet scientists and mathematicians have spent generations searching
the far reaches of the universe for that one elusive state-nothingness.
Although this may sound like a simple task, every...

The bestselling historical novel that exposes the less than honorable side of our Founding Fathers by the Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist.
In this gripping and timely work, William Safire unveils the story behind the nation's first great political scandals. James Thomson Callender, the "scandalmonger" of the title, is an ambitious gossip-peddling editor secretly hired by Thomas Jefferson as a political weapon. After carefully damaging Alexander Hamilton's reputation, thereby paving the way for Jefferson's success, Callender is shunned by the very politicians on whose behalf he was jailed...

Two narratives twine through this superb novel: one introduces Gabriel Atlan-Ferrara, a fabled orchestral conductor, and his great passion, Inez Prada, a red-haired Mexican diva; the other is a mysterious telling of the first encounter in human history between a man and a woman. Berlioz's music for The Damnation of Faust brings Gabriel and Inez together, while the emerging love of neh-el and ah-nel--the original lovers--echoes the Faustian pact of love and death. Linking these narratives is a beautiful crystal seal that belongs to Atlan-Ferrara, its meaning an enigma that obsesses him....

During one incendiary summer, Murry Taylor kept an extensive journal of his day-to-day activities as an Alaskan smokejumper. It wasn't his first season fighting wildfires, and he's far from being a rookie--he's been on the job since 1965. Through this narrative of one busy season, Taylor reflects on the years of training, the harrowing adrenaline-fueled jumps, his brushes with death, the fires he conquered, and the ones that got away. It's a world full of bravado, one with epic battles of man versus nature, resulting in stories of death-defying defeats, serious injury, and occasionally...