Zaida Ben-yusuf: New York Portrait Photographer
by Frank H., III Goodyear

Hardcover $59.95 - 10%

In the early twentieth century Zaida Ben-Yusuf (1869–1933) was one of the busiest photographers in New York City, maintaining a fashionable studio on Fifth Avenue, exhibiting her distinctly modern portraits across America, Europe and Russia, and publishing work in many magazines. Her self-portraits also challenged traditional perceptions of female identity. This striking book celebrates Ben-Yusuf ’s achievement, showcasing a significant selection of her elegant and compelling portraits featuring prominent artistic and political figures of the day, including Lincoln Steffens, Edith Wharton, Elsie de Wolfe and Robert Henri. ”
Architecture: A World History
by Daniel Borden, Jerzy Elzanowski, Joni Taylor, Stephanie Tuerk

Paperback $19.95

Lavishly illustrated and super-condensed, Architecture: A World History is the perfect gift for any architecture buff. In this pocket-sized book bursting with 600 illustrations, page after page is dedicated to significant architectural movements, time lines that explore the evolution of the practice, and capsule biographies of great architects and examinations of their masterpieces.

Organized chronologically, the book travels from prehistory to the present, highlighting noteworthy examples of important architectural styles, and showcasing the work of significant architects, including Mies van der Rohe, Frank Gehry, Philip Johnson, Frank Lloyd Wright, Zaha Hadid, and Rem Koolhaas. From the pyramids of Egypt to the Taj Mahal, the Eiffel Tower to the Glass House, Architecture: A World History takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the most spectacular examples of architecture from around the world and throughout time.

Why You Shouldn’t Eat Your Boogers and Other Useless or Gross Information About Your Body: Information About Your Body
by Francesca Gould

Paperback $12.95

This delightful book is full of random and, at times, scatological facts about the human anatomy. Broken down by the systems of the body, it answers questions you may be too embarrassed to ask or even think about, such as:

- Do bugs live in your eyelashes?
- What does human flesh taste like?
- Can you really catch a cold by standing in the rain?
- How do astronauts poo in space?
- What foods can cure a hangover?
- Why is yawning contagious?
- Is eating boogers bad for you?

This oddball yet erudite book is full of fascinating factoids that those of us in search of guilty pleasures (or gross thrills!) will delight in.

The Life and Death of Images
Edited by Diarmuid Costello & Dominic Willsdon

Paperback $24.95

During the 1970s and 1980s the discourse surrounding aesthetics largely disappeared from the study of art history, theory, and cultural studies. Claims for the aesthetic value of artworks were thought elitist and politically regressive. The 1990s witnessed a return to aesthetics, but one that stressed the independent claims of beauty in reaction to its perceived suppression by ethical and political imperatives. Beauty, however, is just one aspect of the aesthetic. In recent years, increasing attention has been paid to the ways in which aesthetics and ethics are intertwined.

In The Life and Death of Images some of the world’s leading cultural thinkers engage in dialogue with one another concerning this “new” aesthetics. In provocative and accessible fashion, they demonstrate its relevance to a range of disciplines including analytic and continental philosophy, art history, theory and practice, cultural history and visual culture, rhetoric and comparative literature. While the focus is primarily on artworks, contributors also consider other forms of imagery that raise questions about the boundaries between art and non-art, about beauty, and about the ethics of aesthetics.

Little Criminals
by Gene Kerrigan

Paperback $16.95

Justin and Angela Kennedy are doing fine. Better than fine-they have wealth, position, love, children, and a limitless future. Into their lives comes Frankie Crowe, an ambitious criminal tired of risking his life for small change. Together with a crew of singularly dangerous men, Frankie decides that a kidnapping could be the first step toward a better life. Set in modern Dublin, Little Criminals is a story that bristles with tension and expectation, a story about what happens to the fragile things-friendship, love, compassion-when all rules are broken.

The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China from the Bottom Up
by Liao Yiwu

Hardcover $25.00 - 10%

The Corpse Walker is a compilation of twenty-seven extraordinary oral histories that opens a window, unlike any other, onto the lives of ordinary, often outcast, Chinese men and women. Liao Yiwu (one of the best-known writers in China because he is also one of the most censored) chose his subjects from the bottom of Chinese society: people for whom the “new” China-the China of economic growth and globalization-—is no more beneficial than the old. By asking challenging questions with respect and empathy, he manages to get his subjects to talk openly about their lives.

Here are a professional mourner, a trafficker in humans, a leper, an abbot, a retired government official, a former landowner, a mortician, a feng shui master, a former Red Guard, a political prisoner, a village teacher, a blind street musician, a Falun Gong practitioner, and many others–people who have been battered by life but who have managed to retain their dignity, their humor, and their essential, complex humanity.

Liao crafted the interviews (conducted between 1990 and 2003) with sensitivity and patience, working both from notes and from his own memory of these remarkable conversations. The result is an idiosyncratic, powerful, and richly revealing portrait of a people, a time, and a place we might otherwise have never known.

A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World
by Tony Horwitz

Hardcover $27.50 - 10%

On a chance visit to Plymouth Rock, Tony Horwitz realizes he’s mislaid more than a century of American history, from Columbus’s sail in 1492 to Jamestown’s founding in 16-oh-something. Did nothing happen in between? Determined to find out, he embarks on a journey of rediscovery, following in the footsteps of the many Europeans who preceded the Pilgrims to America.

An irresistible blend of history, myth, and misadventure, A Voyage Long and Strange captures the wonder and drama of first contact. Vikings, conquistadors, French voyageurs—these and many others roamed an unknown continent in quest of grapes, gold, converts, even a cure for syphilis. Though most failed, their remarkable exploits left an enduring mark on the land and people encountered by late-arriving English settlers.

Tracing this legacy with his own epic trek—from Florida’s Fountain of Youth to Plymouth’s sacred Rock, from desert pueblos to subarctic sweat lodges—Tony Horwitz explores the revealing gap between what we enshrine and what we forget. Displaying his trademark talent for humor, narrative, and historical insight, A Voyage Long and Strange allows us to rediscover the New World for ourselves.

A Wolf at the Table: A Memoir of My Father
by Augusten Burroughs

Hardcover $24.95 - 10%

With A Wolf at the Table, Augusten Burroughs makes a quantum leap into untapped emotional terrain: the radical pendulum swing between love and hate, the unspeakably terrifying relationship between father and son. Told with scorching honesty and penetrating insight, it is a story for anyone who has ever longed for unconditional love from a parent. Though harrowing and brutal, A Wolf at the Table will ultimately leave you buoyed with the profound joy of simply being alive. It’s a memoir of stunning psychological cruelty and the redemptive power of hope.

A School Leader’s Guide to Excellence: Collaborating Our Way to Better Schools
by Carmen Farina & Laura Kotch

Paperback $22.00