Robert Fass

In 2005, celebrated novelist Francisco Goldman married Aura Estrada at a Mexican hacienda. More than twenty years his junior, Aura was a gifted young writer on the cusp of her own brilliant career, and the two were deeply in love. Then, a month before their second anniversary, Aura broke her neck bodysurfing while they were on vacation. Goldman was blamed by Aura's family-and crippled by his own grief and self-recrimination. In the aftermath of the...

In this characteristically turbocharged new book, celebrated Rolling Stone journalist Matt Taibbi provides an insider's guide to the variety of ways today's mainstream media tells us lies. Part tirade, part confessional, it reveals that what most people think of as "the news" is, in fact, a twisted wing of the entertainment business. In the Internet age, the press have mastered the art of monetizing anger, paranoia, and distrust. Taibbi, who has spent...

Explores the complexity of truth and the ways that people take advantage of this complexity to use and abuse neutral truths to suit their own agendas in politics, business, the media, and everyday life.

For the past decade, an audacious program called Football Dreams has held tryouts for millions of young boys across Africa, looking for soccer's next superstars. Sebastian Abbot follows a small group of the boys, weaving together the drama of the boys' determination to chase their dreams with the latest ideas on talent spotting and predicting sporting success, Abbot memorably explores why some of the boys succeed and chronicles the heartbreak of those...

Draws on cutting-edge scientific studies to discuss the U-shaped trajectory of happiness, which declines from the optimism of youth before surging upward again after age fifty, and offers ways to endure the slump during midlife

After the sudden death of his wife, Maida, Gene is haunted by the fear that their marriage was not all it appeared to be. Alongside Ed and Gayle Donnelly, friends since college days, he tries to resurrect happy memories of the times the two couples shared, raising their children in a small New Hampshire town and vacationing together at a lake house every summer. Meanwhile, his daughter, Dary, challenges not only his happy version of the past but also...

The Washington Post hailed Roger Rosenblatt's Making Toast as "a textbook on what constitutes perfect writing," and People lauded Kayak Morning as "intimate, expansive and profoundly moving." Classic tales of love and grief, the New York Times bestselling memoirs are also original literary works that carve out new territory at the intersection of poetry and prose. Now comes The Boy Detective, a story of the author's childhood in New York City, suffused...

In a summer that refuses to end, in the deceiving warmth of earliest October, civil war has come to Green Town, Illinois. It is the age-old conflict: the young against the elderly, for control of the clock that ticks their lives ever forward. The first cap-pistol shot heard 'round the town is dead accurate, felling an old man in his tracks, compelling town elder and school board despot Mr. Calvin C. Quartermain to marshal his graying forces and declare...

The 1-eyed detective Tim Corrigan tears New York apart in search of an assassin Tim Corrigan was the toughest detective in the NYPD before he joined the army, and fighting in Korea didn't make him any softer. He returned with an eye patch and a sidekick: a tough-as-nails GI named Chuck Baer, who picked up a private investigator's license in order to keep an eye on his old foxhole buddy. In a fair fight, these 2 veterans could take down any hoodlum...

As the Titanic and her passengers sank slowly into the Atlantic Ocean after striking an iceberg late in the evening of April 14, 1912, a nearby ship looked on. Second Officer Herbert Stone, in charge of the midnight watch on the SS Californian sitting idly a few miles north, saw the distress rockets that the Titanic fired. He alerted the captain, Stanley Lord, who was sleeping in the chartroom below, but Lord did not come to the bridge. Eight rockets...