When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle and 1,800 pounds of porn. Andrew had been considered the “king of 20th century smut,” a career that began as a strategy to pay for his son’s orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the ’70s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel was at its height. Over one long summer in his hometown, helping his mother move out of the house, Chris began to examine his deceased father’s possessions and realized he finally had an opportunity to come to grips with the mercurial man he always feared but never understood.

No writer has succeeded in capturing the medical and human drama of illness as honestly and as eloquently as Oliver Sacks. During the last few months of his life, he wrote a set of essays in which he movingly explored his feelings about completing a life and coming to terms with his own death. “It is the fate of every human being,” Sacks writes, “to be a unique individual, to find his own path, to live his own life, to die his own death.” Together, these four essays form an ode to the uniqueness of each human being and to gratitude for the gift of life.

The author of five previous volumes of selected writings, including the international bestseller ARGUABLY, Christopher Hitchens left at his death nearly 250,000 words of essays not yet published in book form. AND YET… assembles a selection that ranges from the literary to the political and is, by turns, a banquet of entertaining and instructive delights, including essays on Orwell, Lermontov, Chesterton, Fleming, Naipaul, Rushdie, Pamuk and Dickens, among others, as well as his laugh-out-loud self-mocking “makeover.”

It began in 1692 when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic.

1944 witnessed a series of titanic events: FDR at the pinnacle of his wartime leadership as well as his reelection, the planning of Operation Overlord with Churchill and Stalin, the unprecedented D-Day invasion, the liberation of Paris and the horrific Battle of the Bulge, and the tumultuous conferences that finally shaped the coming peace. But on the way, millions of more lives were still at stake as President Roosevelt was exposed to mounting evidence of the most grotesque crime in history: the Final Solution.

This first comprehensive biography of Jewish American writer and humorist Harry Golden (1903-1981) --- author of the 1958 national bestseller ONLY IN AMERICA --- illuminates a remarkable life intertwined with the rise of the civil rights movement, Jewish popular culture, and the sometimes precarious position of Jews in the South and across America during the 1950s.

BLACK MAN IN A WHITE COAT examines the complex ways in which both black doctors and patients must navigate the difficult and often contradictory terrain of race and medicine. As Damon Tweedy transforms from student to practicing physician, he discovers how often race influences his encounters with patients. Through their stories, he illustrates the complex social, cultural and economic factors at the root of most health problems in the black community. These issues take on greater meaning when Tweedy himself is diagnosed with a chronic disease far more common among black people.

Raised in California and Hawaii, William Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia and Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. BARBARIAN DAYS takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds and immerses us in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships annealed in challenging waves.

For three decades, C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met every week in Lewis' Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times. In THE FELLOWSHIP, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works.

Born in the early years of the Soviet Union, Svetlana Stalin spent her youth inside the walls of the Kremlin. As she gradually learned about the extent of her father’s brutality after his death, Svetlana could no longer keep quiet. In 1967 she shocked the world by defecting to the United States, leaving her two children behind. With access to KGB, CIA and Soviet government archives, as well as the close cooperation of Svetlana’s daughter, Rosemary Sullivan pieces together Svetlana’s incredible life.