Does strolling through an art museum, admiring the old masters, improve us morally and spiritually? Would government subsidies of "high art" (such as big-city opera houses) be better spent on local community art projects? In What Good are the Arts? John Carey--one of Britain's most respected literary critics--offers a delightfully skeptical loo...more

The famous, funny, and inspiring stories of creation as readers have never heard them before. From the tale of how the leopard got his spots to the crab who played with the sea, from the ingenious invention of the alphabet to how the rhinoceros got his wrinkled skin, these stories of strange happenings in the High and Far-Off Times brim with life, ...more

Lily is a photojournalist in search of the "animal people" who supposedly haunt the city's darkest slums. Hank is a slumdweller who knows the bad streets all too well. One night, in a brutal incident, their two lives collide--uptown Lily and downtown Hank, each with a quest and a role to play in the secret drama of the city's oldest inhabitants.For...more

Marshall McLuhan pioneered the study of the media and is now making a comeback, despite the fact that he died in 1980. McLuhan was a professor of English who loved James Joyce, hated television, played himself in Woody Allen's Annie Hall, and fired off ideas like a machine gun. If he were alive today, he would want to continue infuriating a world m...more

Bill Bryson is an unabashed Anglophile who, through a mistake of history, happened to be born and bred in Iowa. Righting that error, he spent 20 years in England before deciding to repatriate: "I had recently read that 3.7 million Americans according to a Gallup poll, believed that they had been abducted by aliens at one time or another, so i...more