Neil Hickey was a twenty-four year old job seeker when he heard the editor of a major magazine call journalism the most fun you can have, standing up. The young reporter had already come to that conclusion independently after working his way through college as a Baltimore newspaperman. Hed go on to spend more than a half century meeting movie stars, musicians, and some of the most powerful people in Washington as he honed his craft. Now an adjunct professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism, Hickey shares an insiders view of pop culture, war, oppression, and even happenings beyond our solar system. Meeting astronaut Neil Armstrong trumped interviews with presidents of the United States, secretaries of state past and present, and Nobel Prize winners. In Singapore, his assignment was to serve as a judge for the Miss Universe contest. Whether its chatting with President Bill Clinton or Jimmy Carter, traveling with former Secretary of State Henry Kissinger or investigating the Challenger spacecraft disaster, Hickey shares deep insights into American culture, the nature of war, and the art of journalism in Adventures in the Scribblers Trade.

Catch Me If You Can meets The Great Gatsby meets Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief in this captivating Jazz Age true-crime caper about "the greatest jewel thief who ever lived" (Life Magazine), Arthur Barry, who charmed celebrities and millionaires—everyone from Rockefellers to members of the royal family—while simultaneously planning and executing the most audacious and lucrative heists of the 1920s. “A master of narrative nonfiction. In this mesmerizing tale about a Jazz Age gentlemanly thief, Jobb has found his own perfect jewel.” ―DAVID GRANN, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Wager and Killers of the Flower Moon “An enthrallingly propulsive, unpredictably twisty biography of one of the most fascinating criminals of the 20th Century. I was hooked from the very first heist.” ―MICHAEL FINKEL, New York Times bestselling author of The Art Thief and The Stranger in the Woods A skilled con artist and one of the most successful burglars in history, Arthur Barry was adept at slipping in and out of bedrooms undetected, even when his victims slept only inches away. He became a folk hero, a gentleman bandit touted in the press as the “Prince of Thieves” and an “Aristocrat of Crime.” Think Cary Grant in To Catch a Thief. In a span of seven years, Barry stole pearls, diamonds, and other precious gems worth almost $60 million today. Among his many victims were a Rockefeller, an heiress to the Woolworth Department Store fortune, an oil magnate, Wall Street bigwigs, a top executive of automotive giant General Motors, and a famous polo player. He befriended the Prince of Wales, Harry Houdini, and other luminaries. The rollicking, caper-filled rise and dramatic downfall of this master thief is a high-speed ride told in stylish prose. A Gentleman and a Thief is also a love story. Barry confessed to dozens of burglaries to protect his wife, Anna Blake (and was the prime suspect in scores of others on Long Island and across Westchester County). Sentenced to a twenty-five-year term, he staged a dramatic prison break—triggering a bloody inmates' riot—when Anna became seriously ill, so they could be together for a few more years as fugitives. Page-turning, escapist, and sparkling with insight into the allure of gemstones and our fascination with well-planned heists and the suave, clever criminals who pull them off, A Gentleman and a Thief is perfect for true crime fans who relish the exploits of con artists and high-class crooks.

Dylan can be as evasive and abstruse as he is witty; he can be cranky and sarcastic. But in the right moments, he offers candid, revealing commentary about his groundbreaking music and creative process. Dylan on Dylan is an authoritative, chronologically arranged anthology of interviews, speeches and press conferences, as well as excerpts from nearly a hundred additional Q&As spanning Dylan's entire career. The material comes from reknowned publications like Rolling Stone and from obscure periodicals like Minnesota Daily, a student newspaper at Dylan's alma mater. Interviewers include some of the top music journalists of our time, such as Robert Love and Mikal Gilmore, as well as musicians like Pete Seeger and Happy Traum. Introductions put each piece in context and, in many cases, include the interviewer's reminiscences about the encounter.

In a career spanning 70 years, composer, conductor, and multi-instrumentalist David Amram is hailed today as the creator of symphonic works, chamber music, and two operas; as a brilliant jazz and vocal improviser; and the composer of memorable stage and film scores. He has collaborated with many leading musicians, playwrights, artists, actors, and writers, including Jack Kerouac, Woody Guthrie, Leonard Bernstein, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Parker, Arthur Miller, Elia Kazan, Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, Elmira Darvarova, Paul Newman, Willie Nelson, Steve Earle, and hundreds more. An innovator who blended jazz and global folk styles with classical traditions, Amram’s career also emphasizes the creative potential of joyful collaboration. This new book offers a fascinating and wide-ranging picture of Amram’s work and influence, from the rich, pioneering days of 1950s America to today’s embrace of international cultures. It shows how Amram’s gift as an on-stage spontaneous creator enriches his formal classical composing. With multi-media links for readers, it is possible to see and hear film and audio highlights and adventures described in this book by important conductors, musicians, performers, scholars, and journalists. This book is the essential guide to a major figure in contemporary music.

The first book in the word-of-mouth phenomenon debut fantasy series about one man's dangerous journey through a labyrinthine world. "One of my favorite books of all time" -- Mark Lawrence The Tower of Babel is the greatest marvel in the world. Immense as a mountain, the ancient Tower holds unnumbered ringdoms, warring and peaceful, stacked one on the other like the layers of a cake. It is a world of geniuses and tyrants, of luxury and menace, of unusual animals and mysterious machines. Soon after arriving for his honeymoon at the Tower, the mild-mannered headmaster of a small village school, Thomas Senlin, gets separated from his wife, Marya, in the overwhelming swarm of tourists, residents, and miscreants. Senlin is determined to find Marya, but to do so he'll have to navigate madhouses, ballrooms, and burlesque theaters. He must survive betrayal, assassins, and the illusions of the Tower. But if he hopes to find his wife, he will have to do more than just endure. This quiet man of letters must become a man of action.

Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment -- to systematically read her way through a random shelf of books in the library, LEQ-LES, "fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels." An original take on literary taste and habits by the acclaimed author of Parallel Lives. Rose, after a career of reading from syllabuses and writing about canonical books, decided to read like an explorer. She "wanted to sample, more democratically, the actual ground of literature." Casting herself into the untracked wilderness of the New York Society Library's stacks, she chose a shelf of fiction almost at random and read her way through it. What results is a spirited experiment in "Off-Road or Extreme Reading." Rose's shelf of roughly thirty books has everything she could wish for—a remarkable variety of authors and a range of literary ambitions and styles. The early-nineteenth-century Russian classic A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is spine by spine with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside tales about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels about a novel from an Afrikaans writer who fascinates Rose to the extent that she ends up watching a YouTube video of his funeral. A joyous testament to the thrill of engagement with books high and low, The Shelf leaves us with the feeling that there are treasures to be found on every library or bookstore shelf. Rose investigates her own discoveries with exuberance, candor, and while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf. “Exhilarating, adventurous, original--Phyllis Rose's The Shelf is a reminder of what reading and writing are all about.” -- Azar Nafisi, author of Reading Lolita in Tehran