Marian died by her own hand exactly one year ago. The author approaches Marian's death from the viewpoints of the people that touched her life including her lover, her best friend, and even her enemies.

"Do you have a favorite sound?" little Yoshio asks. The musician answers, "The most beautiful sound is the sound of ma, of silence." But Yoshio lives in Tokyo, Japan: a giant, noisy, busy city. He hears shoes squishing through puddles, trains whooshing, cars beeping, and families laughing. Tokyo is like a symphony hall! Where is silence? Join Yoshio on his journey through the hustle and bustle of the city to find the most beautiful sound of all.

A woman's year alone, on solitary retreat on a remote precipice in New Zealand. Isolation, cold, hunger, elemental winds from Antarctic, screams in the night; she survived with deep reflections, observations and insights.

The National Book Award–finalist movingly examines the lives of a group of New Yorkers deeply affected by one woman’s troubled life—and death. Marian is haunted by an unspoken past reflected in the choices she makes. Whether it’s her drug addiction or her dubious affairs, she finds herself increasingly adrift and alone. Yet in a city of millions, her story plays a part in the lives of others. Jaded cops who register Marian at a glance, a lover who agonizes over her abortion, a close friend stunned by her tragic overdose, a panhandling dwarf making the rounds in her Upper West Side neighborhood—each story weaves back and forth through time, revealing a compelling, compassionate portrait of one woman’s tragic fate. In a novel whose “structure combines delicacy and great tensile strength . . . Bell’s voice is increasingly diverse, accurate and, in this book of mourning, powerfully moving” (Publishers Weekly). One of America’s finest storytellers shows once again that he is a writer of “superb command” (The New York Times).

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Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. What is silence? In a series of short meditations, novelist and playwright John Biguenet considers silence as a servant of power, as a lie, as a punishment, as the voice of God, as a terrorist's final weapon, as a luxury good, as the reason for torture-in short, as an object we both do and do not recognize. Concluding with the prospects for its future in a world burgeoning with noise, Biguenet asks whether we should desire or fear silence-or if it is even ours to choose. Object Lessons is published in partnership with an essay series in The Atlantic.

Study of one of the defining films of recent American cinema, exploring the way it weaves together gothic, horror and thriller conventions.