From one of Mexico’s most exciting young writers, a cosmopolitan and candid essay collection exploring life in cities across the world and reflecting on the transformative importance of literature in understanding ourselves In ten intimate essays, Daniel Saldaña París explores the cities he has lived in, each one home to a new iteration of himself. In Mexico City he’s a young poet eager to prove himself. In Montreal—an opioid addict desperate for relief. In Madrid—a lonely student seeking pleasure in grotesque extremes. These now diverging, now coalescing selves raise questions: Where can we find authenticity? How do we construct the stories that define us? What if our formative memories are closer to fiction than truth? Saldaña París turns to literature and film, poetry and philosophy for answers. The result is a hybrid of memoir and criticism, "a sensory work, full of soundscapes, filth, planes, closed spaces, open vastness" (El País).

An unprecedented history of Brooklyn, told through its places, buildings, and the people who made them, from the early seventeenth century to today America's most storied urban underdog, Brooklyn has become an internationally recognized brand in recent decades—celebrated and scorned as one of the hippest destinations in the world. In Brooklyn: The Once and Future City, Thomas J. Campanella unearths long-lost threads of the urban past, telling the rich history of the rise, fall, and reinvention of one of the world’s most resurgent cities. Spanning centuries and neighborhoods, Brooklyn-born Campanella recounts the creation of places familiar and long forgotten, both built and never realized, bringing to life the individuals whose dreams, visions, rackets, and schemes forged the city we know today. He takes us through Brooklyn’s history as homeland of the Leni Lenape and its transformation by Dutch colonists into a dense slaveholding region. We learn about English émigré Deborah Moody, whose town of Gravesend was the first founded by a woman in America. We see how wanderlusting Yale dropout Frederick Law Olmsted used Prospect Park to anchor an open space system that was to reach back to Manhattan. And we witness Brooklyn’s emergence as a playland of racetracks and amusement parks celebrated around the world. Campanella also describes Brooklyn’s outsized failures, from Samuel Friede’s bid to erect the world’s tallest building to the long struggle to make Jamaica Bay the world’s largest deepwater seaport, and the star-crossed urban renewal, public housing, and highway projects that battered the borough in the postwar era. Campanella reveals how this immigrant Promised Land drew millions, fell victim to its own social anxieties, and yet proved resilient enough to reawaken as a multicultural powerhouse and global symbol of urban vitality.

Seldom, if ever, has a writer been given access to a former major drug dealer in the Mafia underworld and three generations of family members that followed. After nearly two years of interviews and subsequent research, it has been discovered that a close relative of the family was one of the most powerful figures in the Mafia from the 1940s to the mid 1990s, yet his identity until now has never been revealed. He was the consigliere for all of the American Mafia. The book tells in detail the life and times of a family who escaped the threat of Fascism in Sicily at the turn of the century and the rise of one of the children to a major figure in the Mob. Another sibling returned from a tragic life in an orphanage only to become an adept criminal. He ultimately spent twenty years off and on in prison with the Who's Who of the Mafia, men who became friends and had secret stories to tell. After prison, he became one of the pioneers of Off Off Broadway in NYC and later was responsible for the regeneration of Little Italy in the Lower East Side of NYC. The book details the influence and protection afforded later generations of the family to this day. It offers a unique insight into the real life of people during this 100 year period. Myths about the Mob are disclosed and inaccuracies in the history of the Mafia are corrected. It is a very compelling epic true story. It is a book you will not be able to put down. Look on www.mafiasecretjudge.com for further details.

“A vivid portrait of faith lost and found through the eyes of a Japanese Buddhist monk in America” (Shelf Awareness) as he makes his way from an isolated monastery in Japan to the bustling streets of Brooklyn, New York. Seido Oda spent his boyhood in a small mountainside village in rural Japan. When his parents hand him over to the monks at the nearby Buddhist monastery, he devotes himself to painting, poetry, and prayer—and avoiding human contact. But his quiet life is unexpectedly upended when he is ordered by his superior to open a temple in Brooklyn. New York is a shock to the introverted Oda, who now must lead a ragtag army of eccentrics who make up the local Buddhist community. After tragedy strikes, Oda finally realizes his own long-buried sadness and spiritual short­comings. It is only with newly opened eyes that Oda comes to find in Brooklyn the home he has always sought.

Autobiography. How relationships enhanced my life.