Re-Inventing the Book: Challenges from the Past for the Publishing Industry chronicles the significant changes that have taken place in the publishing industry in the past few decades and how they have altered the publishing value chain and the structure of the industry itself. The book examines and discusses how most publishing values, aims, and strategies have been common since the Renaissance. It aims to provide a methodological framework, not only for the understanding, explanation, and interpretation of the current situation, but also for the development of new strategies. The book features an overview of the publishing industry as it appears today, showing innovative methods and trends, highlighting new opportunities created by information technologies, and identifying challenges. Values discussed include globalization, convergence, access to information, disintermediation, discoverability, innovation, reader engagement, co-creation, and aesthetics in publishing. - Describes common values and features in the publishing industry since the Renaissance/invention of printing - Proposes a methodological framework that helps users understand current publishing issues and trends - Focuses on reader engagement and participation - Proposes and discusses the publishing chain, not only as a value chain, but also as an information chain - Considers the aesthetics of publishing, not only for the printed book, but also for digital material

In a searing historical novel, Tonya Bolden illuminates post-Reconstruction America in an intimate portrait of a determined young woman who dares to seize the opportunity of a lifetime. As a young black woman in 1880s Savannah, Essie's dreams are very much at odds with her reality. Ashamed of her beginnings, but unwilling to accept the path currently available to her, Essie is trapped between the life she has and the life she wants. Until she meets a lady named Dorcas Vashon, the richest and most cultured black woman she's ever encountered. When Dorcas makes Essie an offer she can't refuse, she becomes Victoria. Transformed by a fine wardrobe, a classic education, and the rules of etiquette, Victoria is soon welcomed in the upper echelons of black society in Washington, D. C. But when the life she desires is finally within her grasp, Victoria must decide how much of herself she is truly willing to surrender.

"The story ends in September 2001. It is by the capacity to understand the interweaving actions and aspirations of many different characters - in Lebanon, Israel, Turkey, England - that there might be a chance, it seems, for humans to be nudged out of their self-destructive genetic and environmental conditioning."--BOOK JACKET.

A New York Times Paperback Row Editor's Choice Combining the infectious narration of Nick Hornby’s Funny Girl, the philosophical lyricism of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives, and the mesmerizing power of Anna North’s The Life and Death of Sophie Stark, a breathtaking debut, brimming with youthful brio and irresistible humor, that chronicles a young man’s friendship with a most peculiar artist. On a rooftop in Brooklyn on a spring night, a young intern and would-be writer, newly arrived from Copenhagen, meets the intriguing Ana Ivan. Clever and funny, with an air of mystery and melancholia, Ana is a performance artist, a mathematician, and a self-proclaimed time traveler. She is also bad luck, she confesses; she is from a cursed Romanian lineage. Before long, the intern finds himself seduced by Ana’s enthralling stories—of her unlucky countrymen; of her parents’ romance during the worst years of Nicolae Ceaucescu’s dictatorship; of a Daylight Savings switchover gone horribly wrong. Ana also introduces him to her latest artistic endeavor. Following the astronomical rather than the Gregorian calendar, she is trying to alter her sense of time—an experiment that will lead her to live in complete darkness for one month. Descending into the blackness with Ana, the intern slowly loses touch with his own existence, entangling himself in the lives of Ana, her starry-eyed mother Maria, and her raging math-prodigy father Ciprian. Peeling back the layers of her past, he eventually discovers the perverse tragedy that has haunted Ana’s family for decades and shaped her journey from the streets of Bucharest to the Atlas Mountains of Morocco and finally to New York City. The Invention of Ana blurs the lines between narrative and memory, perception and reality, identity and authenticity. In his stunning debut novel, Mikkel Rosengaard illuminates the profound power of stories to alter the world around us—and the lives of the ones we love.

Austin Voronkov is many things. He is an engineer, an inventor, an immigrant from Russia to Bridgeport, Connecticut, in 1913, where he gets a job at a rifle factory. At the house where he rents a room, he falls in love with a woman named Julia, who becomes his wife and the mother of his three children. When Austin is wrongly accused of attending anarchist gatherings his limited grasp of English condemns him to his fate as a deportee, retreating with his new bride to his home in Russia, where he and his young family become embroiled in the Civil War and must flee once again, to Mexico. While Julia and the children are eventually able to return to the U.S., Austin becomes indefinitely stranded in Mexico City because of the black mark on his record. He keeps a daily correspondence with Julia, as they each exchange their hopes and fears for the future, and as they struggle to remain a family across a distance of two countries. Austin becomes convinced that his engineering designs will be awarded patents, thereby paving the way for the government to approve his return and award his long sought-after American citizenship. At the same time he becomes convinced that an FBI agent is monitoring his every move, with the intent of blocking any possible return to the United States. Austin and Julia's struggles build to crisis and heartrending resolution in this dazzling, sweeping debut. The novel is based in part on Vanessa Manko's family history and the life of a grandfather she never knew. Manko used this history as a jumping off point for the novel, which focuses on borders between the past and present, sanity and madness, while the very real U.S.-Mexico border looms. The novel also explores how loss reshapes and transforms lives. It is a deeply moving testament to the enduring power of family and the meaning of home.

The searing and haunting debut novel from PEN finalist and New York Times bestelling author Andrea J. Buchanan Spanning five generations of women, Five-Part Invention wrestles with the question—if trauma echoes through generations, can love echo, too? Is the love we transmit enough to undo the trauma of the past that we unwittingly carry with us and often re-enact in the present? When Lise, a pianist, suffers a nervous breakdown early in her marriage, her husband, in a warped act of protection and jealousy, has her piano taken away. With prose that is precise and emotionally affecting, Buchanan vividly renders how Lise's separation from her one source of expression and fulfilment cascades into her relationship with her daughter, leaving a legacy of trauma that echoes through the generations to come. Characters emerge broken and passionate, jagged, and yet hopeful and emotionally resonant, written in a way that only Buchanan, herself a conservatory-trained pianist, could achieve. Five-Part Invention is by turns frightening and exquisitely observed, and establishes Buchanan as a literary force.

First published in 1997, Inventing Memory is about four generations of remarkable women from a Jewish-American family-their triumphs, tragedies, scandals, and love affairs-as related by Sara Solomon, the youngest of these women. While trying to chronicle their history, the story becomes essentially hers, as she comes to understand the nature of memory, the way all of us both invent and assimilate our ancestors. In learning about the women in her family, Sara discovers how to create her own future.