A mystery surrounding a vintage car lies at the heart of this “moving, psychologically complex” novel of life, death, and history (Providence Journal). A beloved car becomes a piece of us—a way back into our histories, or forward into our destinies. For Emerson Tang, the only son of a prominent New England family, that car is a 1954 Beacon. A collector—of art and experience—Emerson keeps his prized possession safely stored away. When his health begins to fail, his archivist and caretaker is approached by a secretive French painter determined to buy the Beacon at any cost. But they discover that the Beacon has been compromised—and that its importance reaches far beyond Emerson’s own history. Soon they run into another who shares their obsession: the heir to the ruined Beacon Motor Company, who is determined to restore his grandfather’s legacy. These four become unlikely adventurers, joined in their aim to reunite the Beacon’s original body and engine, pitted against one another in their quest to claim it. Each new clue takes one closer to triumph, but also takes these characters, each grieving a deep loss, toward finding missing pieces of their own lives. A fast-paced ride through the twentieth century—to modernism, fascism, and industrialism, to Manhattan, a German zeppelin, a famed concours in Pebble Beach, and a road race in Italy—The Afterlife of Emerson Tang takes us deep into a complicated automotive romance. A novel of strangers connected across time, through a car that is so much more than a car, it asks us what should be preserved, what memories to trust, and whether some of the legacies we hold most dear—including that grand contraption, the automobile—can be made new again. “Passionately written . . . Champa delves into individual souls and emotions in her riveting, layered tale that holds its surprises right up until the end.” —Providence Journal “A vintage 1954 Beacon car is the axis around which four characters revolve, trying to accept and resolve each of their sorrows in Champa’s vividly detailed debut . . . [an] intellectual yet deeply human examination of what it means to live as well as to die.” —Booklist

A driving, panoramic novel of four strangers whose personal struggles with grief become interconnected through their quest to reunite the body and engine of a vintage car.

Hugo and Shirley Jackson award-winning Peter Watts stands on the cutting edge of hard SF with his acclaimed novel, Blindsight Two months since the stars fell... Two months of silence, while a world held its breath. Now some half-derelict space probe, sparking fitfully past Neptune's orbit, hears a whisper from the edge of the solar system: a faint signal sweeping the cosmos like a lighthouse beam. Whatever's out there isn't talking to us. It's talking to some distant star, perhaps. Or perhaps to something closer, something en route. So who do you send to force introductions with unknown and unknowable alien intellect that doesn't wish to be met? You send a linguist with multiple personalities, her brain surgically partitioned into separate, sentient processing cores. You send a biologist so radically interfaced with machinery that he sees x-rays and tastes ultrasound. You send a pacifist warrior in the faint hope she won't be needed. You send a monster to command them all, an extinct hominid predator once called vampire, recalled from the grave with the voodoo of recombinant genetics and the blood of sociopaths. And you send a synthesist—an informational topologist with half his mind gone—as an interface between here and there. Pray they can be trusted with the fate of a world. They may be more alien than the thing they've been sent to find. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

A unique anthology of poems--from around the world and through the ages--that celebrates the gloriously diverse insect world. Given that insects vastly outnumber us, it is no surprise that many cultures have long and rich traditions of verse about our tiny fellow creatures. Tang Dynasty poets in China and the haiku masters of Japan composed thousands of works in praise of crickets, grasshoppers, cicadas, moths, and butterflies, as well as such humbler bugs as houseflies, fleas, and mosquitoes. In the West, poems about insects date back to the ancient Greeks and appear frequently in Europe from the Elizabethan period onward. The brilliant poets collected here range far and wide in time and place, including Tu Fu, John Donne, Kobayashi Issa, William Wordsworth, Victor Hugo, Ivan Turgenev, Emily Dickinson, Christina Rossetti, Robert Frost, E. E. Cummings, Elizabeth Bishop, Ted Hughes, Pablo Neruda, Mary Oliver, Xi Chuan, and Kevin Young. Bees, butterflies, and beetles, cockroaches and caterpillars, fireflies and dragonflies, ladybugs and glowworms—the miniature beings that adorn these pages are as varied as the poetic talents that celebrate them. Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free cream-colored paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket.

Designated a UNESCO World Heritage site in 1993, the HÅ ryÅ«ji temple complex includes some of the oldest and largest surviving wooden buildings in the world. The original HÅ ryÅ«ji temple was built between 601 and 607 by Prince Regent ShÅ toku (573?â "622), one of Japanâ (TM)s best-known cultural heroes. The construction of the temple marked the introduction of Buddhism and Buddhist art and architecture to Japan from China, by way of the Korean peninsula, as promoted by Prince ShÅ toku. After a fire in 670 that destroyed the site, the temple was rebuilt and enlarged. HÅ ryÅ«ji became one of Japanâ (TM)s leading centers of Buddhist scholarship as well as a focus for the cult of its founder, Prince ShÅ toku. This volume of essays originate from the â oeThe Dawn of East Asian International Buddhist Art and Architecture: HÅ ryÅ«ji (Temple of the Exalted Law) in Its Contextsâ symposium held at the University of Virginia in October 2005. Covering the disciplines of archaeology, architecture, architectural history, art history, and religion, these essays aim to shed new light on the HÅ ryÅ«ji complex by (1) examining new archaeological materials, (2) incorporating computer analysis of the structural system of the pagoda, and (3) including cross-cultural, interdisciplinary perspectives that reflect current research in various fields.

This volume illustrates one hundred works from a significant and wide-ranging collection of Chinese ceramics, including works of the Chinese potters' art from the Neolithic through the Yuan dynasties (approximately 4000 BC through to the 14th century), with works from the major traditions and kilns. It showcases the extraordinary achievements of Chinese potters in both earthenware and stoneware, and in ceramics made for use in this world as well as the afterlife. One of the earliest works included is a product of the late phase of the Dawenkou culture (c. 2800-2400 BC), one of China's several, co-existing Neolithic cultures characterized by distinctive pottery. Examples of funerary art from the Han and Tang dynasties are included, and finally Song wares that embody a literati aesthetic.