As the only American city under direct congressional control, Washington has served historically as a testing ground for federal policy initiatives and social experiments—with decidedly mixed results. Well-intentioned efforts to introduce measures of social justice for the district's largely black population have failed. Yet federal plans and federal money have successfully created a large federal presence—a triumph, argues Howard Gillette, of beauty over justice. In a new afterword, Gillette addresses the recent revitalization and the aftereffects of an urban sports arena.

Finalist, 2020 Miller Williams Poetry Prize Like nesting dolls, the poems in I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First contain scenes within scenes, inviting the reader over and over again to sharpen focus on minute details that, though small, reveal much about human perception and imagination. Angie Mazakis handles these layers of revelation with great tenderness. Her poems wander in the way that a curious mind wanders, so that even though they often end very far from where they started, they are anchored in the familiar, referring to experiences we all share: a moment of distraction in a coffee shop imagining a conversation with someone across the room, or a narrative built around the expressions of the cartoon people on the airplane seatback safety guide. I Was Waiting to See What You Would Do First is a testament to the notion that whether through a cosmic or microscopic lens, “You just see one moment; you just see now.”

"A fascinating, revelatory portrait of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and its treasures by a former New Yorker staffer who spent a decade as a museum guard"--

This is the first published version of Beauty and the Beast, written by the French author Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve in the mid-18th century and translated by James Robinson Planch . It is a novel-length story intended for adult readers, addressing the issues of the marriage system of the day in which women had no right to choose their husband or to refuse to marry. There is also a wealth of rich back story as to how the Prince became cursed and revelations about Beauty's parentage, which fail to appear in subsequent versions of the now classic fairy tale.

One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Winner of the 2006 Orange Prize for Fiction, another bestselling masterwork from the celebrated author of Swing Time and White Teeth "In this sharp, engaging satire, beauty's only skin-deep, but funny cuts to the bone." —Kirkus Reviews Having hit bestseller lists from the New York Times to the San Francisco Chronicle, this wise, hilarious novel reminds us why Zadie Smith has rocketed to literary stardom. On Beauty is the story of an interracial family living in the university town of Wellington, Massachusetts, whose misadventures in the culture wars—on both sides of the Atlantic—serve to skewer everything from family life to political correctness to the combustive collision between the personal and the political. Full of dead-on wit and relentlessly funny, this tour de force confirms Zadie Smith's reputation as a major literary talent.

Winner of the Man Booker Prize Named a Best Book of the Century by The New York Times Book Review International Bestseller From acclaimed author Alan Hollinghurst, a sweeping novel about class, sex, and money during four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. In the summer of 1983, twenty-year-old Nick Guest moves into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: conservative Member of Parliament Gerald, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their two children, Toby-whom Nick had idolized at Oxford-and Catherine, who is highly critical of her family's assumptions and ambitions. As the boom years of the eighties unfold, Nick, an innocent in the world of politics and money, finds his life altered by the rising fortunes of this glamorous family. His two vividly contrasting love affairs, one with a young black man who works as a clerk and one with a Lebanese millionaire, dramatize the dangers and rewards of his own private pursuit of beauty, a pursuit as compelling to Nick as the desire for power and riches among his friends. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly comic, this is a major work by one of our finest writers.