Rose lives in New York, the city of bright lights and excitementwhere extraordinary things happen every day. But Rose wasn’t born in New York; she was adopted and arrived there at age two; and though Rose loves her home and her adopted family, sometimes she can’t help but feel different, like she’s meant to be somewhere else.
Then one day in Central Park, Rose sees something truly extraordinary: a crystal staircase rising out of the lake, and two small figures climbing the shimmering steps before vanishing like a mirage. Only it isn’t a mirage. Rose is being watchedby representatives of U Nork, a hidden city far more spectacular than its sister city, New York.
In U Nork, dirigibles and zeppelins skirt dazzling skyscrapers that would dwarf the Chrysler Building. Impeccably dressed U Norkers glide along the sidewalks on roller skates. Rose can hardly take it all in.And then she learns the most astonishing thing about U Nork: its citizens are in danger, and only Rose can help them.
In this masterful new fantasy, best-selling author Adam Gopnik joins with legendary illustrator Bruce McCall to explore powerful themes of identity and the meaning of home.
Read MoreNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The finest book on France in recent years.”—Alain de Botton, The New York Times Book Review In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of Paris.
In the grand tradition of Stein, Hemingway, Baldwin, and Liebling, Gopnik set out to enjoy the storied existence of an American in Paris—walks down the paths of the Tuileries, philosophical discussions in cafés, and afternoon jaunts to the Musée d’Orsay.
But as readers of Gopnik’s beloved and award-winning “Paris Journal” in The New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with la vie quotidienne—the daily, slightly less fabled life. As Gopnik discovers in this tender account, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar—both promise new routines, new languages, and a new set of rules by which each day is to be lived.
With singular wit and insight, Gopnik manages to weave the magical with the mundane in this wholly delightful book that Entertainment Weekly deemed “magisterial.”
Read MoreAlways black and white, naturally lit, and stripped of make-up and costumes, French photographer Brigitte Lacombe's iconic celebrity portraits reveal the generation of film and theater stars that has emerged since the 70s. See Spielberg looking boyish; Kevin Kline embarassed and self-conscious; Leonardo di Caprio watching hawkishly; John Malkovich staring; Diane Keaton collapsed in laughter.
This exquisitely produced oversize volume is a retrospective of images that gorgeously conveys Lacombe's deep love for the performing arts and the people involved in it.
Read MoreNot long after Adam Gopnik returned to New York at the end of 2000 with his wife and two small children, they witnessed one of the great and tragic events of the city’s history. In his sketches and glimpses of people and places, Gopnik builds a portrait of our altered New York: the changes in manners, the way children are raised, our plans for and accounts of ourselves, and how life moves forward after tragedy.
Rich with Gopnik’s signature charm, wit, and joie de vivre, here is the most under-examined corner of the romance of New York: our struggle to turn the glamorous metropolis that seduces us into the home we cannot imagine leaving.
Read MoreIn this captivating double life, Adam Gopnik searches for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution. Born by cosmic coincidence on the same day in 1809 and separated by an ocean, Lincoln and Darwin coauthored our sense of history and our understanding of man’s place in the world.
Here Gopnik reveals these two men as they really were: family men and social climbers, ambitious manipulators and courageous adventurers, grieving parents and brilliant scholars. Above all we see them as thinkers and writers, making and witnessing the great changes in thought that mark truly modern times.
Read MoreFrom the author of Paris to the Moon, a beguiling tour of the morals and manners of our present food mania, in search of eating’s deeper truths. Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, and even our moralizing.
With our top chefs as deities and finest restaurants as places of pilgrimage, we have made food the stuff of secular seeking and transcendence, finding heaven in a mouthful. But have we come any closer to discovering the true meaning of food in our lives? With inimitable charm and learning, Adam Gopnik takes us on a beguiling journey in search of that meaning as he charts America’s recent and rapid evolution from commendably aware eaters to manic, compulsive gastronomes.
Read MoreA taste for winter, a love of winter a mind for winter” is for many a part of the modern human condition. International bestselling author Adam Gopnik does for this storied season what he did for the City of Light in the New York Times bestseller Paris to the Moon.
Here he tells the story of winter in five parts: Romantic Winter, Radical Winter, Recuperative Winter, Recreational Winter, and Remembering Winter. In this stunningly beautiful meditation, Gopnik touches on a kaleidoscope of subjects, from the German romantic landscape to the politics of polar exploration to the science of ice.
And in the end, he pays homage to what could be a lost season and thus, a lost collective cultural history due to the threat of global warming. Through delicate, enchanting, and intricate narrative detail, buoyed by his trademark gentle wit, Gopnik draws us into another magical world and makes us look at it anew.
Read MoreA Vintage Shorts Travel Selection There’s nothing like autumn in New York, as Adam Gopnik and his family find when they return to Manhattan after an extended stay in France. From the longtime New Yorker scribe and author of the national bestseller Paris to the Moon, here is a lyrical appreciation of the city that never sleeps.
From Central Park to the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, covering noisy apartments, perfect taxi cab routes, and grade school pageants where the children just might fly, Adam Gopnik paints a timeless portrait of New York, a city “old as time, worn as Rome, mysterious as life.
” An eBook short.
Read More'Engaging, witty, thoughtful, clever, casual, ebullient, erudite and thoroughly modern' Spectator'A dazzling talent - hilarious, winning and deft' Malcolm Gladwell In Mid-Air is a collection of short essays by the acclaimed writer and speaker, Adam Gopnik.
Known for his ability to perceive 'the whole world in a grain of sand', he uses this format to take a dizzying range of subjects and intricately explore their meaning to our lives - as people, as citizens and as families. From how he works so that his daughter can have holes in her clothes, to why appropriation is more empowering than oppressing; from French sex to binge-watching TV, from the secret of a happy marriage to why we should mention the war - each topic is illuminated by his erudition and wit.
As in their original form on the radio, Gopnik's essays - each one a pleasure garden of wry confessions, self-deprecating asides, wordplay and striking insights - feel like the most intimate of conversations between writer and reader; yet at the same time they capture a public forum of pithy debate and tender persuasion.
Above all, In Mid-Air initiates a sense of wonder in the ordinary that yearns to be shared.
Read MoreA stirring defense of liberalism against the dogmatisms of our time from an award-winning and New York Times bestselling author.Not since the early twentieth century has liberalism, and liberals, been under such relentless attack, from both right and left.
The crisis of democracy in our era has produced a crisis of faith in liberal institutions and, even worse, in liberal thought. A Thousand Small Sanities is a manifesto rooted in the lives of people who invented and extended the liberal tradition. Taking us from Montaigne to Mill, and from Middlemarch to the civil rights movement, Adam Gopnik argues that liberalism is not a form of centrism, nor simply another word for free markets, nor merely a term denoting a set of rights.
It is something far more ambitious: the search for radical change by humane measures. Gopnik shows us why liberalism is one of the great moral adventures in human history -- and why, in an age of autocracy, our lives may depend on its continuation.
Read MoreFrom the earliest years of the American republic, Paris has provoked an extraordinary American literary response. An almost inevitable destination for writers and thinkers, Paris has been many things to many Americans: a tradition-bound bastion of the old world of Europe; a hotbed of revolutionary ideologies in politics and art; and a space in which to cultivate an openness to life and love thought impossible at home.
Including stories, letters, memoirs, and reporting, Americans in Paris distills three centuries of vigorous, glittering, and powerfully emotional writing about the place that Henry James called “the most brilliant city in the world.” American writers came to Paris as statesmen, soldiers, students, tourists, and sometimes they stayed as expatriates.
This anthology ranges from the crucial early impressions of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin to the latter-day reflections of writers as varied as James Baldwin, Isadora Duncan, and Jack Kerouac. Along the way we encounter the energetic travelers of the nineteenth century—Emerson, Mark Twain, Henry James—and the pilgrims of the twentieth: Gertrude Stein, F.
Scott Fitzgerald, E. E. Cummings, Cole Porter, Henry Miller. Come along as Thomas Paine takes a direct and dangerous part in the French Revolution; Harriet Beecher Stowe tours the Louvre; Theodore Dreiser samples the sensual enticements of Parisian nightlife; Edith Wharton movingly describes Paris in the early days of World War I; John Dos Passos charts the gathering political storms of the 1930s; Paul Zweig recalls the intertwined pleasures of language and sex; and A.
J. Liebling savors the memory of his culinary education in delicious detail. Americans in Paris is a diverse and constantly engaging mosaic, full of revealing cultural gulfs and misunderstandings, personal and literary experimentation, and profound moments of self-discovery.
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