Madeleine Hanna breaks out of her straight-and-narrow mold when she falls in love with charismatic loner Leonard Bankhead, while at the same time an old friend of hers resurfaces, obsessed with the idea that Madeleine is his destiny.

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year
From the author of Either/Or and The Idiot, Elif Batuman's The Possessed presents the true but unlikely stories of lives devoted—Absurdly! Melancholically! Beautifully!—to the Russian Classics.
No one who read Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies

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THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
A book club discuss the works of Jane Austen and experience their own affairs of the heart in this charming “tribute to Austen that manages to capture her spirit” (The Boston Globe).
In California’s central valley, five women and one man join to discuss Jane Austen’s novels. Over the six months they get together, marriages are tested, affairs begin, unsuitable arrangements...

Learn to distinguish the different styles of classical music; explore composers, instruments, orchestras, concerts, recordings, and more; build a fabulous classical music library.

A self-styled intellectual rebel, William Deresiewicz never thought Jane Austen's novels had anything to offer him. But when he was assigned to read Emma as a Columbia graduate student, something extraordinary happened. Austen's devotion to the everyday and her belief in the value of ordinary lives ignited something in him. Viewing the world through her eyes and treating people as generously, his life suddenly acquired the fascination of a novel.

Photographs from around the world celebrate the universal joy that kids get from making music, whether they're playing instruments, clapping their hands, stomping their feet, or singing. Music can help express one child's feelings--or it can bring a whole community together.

Psychiatrist Andrew Marlowe, devoted to his profession and the painting hobby he loves, has a solitary but ordered life. When renowned painter Robert Oliver attacks a canvas in the National Gallery of Art and becomes his patient, Marlow finds that order destroyed. Desperate to understand the secret that torments the genius, he embarks on a journey that leads him into the lives of the women closest to Oliver and a tragedy at the heart of French Impressionism....

One evening, journalist Eric Siblin attended a recital of Johann Sebastian Bach's Cello Suites and began an epic quest that would unravel three centuries of intrigue, politics, and passion. The Cello Suites weaves together three dramatic narratives: the disappearance of Bach's manuscript in the eighteenth century; Pablo Casals's discovery and popularization of the music in Spain in the late-nineteenth century; and Siblin's infatuation with the suites...

Three stories, each around a particular Matisse painting. In Medusa's Ankles, a hairdresser informs a customer he is considering leaving his wife because she has allowed her ankles to get fat. The novel describes the reaction of the customer, herself conscious of her waning looks.

"Americans love musicals. Americans invented musicals. Americans perfected musicals. But what, exactly, is a musical? In [this book], Jack Viertel takes them apart, puts them back together, sings their praises, marvels at their unflagging inventiveness, and occasionally despairs over their more embarrassing shortcomings. In the process, he invites us to fall in love all over again by showing us how musicals happen, what makes them work, how they captivate...