A publishing editor is given the chance to see what life might have been like had been a lascivious slumlord, an overworked comedian, a famous but miserable author, or a politician on the brink of disaster.

In this prescient essay collection, the acclaimed author of Foucault's Pendulum examines the cultural trends and perils at the dawn of the 21st century. In the last decade of the 20th century, Umberto Eco saw an urgent need to embrace tolerance and multiculturalism in the face of our world's ever-increasing interconnectivity. At a talk delivered during the first Gulf War, he points out the absurdity of armed conflict in a globalized economy where...

"When college-bound Kathleen McPherson, in Minneapolis, pushes her family's traditional boundaries, she's horrified to discover a stalker intent on killing her. A classmate, whose romantic life seems to parallel Kathleen's, is stabbed to death near Kathleen's home. Gossip implies the murdered girl carried on with an older man. Kathleen and her best friend run away to Chicago to escape the knife-wielding stalker and to find happiness as flappers. Instead...

"The souls of ten animals caught up in human conflicts over the last century, and connected to both famous and little-known writers in surprising ways, tell their astonishing stories of life and death"--

In this influential book, the prototypical feminist writer of her day addressed a range of issues, from the Woman Question to prostitution and slavery, marriage and employment reform, and the European revolutionary movements of the 1840s. A thought-provoking challenge to contemporary assumptions of male privilege, it is a feminist literature classic.

"With the rapidly cascading Asian Financial Crisis threatening to go global and Korea in imminent meltdown, investment banker Dae Joon finds himself back in his native Seoul as part of an international team brought in to rescue the country from sovereign default. For Dae Joon - also known by his American name of Shane, after the cowboy movie his father so loved - the stakes are personal. Raised in the US and Harvard Business School-educated, Dae Joon...

"Home is where we love, suffer, and learn. Some homes we chose, others are inflicted upon us, and still others are bodies we are born into. In this astounding collection of stories, human and more-than-human worlds come together in places we call home. Four sisters and their mother explore their fears while teeny ghost people dress up in fragments of their children's clothes. A somewhat-ghost tends the family garden. Deep in the mountains, a shapeshifting...

"A lightly comedic, historical novel, Arroyo tells the parallel stories of a solar-dreaming young man and his semi-clairvoyant, impish mutt during two distinct epochs in Pasadena, California: 1913, as the landmark Colorado Street Bridge suffers a lethal collapse during construction but opens in the fanfare of the automobile age anyway; and 1993, as the refurbished bridge commemorates its 80th birthday in a marquee suburb-one that is perhaps not quite...

In the early 1900s, Bessie Bawtry, a small child with big notions, lives in a South Yorkshire mining town in England. Precocious and refined in a land of little ambition and much mining grime, Bessie waits for the day she can escape the bleak, coarse existence her ancestors had seldom questioned. Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the depressed little town...

"In The Writer's Crusade, author Tom Roston examines the connection between Vonnegut's life and Slaughterhouse-Five. Did Vonnegut suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder? Did Billy Pilgrim? Roston probes Vonnegut's work, his personal history, and discarded drafts of the novel, as well as original interviews with the writer's family, friends, scholars, psychologists, and other novelists including Karl Marlantes, Kevin Powers, and Tim O'Brien. The...