National Book Award Winner, Nonfiction, 2014  A vibrant, colorful, and revelatory inner history of China during a moment of profound transformation.  From abroad, we often see China as a caricature: a nation of pragmatic plutocrats and ruthlessly ded...

Age of Ambition

The ascension of Vladimir Putin - a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB - to the presidency of Russia in 1999 should have been a signal that the country was headed away from democracy. Yet in the intervening years - as America and the world's other ...

Winter Is Coming

Wolfgang Faust was the driver of a Tiger I tank with the Wehrmacht Heavy Panzer Battalions, seeing extensive combat action on the Eastern Front in 1943-45. This memoir is his brutal and deeply personal account of the Russian Front's appalling carnage...

Tiger Tracks

While the Battle of Berlin in 1945 is widely known, the horrific story of the Halbe Kessel remains largely untold. In April 1945, victorious Soviet forces encircled 80,000 men of the German 9th Army in the Halbe area, South of Berlin, together with m...

The Last Panther

Full of unforgettable figures and an unrelenting spirit of adventure, Strange Stones is a far-ranging, thought-provoking collection of Peter Hessler’s best reportage - a dazzling display of the powerful storytelling, shrewd cultural insight, and warm...

Strange Stones

Deng Xiaoping joined the Chinese Communist movement as a youth and rose in its ranks to become an important lieutenant of Mao's from the 1930s onward. Two years after Mao's death in 1976, Deng became the de facto leader of the Chinese Communist Party...

Deng Xiaoping

Originally published in 1982 as the first of Edmund White's trilogy of autobiographical novels, A Boy's Own Story became an instant classic for its pioneering portrayal of homosexuality. The audiobook's unnamed narrator, growing up during the 1950s, ...

A Boy's Own Story

Whether you're a frequent visitor to Europe or just an armchair traveler, the surprising and extraordinary stories in Lingo will forever change the way you think about the continent and may even make you want to learn a new language. Lingo spins the ...

Lingo

This deeply researched book describes one of the great forgotten battles of the 20th century. At its height it involved nearly a million Chinese and Japanese soldiers, while sucking in three million civilians as unwilling spectators and, often, victi...

Shanghai 1937

The acclaimed novel of love and resistance during late 1930s China by Mo Yan, winner of the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.  Spanning three generations, this novel of family and myth is told through a series of flashbacks that depict events of stagge...

Red Sorghum

When the narrator of White's poised yet scalding autobiographical novel first embarks on his sexual odyssey, it is the 1950s, and America is "a big gray country of families on drowsy holiday." That country has no room for a scholarly teenager with gu...

The Beautiful Room Is Empty

Ten Days That Shook the World is John Reed's eyewitness account of the Russian Revolution. A contemporary journalist writing in the first flush of revolutionary enthusiasm, he gives a gripping record of the events in Petrograd in November 1917, when ...

Ten Days That Shook the World

Following A Boy's Own Story (now a classic of American fiction) and his richly acclaimed The Beautiful Room Is Empty, here is the eagerly awaited final volume of Edmund White's groundbreaking autobiographical trilogy.  Named for the work by Haydn in ...

The Farewell Symphony

Imagine raising an orphaned bear cub, carefully reintroducing her to the wild, then being welcomed back, almost daily, to observe her wild world for more than 17 years. Imagine visiting her in her feeding spots, watching her with her mates and her yo...

In the Company of Bears

In the tradition of In Patagonia and Great Plains, Michael Meyer's In Manchuria is a scintillating combination of memoir, contemporary reporting, and historical research, presenting a unique profile of China's legendary northeast territory. For three...

In Manchuria

Almost unknown to the rest of the globe, Xiaomi has become the world's third-largest mobile phone manufacturer. Its high-end phones are tailored to Chinese and emerging markets, where it outsells even Samsung. Since the 1990s China has been climbing ...

Little Rice

For the past 40 years Western economies have splurged on debt. Now, as the reality dawns that many debts cannot be repaid, we find ourselves again in crisis. But the oncoming defaults have a time-worn place in our economic history. As with the crises...

Paper Promises

The life of Bodhidharma, the founder of Zen Buddhism, has, with the passing of time, been magnified to the scale of myth, turning history into the stuff of legend. Known as the First Patriarch, Bodhidharma brought Zen from South India into China in 5...

Tracking Bodhidharma

Shostakovich's Seventh Symphony was first played in the city of its birth on August 9, 1942. There has never been a first performance to match it. Pray God, there never will be again. Almost a year earlier, the Germans had begun their blockade of the...

Leningrad: Siege and Symphony

When an earthquake of historic magnitude leveled the industrial city of Tangshan in the summer of 1976, killing more than a half-million people, China was already gripped by widespread social unrest. As Mao lay on his deathbed, the public mourned the...

Heaven Cracks, Earth Shakes

An irreverent tale of an American Jew serving in the Peace Corps in rural China, which reveals the absurdities, joys, and pathos of a traditional society in flux. In September of 2005, the Peace Corps sent Michael Levy to teach English in the heart o...

Kosher Chinese

From master storyteller Yan Lianke, winner of the prestigious Franz Kafka Prize and a finalist for the Man Booker International Prize, The Four Books is a powerful, daring novel of the dog-eat-dog psychology inside a labor camp for intellectuals duri...

The Four Books

English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn’t speak it - only one in five people does. Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world’s 7.4 billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewe...

Babel

In this first of a planned five-volume set, David Roy provides a complete and annotated translation of the famous Chin P'ing Mei, an anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel that focuses on the domestic life of Hsi-men Ch'ing, a corrupt, upwardly mo...

The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei (Volume One: The Gathering)

Part Lovely Bones, part Dogs of Babel, a series of letters tell Angel's story in her own words. Now deceased, the irrepressible golden retriever had been rescued from a shelter at an advanced age and given a second lease on life by author Martin Levi...

Letters from Angel

Winner of the National Book Award 2014  A young army captain who risked execution to swim from free-market Taiwan to Communist China. A barber who made $150 million in the gambling dens of Macau. The richest woman in China, a recycling tycoon known a...

In this second of a planned five-volume series, David Roy provides a complete and annotated translation of the famous Chin P'ing Mei, an anonymous sixteenth-century Chinese novel that focuses on the domestic life of His-men Ch'ing, a corrupt, upwardl...

The Plum in the Golden Vase or, Chin P'ing Mei (Volume Two, The Rivals)

Thanks to Salem sea captains, Gilded Age millionaires, curators on horseback and missionaries gone native, North American museums now possess the greatest collections of Chinese art outside of East Asia itself. How did it happen? The China Collectors...

The China Collectors

From the author of the award-winning Vermeer’s Hat, a historical detective story decoding a long-forgotten link between 17th-century Europe and China. Timothy Brook’s award-winning Vermeer’s Hat unfolded the early history of globalization, using Verm...

Mr. Selden's Map of China

“Diplomacy is not about being nice, polite or agreeable. It is fundamentally about protecting and promoting the country’s interests, preferably by being nice but, if necessary, by other appropriate means.” (Bilahari Kausikan)  Small states are always...

Singapore Is Not an Island

John Polly enters Shanghai in 1948 on a muggy, velvet evening, just in time for the Communist takeover of China. It marks only his fourth month in America's newly formed Central Intelligence Agency. Over the next two decades, Polly will become The Wh...

The White Mandarin

In the early years of Adams Golf, entrepreneur Barney Adams labored in obscurity. He collected six patents for his golf products, manufacturing fine equipment but enjoying no sales. Everything changed for him and his company in 1996, though, when he ...

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