Dressed to Kill: Jazz Age Fashion from Virginia's
By Virginia Bates/Daisy Bates
Rizzoli 978 0 8478 4187 5
$50.00 Design

This lavish volume invites the reader into the glamorous fashions of the 1920s. To coincide with the release of the film The Great Gatsby, we are pleased to offer Jazz Age Fashion at a new lower price. This stunning volume highlights the best of the collection, scaling the heights of Jazz Age fashion with chapters on sequined dresses, cocktail wear, bridge coats, opera coats, evening jackets, and house coats. With sumptuous still-life photographs of rare and precious beaded dresses, feathered capes, and silky kimonos, highlighting the craftsmanship and ornamentation of each piece, this is a must-have book for collectors, connoisseurs, and those who believe in evening style.

The Attacking Ocean
By Brian Fagan
Bloomsbury 978 1 60819 692 0
$31.50 History/Science

The past fifteen thousand years--the entire span of human civilization--have witnessed dramatic sea level changes, which began with rapid global warming at the end of the Ice Age, when sea levels were more than 700 feet below modern levels. Over the next eleven millennia, the oceans climbed in fits and starts. These rapid changes had little effect on those humans who experienced them, partly because there were so few people on earth, and also because they were able to adjust readily to new coastlines.

Global sea levels stabilized about six thousand years ago except for local adjustments that caused often quite significant changes to places like the Nile Delta. So the curve of inexorably rising seas flattened out as urban civilizations developed in Egypt, Mesopotamia, and South Asia. The earth's population boomed, quintupling from the time of Christ to the Industrial Revolution. The threat from the oceans increased with our crowding along shores to live, fish, and trade.

Since 1860, the world has warmed significantly and the ocean's climb has speeded. The sea level changes are cumulative and gradual; no one knows when they will end. The Attacking Ocean, from celebrated author Brian Fagan, tells a tale of the rising complexity of the relationship between humans and the sea at their doorsteps, a complexity created not by the oceans, which have changed but little. What has changed is us, and the number of us on earth.

The Great Degeneration
By Niall Ferguson
Penguin 978 1 59420 545 3
$28.50 Economics

All the Dead Yale Men
By Craig Nova
Counterpoint 978 1 58243 828 3
$34.50 Fiction

Originally published in 1982 to wide acclaim, The Good Son remains Craig Nova's undisputed masterpiece. This classic explored the complicated entanglements of fathers and sons —expressed in the story of nouvue-riche father Pop Mackinnon, who used his wealth to manipulate his son Chip into the ‘right' kind of marriage upon the young man's return from World War II.

Chip eventually gave up the love of his life and married to secure his future – and what were the consequences of that decision? All the Dead Yale Men answers that question in telling the story of Frank Mackinnon, son of Chip, a prosecutor in Boston with a happy marriage and a daughter set to follow his footsteps into law school. Chip's death throws Frank into his family's legacy, where he must contend with the inheritance of the Mackinnon's beloved land and a bevy of secrets that dates back three generations. And when Frank's daughter Pia falls under the sway of local bad boy Aurlon Miller, his grief over his father's death triggers the family legacy of social standing and manipulation to begin anew, leading Frank to the darkest edges of what a father will do to protect the ones he loves.

All the Dead Yale Men examines the end of an era, how privilege and inheritance often crumble in the face of the modern world, a story enriched by the setting and mythology of Boston and its surroundings. The novel not only moves the Mackinnon's story forward but will recast historical elements of the classic novel as well, heralding the arrival of a new American classic.

In Times of Fading Light
By Eugen Ruge
Graywolf Press 978 1 55597 643 9
$30.00 Fiction

In Times of Fading Light begins in September 2001 as Alexander Umnitzer, who has just been diagnosed with terminal cancer, leaves behind his ailing father to fly to Mexico, where his grandparents lived as exiles in the 1940s.

The novel then takes us both forward and back in time, creating a panoramic view of the family's history: from Alexander's grandparents' return to the GDR to build the socialist state, to his father's decade spent in a gulag for criticizing the Soviet regime, to his son's desire to leave the political struggles of the twentieth century in the past.

With wisdom, humor, and great empathy, Eugen Ruge draws on his own family history as he masterfully brings to life the tragic intertwining of politics, love, and family under the East German regime.

Great Retreats: Yoga
Ed. & Compiled by Angelika Taschen Text by Kristin Rubesamen
Taschen 978 3 8365 3488 6
$23.99 Travel

An Archaeology of Architecture: Photowriting the Built Environment
By Dennis Tedlock
University of New Mexico Press 978 0 8263 5305 4
$57.50 Photography/Architecture

Page by page, this book takes us on a journey through the built world that ranges from Greece to Guatemala and from New York to San Francisco. Tedlock practices what he calls photowriting, a creative process that brings photographer and writer together in the same person. It may be true enough that a photograph can show more than words can say, but it is equally true that words can say more than a photograph can show. A third space opens up in the middle, where the viewer-reader can look back and forth between image and text at will.

Tedlock looks at the built world with the eye of an archaeologist and ethnographer. His long experience as a fieldworker has made him acutely aware of the ways in which buildings are continuously altered by human actions and natural forces. Anthropology assigns ruins to archaeology and structures currently in use to ethnology, but Tedlock reminds the viewer that an occupied building bears marks of the same processes that produce archaeological remains. As he puts it, "Whenever I look around at the worlds humans build for themselves, I see archaeology in the making."

Openly Straight
By Bill Konigsberg
Arthur A. Levine Books  978 0 545 50989 3
$19.99 Juvenile Fiction

A funny, honest novel about being out, being proud . . . and being ready for something else.

Rafe is a normal teenager from Boulder, Colorado. He plays soccer. He's won skiing prizes. He likes to write.

And, oh yeah, he's gay. He's been out since 8th grade, and he isn't teased, and he goes to other high schools and talks about tolerance and stuff. And while that’s important, all Rafe really wants is to just be a regular guy. Not that GAY guy. To have it be a part of who he is, but not the headline, every single time.

So when he transfers to an all-boys' boarding school in New England, he decides to keep his sexuality a secret — not so much going back in the closet as starting over with a clean slate. But then he sees a classmate breaking down. He meets a teacher who challenges him to write his story. And most of all, he falls in love with Ben . . . who doesn't even know that love is possible.

This witty, smart, coming-out-again story will appeal to gay and straight kids alike as they watch Rafe navigate being different, fitting in, and what it means to be himself.

Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology 2013
Ed. By Suzanne Buffam
House of Anansi 978 1 77089 330 6
$19.95 Poetry

The highly anticipated annual anthology of the best Canadian and international poetry.
Each year, the best books of poetry published in English internationally and in Canada are honoured with the Griffin Poetry Prize, one of the world’s most prestigious and richest literary awards. Since 2001 this annual prize has acted as a tremendous spur to interest in and recognition of poetry, focusing worldwide attention on the formidable talent of poets writing in English. And each year The Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology features the work of the extraordinary poets shortlisted for the awards, and introduces us to some of the finest poems in their collections.

This year, editor and prize juror Suzanne Buffam’s selections from the international shortlist include poems from Jennifer Maiden’s Liquid Nitrogen (Giramondo Publishing), Alan Shapiro’s Night of the Republic (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt), Brenda Shaughnessy’s Our Andromeda (Copper Canyon Press), and Ghassan Zaqtan’s Like a Straw Bird it Follows Me, and Other Poems (Yale University Press), translated by Fady Joudah. The selections from the Canadian shortlist include poems from David W. McFadden’s What’s the Score (Mansfield Press), Sailing to Babylon by James Pollock (Able Muse Press), and Personals by Ian Williams (Freehand Books).

In choosing the 2013 shortlist, prize jurors Suzanne Buffam, Mark Doty, and Wang Ping considered more than 500 collections published in the previous year. The jury also wrote the citations that introduce the seven poets’ nominated works.

Royalties generated from The 2013 Griffin Poetry Prize Anthology will be donated to UNESCO’s World Poetry Day, which was created to support linguistic diversity through poetic expression and to offer endangered languages the opportunity to be heard in their communities.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl
By Andrew Blackwell
Rodale 978 1 62336 026 9
$18.50 Travel

For most of us, traveling means visiting the most beautiful places on Earth-Paris, the Taj Mahal, the Grand Canyon. It's rare to book a plane ticket to visit the lifeless moonscape of Canada's oil sand strip mines, or to set sail for the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. But in Visit Sunny Chernobyl, Andrew Blackwell embraces a different kind of travel, taking a jaunt through the most gruesomely polluted places on Earth.

Visit Sunny Chernobyl fuses immersive first-person reporting with satire and analysis, making the case that it's time to start appreciating our planet as-is-not as we wish it to be. Equal parts travelogue, expose environmental memoir, and faux guidebook, Blackwell careens through a rogue's gallery of environmental disaster areas in search of the worst the world has to offer-and approaches a deeper understanding of what's really happening to our planet in the process.