Tells the story of how millions of Jewish immigrants came to New York's Lower East Side and how this neighborhood became the center of Jewish work, family, and culture, producing such entertainment greats as Ira Gershwin and George Burns, along with gangster Meyer Lansky.

Rhys Bowen's characteristic blend of atmospheric turn-of-the-century history, clever plotting, and sparkling characters will delight readers in The Edge of Dreams, from her bestselling Molly Murphy series. Molly Murphy Sullivan's husband Daniel, a captain in the New York City police force, is stumped. He's chasing a murderer whose victims have nothing in common—nothing except for the taunting notes that are delivered to Daniel after each murder. And when Daniel receives a note immediately after Molly and her young son Liam are in a terrible train crash, Daniel and Molly both begin to fear that maybe Molly herself was the target. Molly's detective instincts are humming, but finding the time to dig deeper into this case is a challenge. She's healing from injuries sustained in the crash and also sidetracked by her friends Sid and Gus's most recent hobby, dream analysis. And when Molly herself starts suffering from strange dreams, she wonders if they just might hold the key to solving Daniel's murder case.

In this extraordinary book, Kevin Starr–widely acknowledged as the premier historian of California, the scope of whose scholarship the Atlantic Monthly has called “breathtaking”–probes the possible collapse of the California dream in the years 1990—2003. In a series of compelling chapters, Coast of Dreams moves through a variety of topics that show the California of the last decade, when the state was sometimes stumbling, sometimes humbled, but, more often, flourishing with its usual panache. From gang violence in Los Angeles to the spectacular rise–and equally spectacular fall–of Silicon Valley, from the Northridge earthquake to the recall of Governor Gray Davis, Starr ranges over myriad facts, anecdotes, news stories, personal impressions, and analyses to explore a time of unprecedented upheaval in California. Coast of Dreams describes an exceptional diversity of people, cultures, and values; an economy that mirrors the economic state of the nation; a battlefield where industry and the necessities of infrastructure collide with the inherent demands of a unique and stunning natural environment. It explores California politics (including Arnold Schwarzenegger’s election in the 2003 recall), the multifaceted business landscape, and controversial icons such as O. J. Simpson. “Historians of the future,” Starr writes, “will be able to see with more certainty whether or not the period 1990-2003 was not only the end of one California but the beginning of another”; in the meantime, he gives a picture of the place and time in a book at once sweeping and riveting in its details, deeply informed, engagingly personal, and altogether fascinating.

The Edge of Knowing explores the relationship between the rhetoric of dreams and realist literary practice in modern Chinese literature from the May Fourth Era in the early twentieth century through the period just following the end of the Cultural Revolution in 1976. The writers� attention to dreams demonstrates the multiple influences of Western psychology, utopian desire for revolutionary change, and the enduring legacy of traditional Chinese philosophy. At the same time, modern Chinese writers used their work to represent social reality for the purpose of nation-building. Recent political usage of dream rhetoric in the People�s Republic of China attests to the continuing influence of dreams on the imagination of Chinese modernity. By employing a number of critical perspectives, The Edge of Knowing will appeal to readers seeking to understand the complicated relationship between literary form and Chinese history and politics.�

From the author of We Are the Ants comes “another winner” (Booklist, starred review) about a boy who believes the universe is slowly shrinking as the things he remembers are being erased from others’ memories. Tommy and Ozzie have been best friends since the second grade, and boyfriends since eighth. They spent countless days dreaming of escaping their small town—and then Tommy vanished. More accurately, he ceased to exist, erased from the minds and memories of everyone who knew him. Everyone except Ozzie. Ozzie doesn’t know how to navigate life without Tommy, and soon he suspects that something else is going on: that the universe is shrinking. When Ozzie is paired up with the reclusive and secretive Calvin for a physics project, it’s hard for him to deny the feelings developing between them, even if he still loves Tommy. But Ozzie knows there isn’t much time left to find Tommy—that once the door closes, it can’t be opened again. And he’s determined to keep it open as long as possible.

Roberto Sebastián Antonio Matta Echaurren (1911-2002) was an international figure whose worldview represented a synthesis of European, American, and Latin American cultures. As a member of the Surrealist movement and an early mentor to several Abstract Expressionists, Matta broke with both groups to pursue a highly personal artistic vision. His mature work blended abstraction, figuration, and multi-dimensional spaces into complex, cosmic landscapes. This monograph traces the life and the work of the artist from the beginning to his most celebrated works; it also includes the interview that, just before his death last year at the age of 91, Roberto Matta gave Tate's contributing editor Hans Ulrich Obrist. Here the former Surrealist discusses ideas ranging from chance, dreams, resistance and a new geometry to Le Corbusier, scroungers and a return to Marx. The book features this last interview.

One of few truly gifted essayists who have turned their talents to science, Wyn Wachhorst here fashions a luminous meditation on the meaning of space exploration from a montage of images and reflections on humanity's dream of spaceflight. In a survey of major figures from Johannes Kepler to Wernher von Braun, he sees in the rise of spaceflight a metaphor of modern history as a recurrent story of transformation and rebirth. Other essays offer new perspectives on the nature of wonder, recall the romantic vision of the decades prior to Sputnik ("nostalgia for a bygone future"), and look at the larger meaning of the moon landing, seeing in spaceflight not only a spiritual quest in the broadest sense of the word, but a cure for the withered capacity for wonder that afflicts the postmodern mind.