Virtually everything Vaclav Havel has ever written has acquired a new resonance, whether ironic, artistic, philosophical or political, since he became President of his country in 1989. This selection of his prose ranges in time from the early 1960s to his New Year message of 1990.

When you can't be there in person, be there in spirit. Write now. Read later. Treasure forever: Letters to Open When. offers a meaningful way for friends, family, and long-distance loves to be there in spirit when they can't be there in person. The gift-giver fills this book of letters with pep talks and good cheer, seals each envelope with a sticker, and gifts this keepsake for future opening. The recipient gets to break the seals to find the greatest gift: their loved one's encouraging words whenever they need them the most. • Each letter is printed with a unique prompt like "Open when you're looking for inspiration.," "Open when you need a pep talk.," "Open when you need to make a big decision.," and "Open when you need a good laugh," plus two blank letters to write your own • Makes a great encouragement, thinking about you, cheer up, friendship and long-distance relationship gift • Created by Lea Redmond, the author of the bestselling Letters to My. book series that has sold more than 2 million copies worldwide Fans of Letters to My Love, Letters to My Daughter, and Letters to My Son will love Letters to Open When.. A pep talk, some advice or encouraging words are just a letter away. Letters to Open When. includes 12 prompted letters that will inspire, motivate, and cheer up. Seal letters with the included stickers before giving this time capsule to your special someone!

Torture is an open secret in Chicago. Nobody in power wants to acknowledge this grim reality, but everyone knows it happens—and that the torturers are the police. Three to five new claims are submitted to the Torture Inquiry and Relief Commission of Illinois each week. Four hundred cases are currently pending investigation. Between 1972 and 1991, at least 125 black suspects were tortured by Chicago police officers working under former Police Commander Jon Burge. As the more recent revelations from the Homan Square “black site” show, that brutal period is far from a historical anomaly. For more than fifty years, police officers who took an oath to protect and serve have instead beaten, electrocuted, suffocated, and raped hundreds—perhaps thousands—of Chicago residents. In The Torture Letters, Laurence Ralph chronicles the history of torture in Chicago, the burgeoning activist movement against police violence, and the American public’s complicity in perpetuating torture at home and abroad. Engaging with a long tradition of epistolary meditations on racism in the United States, from James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time to Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me, Ralph offers in this book a collection of open letters written to protesters, victims, students, and others. Through these moving, questing, enraged letters, Ralph bears witness to police violence that began in Burge’s Area Two and follows the city’s networks of torture to the global War on Terror. From Vietnam to Geneva to Guantanamo Bay—Ralph’s story extends as far as the legacy of American imperialism. Combining insights from fourteen years of research on torture with testimonies of victims of police violence, retired officers, lawyers, and protesters, this is a powerful indictment of police violence and a fierce challenge to all Americans to demand an end to the systems that support it. With compassion and careful skill, Ralph uncovers the tangled connections among law enforcement, the political machine, and the courts in Chicago, amplifying the voices of torture victims who are still with us—and lending a voice to those long deceased.

Based on true events, the story of a Holocaust survivor who spent her life trying to disappear.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • WINNER OF THE PEN/FAULKNER AWARD • The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral delivers “a master novelist's haunting parable about our troubled modern moment" (The Wall Street Journal). It is 1998, the year in which America is whipped into a frenzy of prurience by the impeachment of a president, and in a small New England town, an aging classics professor, Coleman Silk, is forced to retire when his colleagues decree that he is a racist. The charge is a lie, but the real truth about Silk would have astonished even his most virulent accuser. Coleman Silk has a secret, one which has been kept for fifty years from his wife, his four children, his colleagues, and his friends, including the writer Nathan Zuckerman. It is Zuckerman who stumbles upon Silk's secret and sets out to reconstruct the unknown biography of this eminent, upright man, esteemed as an educator for nearly all his life, and to understand how this ingeniously contrived life came unraveled. And to understand also how Silk's astonishing private history is, in the words of The Wall Street Journal, "magnificently" interwoven with "the larger public history of modern America."

A tongue-in-cheek textbook for how to live in our modern age.