In Passage to Ararat, which received the National Book Award in 1976, Michael J. Arlen goes beyond the portrait of his father, the famous Anglo-Armenian novelist of the 1920s, that he created in Exiles to try to discover what his father had tried to forget: Armenia and what it meant to be an Armenian, a descendant of a proud people whom conquerors had for centuries tried to exterminate. But perhaps most affectingly, Arlen tells a story as large as a whole people yet as personal as the uneasy bond between a father and a son, offering a masterful account of the affirmation and pain of kinship.

"One doesn't have to be a panjandrum of Communications to realize that television does something to us," Michael Arlen (former TV critic of The New Yorker) writes in the Introduction to Living-Room War. He continues, "Television has a transforming effect on events. It has a transforming effect on the people who watch the transformed events-it's just hard to know what that is." Living-Room War is Arlen's valiant-and entertaining-attempt to figure out exactly what exactly television does to us. This timeless collection of essays provides a poetic look at 1960s television culture, ranging from the Vietnam war to Captain Kangaroo, from the 1968 Democratic convention to televised sports.

In this breathtaking debut novel by Felix Gilman, one man embarks on a thrilling and treacherous quest for his people’s lost god—in an elaborate Dickensian city that is either blessed …or haunted. Arjun arrives in Ararat just as a magnificent winged creature swoops and sails over the city. For it is the day of the return of that long-awaited, unpredictable mystical creature: the great Bird. But does it come for good or ill? And in the service of what god? Whatever its purpose, for one inhabitant the Bird sparks a long-dormant idea: to map the mapless city and liberate its masses with the power of knowledge. As the creature soars across the land, shifting topography, changing the course of the river, and redrawing the territories of the city’s avian life, crowds cheer and guns salute in a mix of science and worship. Then comes the time for the Bird’s power to be trapped—within the hull of a floating warship called Thunderer, an astounding and unprecedented weapon. The ship is now a living temple to the Bird, a gift to be used, allegedly, in the interests of all of Ararat. Hurtled into this convulsing world is Arjun, an innocent who will unwittingly unleash a dark power beyond his imagining—and become entangled in a dangerous underground movement that will forever transform Ararat. As havoc overtakes the streets, Arjun dares to test the city’s moving boundaries. In this city of gods, he has come to search among them, not to hide. A tour de force of the imagination, and a brilliant tale of rebellion, Thunderer heralds the arrival of a truly gifted fantasy writer who has created a tale as rich, wondrous, and captivating as the world in which it is set.

It will come as no surprise that Michael J. Arlen's first novel is at once romantic, disturbing, and original, an artistic achievement of impressive subtlety and force. A famous father and his estranged son meet for the first time in many years on the father's ranch in New Mexico. Tom Avery, a New York-based journalist on the edge of turning forty, thinks it's time for his new wife, Catherine, to meet his father, a celebrated Hollywood director Sam Avery. At seventy-two, Sam is still full of hell and larger than life--imperious, charming, catankerous, seductive, and dangerous. When the three come together, father and son seem doomed to increasing and potentially deadly conflict. At the same time, Tom's love for his pretty, somewhat unworldly wife is gradually transmuted by the threat of a strange, erotic triangle involving his father. The drama is enacted in a stark, real world--eagles soar in the mountains, a rider is thrown in a treacherous race--but it is also a dream world, the kind that sometimes takes over when men and women are caught up in unexpected feelings. Does Catherine, for instance, really abandon Tom for Sam? Or does Tom somehow "offer" his wife as a gift to his unapproachable father? And, for that matter, can Sam ever care about anyone but himself? Say Goodbye to Sam is concerned, in the end, with the dangers of love, and with the bravery required not only in loving someone but in being loved.

A NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST A young Armenian-American goes to Turkey in a "love thine enemy" experiment that becomes a transformative reflection on how we use—and abuse—our personal histories Meline Toumani grew up in a close-knit Armenian community in New Jersey where Turkish restaurants were shunned and products made in Turkey were boycotted. The source of this enmity was the Armenian genocide of 1915 at the hands of the Ottoman Turkish government, and Turkey's refusal to acknowledge it. A century onward, Armenian and Turkish lobbies spend hundreds of millions of dollars to convince governments, courts and scholars of their clashing versions of history. Frustrated by her community's all-consuming campaigns for genocide recognition, Toumani leaves a promising job at The New York Times and moves to Istanbul. Instead of demonizing Turks, she sets out to understand them, and in a series of extraordinary encounters over the course of four years, she tries to talk about the Armenian issue, finding her way into conversations that are taboo and sometimes illegal. Along the way, we get a snapshot of Turkish society in the throes of change, and an intimate portrait of a writer coming to terms with the issues that drove her halfway across the world. In this far-reaching quest, told with eloquence and power, Toumani probes universal questions: how to belong to a community without conforming to it, how to acknowledge a tragedy without exploiting it, and most importantly how to remember a genocide without perpetuating the kind of hatred that gave rise to it in the first place.

In five centuries, the Empire of the Mxica, descendants of the ancient Aztecs, spread out to conquer the Earth. Now, a young human discovers a long-buried secret that could alter the galactic balance of power forever.