In the imaginary South American republic of Costaguana, Charles Gould's San Tomé silver mine is besieged by rebels, in this 1904 novel by the author of Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Gould recruits the allegedly incorruptible hero Nostromo to oppose the marauders, but Nostromo's own mistakes may have disastrous repercussions. Conrad's novel portrays in shocking detail the corrupting influence of money, the devious effects of greed, and the lure of silver and its power over men — destroying some and revealing the strengths of others.

Detailed with loving accuracy in the photography of Melba Levick and in the lucid prose of Karen Dardick, Estate Gardens of California showcases fifteen magnificent estate gardens that are uniquely, exuberantly Californian. Included within are the classically inspired, 654-acre gardens of Filoli near San Francisco, a property of the National Trust for Historic Preservation-an estate with grounds of such alluring beauty that many times the cameras of Hollywood have come here to film; the Huntington Library Gardens in San Marino, one of the most important botanical gardens in the world; and the opulent and strange but wildly popular Lotusland in Montecito, a fantasy world of exquisite beauty created by Madam Ganna Walska with famed designer Lockwood de Forest. Other gardens featured are in Pebble Beach, Newport Beach, Beverly Hills, the Napa and Sonoma Valleys, and Rancho Palos Verdes. It is the plant palette of almost endless possibilities that makes California's great gardens so breathtaking. In Estate Gardens a rare and privileged glimpse of these possibilities is given. Cohen Estate, Newport Beach (owner of Four Seasons Hotel, Los Angeles) Collins Estate, Beverly Hills Hacienda Mar Monte, Pebble Beach Descanso Gardens, La Canada (open to public) Filoli, Woodside (open to public) Lotusland, Montecito (open to public) Rancho Los Alamitos, Long Beach (open to public) Stathatos Estate, San Marino Beaulieu Residence, Napa Valley (private residence of owner of Beaulieu winery) Villa Fiore, Dry Creek Valley, Sonoma County Huntington Library, San Marino (open to public) Val Verde, Montecito (open for limited public viewing) Villa Narcissa, Rancho Palos Verdes Virginia Robinson Estate and Gardens, Beverly Hills (open for limited public viewing) Alden Estate, Santa Monica Canyon.

Perhaps the greatest of all English artists, Thomas Gainsborough (1727–1788) was born in the small town of Sudbury on the river Stour in Suffolk. His house is now both a museum and a research center for Gainsborough studies. It holds an outstanding collection of paintings, drawings, prints, books, and memorabilia relating to the artist and his time. This book presents both the highlights of this collection, which has not hitherto been published, and significant new research and insights relating to Gainsborough’s art, character, and career. Works in the collection include fine examples by Gainsborough himself at all stages of his career, along with paintings and engravings by the artist’s mentors, Francis Hayman and Hubert-Francois Gravelot, and by his followers, notably his nephew Gainsborough Dupont and Thomas Rowlandson, and by other East Anglian artists, including John Constable. Hugh Belsey is curator of Gainsborough’s House. He has published widely on Gainsborough and other 18th-century artists, most recently Gainsborough: A Country Life.

Hollywood icon, German dissident, lover, war heroine, distant mother, and eventual recluse. These are just some of the sobriquets attached to Marlene Dietrich. Ean Wood seeks to show the true Marlene Dietrich, the girl from Berlin who would find herself at the centre of world events, a supporter of the Allied cause and movie icon, meeting, working with and loving some of the most powerful and influential men of the 20th century.

Have you ever wondered where rainbows come from, or why we don't fall off the earth? A young boy named Isaac Newton asked these same questions more than 300 years ago. His search for answers unlocked secrets that gave us the world we know today. Automobiles, television, lasers, and many things that are common-place today were made possible by ideas that began inside Isaac Newton's mind. Where others took the world around them at face value, Isaac always looked deeper. He constantly searched for answers to the question, 'Why?'. His questioning mind helped us to understand the universe. It helped him to grow from a sad, lonely boy into one of the most famous scientists of all time.

These seventeen stories first published in book form stunningly present the Celtic legends and myths of the Arthurian quest for the Grail.

Vincent van Gogh was a Western painter who lived at the end of the 19th century. His work as an artist continues to inspire today because it is fresh and unique. The paintings van Gogh created are full of movement and life, although the subjects are often simple. This is because the artist tried to paint the energy behind what he was seeing. As a result, people and flowers — even the houses and furniture in his pictures — seem to be alive. In the end, he suffered much loneliness and despair. During his life, his art never sold well and he thought he was a failure. Yet today his work is some of the most famous in the world.

Time is running out for the passengers and crew of the tourist cruiser Selene, incarcerated in a sea of choking lunar dust. On the surface, her rescuers find their resources stretched to the limit by the mercilessly unpredictable conditions of a totally alien environment.

Born in Salzburg Austria in 1756, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was recognized as a musical prodigy when he was three years old. He was 35 years old when he died. During his life, he completed 41 symphonies, 27 piano concertos, 23 string quartets, 17 piano sonatas, 7 major operas, and numerous works for voice and other instruments. But his road to fame was not easy. It was littered with loss and disappointment. He died in 1791.

Newsday called it the most authoritative and candid look yet at the personal lives... of the oft-scrutinized group. In The Love You Make, Peter Brown, a close friend and business manager of the band-and the best man at John and Yoko's wedding-looks at the four lads from Liverpool who established the greatest music phenomenon of the twentieth century. Written with the full cooperation of each of the group's members and their intimates, this book goes beyond the glitter to tell the inside story of the music, the marriages, the drugs, disagreements, and divorces-everything that made the Fab Four the phenomenon they are.

The ever-brilliant Barnes concocts a mordant sexual comedy for his latest novel, taking over the later lives of three characters he introduced in the earlier Talking It Over. Straight, rather stuffy organic-food kingpin Stuart; his former best friend, the ebulliently witty layabout Oliver; and Gillian, whom Oliver stole from Stuart, address the reader in turns about just what happened (or in Oliver's case, show off for the reader in a dazzling display of verbal pyrotechnics that would bring down the house if this were a play). There's no doubt that in most ways Stuart deserves Gillian more than Oliver does, and the latter's attraction for her seems odd. On the other hand, Oliver is, unexpectedly, quite a good father, and there are hints of obtuseness and brutality about Stuart's bluff self-satisfaction. Poor Gillian, whose French-born mother also comments on the proceedings from a cynical distance, seems quite unable to decide between the two men when Stuart forcibly reenters her life. Out of their often self-serving, sometimes touchingly self-aware accounts of a handful of encounters emerges a funny, occasionally poignant look at the strange confusion between friendship and love--as well as more than a hint that nobody truly knows just who they really are and what they are capable of. It's slight but telling and, except for Oliver's wonderful and witty set pieces, oddly subdued for Barnes, but it would make an excellent play, in the Tom Stoppard vein. (Feb. 13) Forecast: Although Barnes's succession of clever novels have won him a following here, the strongly English domesticity portrayed in Love, Etc. seems unlikely to gather him many new adherents. For connoisseurs of brilliant invective, however, it's a treat, and Knopf is anticipating that interest with a 40,000 first printing.

As good a rifle company as any in the world, Easy Company, 506th Airborne Division, U.S. Army, kept getting the tough assignments — responsible for everything from parachuting into France early D-Day morning to the capture of Hitler's Eagle's Nest at Berchtesgaden. In Band of Brothers, Ambrose tells of the men in this brave unit who fought, went hungry, froze, and died, a company that took 150 percent casualties and considered the Purple Heart a badge of office. Drawing on hours of interviews with survivors as well as the soldiers' journals and letters, Stephen Ambrose recounts the stories, often in the men's own words, of these American heroes.

Philip Callow AIs splendidly readable biography of Robert Louis Stevenson recounts the life of Scotland. AIs finest writer of English prose and the author of such classics as Treasure Island and Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. A sickly child, Louis became in turn a bohemian dandy, a literary gypsy traipsing through the mountains of France with a donkey, and at twenty-eight the lover of an American woman ten years his senior, the fabulous Fanny. His feelings are always his reasons, said O. Henry James, and caught in a sentence the secret of Stevenson AIs popularity as one of the last of the classic storytellers. Stevenson was destined to be a modern man.O-James Campbell, New York Times Book Review. Illustrated.

When Matisse dies, Pablo Picasso remarked in the 1950s, Chagall will be the only painter left who understands what color really is. As a pioneer of modernism and one of the greatest figurative artists of the twentieth century, Marc Chagall achieved fame and fortune, and over the course of a long career created some of the best-known and most-loved paintings of our time. Yet behind this triumph lay struggle, heartbreak, bitterness, frustration, lost love, exile — and above all the miracle of survival. Born into near poverty in Russia in 1887, the son of a Jewish herring merchant, Chagall fled the repressive potato-colored tsarist empire in 1911 for Paris. There he worked alongside Modigliani and Leger in the tumbledown tenement called La Ruche, where one either died or came out famous. But turmoil lay ahead — war and revolution; a period as an improbable artistic commissar in the young Soviet Union; a difficult existence in Weimar Germany, occupied France, and eventually the United States. Throughout, as Jackie Wullschlager makes plain in this groundbreaking biography, he never ceased giving form on canvas to his dreams, longings, and memories. His subject, more often than not, was the shtetl life of his childhood, the wooden huts and synagogues, the goatherds, rabbis, and violinists — the whole lost world of Eastern European Jewry. Wullschlager brilliantly describes this world and evokes the characters who peopled it: Chagall's passionate, energetic mother, Feiga-Ita; his eccentric fellow painter and teacher Bakst; his clever, intense first wife, Bella; their glamorous daughter, Ida; his tough-minded final companion and wife, Vava; and the colorful, tragic array ofartist, actor, and writer friends who perished under the Stalinist regime. Wullschlager explores in detail Chagall's complex relationship with Russia and makes clear the Russian dimension he brought to Western modernism. She shows how, as Andre Breton put it, under his sole impulse, metaphor made its triumphal entry into modern painting, and helped shape the new surrealist movement. As art critic of the Financial Times, she provides a breadth of knowledge on Chagall's work, and at the same time as an experienced biographer she brings Chagall the man fully to life — ambitious, charming, suspicious, funny, contradictory, dependent, but above all obsessively determined to produce art of singular beauty and emotional depth. Drawing upon hitherto unseen archival material, including numerous letters from the family collection in Paris, and illustrated with nearly two hundred paintings, drawings, and photographs, Chagall is a landmark biography to rank with Hilary Spurling's Matisse and John Richardson's Picasso.

The mind-bending novels of Philip K. Dick transcend genre to explore the nature of consciousness and reality, placing ordinary men and women in congress with the unknowable and the awe-full. Valis, the first in Dick's final trio of novels, is a theological detective story in which God is both a missing person and the perpetrator of the ultimate crime. The schizophrenic hero, a Dick alter-ego named Horselover Fat, begins receiving revelatory visions through a burst of pink laser light. As a coterie of religious seekers forms to explore these messages, they are led to a rock musician's estate, where a two-year old Messianic figure named Sophia confirms that an ancient, mechanical intelligence orbiting the earth has been guiding their discoveries. Mixing Gnostic Christianity with Dick's own strange philosophy, Valis is as funny and surprising as it is eye-opening.

When French artist Paul Gauguin visited Tahiti in 1891 he was fascinated by the native people's language and customs, and he was inspired by the vibrant colours of this new and exciting world. This volume follows him on his discovery of the island. Through Gauguin's colourful paintings, young readers can learn about the island, the lives of its inhabitants, and its exotic tropical plants and animals.

The Arnolfini Marriage, an Egyptian mummy, a gilded clock, a Japanese puppet, Van Gogh's Irises, a Tibetan conch trumpet, an Eskimo mask, and a meso-American calendar. These are just a few of the treasures from Europe, the Americas, Asia, Africa and Australasia featured in this book, an eye-opening introduction to the wonders of world art. The artefacts are organized and explored in five themes: time and space; other worlds; people's lives; fantasy and history; and the natural world. In this tour of art from prehistoric times up to the present day, Andrea Belloli explores how each reasure was made, who created and used it, and what it tells us about the culture from which it sprang.

Hailed as original and unsettling, an Animal Farm for the new century (The Wall Street Journal), this first novel lingers long after the last page has been turned. Described as a fascinating psychological thriller (The Baltimore Sun), this entrancing novel introduces Isserley, a female driver who picks up hitchhikers with big muscles. She, herself, is tiny-like a kid peering up over the steering wheel. Scarred and awkward, yet strangely erotic and threatening, she listens to her hitchhikers as they open up to her, revealing clues about who might miss them if they should disappear. At once humane and horrifying, Under the Skin takes us on a heart-thumping ride through dangerous territory-our own moral instincts and the boundaries of compassion. A grotesque and comical allegory, a surreal representation of contemporary society run amok, Under the Skin has been internationally received as the arrival of an exciting talent, rich and assured.

Well now, have you heard about how the Irish fought for Alexander the Great? Or did you know that at one time the Irish were forbidden to wear trousers? Perhaps you don't know why the Irish revere John Paul Jones or how Jack the Ripper influenced Irish 'Invincibles'. Ah then, there's many a strange tale and capricious truth hidden in the history and lore of the Green Isle that will surprise and quicken your Irish blood, whether it's a pint or only a drop! This book, with 101 curious, delightful, ironic and even outrageous tales from the Emerald Isle, is a must-have for every Irish-interest library. Illustrated throughout.