Paul Hecht

The unexpected delivery of a large crate containing an Antarctic penguin changes the life and fortunes of Mr. Popper, a house painter obsessed by dreams of the Polar regions.

Cousin Bette (1846) is considered to be Balzac's last great novel, and a key work in his Human Comedy. Set in the Paris of the 1830s and 1840s, it is a complex tale of the devastating effect of violent jealousy and sexual passion. Against a meticulously detailed backdrop of a post-Napoleonic France struggling with massive industrial and economic change, Balzac's characters span many classes of society, from impoverished workers and wealthy courtesans...

In Inventing a Nation, National Book Award winner Gore Vidal transports the reader into the minds, the living rooms (and bedrooms), the convention halls, and the salons of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, John Adams, and others. We come to know these men, through Vidal's splendid prose, in ways we have not up to now-their opinions of each other, their worries about money, their concerns about creating a viable democracy. Vidal brings them to life...

New York Times best-selling author Neal Bascomb's Hunting Eichmann is the first complete narrative of the pursuit and capture of SS Nazi officer and Holocaust architect Adolf Eichmann. "A fantastic true spy story."-Associated Press When the Allies stormed Berlin in the last days of the Third Reich, Adolf Eichmann shed his SS uniform and vanished. Following his escape from two American POW camps, his retreat into the mountains and out of Europe,...

From bestselling, prize-winning author Russell Shorto comes a grand and strange history of the on-going debate between religion and science-seen through the oddly momentous journey of the skull and bones of the great French philosopher Rene Descartes. In this book Shorto brilliantly shows how this argument first started with Descartes and how his ideas (and bones) have remained central to this theoretical struggle for over 350 years. On a brutal winter's...

Despite being a founder of both the United States and the French Republic, the creator of the phrase "United States of America," and the author of three of the biggest bestsellers of the eighteenth century, Thomas Paine is perhaps the least well known--and the most controversial--of the American founding fathers. Author Nelson's portrait brings him to life against the backdrop of the Revolutionary era and the intellectual exhilaration of the Age of...

Professor Dr. Moritz-Maria von Igelfeld and his colleagues at the University of Regensburg's Institute of Romance Philology pride themselves on their unwavering commitment to intellectual excellence. They know it is their job to protect a certain civilized approach to the scholarly arts. So when a new deputy librarian, Dr. Hilda Schreiber-Ziegler, threatens to drag them all down a path of progressive inclusivity, they are determined to stop her in...

Originally serialized in the New Yorker, this dazzling story is based on actual letters the author's father found in the attic of the old family palazzo. The letters describe a searing and illicit affair between the author's ancestor Andrea Memmo, a great Venetian statesman, and a beautiful half-English girl named Giustiniana Wynne.

A new translation of the author's short fiction. The title story is on a man's infatuation with a beautiful boy while on holiday in Venice, in The Blood of the Walsungs a woman cheats on her fiance by having an affair with her twin brother, and in The Will for Happiness a sick man waits five years to marry a woman, dying the day after the wedding.