Product Description: “If you like brave, acute, elated, naked, brutal, tender, humane, and beautiful prose, then you’ve come to the right place.” — Nicole Krauss André Aciman has been hailed as “the most exciting new fiction writer of the twenty-first century” (New York magazine), a “brilliant chronicler of the disconnect ...read more

“If you like brave, acute, elated, naked, brutal, tender, humane, and beautiful prose, then you’ve come to the right place.” ― Nicole Krauss André Aciman has been hailed as “the most exciting new fiction writer of the twenty-first century” (New York magazine), a “brilliant chronicler of the disconnect . . . between who we are and who we wish we might have been” (Wall Street Journal), and a writer of “fiction at its most supremely interesting” (Colm Tóibín). Now, with his third and most ambitious novel, Aciman delivers an elegant and powerful tale of the wages of assimilation ― a moving story of an immigrant’s remembered youth and the nearly forgotten costs and sacrifices of becoming an American. It’s the fall of 1977, and amid the lovely, leafy streets of Cambridge a young Harvard graduate student, a Jew from Egypt, longs more than anything to become an assimilated American and a professor of literature. He spends his days in a pleasant blur of seventeenth-century fiction, but when he meets a brash, charismatic Arab cab driver in a Harvard Square café, everything changes. Nicknamed Kalashnikov ― Kalaj for short ― for his machine-gun vitriol, the cab driver roars into the student’s life with his denunciations of the American obsession with “all things jumbo and ersatz” ― Twinkies, monster television sets, all-you-can-eat buffets ― and his outrageous declarations on love and the art of seduction. The student finds it hard to resist his new friend’s magnetism, and before long he begins to neglect his studies and live a double life: one in the rarefied world of Harvard, the other as an exile with Kalaj on the streets of Cambridge. Together they carouse the bars and cafés around Harvard Square, trade intimate accounts of their love affairs, argue about the American dream, and skinny-dip in Walden Pond. But as final exams loom and Kalaj has his license revoked and is threatened with deportation, the student faces the decision of his life: whether to cling to his dream of New World assimilation or risk it all to defend his Old World friend. Harvard Square is a sexually charged and deeply American novel of identity and aspiration at odds. It is also an unforgettable, moving portrait of an unlikely friendship from one of the finest stylists of our time.

The Buddhist practice of mindfulness caught on in the west when we began to understand the everyday, personal benefits it brought us. Now, in this extraordinary book, the highly acclaimed thought leader and longtime English translator of His Holiness the Dalai Lama shows us that compassion can bring us even more.Based on the landmark course in compassion training Jinpa helped create at Stanford Medical School, A Fearless Heart shows us that we actually fear compassion. We worry that if we are too compassionate with others we will be taken advantage of, and if we are too compassionate with ourselves we will turn into slackers. Using science, insights from both classical Buddhist and western psychology, and stories both from others and from his own extraordinary life, Jinpa shows us how to train our compassion muscle to relieve stress, fight depression, improve our health, achieve our goals, and change our world.Practical, spiritual, and immediately relevant, A Fearless Heart will speak to listeners of The Art of Happiness and Wherever You Go, There You Are.

Product Description: "He got stared at a lot. People asked out loud - some out of curiosity, others out of malice - whether we were men or women or number nines or devadasis. Several men made bold to touch us, on our backs, on our shoulders. Some attempted to grab our breasts...read more

Product Description: Meet the members of the Sunset Club: Pandit Preetam Sharma, Nawab Barkatullah Baig, and Sardar Boota Singh. Friends for over 40 years, they are now in their 80s. And every evening, at the sunset hour, they sit together on a bench in Lodhi Gardens to exchange news and views on the events of the day, talking about everything from love, lust, sex, and scandal to religion and politics...read more