The acclaimed author of Low Life reinvents the memoir in a cunning, lyrical book that is at once a personal history and a meditation on the construction of identity. Born in Belgium but raised in New Jersey, Luc Sante transformed himself from a pious, timid Belgian boy into a loutish American adolescent, who eschewed French while fantasizing about the pop star Françoise Hardy. To show how this transformation came about—and why it remained incomplete—The Factory of Facts combines family anecdote and ancestral legend; detailed forays into Belgian history, language, and religion; and deft synopses of the American character.

Luc Sante's Low Life is a portrait of America's greatest city, the riotous and anarchic breeding ground of modernity. This is not the familiar saga of mansions, avenues, and robber barons, but the messy, turbulent, often murderous story of the city's slums; the teeming streets—scene of innumerable cons and crimes whose cramped and overcrowded housing is still a prominent feature of the cityscape.Low Life voyages through Manhattan from four different directions. Part One examines the actual topography of Manhattan from 1840 to 1919; Part Two, the era's opportunities for vice and entertainment—theaters and saloons, opium and cocaine dens, gambling and prostitution; Part Three investigates the forces of law and order which did and didn't work to contain the illegalities; Part Four counterposes the city's tides of revolt and idealism against the city as it actually was. Low Life provides an arresting and entertaining view of what New York was actually like in its salad days. But it's more than simpy a book about New York. It's one of the most provocative books about urban life ever written—an evocation of the mythology of the quintessential modern metropplois, which has much to say not only about New York's past but about the present and future of all cities.

Matilde Anselm, professor of cardiac anesthesiology, arrives in Paris from New York to be part of a surgery team in the winter of 1990, as manifestations against the First Gulf War are raging in the streets. Even as her concerns mount over the shadowy protocols surrounding the planned heart transplant, and even as she falls in love with the Arab diplomat in charge of those protocols, a surprise inheritance—a mysterious Paris apartment and a trove of love letters from the Spanish Civil War, bequeathed to her by a stranger—sweep her through a hidden Paris and into the labyrinth of her own buried past. As the diplomat and the apartment reluctantly reveal their secrets, the tragedies they unearth open a further mystery, the enigma that has haunted Matilde’s life. In the end she is left devastated, liberated, and, for the very first time, herself. Paris Twilight grapples with the meaning of love, the sin of suicide, and the mystery of family in a masterful fiction debut, a dizzying tale of personal transformation.

An account of one young woman's emergence from a tragic childhood describes how, after spending her early years trapped in a chair in a closed room, Genie learned to walk, chew, and speak, with the help of the scientists who adopted her. As the scientists study her, hoping to gain new insight into language acquisition and development, the book raises questions about the line between aid and exploitation.

Michael Ryan’s first collection in fifteen years shows the acclaimed poet at the height of his powers. Highlighting the wit and passion displayed throughout his career, Ryan’s latest work comprises fifty-seven poems from three award-winning volumes and thirty-one new poems. In both dramatic lyrics and complex narratives, Ryan renders the world with startling clarity, freshness, and intimacy. New and Selected Poems is filled with the stuff of everyday life, and as The New York Times Book Review said, it “include[s] pain and fear but also surprise, joy, laughter, everything human.”

"Ryan speaks plainly of plain things, and the result is remarkable poetry. Avoiding agenda, he uses colloquial language bent slightly to his needs—'he saw that this was the way / they could no longer talk together''—to discover the particular resonance of each event, whether bicycling, freeing a bird from a chimney, or reflecting on a burglary. The discovery is often delivered with a punch at poem's end. Thus, losing his contacts when swimming 'to get skinny,' the poet is reminded of a 'friend diving at dusk / in that mountain lake for his daughter / and what came to him when his hands / sank into the cold mud at the bottom.' Occasionally, the punch is not so decisive, but most of the time Ryan is remarkably on target. A fresh new collection from one of the most distinctive poets writing today." —Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

In this refreshing volume, Mary Ruefle establishes herself as an independent voice in contemporary poetry. With an impeccable eye for metaphor and, as the volume's title suggests, an immovable stance in the world, she emerges as a poet of powerful sensibility. A sense of wonder and sophisticated delight color the "beautiful vagueness" she speaks of, the archetypal vision where emotion dwells in things, thoughts are concrete, and truth is alive and everchanging.

Without romanticism or banality, these poems live in and of themselves; the language is allowed to breathe and work, not be worked. Ruefle knows a fundamental principle often forgotten in American poetry today, that language is smarter than the writer is. The result is an independent aesthetic that is both charged and honest. The wisdom of the volume is in its essentiality, its precarious balance of image and thought. A careful reading of these poems allows the authority of the speaker, and of the world itself, to move us closer to our own sense of the world and of ourselves in it.

There's a line in a Mary Ruefle poem which speaks of the smell of freshly sharpened pencils. How accurate, we think as we read her. In poems striking for their vivid, playful, and original use of the imagination, she brings us an often unnerving, but always fresh and exhilarating view of our common experience of the world.

An award-winning writer delivers a poignant and provocative novel of identity, race and the search for belonging in the age of globalization.

One afternoon, not long after Kelly Thorndike has moved back to his hometown of Baltimore, an African American man he doesn’t recognize calls out to him. To Kelly’s shock, the man identifies himself as Martin, who was one of Kelly’s closest friends in high school—and, before his disappearance nearly twenty years before, skinny, white, and Jewish. Martin then tells an astonishing story: After years of immersing himself in black culture, he’s had a plastic surgeon perform “racial reassignment surgery”—altering his hair, skin, and physiognomy to allow him to pass as African American. Unknown to his family or childhood friends, Martin has been living a new life ever since. Now, however, Martin feels he can no longer keep his new identity a secret; he wants Kelly to help him ignite a controversy that will help sell racial reassignment surgery to the world. Kelly, still recovering from the death of his wife and child and looking for a way to begin anew, agrees, and things quickly begin to spiral out of control. Inventive and thought-provoking, Your Face in Mine is a brilliant novel about cultural and racial alienation and the nature of belonging in a world where identity can be a stigma or a lucrative brand.

The characters in Jess Row’s remarkable fiction inhabit “a city that can be like a mirage, hovering above the ground: skyscrapers built on mountainsides, islands swallowed in fog for days.” This is Hong Kong, where a Chinese girl and her American teacher explore the “blindness” of bats in an effort to locate the ghost of her suicidal mother; an American graduate student provokes a masseur into reliving the traumatic experience of the Cultural Revolution; a businessman falls in love with a prim bar hostess across the border, in Shenzhen, and finds himself helpless to dissolve the boundaries between them; a stock analyst obsessed with work drives her husband to attend a Zen retreat, where he must come to terms with his failing marriage. Scrupulously imagined and psychologically penetrating, these seven stories shed light on the many nuances of race, sex, religion, and culture in this most mysterious of cities, even as they illuminate the most universal of human experiences.