Failed States. The Abuse of Power and The Assault on Democracy

Failed States: The Abuse of Power And the Assault on Democracy

Politics & Social Sciences

CHOMSKY, Noam.

Politics & Government

Hamish Hamilton/Penguin

Alain de Botton reflects on the modern-day addiction to the news and tries to show how 'this ubiquitous and familiar habit' is actually 'a lot weirder and rather more hazardous' than we think. He takes a number of news stories - from MPs' expenses to an air crash - and subjects them to intense analysis, while also examining our responses to news items such as murder, disasters and celebrities' love lives.

The News: A User's Manual

ALAIN DE BOTTON

Social Sciences

Little Failure: A Memoir

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALISTNAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MICHIKO KAKUTANI, THE NEW YORK TIMES • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY TIMENAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY MORE THAN 45 PUBLICATIONS, INCLUDING The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • NPR • The New Yorker • San Francisco Chronicle • The Economist • The Atlantic • Newsday • Salon • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • Esquire (UK) • GQ (UK)After three acclaimed novels, Gary Shteyngart turns to memoir in a candid, witty, deeply poignant account of his life so far. Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family and belonging that feels epic and intimate and distinctly his own.Born Igor Shteyngart in Leningrad during the twilight of the Soviet Union, the curious, diminutive, asthmatic boy grew up with a persistent sense of yearning—for food, for acceptance, for words—desires that would follow him into adulthood. At five, Igor wrote his first novel, Lenin and His Magical Goose, and his grandmother paid him a slice of cheese for every page.In the late 1970s, world events changed Igor’s life. Jimmy Carter and Leonid Brezhnev made a deal: exchange grain for the safe passage of Soviet Jews to America—a country Igor viewed as the enemy. Along the way, Igor became Gary so that he would suffer one or two fewer beatings from other kids. Coming to the United States from the Soviet Union was equivalent to stumbling off a monochromatic cliff and landing in a pool of pure Technicolor.Shteyngart’s loving but mismatched parents dreamed that he would become a lawyer or at least a “conscientious toiler” on Wall Street, something their distracted son was simply not cut out to do. Fusing English and Russian, his mother created the term Failurchka—Little Failure—which she applied to her son. With love. Mostly.As a result, Shteyngart operated on a theory that he would fail at everything he tried. At being a writer, at being a boyfriend, and, most important, at being a worthwhile human being.Swinging between a Soviet home life and American aspirations, Shteyngart found himself living in two contradictory worlds, all the while wishing that he could find a real home in one. And somebody to love him. And somebody to lend him sixty-nine cents for a McDonald’s hamburger.Provocative, hilarious, and inventive, Little Failure reveals a deeper vein of emotion in Gary Shteyngart’s prose. It is a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world.Praise for Little Failure“Hilarious and moving . . . The army of readers who love Gary Shteyngart is about to get bigger.”—The New York Times Book Review“A memoir for the ages . . . brilliant and unflinching.”—Mary Karr“Dazzling . . . a rich, nuanced memoir . . . It’s an immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story, and a becoming-a-mensch story, and in all these ways it is, unambivalently, a success.”—Meg Wolitzer, NPR“Literary gold . . . bruisingly funny.”—Vogue“A giant success.”—Entertainment Weekly

Little Failure: A memoir

GARY SHTEYNGART

Companion piece

"A story is never an answer. A story is always a question." 
Here we are in extraordinary times. 
Is this history?\nWhat happens when we cease to trust governments, the media, each other? 
What have we lost? 
What stays with us? 
What does it take to unlock our future?\nFollowing her astonishing Seasonal Quartet, Ali Smith again lights a way for us through the nightmarish now, in a vital celebration of companionship in all its timeless and contemporary, legendary and unpindownable, spellbinding and shapeshifting forms.\nCompanion Piece stands apart from the Quartet, which remains discrete unto itself. But like Smith's groundbreaking series, this new novel boldly captures the spirit of the times.\n"Every hello, like every voice, holds its story ready, waiting."

Companion Piece

Ali Smith

Way To Go

Upamanyu Chatterjee

Please Note That The Following Individual Books As Per Original ISBN and Cover Image In this Listing shall be Dispatched Collectively: The Water Dancer & We Were Eight Years in Power By Ta-Nehisi Coates 2 Books Collection Set: The Water Dancer [Hardcover]: Hiram Walker is born into bondage on a Virginia plantation. But he is also born gifted with a mysterious power that he won't discover until he is almost a man, when he risks everything for a chance to escape. One fateful decision will carry him away from his makeshift plantation family - his adoptive mother, Thena, a woman of few words and many secrets, and his beloved, angry Sophia - and into the covert heart of the underground war on slavery. Hidden amidst the corrupt grandeur of white plantation society, exiled as guerrilla cells in the wilderness, buried in the coffin of the deep South and agitating for utopian ideals in the North, there exists a widespread network of secret agents working to liberate the enslaved. We Were Eight Years in Power: In this unflinching book, Ta-Nehisi Coates takes stock of Obama's eight years in power, through such iconic, unmissable essays as 'Fear of a Black President' and 'The Case for Reparations'. His account traverses the intersections of the political, the ideological and the cultural, presenting an America in radical flux and yet still in the grip of racial injustice, class warfare and institutional conspiracy. And it reflects on the author's own journey through these eight years, charting the public through the private in passages of startling intimate and piercingly relevant memoir.

The Water Dancer & We Were Eight Years in Power By Ta-Nehisi Coates 2 Books Collection Set

History

Ta-Nehisi-Coates

Africa

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Books by Hamish Hamilton/Penguin