Adam Gopnik

"In The Real Work―the term magicians use for the accumulated craft that makes for a great trick―Gopnik becomes a dedicated student of several masters of their craft: a classical painter, a boxer, a dancing instructor, a driving instructor, and others. Rejecting self-help bromides and bullet points, he nevertheless shows that the top people in any field share a set of common qualities and methods. For one, their mastery is always a process of breaking...

On a memorable day in human history, February 12, 1809, two babies were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. It was a time of backward-seeming notions, when almost everyone still accepted the biblical account of creation as the literal truth and authoritarianism as the most natural and viable social order. But by the time both men died, the world had changed: ordinary people...

"From the author of Paris to the Moon--one man's quest for the meaning of food in a time obsessed with what to eat. Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, even our moralizing--"You still eat meat?" How could the land of Chef Boyardee have come so far overnight? And where can we possibly go from here? Locating our table ancestry in France, Adam Gopnik traces our rapid evolution from commendable...

An exploration of liberalism profiles the individuals and movements that formed its tradition of radical change through humane measures.

Young Rose discovers magical glass steps in New York's Central Park that lead to the fantastic city of U Nork, whose residents have been awaiting the arrival of the only person who can save them.

Eleven-year-old Oliver, an American boy residing in Paris, discovers, much to his astonishment, that phantoms live within the windowpanes and have selected Oliver to lead a war against the "soul-stealers" that inhabit mirrors.

Louis Stettner is one of the last living members of the avant-garde New York School of Photography. His Penn Station series of the late 1950s represents some of his most important work, gathered here in a single form for the first time. The series is less a portrait of now-vanished building, though the station makes itself felt by its shadowy spaces and glowing surfaces, than a study of people at once in transit and in suspension. For Stettner, it...