"Jules Verne's pioneering classic tells the story of the distinguished but eccentric Professor Lidenbrock, who finds a scrap of parchment in an old manuscript. A cipher, written in runes, tells of an entrance to another world - a world hidden beneath our own. So with his nephew reluctantly in tow, the Professor follows this cryptic clue down into a dormant volcano, and the further they descend, the more extraordinary the discoveries and creatures...

"Even if I lived a hundred lives, I still wouldn't be exhausted." These words capture the intensity of the experiences of Claude Lanzmann, a man whose acts have always been a negation of resignation: a member of the Resistance at sixteen, a friend to Jean-Paul Sartre and a lover to Simone de Beauvoir, and the director of one of the most important films in the history of cinema, Shoah. In these pages, Lanzmann composes a hymn to life that flows from...

Its a rare and secret profession, comprising a few dozen people around the world equipped with a mysterious mixture of knowledge and innate sensibility. Summoned to Swiss bank vaults, Fifth Avenue apartments, and Tokyo storerooms, they are entrusted by collectors, dealers, and museums to decide if a coveted picture is real or fake and to determine if it was painted by Leonardo da Vinci or Raphael. The Eye lifts the veil on the rarified world of connoisseurs...

"The small village of Puy-Larroque, southwest France, 1898. �El�eonore is a child living with her father, a pig farmer whose terminal illness leaves him unable to work, and her God-fearing mother, who runs both farm and family with an iron hand. �El�eonore passes her childhood with little heat and no running water, sharing a small room with her cousin Marcel, who does most of the physical labor on the farm. When World War I breaks out and...

"Charming, impudent, privileged, emotionally precocious, Vincent de I'Etoile is the same age as the young century when he meets the elegant, asthmatic forty-five-year-old Marcel Proust, and in one week - at literary salons, at the Ritz, in private rooms, in cafes - the striking youth with black hair and green eyes fashions an intimate platonic friendship with Parisian society's most eminent outsider." "It is 1916. For two years war has ravaged Europe,...

"A funny, fast-paced, and poignant take on Franco-African history, as told through the eyes of three African security guards in Paris. All over the city, they are watching: Black men paid to stand guard, invisible amongst the rich white flâneurs--and yet the only ones who truly see. From Les Grands Moulins and the sales at Camaïeu to a Sephora on the Champs-Élysées, Ferdinand, Ossiri, and Kassoum, two generations of Ivoirians, seek their way as...

"A gripping study of inheritance, The Ghetto Within re-imagines the life of this Jewish grandfather, a Polish exile in Argentina, whose guilt provokes an enduring silence to span generations. 1928. Vicente Rosenberg is one of countless European émigrés making a new life for themselves in Argentina. It is here, along the bustling avenues of Buenos Aires, that he will meet and marry Rosita, whose ties to his native Poland are more ancestral than extant....