Clearance Text

Riveting . . . An engrossing, street-level recounting and ambivalent ode to a great city.--Jamie Berger, San Francisco Chronicle

On July 13, 1977, there was a blackout in New York City. With the dark came excitement, adventure, and fright in subway tunnels, office towers, busy intersections, high-rise stairwells, hotel lobbies, elevators, and hospitals. There was revelry in bars and restaurants, music and dancing in the streets. On block after block, men and women proved themselves heroes by helping neighbors and strangers make it through the night.

Unfortunately, there was also widespread looting, vandalism, and arson. Even before police restored order, people began to ask and argue about why. Why did people do what they did when the lights went out? The argument raged for weeks but it was just like the night: lots of heat, little light-a shouting match between those who held fast to one explanation and those who held fast to another.

James Goodman cuts between accidents, encounters, conversations, exchanges, and arguments to re-create that night and its aftermath in a dizzying accumulation of detail. Rejecting simple dichotomies and one-dimensional explanations for why people act as they do in moments of conflict and crisis, Goodman illuminates attitudes, ideas, and experiences that have been lost in facile generalizations and analyses. Journalistic re-creation at its most exciting, Blackout provides a whirlwind tour of 1970s New York and a challenge to conventional thinking.

Sam Shepard is the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of more than forty-five plays. He was a finalist for the W. H. Smith Literary Award for his story collection "Great Dream of Heaven," " "and he has also written the story collection "Cruising Paradise," " "two collections of prose pieces, "Motel Chronicles "and "Hawk Moon," " "and "Rolling Thunder Logbook," " "a diary of Bob Dylan's 1975 Rolling Thunder Review tour. As an actor he has appeared in more than thirty films, including "Days of Heaven," " Crimes of the Heart," " Steel Magnolias," " The Pelican Brief," " Snow Falling on Cedars," " All the Pretty Horses," " Black Hawk Down," " "and "The Notebook."" "He received an Oscar nomination in 1984 for his performance in "The Right Stuff." His screenplay for "Paris, Texas" won the Grand Jury Prize at the 1984 Cannes Film Festival, and he wrote and directed the film "Far North "in 1988 and co-wrote and starred in Wim Wenders' "Don't Come Knocking "in 2005. Shepard's plays, eleven of which have won Obie Awards, include "The God of Hell," " The Late Henry Moss," "Simpatico," "Curse of the Starving Class," " True West," " Fool for Love," and "A Lie of the Mind," " "which won a New York Drama Desk Award. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Shepard received the Gold Medal for Drama from the Academy in 1992, and in 1994 he was inducted into the Theatre Hall of Fame. He lives in New York.

"From the Trade Paperback edition."

Literary Nonfiction. Memoir. African American Studies. LGBT Studies. Moving between journal entry, memoir, and exposition, Audre Lorde fuses the personal and political as she reflects on her experience coping with breast cancer and a radical mastectomy. Includes photos and tributes to Lorde written after her death in 1992.

"Grief, terror, courage, the passion for survival and for more than survival, are here in the searchings of a great poet." Adrienne Rich

"This book teaches me that with one breast or none, I am still me." Alice Walker"

" A brief but sparkling bon-bon from the French writer Jacques Cazotte, who was guillotined in 1792. A young captain, stationed in Naples, is tempted into summoning up Beelzebub, who appears first in the guise of a hideous camel, then as a cute spaniel, and lastly - and most dangerously - as a gorgeous, pouting nymphette who declares herself enamoured of the young man and follows him everywhere. This is an amusing study of temptation, with sinister undertones."
Anne Billson in Time Out

"In Biondetta there remains no trace of the monstrous apparition conjured up by Alvaro in the ruins of Portico. The satanic seductress is hidden behind the face of the tormented and plaintive beauty until the end of the fable."
Jorges Luis Borges

"The Devil in Love is famous on various counts: for its charm and the perfection of its scenes, but above all for the originality of its conception. "
Gerard de Nerval