William Boyd’s masterful new novel tells, in a series of intimate journals, the story of Logan Mountstuart—writer, lover, art dealer, spy—as he makes his often precarious way through the twentieth century.

'The Weight of a Human Heart' turns the rules of storytelling on their head. A series of graphs illustrates the disintegration of a marriage, step by excruciating step. A literary feud, and an affair, play out in the book review section of a national newspaper. A young girl learns her mother's disturbing secrets.

As millions are slaughtered on the Western Front, a ridiculous and little-reported campaign is being waged in East Africa - a war they continued after the Armistice because no one told them to stop.

The heart has consistently captured the human imagination. It has been singled out as a cultural icon, the repository of our deepest religious and artistic impulses, the organ whose steady functioning is understood, both literally and symbolically, as the very life force itself. The Sublime Engine will explore the profound sense of awe every person feels when they ponder the miracle encased within their ribs. In this lyrical history of our most essential organ, a critically-acclaimed novelist and a leading cardiologist--who happen to be brothers--draw upon history, science, religion, popular culture, and literature to illuminate all of the heart's physical and figurative chambers. Each of the four sections-- The Ancient Heart, The Renaissance Heart, The Modern Heart, and The Future Heart--will focus on a major epoch in our understanding of the heart and the hidden history of cardiology. Erudite, witty, and enthralling, The Sublime Engine makes the heart come alive for readers.

"[This book] deserves to be in everyone’s library. . . . It’s loaded with great information, and it can save your life or the life of someone you love."—Dr. Joseph Mercola "This book is life-changing for those trying to understand their own bodies, or those of loved ones, and it’s truly transformative in the hands of medical professionals, especially young doctors."—Foreword Reviews Thomas Cowan was a 20-year-old Duke grad—bright, skeptical, and already disillusioned with industrial capitalism—when he joined the Peace Corps in the mid-1970s for a two-year tour in Swaziland. There, he encountered the work of Rudolf Steiner and Weston A. Price—two men whose ideas would fascinate and challenge him for decades to come. Both drawn to the art of healing and repelled by the way medicine was—and continues to be—practiced in the United States, Cowan returned from Swaziland, went to medical school, and established a practice in New Hampshire and, later, San Francisco. For years, as he raised his three children, suffered the setback of divorce, and struggled with a heart condition, he remained intrigued by the work of Price and Steiner and, in particular, with Steiner’s provocative claim that the heart is not a pump. Determined to practice medicine in a way that promoted healing rather than compounded ailments, Cowan dedicated himself to understanding whether Steiner’s claim could possibly be true. And if Steiner was correct, what, then, is the heart? What is its true role in the human body? In this deeply personal, rigorous, and riveting account, Dr. Cowan offers up a daring claim: Not only was Steiner correct that the heart is not a pump, but our understanding of heart disease—with its origins in the blood vessels—is completely wrong. And this gross misunderstanding, with its attendant medications and risky surgeries, is the reason heart disease remains the most common cause of death worldwide. In Human Heart, Cosmic Heart, Dr. Thomas Cowan presents a new way of understanding the body’s most central organ. He offers a new look at what it means to be human and how we can best care for ourselves—and one another.

Short stories

The "breathtakingly brilliant" novel by the author of Infinite Jest (New York Times) is a deeply compelling and satisfying story, as hilarious and fearless and original as anything Wallace ever wrote. The agents at the IRS Regional Examination Center in Peoria, Illinois, appear ordinary enough to newly arrived trainee David Foster Wallace. But as he immerses himself in a routine so tedious and repetitive that new employees receive boredom-survival training, he learns of the extraordinary variety of personalities drawn to this strange calling. And he has arrived at a moment when forces within the IRS are plotting to eliminate even what little humanity and dignity the work still has. The Pale King remained unfinished at the time of David Foster Wallace's death, but it is a deeply compelling and satisfying novel, hilarious and fearless and as original as anything Wallace ever undertook. It grapples directly with ultimate questions -- questions of life's meaning and of the value of work and society -- through characters imagined with the interior force and generosity that were Wallace's unique gifts. Along the way it suggests a new idea of heroism and commands infinite respect for one of the most daring writers of our time. "The Pale King is by turns funny, shrewd, suspenseful, piercing, smart, terrifying, and rousing." --Laura Miller, Salon

When William Boyd published his biography of New York modern artist Nat Tate, a huge reception of critics and artists arrived for the launch party, hosted by David Bowie, to toast the late artist's life. Little did they know that the painter Nat Tate, a depressive genius who burned almost all his output before his suicide, never existed. The book was a hoax, and the art world had fallen for it. Nat Tate is a work of art unto itself-an investigation of the blurry line between the invented and the authentic, and a thoughtful tour through the spirited and occasionally ludicrous American art scene of the 1950s. William Boyd is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Praise for Nat Tate: "William Boyd's description of Tate's working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked up on Prince Street, New York, in the late '60s must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist's most profound dread-that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist-did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate."-David Bowie "A moving account of an artist too well understood by his time."-Gore Vidal

The search for happiness has been an enduring quest for us all. The greatest minds from history--Plato, Aristotle, Epicurus, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Gandhi, Einstein and many others—all confirm that happiness is the one thing we all crave after. The Wild Longing of the Human Heart is divided into two parts. Part one examines the brief history of happiness which has not always meant exactly the same thing to all cultures and individuals, and then moves on to summarize the latest information from the areas of brain science as well as the field of positive psychology. Part two proposes that it is not happiness (in the psycho-physiological sense of something like tranquility) which is the true goal of human living. Rather, the true goal of the “wild longing” is a meaningful life, guided by the search for truth, beauty and goodness.

"Josef Pieper's account of the centrality and meaning of the virtues is a needed primer to teach us exactly the meaning and relationship of the virtues and how they relate to the faith and its own special virtues. Pieper's attention is ever to the particular virtue, its precise meaning, and to its contribution to the wholeness that constituted an ordered, active, and truthful human life. No better brief account of the virtues can be found. Pieper has long instructed us in these realities that need to be made operative in each life as it touches all else 'that is', as Pieper himself often puts it." — James V. Schall, S.J., Georgetown University "A fine and thought provoking examination of the relationship between the mind, heart, and moral life of the human person." — John Cardinal O'Connor, Archbishop of New York "Pieper's sentences are admirably constructed and his ideas are expressed with maximum clarity. He restores to philosophy what common sense obstinately tells us ought to be found there: wisdom and insight." — T. S. Eliot