The explosive Edgar Award–winning debut novel—told entirely through surveillance recordings, eyewitness reports, and other “official” documents—by New York Times bestselling author Lawrence Sanders New York City. Summer 1968.Newly sprung from prison, professional burglar John Anderson is preparing for the biggest heist of his criminal career. The mark is a Manhattan luxury apartment building with the tony address of 535 East Seventy-Third Street. Enlisting a crew of scouts, con artists, and a getaway driver, Anderson orchestrates what he believes to be a foolproof plan. To pull off the big score, he needs one last thing: the permission of the local mafia, who expect a piece of the action. But no one inside Anderson’s operation knows that the police have recorded their conversations. The New York Police Department has hatched a plot of its own—but even its task force may not be enough to stop such a cunningly planned robbery.

The first-ever biography of the seminal American director whose remarkable life traces a line through American entertainment history Acclaimed as the ultimate New York movie director, Sidney Lumet began his astonishing five-decades-long directing career with the now classic 12 Angry Men, followed by such landmark films as Serpico, Dog Day Afternoon, and Network. His remarkably varied output included award-winning adaptations of plays by Anton Chekhov, Arthur Miller, Tennessee Williams, and Eugene O’Neill, whose Long Day’s Journey into Night featured Katharine Hepburn and Ralph Richardson in their most devastating performances. Renowned as an “actor’s director,” Lumet attracted an unmatched roster of stars, among them: Henry Fonda, Sophia Loren, Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Sean Connery, Ingrid Bergman, Paul Newman, Al Pacino, Ethan Hawke, and Philip-Seymour Hoffman, accruing eighteen Oscar nods for his actors along the way. With the help of exclusive interviews with family, colleagues, and friends, author Maura Spiegel provides a vibrant portrait of the life and work of this extraordinary director whose influence is felt through generations, and takes us inside the Federal Theater, the Group Theatre, the Actors Studio, and the early “golden age” of television. From his surprising personal life, with four marriages to remarkable women—all of whom opened their living rooms to Lumet’s world of artists and performers like Marilyn Monroe and Michael Jackson—to the world of Yiddish theater and Broadway spectacles, Sidney Lumet: A Life is a book that anyone interested in American film of the twentieth century will not want to miss.

The #1 New York Times–bestselling author introduces readers to “a great detective, a detective’s detective,” New York cop Edward X. Delaney (Kirkus Reviews). New York Police Department Captain Edward Delaney is called to the scene of a brutal murder. A Brooklyn councilman was struck from behind, the back of his skull punctured and crushed with an unknown weapon. The victim wasn’t robbed, and there’s no known motive. The commissioner appoints Delaney to head up a clandestine task force, but soon this effort ignites an internecine war of departmental backstabbing. Distracted by the serious illness of his wife, Barbara, Delaney begins his secret investigation. Then the killer claims another victim—slain in the exact same way, leaving the strange puncture wound. As more young men are found murdered, Delaney starts putting the pieces together. Soon, he’s faced with a cop’s dilemma: He knows who the killer is, but the man is untouchable. That’s when Delaney lays a trap to bring a monster to justice . . .

A brilliant scientist tapes into the animal urges that stir within us all resulting in an explosion of sex and violence.

In 1957, A Face in the Crowd incorporated live video images to warn about the future of broadcast TV. In 2015, Kung Fury was infused with analogue noise to evoke the nostalgic feeling of watching an old VHS tape. Between the two films, numerous ones would incorporate video images to imagine the implications of video practices. Drawing on media archaeology, Videographic Cinema shows how such images and imaginaries have emerged, changed and remained over time according to their shifting technical, historical and institutional conditions. Rediscovering forgotten films like Anti-Clock (1979) and reassessing ones like Lost Highway (1997), Jonathan Rozenkrantz charts neglected chapters of video history, including self-confrontation techniques in psychiatry, their complex relation with surveillance, and the invention/discovery of the “videographic psyche” by artists, therapists and filmmakers. Spanning six decades, Videographic Cinema discovers an epistemic shift from prospective imaginaries of surveillance and control conditioned on video as a medium for live transmission, to retrospective ones concerned with videotape as a recording memory. It ends by considering videographic filmmaking itself as a form of archaeology in the age of analogue obsolescence.

There’s been a revolution in American popular fiction. The writers who dominated the bestseller lists a generation ago with blockbuster novels about movie stars and exotic foreign lands have been replaced by a new generation writing a new kind of bestseller, one that hooks readers with crime, suspense, and ever-increasing violence. Patrick Anderson, The Washington Post’s man on the thriller beat, calls this revolution “the triumph of the thriller,” and lists among its stars Thomas Harris, Michael Connelly, George Pelecanos, Dennis Lehane, Sue Grafton, and Elmore Leonard. In his provocative, caustic, and often hilarious survey of today’s popular fiction, Anderson shows us who the best thriller writers are–and the worst. He shows how Michael Connelly was inspired by Raymond Chandler, how George Pelecanos toiled in obscurity while he mastered his craft, how Sue Grafton created the first great woman private eye, and how Thomas Harris transformed an insane cannibal into the charming man of the world who made FBI agent Clarice Starling his lover. Anderson shows Scott Turow inventing the modern legal thriller and John Grisham translating it into a stunning series of bestsellers. He casts a cold eye on Tom Clancy’s militaristic techno-thrillers, and praises Alan Furst and Robert Littell as world-class spy novelists. He examines the pioneering role of Lawrence Sanders, the offbeat appeal of Dean Koontz, the unprecedented success of The Da Vinci Code, and the emergence of the literary thriller. Most of all, Anderson demands that the best of these novelists be given their due–not as genre writers, but as some of the most talented men and women at work in American fiction. Don’t trust the literary elites to tell you what to read, he warns–make up you own minds. The Triumph of the Thriller will convince many readers that we’ve entered an important new era in popular fiction. This book can be your guide to it.

A biography of a star and an investigation of what can happen to a man when the images he creates take over his life. Sean Connery’s creation of secret agent James Bond invigorated Britain and its cinema, allowing a cash-strapped, morale-sapped country in decline to fancy itself still a player on the world stage. How can such worship not play havoc with one’s soul—especially a soul as painfully unprepared for the pressures of stardom as Connery’s? Spirited and argumentative, Christopher Bray’s Sean Connery is the story of an actor learning his craft on the job and, at the end of his career, of a man pressing his stardom into the service of a burgeoning political awareness.

Yoga. Humanistic Psychology. Meditation. Holistic Healing. These practices are commonplace today. Yet before the early 1960s they were atypical options for most people outside of the upper class or small groups of educated spiritual seekers. Esalen Institute, a retreat for spiritual and personal growth in Big Sur, California, played a pioneering role in popularizing quests for self-transformation and personalized spirituality. This “soul rush” spread quickly throughout the United States as the Institute made ordinary people aware of hundreds of ways to select, combine, and revise their beliefs about the sacred and to explore diverse mystical experiences. Millions of Americans now identify themselves as spiritual, not religious, because Esalen paved the way for them to explore spirituality without affiliating with established denominations The American Soul Rush explores the concept of spiritual privilege and Esalen’s foundational influence on the growth and spread of diverse spiritual practices that affirm individuals’ self-worth and possibilities for positive personal change. The book also describes the people, narratives, and relationships at the Institute that produced persistent, almost accidental inequalities in order to illuminate the ways that gender is central to religion and spirituality in most contexts.

The final two cases in the series by the #1 New York Times–bestselling author—plus the Edgar Award–winning debut novel that introduced Edward Delaney. Lawrence Sanders’s first novel in the Deadly Sins series became a New York Times bestseller and was made into an acclaimed film starring Frank Sinatra as hard-bitten New York City homicide detective Edward Delaney. Sanders would follow up with three more Deadly Sins novels—each one a New York Times bestseller—proving himself again and again to be “a master” (The New Yorker). This collection also includes Sanders’s first novel, completed at age fifty, The Anderson Tapes, which introduced Edward Delaney and won an Edgar Award, and was made into a film starring Sean Connery. The Third Deadly Sin: By day, she’s an unassuming middle-aged secretary. By night, dressed in a midnight-black wig, a skin-tight dress, and spike heels, she prowls smoky hotel bars for prey. Inside her leather bag are keys, cash, mace, and a Swiss Army knife. Her first victim—a convention guest at an upscale Manhattan hotel—is found dead with multiple stab wounds. Edward Delaney has come out of retirement to stop the so-called Hotel Ripper, who has seized the city in a chokehold of panic. But he’s not expecting the killer to be a woman. “A first-rate thriller . . . as good as you can get.” —The New York Times The Fourth Deadly Sin: With no leads and a case getting colder by the hour, the NYPD calls in former chief Edward Delaney to solve the grisly murder of Dr. Simon Ellerbee, a noted Upper East Side psychiatrist, who not only had his skull bashed in by a ball-peen hammer but had his eyes mutilated. It’s up to the veteran detective to analyze the symbolism of the attack and study the doctor’s patients to find out which one of them wanted to hammer home a point. “Not to be missed.” —Kansas City Star The Anderson Tapes: Newly sprung from prison, professional burglar John Anderson is preparing for the biggest heist of his criminal career. The mark is a Manhattan luxury apartment building. Enlisting a crew of scouts, con artists, and a getaway driver, Anderson orchestrates what he believes to be a foolproof plan. To pull off the big score, he needs one last thing: the permission of the local mafia, who expect a piece of the action. But no one inside Anderson’s operation knows that the police have recorded their conversations. The NYPD has hatched a plot of its own—but even its task force may not be enough to stop such a cunningly planned robbery. “The novel races forward, accelerating in action and suspense.” —TheNew York Times