“American history comes to vivid, engaging life in this tale of two interconnected families (one white, one black) that spans from the 1950s to Barack Obama’s first year as president. . . . The complex, beautifully drawn characters are unique and indelible.”—Entertainment Weekly “An astoundingly audacious debut.”—O: The Oprah Magazine • “A gorgeous generational saga.”—New York Post NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ESQUIRE • FINALIST FOR THE PEN/HEMINGWAY AWARD FOR DEBUT NOVEL Meet James Samuel Vincent, an affluent Manhattan attorney who shirks his modest Irish American background but hews to his father’s meandering ways. James muddles through a topsy-turvy relationship with his son, Rufus, which is further complicated when Rufus marries Claudia Christie. Claudia’s mother—Agnes Miller Christie—is a beautiful African American woman who survives a chance encounter on a Georgia road that propels her into a new life in the Bronx. Soon after, her husband, Eddie Christie, is called to duty on an air craft carrier in Vietnam, where Tom Stoppard’s play “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead” becomes Eddie’s life anchor, as he grapples with mounting racial tensions on the ship and counts the days until he will see Agnes again. These unforgettable characters’ lives intersect with a cast of lovers and friends—the unapologetic black lesbian who finds her groove in 1970s Berlin; a moving man stranded in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, during a Thanksgiving storm; two half-brothers who meet as adults in a crayon factory; and a Coney Island waitress whose Prince Charming is too good to be true. With piercing humor, exacting dialogue, and a beautiful sense of place, Regina Porter’s debut is both an intimate family portrait and a sweeping exploration of what it means to be American today. Praise for The Travelers “[A] kaleidoscopic début . . . Porter deftly skips back and forth through the decades, sometimes summarizing a life in a few paragraphs, sometimes spending pages on one conversation. As one character observes, ‘We move in circles in this life.’” —The New Yorker “Porter’s electric debut is a sprawling saga that follows two interconnected American families. . . . Readers will certainly be drawn in by Porter’s sharp writing and kept hooked by the black-and-white photographs interspersed throughout the book, which give faces to the evocative voices.”—Booklist

A pulse-racing international thriller from the New York Times bestselling author of The Expats and The Accident It’s 3:00am. Do you know where your husband is? Meet Will Rhodes: travel writer, recently married, barely solvent, his idealism rapidly giving way to disillusionment and the worry that he’s living the wrong life. Then one night, on assignment for the award-winning Travelers magazine in the wine region of Argentina, a beautiful woman makes him an offer he can’t refuse. Soon Will’s bad choices—and dark secrets—take him across Europe, from a chateau in Bordeaux to a midnight raid on a Paris mansion, from a dive bar in Dublin to a mega-yacht in the Mediterranean and an isolated cabin perched on the rugged cliffs of Iceland. As he’s drawn further into a tangled web of international intrigue, it becomes clear that nothing about Will Rhodes was ever ordinary, that the network of deception ensnaring him is part of an immense and deadly conspiracy with terrifying global implications—and that the people closest to him may pose the greatest threat of all. It’s 3:00am. Your husband has just become a spy.

In 2003/2004 Elizabeth Heyert photographed the bodies of more than thirty people at the Harlem funeral parlor of Isaiah Owens who prepared the corpses for their last journey. She would take pictures early in the morning, after the families had said goodbye to their loved ones the previous evening and before the service later in the morning. This book is a unique contribution to contemporary portrait photography. It is movingly intimate but never sensationalist. As Heyert explains, there is a historical dimension to these images: I was aware that I was also photographing a community from the past, a vanishing piece of cultural history. Some of the people I photographed left a brutal life in the Depression-era South to move to Harlem, where many of the southern religious traditions were re-established. Younger peo-ple were born and died in Harlem, but were still buried according to the old style, dressed for going to the party (Isaiah Owens) but in snazzy track suits instead of burial gowns. With Harlem rapidly changing, these traditions are fading. I hope my photographs will tell some small part of the story of a passing generation and their way of death.

Anthropologists George and Sharon Gmelch have been studying the quasi-nomadic people known as Travellers since their fieldwork in the early 1970s, when they lived among Travellers and went on the road in their own horse-drawn wagon. In 2011 they returned to seek out families they had known decades before—shadowed by a film crew and taking with them hundreds of old photographs showing the Travellers' former way of life. Many of these images are included in this book, alongside more recent photos and compelling personal narratives that reveal how Traveller lives have changed now that they have left nomadism behind.

Travelers in the Third Reich is an extraordinary history of the rise of the Nazis based on fascinating first-hand accounts, drawing together a multitude of voices and stories, including politicians, musicians, diplomats, schoolchildren, communists, scholars, athletes, poets, fascists, artists, tourists, and even celebrities like Charles Lindbergh and Samuel Beckett. Their experiences create a remarkable three-dimensional picture of Germany under Hitler—one so palpable that the reader will feel, hear, even breathe the atmosphere.These are the accidental eyewitnesses to history. Disturbing, absurd, moving, and ranging from the deeply trivial to the deeply tragic, their tales give a fresh insight into the complexities of the Third Reich, its paradoxes, and its ultimate destruction.

- An objective exploration of an often-maligned community that exists on the fringes of societyIn Ireland, around 25,000 people still live in temporary settlements in the style of itinerant workers, far removed from the amenities of Western civilization. Moving from place to place in mobile homes without electricity or running water, the largest Catholic minority of the country are faced with many prejudices. Strangely out of step with 21st-century lifestyle, they stick to their seemingly outdated traditions while also trying to find a new identity that fits in with modern society. Even in the present day, this ambiguity continues to define life for the traveller community, whose livelihood depends on horse breeding and hunting and who keep their own language alive as part of their insular culture. In 2011, the photographer Birte Kaufmann cautiously began to make contact with the travelling community, earning their trust and on some occasions living with them. For her portrayal of this unknown world, she needed to be in close contact with the families in order to capture their particular character and to avoid the usual stereotypes. Without a doubt, Birte Kaufmann's combination of reportage and documentary photography hits the right note and offers impressive insights into the Irish travellers' extraordinary world.

Three hundred years of wanderlust are captured in this beautiful new illustrated edition of the VIRAGO BOOK OF WOMEN TRAVELLERS. Some of the women are observers of the world in which they wander and others are more active. Often they are storytellers, weaving tales about the people they encounter and whether it is curiosity about the world or escape from personal tragedy, these women approached their journeys with wit, intelligence, compassion and empathy for the lives of others. The constraints and perils, the perceptions and complex emotions women journey with are different and for many women, the inner landscape is as important as the outer. This does not mean that the woman traveller is not politically aware, historically astute or in touch with the customs and language of the place but it does mean that a woman cannot travel and not be aware of her body and the limitations her sex presents.

"The Mind of the Traveler is a panoramic excursion through these transformations of passage. Eric Leed explores the great travel traditions of the West: heroic travel, as in the adventures of Odysseus and the chivalric exploits of medieval knights; sacred travel, as in the holy pilgrimages of penance and purification; and philosophic travel in search of knowledge, wether social, as in Marco Polo's itineraries of the East, or scientific, as in Darwin's discoveries aboard the Beagle". --Publisher.