Grove Press Monster. The Autobiography of an L.A. Gang Member Shakur Sanyika

First published anonymously in 1912, this resolutely unsentimental novel gave many white readers their first glimpse of the double standards - and double consciousness - experienced by Black people in modern America. Republished in 1927, at the height of the Harlem Renaissance, with an introduction by Carl Van Vechten, The Autobiography of an Ex-Colored Man became a pioneering document of African-American culture and an eloquent model for later novelists ranging from Zora Neale Hurston to Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison • Narrated by a man whose light skin enables him to 'pass' for white, the novel describes a journey through the strata of Black society at the turn of the century - from a cigar factory in Jacksonville to an elite gambling club in New York, from genteel aristocrats to the musicians who hammered out the rhythms of Ragtime

“One in ten trees comes up sweet…” • In the inhospitable Black Swamp of Ohio, the Goodenough family are barely scratching out a living. Life there is harsh, tempered only by the apples they grow for eating and for the cider that dulls their pain. Hot-headed Sadie and buttoned-up James are a poor match, and Robert and his sister Martha can only watch helplessly as their parents tear each other apart. One particularly vicious fight sends Robert out alone across America, far from his sister, to seek his fortune among the mighty redwoods and sequoias of Gold Rush California. But even across a continent, he can feel the pull of family loyalties…

One night in St Petersburg, two men meet, both adrift in the brash new Russia: Shutov, a writer visiting after years of exile in Paris, and Volsky, an elderly survivor of the Siege of Leningrad and Stalin's purges. His life story - one of extreme suffering, courage and an extraordinary love - he considers unremarkable. To Shutov it is a revelation, the tale of an unsung hero that puts everything into perspective and suggests where true happiness lies

Сколько всего кошек в мире? • Каков шанс выиграть в лотерею дважды? • И сколько же времени требуется, чтобы сосчитать до миллиона? • Узнайте, как решать сложные математические задачи, не имея ничего, кроме обратной стороны конверта, карандаша и немного старомодных мозговых усилий • Присоединяйтесь к Робу Истэуэю, который интересно расскажет о том, как считать без калькулятора. Математика на обратной стороне конверта, наполненная забавными анекдотами, тестами и полезными советами по расчетам для любой ситуации, является бесценным введением в искусство оценки и приятным напоминанием о том, что иногда наш собственный мозг - лучший инструмент, с помощью которого мы имеем дело с числами • Книга на английском языке • How many cats are there in the world? • What's the chance of winning the lottery twice? • And just how long does it take to count to a million? • Learn how to tackle tricky maths problems with nothing but the back of an envelope, a pencil and some good old-fashioned brain power

The Second World War. Poland. Our narrator has no intention of being a hero. He plans to survive this war, whatever it takes • Meticulously he recounts his experiences: the slow unravelling of national events as well as uncomfortable personal encounters on the street, in the cafe, at the office, in his love affairs. He is intimate but reserved; conversational but careful; reflective but determined. As he becomes increasingly and chillingly alienated from other people, the reader is drawn into complicit acquiescence. We are forced to consider what it means to be heroic and how we ourselves would behave in the same circumstances • Written in 1961, this is the masterpiece of one of the great Polish writers of the twentieth century

Benvenuto Cellini is an artist-craftsman, one of the greatest sculptors in the renaissance, passionately devoted to art, the worshipper and frequenter of the great men of his time, the 'divine' Michelangelo, who came to his studio, the 'marvellous' Titian (the adjectives are Cellini's ). He loathed the sculptor Torregiano because he had broken Michelangelo's nose.His autobiography gives a quite extraordinarily vivid account of daily life in Renaissance Florence and Rome, its studios, its taverns, its violence, his loves, the kings, cardinals and popes who commission his works. At 27 he helps direct the defence of the castello San Angelo; his account of his imprisonment there under a mad castellan (who thought he was a bat), his escape by an improvised rope, his recapture, his confinement in 'a cell of tarantulas and venomous worms' is a chapter of adventure equal to any in fact or fiction

A new suspect for the role of Jack the Ripper - in his own words • This manuscript was found in papers belonging to Hulme Beauman, the creator of the radio series Toytown and Larry the Lamb, by Alan Hicken. It is written by a man called James Carnac and is an account of his life, including the period when he became the murderer known to posterity as ‘Jack the Ripper’. Ultimately it is up to the reader to decide. Is this a piece of fiction? If so it has to be one of the very earliest imaginings of the Ripper case, written in the early years of the twentieth century and a fascinating piece of period writing. However, is it non-fiction? There is information in this book that does not appear to be derived from contemporary newspapers or any other publications and the descriptions of Tottenham in the 1870s, the visits to performances of Jekyll and Hyde, the intricate geography of Whitechapel in 1888 are written with pin-point accuracy

Four narrators, a student from a cafe, a private detective hired by an aggrieved husband, the heroine herself and one of her lovers, construct a portrait of Jacqueline Delanque, otherwise known as Louki • The daughter of a single mother who works in the Moulin Rouge, Louki grows up in poverty in Montmartre. Her one attempt to escape her background fails when she is rejected from the Lycee Jules-Ferry. She meanders on through life, into a cocaine habit, and to frequenting the Cafe Conde, whose regulars begin calling her "Louki". She drifts into marriage with a real estate agency director, but finds no satisfaction with him or his friends and so makes the simple decision not to return to him one evening. She turns instead to a young man almost as aimless and adrift as she, but who perhaps loves her all the same

A modern saga spanning the whole of the 20th century, by one of Iceland's most celebrated writers • At the beginning of this story there is death, and yet it is a celebration of life - the passion between a man and a woman, forbidden love, violence, sorrow, betrayal. Happiness and misfortune are passed down from one generation to the next. The sorrow over what was and what might have been weighs heavily on the characters and at the end of this chain, for now, stands Ari, on his way to his dying father, with a score still to be settled • The raw beauty of life is written into the dramatic Icelandic landscape, and into a society that has undergone great transformation within a century. In language both archaic and lyrical, and yet entirely contemporary and full of humour, Jon Kalman Stefansson proves himself one of the finest European writers of his generation

Andrew Landford, MP is driving home one night along a dark country lane when a barn owl flies into his windscreen. It is an accident, nothing more. But Andrew sits on a parliamentary committee concerned with the protection of endangered species, and the death of the owl threatens to destroy his hopes of reaching No. 10 • Also in the car is Andrew's old Oxford friend and political adviser, Charles Fryerne. Will they be able to keep the crime under wraps, or will circumstances conspire against them?

A wonderfully readable investigation of the origins of the modern garden in 18th-century England. Popular history at its finest • One January morning in 1734, cloth merchant Peter Collinson hurried down to the docks at London's Custom House to collect cargo just arrived from John Bartram in the American colonies. But it was not bales of cotton that awaited him, but plants and seeds • Over the next forty years, Bartram would send hundreds of American species to England, where Collinson was one of a handful of men who would foster a national obsession and change the gardens of Britain forever: Philip Miller, author of the bestselling Gardeners Dictionary; the Swede Carl Linnaeus, whose standardised botanical nomenclature popularised botany; the botanist-adventurer Joseph Banks and his colleague Daniel Solander who both explored the strange flora of Tahiti and Australia on Captain Cook's Endeavour

From the Paleozoic volcanoes that stained its soil, to the Saxons who occupied it, to the Tudors who traded its wool, to the Land Girls of wartime, John Lewis-Stempel charts a sweeping, lyrical history of Woodston: the quintessential English farm • With his combined skills of farmer and historian, Lewis-Stempel digs deep into written records, the memories of relatives, and the landscape itself to celebrate the farmland his family have been bound to for millennia. Through Woodston's life, we feel the joyful arrival of oxen ploughing; we see pigs rootling in the medieval apple orchard; and take in the sharp, drowsy fragrance of hops on Edwardian air. He draws upon his wealth of historical knowledge and his innate sense of place to create a passionate, fascinating biography of farming in England