Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, and even our moralizing—“You still eat meat?” With our top chefs as deities and finest restaurants as places of pilgrimage, we have made food the stuff of secular seeking and transcendence, finding heaven in a mouthful. But have we come any closer to discovering the true meaning of food in our lives?   With inimitable charm and learning, Adam Gopnik takes us on a beguiling journey in search of that meaning as he charts America’s recent and rapid evolution from commendably aware eaters to manic, compulsive gastronomes. It is a journey that begins in eighteenth-century France—the birthplace of our modern tastes (and, by no coincidence, of the restaurant)—and carries us to the kitchens of the White House, the molecular meccas of Barcelona, and beyond. To understand why so many of us apparently live to eat, Gopnik delves into the most burning questions of our time, including: Should a Manhattanite bother to find chicken killed in the Bronx? Is a great vintage really any better than a good bottle of wine? And: Why does dessert matter so much?   Throughout, he reminds us of a time-honored truth often lost amid our newfound gastronomic pieties and certitudes: What goes on the table has never mattered as much to our lives as what goes on around the table—the scene of families, friends, lovers coming together, or breaking apart; conversation across the simplest or grandest board. This, ultimately, is who we are.   Following in the footsteps of Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin, Adam Gopnik gently satirizes the entire human comedy of the comestible as he surveys the wide world of taste that we have lately made our home. The Table Comes First is the delightful beginning of a new conversation about the way we eat now.

Product Description: These sixty satirical, rollicking, uproarious tales by the greatest yarn-spinner in our literary history are as fresh and vivid as ever more than a century after their author’s death.Mark Twain’s famous novels Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn have long been hailed as major achievements, but the father of American literature also made his mark as a master of the humorous short story...read more

Product Description: A taste for winter, a love of winter — “a mind for winter” — is for many a part of the modern human condition. International bestselling author Adam Gopnik does for this storied season what he did for the City of Light in the New York Times bestseller Paris to the Moon...read more

Product Description: Yes, we'll always have Paris and who better to capture all its moods than the inimitable Elliott Erwitt? With a keen eye for the real city, Erwitt sees beyond the tourist cliches. Whether the mightiest of monuments or the charm of la vie quotidienne this master photographer chronicles it all...read more

Product Description: In this captivating double life, Adam Gopnik searches for the men behind the icons of emancipation and evolution. Born by cosmic coincidence on the same day in 1809 and separated by an ocean, Lincoln and Darwin coauthored our sense of history and our understanding of man’s place in the world...read more

Product Description: Chef David Waltuck calls Chanterelle "a fantasy of a restaurant, dreamed up by a little, food-loving kid, that somehow, magically, came true." For over 28 years and from two different New York City locations, Chanterelle has broken the boundaries of French cooking, winning over such fans as Gael Greene, Richard Avedon, Keith Haring, and Malcolm Forbes along the way...read more

Product Description: Here you will find the finest essays “judiciously selected from countless publications” (Chicago Tribune), ranging from The New Yorker and Harper’s to Swink and Pinch. In his introduction to this year’s edition, Adam Gopnik finds that great essays have “text and inner text, personal story and larger point, the thing you’re supposed to be paying attention to and some other thing you’re really interested in...read more

Product Description: An affordable paperback edition of this photographic classic

When Meaulnes first arrives at the local school in Sologne, everyone is captivated by his good looks, daring and charisma. But when Meaulnes disappears for several days, and returns with tales of a strange party at a mysterious house and a beautiful girl hidden within it, he has been changed forever.

The author of Paris to the Moon describes the author's fall 2000 move from Paris back to New York with his family in a series of essays that profile the teachers, therapists, coaches, friends, adversaries, and others who make up their extended urban family and describe their new home, the impact of 9/11, real estate, and the meaning of life. Reprint. 40,000 first printing.

A chronicle about raising a family in the middle of Manhattan.

Product Description: Following Adam Gopnik’s best-selling Paris to the Moon, the adventure continues against the panorama of another storied city. Autumn, 2000: the Gopnik family moves back to a New York that seems, at first, safer and shinier than ever...read more

A collection of tales drawn from the author's writings on life in such cities as Montreal, New York, and London depicts a Jewish working-class community that was inspired by his childhood imaginings, in a volume that includes excerpts from such works as The Apprenticeship of Duddy Kravitz and Joshua Then and Now.

Product Description: Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans...read more

Product Description: Paris. The name alone conjures images of chestnut-lined boulevards, sidewalk cafés, breathtaking façades around every corner--in short, an exquisite romanticism that has captured the American imagination for as long as there have been Americans...read more

The entertaining epic about ten men who join a strange expedition in pursuit of an elusive and remarkable animal known as the Snark is accompanied by distinctive, original illustrations, a detailed bibliography, and informative annotations that provide a close-up look at the text and the many literary, linguistic, and mathematical references embedded in th text.

A gold crown on an Epiphany cake leads Oliver Parker, a ten-year-old American boy living in Paris with his journalist father, to a secret race of immortal French classical scholars, the Window Wraiths, who believe that Oliver is their ultimate ruler. Reprint.

Presents selected correspondence from the French novelist, which details his life as a dutiful son and socialite, and reveals his signature ideas about life, art, and character, which appear as major themes in his masterpiece.

Product Description: Brigitte Lacombe: Cinema / Theater Brigitte Lacombe ranks among the most prominent photographers of the contemporary movie and theater scene in France and the US. Her black-and-white portraits of actors and directors, among them Jean-Luc Godard, Robert Altman, Woody Allen, Roberto Rossellini, Robert de Niro, Arthur Miller, Gérard Depardieu, Glenn Close, Winona Ryder, Julia Roberts, Meg Ryan, Dustin Hoffman, Jeanne Moreau, Isabelle Adjani, Joseph Losey, to name but a few, bespeak a trust and familiarity between model and artist that is unique in today’s photography...read more

Product Description: A guide to the Telfair Museum of Art's unique collection of paintings, drawings, and prints donated by twenty-two artists who either were friends with or were admired by the renowned curator and Savannah native Kirk Varnedoe (1946-2003)...read more

Product Description: A complete record of the public art installations sponsored by New York City's Percent for Art Program since 1983 Features two hundred works by nearly as many artists, many of whom are internationally well known, including Vito Acconci, Dennis Adams, Siah Armajani, Alice Aycock, Dawoud Bey, Scott Burton, Jackie Ferrara, Komar & Melamid, Matt Mullican, Pat Steir, Fred Tomaselli, Ursula von Rydingsvard, Carrie Mae Weems, Fred Wilson and Krzysztof Wodiczko Includes interior and exterior permanent art installations at schools, parks, playgrounds, courthouses and other sites throughout New York City's five boroughs Foreword by Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City, and specially commissioned photography by celebrated New York-based architectural photographer David S...read more

Product Description: The Wrong Side of Paris, the final novel in Balzac’s The Human Comedy, is the compelling story of Godefroid, an abject failure at thirty, who seeks refuge from materialism by moving into a monastery-like lodging house in the shadows of Notre-Dame...read more

An anthology of American writers who found inspiration, good living, pleasure, and refuge in Paris includes the work of Sherwood Anderson, Hart Crane, Theodore Dreiser, Ann Morrow Lindbergh, Henry Miller, Mark Twain, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, James Baldwin, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and many, many others. (view table of contents)

The first new translation of Balzac's novel in more than a century follows Godefroid, a thirty-year-old failure, who seeks refuge at the unusual lodging house of a tragic noblewomen, where he encounters an assortment of men, all scarred by the tumult that followed the French Revolution, who have dedicated their lives to anonymous acts of charity. 10,000 first printing.