Throughout his career Jacques Barzun, author of the New York Times bestseller and National Book Award Finalist From Dawn to Decadence, has always been known as a witty and graceful essayist. With subjects ranging from history to baseball to crime novels, A Jacques Barzun Reader is a feast for any reader.

The Sketch-Book (1820-1) looks simultaneously towards audiences on both sides of the Atlantic, as Irving explores the uneasy relationship of an American writer to English literary traditions. He sketches a series of encounters with the cultural shrines of the parent nation, and in two brilliant experiments with tales transplanted from Europe creates the first classic American short stories, Rip Van Winkle and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.

Richard Yates was acclaimed as one of the most powerful, compassionate, and technically accomplished writers of America's post-war generation. His work has inspired such diverse talents as Richard Ford, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, Robert Stone, and Kurt Vonnegut, and his 1961 novel, Revolutionary Road, is an acknowledged classic of American literature. And yet somehow Richard Yates never quite received the wider cultural acclaim of which he is so clearly deserving. The publication of The Collected Stories of Richard Yates is a literary event of the highest order: here, for the first time, Yates's peerless short fiction is published in a single volume. Containing the stories of his classic works Eleven Kinds of Loneliness and Liars in Love, this superb collection also offers nine new stories, seven of which have never before been published.

Henry Spencer Ashbee (1834-1900) was a prosperous and respectable Victorian gentleman, a family man who counted among his many friends the celebrated adventurer Sir Richard Francis Burton. But he was a gentleman with a secret; one so delicious that he rented a separate apartment to contain it. Within the well-appointed chambers of Gray's Inn, Ashbee concealed an astonishingly vast collection of erotica and pornography, thousands of volumes strong. Ian Gibson, the acclaimed biographer of Lorca and Dali, now turns his attention to the hitherto little-known Ashbee, a man who happily supported his wife and four children but spent his spare time meticulously cataloguing such risque titles as Miss Bellasis Birched for Thieving and The Marchioness's Amourous Pastimes. And with exclusive access to Ashbee's diaries and his family's archives, Gibson has uncovered evidence that Ashbee may himself have been the author of the notorious My Secret Life the "true" autobiography of an unnamed Victorian gentleman and his sexual adventures. With his celebrated touch for evoking both his subject and his subject's era, Gibson has created a telling and provocative portrait of a fascinating character and the no less intriguing age that made him possible.

In The Age of Science, the former editor and publisher of Scientific American gives us a sweeping overview of the scientific achievements of the twentieth century, with chapters on the fundamental forces of nature, the subatomic world, cosmology, the cell and molecular biology, earth history and the evolution of life, and human evolution. Beautifully written and illustrated, this is a book for the connoisseur: an elegant, informative, magisterial summation of one of the twentieth century's greatest cultural achievements.

From nineteenth-century mug shots and wanted posters to Weegee's famous crime-scene photographs to the notorious surveillance film of Patty Hearst, Shots in the Dark highlights key developments in the history of crime photography. These are pictures we see once and never forget: an autopsy photograph of Lee Harvey Oswald; the bodies of Lizzie Borden's parents; and mug shots of celecrities including Jane Fonda and Bill Gates.