Birdseye was an inspired and inspiring explorer, and his adventurous spirit lead to many episodes that Kurlansky delights in retelling. From founding a correspondence taxidermy school when he was a teenager to dropping out of Amherst to catch ticks in Idaho, Birdseye always followed a unique course in life. But when he moved to Newfoundland to farm foxes for their furs, he became interested in the substance that would change his life: frozen food. He eventually worked out the best way to keep frozen food tasty and sanitary, and made his fortune selling the rights to General Foods.

Even though the record on Birdseye’s life is less than reliable, Kurlanksy does a fantastic job stitching what we have together into an amusing and inspiring story. Ultimately, he concludes that it was Birdseye’s curiosity that made his unusual life possible. He could never know enough about the world around him, and his need to understand gave him the materials he required to create. He was, in many ways, one of the “crazy ones” that Steve Jobs praised for their willingness to try things no one else would.

The “After You’ve Read…” series of articles will appear every two weeks on KnopfDoubleday.com.

Buy the ebook: iBookstore | Kindle | Nook | Random House

Acclaimed author Graham Joyce’s mesmerizing new novel centers around the disappearance of a young girl from a small town in the heart of England. Her sudden return twenty years later, and the mind-bending tale of where she’s been, will challenge our very perception of truth.

For twenty years after Tara Martin disappeared from her small English town, her parents and her brother, Peter, have lived in denial of the grim fact that she was gone for good. And then suddenly, on Christmas Day, the doorbell rings at her parents’ home and there, disheveled and slightly peculiar looking, Tara stands. It’s a miracle, but alarm bells are ringing for Peter. Tara’s story just does not add up. And, incredibly, she barely looks a day older than when she vanished.

Award-winning author Graham Joyce is a master of exploring new realms of understanding that exist between dreams and reality, between the known and unknown. Some Kind of Fairy Tale is a unique journey every bit as magical as its title implies, and as real and unsentimental as the world around us.

Some Kind of Fairy Tale comes out July 10th!

Read an excerpt:

Some Kind of Fairy Tale by Graham Joyce

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Under the direction of famed explorer Porter Stone, an archaeological team is secretly attempting to locate the tomb of an ancient pharaoh who was unlike any other in history. Stone believes he has found the burial chamber of King Narmer, the near mythical god- king who united upper and lower Egypt in 3200 B.C., and the archaeologist has reason to believe that the greatest prize of all—Narmer’s crown—might be buried with him. No crown of an Egyptian king has ever been discovered, and Narmer’s is the elusive “double” crown of the two Egypts, supposedly pos­sessed of awesome powers.

The dig itself is located in one of the most forbidding places on earth—the Sudd, a nearly impassable swamp in north­ern Sudan. Amid the nightmarish, disorienting tangle of mud and dead vegetation, a series of harrowing and inexpli­cable occurrences are causing people on the expedition to fear a centuries- old curse. With a monumental discovery in reach, Professor Jeremy Logan is brought onto the project to investigate. What he finds will raise new questions . . . and alarm.

In the hands of master storyteller Lincoln Child, The Third Gate breaks new ground and introduces a fascinating new protagonist to the thriller world.

Read an excerpt | Become a fan of Lincoln Child on Facebook | Visit Lincoln Child on the web

The Third Gate comes out June 12th!

Buy the Book: Amazon | Barnes & Noble | Books-a-Million | IndieBound | Powell’s Books | More

Buy the eBook: iBookstore | Kindle | Nook | More

The “After You’rve Read…” series of articles will appear every two weeks on KnopfDoubleday.com.

Whatever happened to Calico Joe?

In the summer of 1973 Joe Castle was the boy wonder of baseball, the greatest rookie anyone had ever seen. The kid from Calico Rock, Arkansas dazzled Cub fans as he hit home run after home run, politely tipping his hat to the crowd as he shattered all rookie records.

Calico Joe quickly became the idol of every baseball fan in America, including Paul Tracey, the young son of a hard-partying and hard-throwing Mets pitcher. On the day that Warren Tracey finally faced Calico Joe, Paul was in the stands, rooting for his idol but also for his Dad. Then Warren threw a fastball that would change their lives forever…

In John Grisham’s new novel the baseball is thrilling, but it’s what happens off the field that makes CALICO JOE a classic.

Order Now:  Amazon | Apple | B&N | IndieBound

Read the first three chapters: Calico Joe excerpt

Born in 1937, David Hockney grew up in a northern English town during the days of postwar austerity. By the time he was ten years old he knew he wanted to be an artist, and after leaving school he went on to study at Bradford Art College and later at the Royal College of Art in London. Bursting onto the scene at the Young Contemporaries exhibition, Hockney was quickly heralded as the golden boy of postwar British art and a leading proponent of pop art. It was during the swinging 60s in London that he befriended many of the seminal cultural figures of the generation and throughout these years Hockney’s career grew. Always absorbed in his work, he drew, painted and etched for long hours each day, but it was a scholarship that led him to California, where he painted his iconic series of swimming pools. Since then, the most prestigious galleries across the world have devoted countless shows to his extraordinary work.

Most recently Hockney has been at the forefront the art world’s digital revolution, producing incredible sketches on his iPhone and iPad, and it is this progressive thinking which has highlighted his genius, vigor and versatility as an artist approaching his 75th birthday.

“Certainly the most moving and amusing account of the most popular British artist of the 20th century. [David Hockney] bounces along as the rebellious, eccentric, funny artist discovers sex, then London, and so on to fame and fortune, via California. Sykes elicits marvellous background details and anecdotes… The wit, energy and magical talent of Hockney to use whatever happens to him to his purpose and for humour are shown on almost every page.”—London Evening Standard

“Prodigiously entertaining.”
—Financial Times

“A chatty, knowledgeable, insider’s biography, full of anecdotes.”
—The Guardian

Beautifully illustrated with color and black-and-white photographs throughout, this gorgeous volume makes a lovely addition to any library and is a perfect gift for any lover of art.

Pre-order a copy from one of these online retailers:
Amazon :: Barnes & Noble :: IndieBound :: Powell’s :: Random House

Much like today, 1890s New York was America’s financial, manufacturing, and entertainment capital.  It was also the premiere destination for sin, teeming with 40,000 prostitutes, casinos, and all-night dives.  Police captains were more than happy to supplement their incomes with hefty bribes, while looking the other way. Captain “Big Bill” Devery, a strapping Irishman who never met a sudsy beer he didn’t like, became Roosevelt’s arch nemesis, and the Tammany Hall political machine was not making TR’s job any easier.

TR’s wild ride is brilliantly documented in Island of Vice, a fascinating read for history buffs, lovers of NYC, sinners and, yes, even saints.  E.L. Doctorow, author of the classic novel, Ragtime calls Island of Vice “a delicious municipal history, impeccably researched, excitingly told.”   We couldn’t have said it better ourselves.

This is a story that dates back to 1847, but for me it begins in 1985. That was the year I graduated high school, and the summer I spent in the countryside outside of Dublin. I was the youngest in a group of two dozen volunteers from Europe and America, part of a work camp building a playground out of dirt, old tires and railroad ties, for a settlement of Travelers. The Travelers were a window back in time, and theirs was a way of life on the brink of extinction. Akin to the gypsies of Ireland, they were increasingly being forced out of their nomadic lifestyle, and onto government settlements.
That particular settlement consisted of a collection of four-room, cinder-block houses, hastily built in the shadows of the thirty-foot wall of a maximum security prison. They were oppressively poor by my middle-class American standards. Their children wore clothes and shoes that were often far too big or small for them, or were practically torn to shreds. They played on a great pile of refuse from the prison, a few old stoves and refrigerators set atop a small mountain of discarded wooden pallets, nails exposed everywhere. And to line them up from youngest to oldest, was to see the progressive levels of hardness, distance from affection, and absence of hope, weaving themselves into the fabric of their hearts.

But there were exceptions: a few children who were quicker to laugh than their companions, an adult or two who smiled more readily than the others, or, most particularly, the old man who played the fiddle at Sunday Mass and never failed to thank us for the playground we were building right there beside the prison walls. He teared up on the day it was finished, and then even more on the day we left. And I wondered how that old man had made it so far in his life without the calloused heart so many around him had at a fraction of his age.

More than twenty years later, in the fading memories of that far away summer, Ethan McOwen was born.

Ethan would face some of the worst episodes of the Irish experience: The Hunger of the Great Famine, emigration to America on the Coffin Ships, the slums of New York, and service in the Irish Brigade during the American Civil War. But beyond deprivation and war, Ethan would face the even greater foes of violence, bigotry, corruption and bitterness, which generally accompany such hardship.

As a love interest for Ethan, I imagined Marcella, born to a wealthy society family in Spain that came to America after her father’s scandalous affair. She would be oppressed in quite different ways, facing the restrictions placed upon women but unwilling to behave the way her family, and society demanded of her. To understand her frustration with the restrictions placed upon her, I had my mother’s story to consider. A century after Marcella’s struggle, the restrictions of being a woman were still there. My mother, the eldest of six children and offered a scholarship to attend college, was told by her mother that they could not afford it. They had only planned on sending her two younger brothers to college.

Then there were Micah and Mary, two slaves who began as minor characters and soon demanded that more and more of their story be told. They were born out of my years as a student and teacher in Washington, D.C., and in Flatbush, Brooklyn, where I learned so much more about the African-American experience in this country. I told my students that they could be anything they wanted to be, if they worked hard enough, but their history books and the world around them told them a very different story. In writing Micah and Mary, I became determined to create characters that would be set apart from the common depiction of slaves in literature and film. They would be cut from the same mold of Frederick Douglass or Harriet Tubman: self-made, highly intelligent, and resolute. They would not be rescued by kindly white folks the way so many African American characters are in stories told by white writers. They would take their freedom, since it was no man’s to ever “give” in the first place.

As I researched and wrote these stories, I became increasingly aware of the common threads that ran through all such experiences. What anger, what frustration, what bitterness and hatred must accompany such limitations? But I did not grow up with parents who saw the world in such a manner. My mother was forty-seven when she finally graduated college, alongside my father, who was fifty, and had served for twenty-one years on the FDNY. It was then that they began their second careers, as teachers, becoming a bold and lasting example of the possible.

The characters of this story would embody such resilience, neither surrendering to the limits of expectations, or becoming embittered by hardship. They would be, like that old man at the Traveler settlement playing his hopeful fiddle and celebrating the completion of an austere playground alongside prison walls, symbols of unyielding character and uncommon strength. They’d be the sort who travel, with

Ms. Danaczko, 28, who said she had seen the 1997 movie “Titanic” perhaps a dozen times, instantly loved Ms O’Brien’s dramatic retelling of the disaster and its aftermath. But when she was piqued by curiosity about her unknown author and typed “Kate Alcott” into Google, nothing significant popped up.

“I guess I hadn’t really thought about the possibility that she might be working under a pen name,” Ms. Danaczko said. “I was operating under the assumption that she was somebody Esther had pulled from the slush pile or was an old friend.”

Read the whole story here.