A short story by Fyodor Dostoyevsky written in 1877. It begins with a man walking St. Petersburg's streets while musing upon how ridiculous his life is, as well as its distinct lack of meaning or purpose. This train of thought leads him to the idea of suicide, which he resolves to commit using a previously-acquired gun. However, a chance encounter with a distressed little girl in the street derails his drastic plans.

'Strangely enough, I mistook it for a gentleman at first. Fortunately I had my spectacles with me so I could see it was really a nose.' With this pair of absurd, comic stories Gogol indulges his imagination and delights readers. Contains 'The Nose' and 'The Carriage'.

The Hour of the Star, Clarice Lispector's consummate final novel, may well be her masterpiece. Narrated by the cosmopolitan Rodrigo S.M., this brief, strange, and haunting tale is the story of Macabéa, one of life's unfortunates. Living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro and eking out a poor living as a typist, Macabéa loves movies, Coca-Cola, and her rat of a boyfriend; she would like to be like Marilyn Monroe, but she is ugly, underfed, sickly, and unloved. Rodrigo recoils from her wretchedness, and yet he cannot avoid realization that for all her outward misery, Macabéa is inwardly free. She doesn't seem to know how unhappy she should be. Lispector employs her pathetic heroine against her urbane, empty narrator--edge of despair to edge of despair--and, working them like a pair of scissors, she cuts away the reader's preconceived notions about poverty, identity, love, and the art of fiction. In her last novel she takes readers close to the true mystery of life, and leaves us deep in Lispector territory indeed.

A mystical dialogue between a male author and his creation, this posthumous work has never before been translated, and is a book of particular beauty and strangeness. A mystical dialogue between a male author (a thinly disguised Clarice Lispector) and his/her creation, a woman named Angela, this posthumous work has never before been translated. Lispector did not even live to see it published. At her death, a mountain of fragments remained to be “structured” by Olga Borelli. These fragments form a dialogue between a god-like author who infuses the breath of life into his creation: the speaking, breathing, dying creation herself, Angela Pralini. The work’s almost occult appeal arises from the perception that if Angela dies, Clarice will have to die as well. And she did.

Magic has made the city of Tiran an industrial utopia, but magic has a cost—and the collectors have come calling. An orphan since the age of four, Sciona has always had more to prove than her fellow students. For twenty years, she has devoted every waking moment to the study of magic, fueled by a mad desire to achieve the impossible: to be the first woman ever admitted to the High Magistry. When she finally claws her way up the ranks to become a highmage, however, she finds that her challenges have just begun. Her new colleagues will stop at nothing to let her know she is unwelcome, beginning with giving her a janitor instead of a qualified lab assistant. What neither Sciona nor her peers realize is that her taciturn assistant was once more than a janitor; before he mopped floors for the mages, Thomil was a nomadic hunter from beyond Tiran’s magical barrier. Ten years have passed since he survived the perilous crossing that killed his family. But working for a highmage, he sees the opportunity to finally understand the forces that decimated his tribe, drove him from his homeland, and keep the Tiranish in power. Through their fractious relationship, mage and outsider uncover an ancient secret that could change the course of magic forever—if it doesn’t get them killed first. Sciona has defined her life by the pursuit of truth, but how much is one truth worth with the fate of civilization in the balance? A standalone dark academia brimming with mystery, tragedy, and the damning echoes of the past. For fans of Leigh Bardugo, V. E. Schwab, and Fullmetal Alchemist. (Content warnings for gore, sexual assault, and suicidal ideation)

NEW YORK TIMES  BESTSELLER  •  A former Wall Street quant sounds the alarm on Big Data and the mathematical models that threaten to rip apart our social fabric—with a new afterword   “A manual for the twenty-first-century citizen . . . relevant and urgent.”— Financial Times   NATIONAL BOOK AWARD LONGLIST • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY  The New York Times Book Review  • The Boston Globe • Wired  •  Fortune  •  Kirkus Reviews  •  The Guardian  •  Nature  •  On Point   We live in the age of the algorithm. Increasingly, the decisions that affect our lives—where we go to school, whether we can get a job or a loan, how much we pay for health insurance—are being made not by humans, but by machines. In theory, this should lead to greater fairness: Everyone is judged according to the same rules.   But as mathematician and data scientist Cathy O’Neil reveals, the mathematical models being used today are unregulated and uncontestable, even when they’re wrong. Most troubling, they reinforce discrimination—propping up the lucky, punishing the downtrodden, and undermining our democracy in the process. Welcome to the dark side of Big Data.

From the legendary music producer, a master at helping people connect with the wellsprings of their creativity, comes a beautifully crafted book many years in the making that offers that same deep wisdom to all of us. "A gorgeous and inspiring work of art on creation, creativity, the work of the artist. It will gladden the hearts of writers and artists everywhere, and get them working again with a new sense of meaning and direction. A stunning accomplishment." --Anne Lamott "I set out to write a book about what to do to make a great work of art. Instead, it revealed itself to be a book on how to be." --Rick Rubin Many famed music producers are known for a particular sound that has its day. Rick Rubin is known for something else: creating a space where artists of all different genres and traditions can home in on who they really are and what they really offer. He has made a practice of helping people transcend their self-imposed expectations in order to reconnect with a state of innocence from which the surprising becomes inevitable. Over the years, as he has thought deeply about where creativity comes from and where it doesn't, he has learned that being an artist isn't about your specific output, it's about your relationship to the world. Creativity has a place in everyone's life, and everyone can make that place larger. In fact, there are few more important responsibilities. The Creative Act is a beautiful and generous course of study that illuminates the path of the artist as a road we all can follow. It distills the wisdom gleaned from a lifetime's work into a luminous reading experience that puts the power to create moments--and lifetimes--of exhilaration and transcendence within closer reach for all of us.

An Instant New York Times Bestseller“Excellent and deeply reported.” —Tim Wu, The New York Times“Startling and intensely researched . . . an essential account of how OpenAI and ChatGPT came to be and the catastrophic places they will likely take us.” —Vulture“Hao’s reporting inside OpenAI is exceptional, and she’s persuasive in her argument that the public should focus less on A.I.’s putative ‘sentience’ and more on its implications for labor and the environment.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells, New YorkerFrom a brilliant longtime AI insider with intimate access to the world of Sam Altman's OpenAI from the beginning, an eye-opening account of arguably the most fateful tech arms race in history, reshaping the planet in real time, from the cockpit of the company that is driving the frenzyWhen AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?Over time, Hao began to wrestle ever more deeply with that question. Increasingly, she realized that the core truth of this massively disruptive sector is that its vision of success requires an almost unprecedented amount of the “compute” power of high-end chips and the processing capacity to create massive large language models, the sheer volume of data that needs to be amassed at scale, the humans “cleaning up” that data for sweatshop wages throughout the Global South, and a truly alarming spike in the usage of energy and water underlying it all. The truth is that we have entered a new and ominous age of only a small handful of globally scaled companies can even enter the field of play. At the head of the pack with its ChatGPT breakthrough, how would OpenAI resist such temptations?Spoiler it didn’t. Armed with Microsoft’s billions, OpenAI is setting a breakneck pace, chased by a small group of the most valuable companies in human history—toward what end, not even they can define. All this time, Hao has maintained her deep sourcing within the company and the industry, and so she was in intimate contact with the story that shocked the entire tech industry—Altman’s sudden firing and triumphant return. The behind-the-scenes story of what happened, told here in full for the first time, is revelatory of who the people controlling this technology really are. But this isn’t just the story of a single company, however fascinating it is. The g forces pressing down on the people of OpenAI are deforming the judgment of everyone else too—as such forces do. Naked power finds the ideology to cloak itself; no one thinks they’re the bad guy. But in the meantime, as Hao shows through intrepid reporting on the ground around the world, the enormous wheels of extraction grind on. By drawing on the viewpoints of Silicon Valley engineers, Kenyan data laborers, and Chilean water activists, Hao presents the fullest picture of AI and its impact we’ve seen to date, alongside a trenchant analysis of where things are headed. An astonishing eyewitness view from both up in the command capsule of the new economy and down where the real suffering happens, Empire of AI pierces the veil of the industry defining our era.

“I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.” ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds. Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable already: He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric one: maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law. Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult readership. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

A strange and brilliant teenager's first panic attacks lead him down the rabbit hole in this wild, highly anticipated debut novel from one of our most distinctive literary minds “I steal language and ideas from Michael Clune.” ―Ben Lerner, Pulitzer Prize-nominated author of The Topeka School Nicholas is fifteen when he forgets how to breathe. He had plenty of reason to feel unstable He’s been living with his dad in the bleak Chicago suburbs since his Russian-born mom kicked him out. Then one day in geometry class, Nicholas suddenly realizes that his hands are objects. The doctor says it’s just panic, but Nicholas suspects that his real problem might not be a psychiatric maybe the Greek god Pan is trapped inside his body. As his paradigm for his own consciousness crumbles, Nicholas; his best friend, Ty; and his maybe-girlfriend, Sarah, hunt for answers why—in Oscar Wilde and in Charles Baudelaire, in rock and roll and in Bach, and in the mysterious, drugged-out Barn, where their classmate Tod’s charismatic older brother Ian leads the high schoolers in rituals that might end up breaking more than just the law. Thrilling, cerebral, and startlingly funny, Pan is a new masterpiece of the coming-of-age genre by Guggenheim fellow and literary scholar Michael Clune, whose memoir of heroin addiction, White Out—named one of The New Yorker’s best books of the year—earned him a cult fan base. Now, in Pan, the great novel of our age of anxiety, Clune drops us inside the human psyche, where we risk discovering that the forces controlling our inner lives could be more alien than we want to let ourselves believe.

In Gustave Doré, one of the most prolific and successful book illustrators of the late 19h century, Edgar Allan Poe's renowned poem The Raven found perhaps its most perfect artistic interpreter. Doré's dreamlike, otherworldly style, tinged with melancholy, seems ideally matched to the bleak despair of Poe's celebrated work, among the most popular American poems ever written. This volume reprints all 26 of Doré's detailed, masterly engravings from a rare 19th-century edition of the poem. Relevant lines from the poem are printed on facing pages and the complete text is also included. Admirers of Doré will find ample evidence here of his characteristic ability to capture the mood and meaning of a work of literature in striking imagery; lovers of The Raven will delight in seeing its mournful musing on love and loss given dramatic pictorial form.