Melville House: 350 books

From the author of the international bestseller Debt: The First 5,000 Years comes a revelatory account of the way bureaucracy rules our lives Where does the desire for endless rules, regulations, and bureaucracy come from? How did we come to spend so much of our time filling out forms? And...

“Virtually all human societies are marked by inequality, at a level that surpasses what could be expected from normal differences in individuals’ capabilities alone.” So begins this new approach to the greatest social ill of our time, and nearly every other era. From a country with one...

One of the country's leading activist curators explores how corporations and governments have used art and culture to mystify and manipulate us. The production of culture was once the domain of artists, but beginning in the early 1900s, the emerging fields of public relations, advertising and...

A polar bear tries to go green--in Hollywood, with Leonardo DiCaprio--in an outrageous tale that includes equally outrageous full-color illustrations. ** ** JUST A SMALL TIME BEAR, LIVING A LONELY WORLD: What happens when an arctic refugee finds himself adrift in LA-LA Land? Behold Beaufort's rocket...

A seductive and shockingly inventive literary thriller that entwines suspense, history, the supernatural, adventure, steampunk, and a wicked sense of adventure into an intoxicating new genre. EPISODE ONE IN AN ASTONISHING NEW SERIES New Venice--the “pearl of the Arctic”--is a place...

**“For sheer reading pleasure Ladee Hubbard’s original and wildly inventive novel is in a class by itself.” —Toni Morrison “The Talented Ribkins is a charming and delightful debut novel with a profound heart, and Ladee Hubbard’s voice is a welcome original.” —Mary Gaitskill •...

College students, recent graduates, and their parents work at Denny’s, volunteer at a public library in suburban Florida, attend satanic ska/punk concerts, eat Chinese food with the homeless of New York City, and go to the same Japanese restaurant in Manhattan three times in two sleepless days,...

Set mostly in Manhattan—although also featuring Atlantic City, Brooklyn, GMail Chat, and Gainsville, Florida—this autobiographical novella, spanning two years in the life of a young writer with a cultish following, has been described by the author as “A shoplifting book about vague relationships,”...

In the tradition of Neil Gaiman and Iain Banks, Simon Sylvester brings an ancient myth to life with this lush, atmospheric coming-of-age tale Nobody comes to the remote Scottish island of Bancree, and seventeen-year-old Flora can’t wait to move to the mainland when she finishes school. So...

The writer Hari Kunzru says “made me feel better about the Apocalypse than I have in ages” is back—with a hilarious coming-of-age love story The unruly undergraduates at Cambridge have a nickname for their new lecturer: Wittgenstein Jr. He’s a melancholic, tormented genius who seems...

Who’s killing the Upper East Side trophy wives? Unleashing the pent-up fury most Americans feel over the financial crisis, Brenda Cullerton’s wickedly riotous tale of an interior “desecrator” turned murderess is a flaming arrow into the dark heart of Manhattan’s filthy rich. Working...

A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant farming families in Hale County, Alabama, at the height of the Great Depression....

“Kitty Burns Florey seems to write from a great wellspring of inner calm that derives from a gleeful appreciation of life's smallest details.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls Once wildly popular in grammar schools across the country, sentence diagramming...

Whitman’s uniquely revealing impressions of the people, places, and events of his time—with a brilliant new introduction by Leslie Jamison, author of the bestselling The Empathy Exams. One of the most creative and individual poets America has produced, Walt Whitman was also a prolific diarist,...