"Ornamental is Juan's third novel, but it will be his first translated into English. It follows a scientist who recruits a group of volunteers for the trial of a new recreational drug that only affects women. Among them is "number 4," who becomes emotionally involved with first the scientist and then his wife, a well-known visual artist in the midst of a creative crisis. The scientist is oblivious to the atrocities his new drug will bring to the city...

Winner of the Camera d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival and the prestigious André Bazin Prize from Cahiers du Cinema, both celebrating outstanding feature debuts, this enthralling work from Vietnamese filmmaker Pham Thien An is a reverie on faith, loss, and nature expressed with uncommon invention and depth. The sudden death of his sister-in-law brings unexpected responsibilities to Thien (Le Phong Vu), who is reluctantly tasked with bringing his five-year-old...

"Charles and Lily, James and Nan. They meet in Greenwich Village in 1963 when Charles and James are jointly hired to steward the historic Third Presbyterian Church through turbulent times. Their personal differences however, threaten to tear them apart. Charles is destined to succeed his father as an esteemed professor of history at Harvard, until an unorthodox lecture about faith leads him to ministry. How then, can he fall in love with Lily--fiercely...

"Late one night, a distraught young man knocks on the door of retired and recently widowed Ally Bright's remote home on the Cornish coast. But before she can make sense of his confused words, he's gone--not to be seen again until he's found the next morning at the foot of the nearby cliffs. In an instant, the peace of Ally's beachcombing life is shattered. Feeling responsible for the young man's fate, she wants to help find answers--as does ex-cop...

It is 1914. Germany has just declared war on France. Piet Barol was a tutor before he came to South Africa, his wife, Stacey, an opera singer. In Cape Town they are living the high life, impersonating French aristocrats-but their lies are catching up with them. The Barols' furniture business is on the verge of collapse. They need top-quality wood, and they need it cheap. Piet enlists two Xhosa [pron. KO-sa] men to lead him into a vast forest, in...

"In Descartes's Meditations, one of the key texts of Western philosophy, the thinker rejects all his former beliefs in the quest for new certainties. Discovering his own existence as a thinking entity in the very exercise of doubt, he goes on to prove the existence of God, who guarantees his clear and distinct ideas as a means of access to the truth. He develops new conceptions of body and mind, capable of serving as foundations for the new science...

Measured by the accuracy of its predictions and the scope of its technological applications, quantum mechanics is one of the most successful theories in science-as well as one of the most misunderstood. The deeper meaning of quantum mechanics remains controversial almost a century after its invention. Providing a way past quantum theory's paradoxes and puzzles, QBism offers a strikingly new interpretation that opens up for the nonspecialist reader...

The "Long Debate" on the nature of truth, the scale of real values, the life one should aspire to live, the character of justice, the sources of law, and the terms of civic and political life is encompassed by the name philosophy. Three persistent themes--understood as problems--are knowledge, conduct, and governance, on which there is a storehouse of insights, some so utterly persuasive as to have shaped thought itself. Beginning with Plato and Aristotle,...

René Descartes was a central figure in the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century. In his Discourse on method he outlined the contrast between mathematics and experimental sciences, and the extent to which each one can achieve certainty. Drawing on his own work in geometry, optics, astronomy, and physiology, Descartes developed the hypothetical method that characterizes modern science, and this soon came to replace the traditional techniques...

In a remote pocket of Nazi-held France, ordinary people risked their lives to rescue many hundreds of strangers, mostly Jewish children. Was this a fluke of history, or something more? Anthropologist Maggie Paxson, certainties shaken by years of studying strife, arrives on the Plateau to explore this phenomenon: What are the traits that make a group choose selflessness? In this beautiful, wind-blown place, Paxson discovers a tradition of offering...