Books published by Alfred A. Knopf

Now in paperback--a fresh, strikingly immediate and elegant verse translation of the classic, with an introduction and helpful guides to each section, by the rising American poet.Born in the United States into a secularized Hindu family, Amit Majmudar puzzled over the many religious traditions on offer, and found that the Bhagavad Gita had much to teach him with its "song of multiplicities." Chief among them is that "its own assertions aren't as important as the relationships between its characters . . . The Gita imagined a relationship in which the soul and God are equals"; it is, he believes, "the greatest poem of friendship . . . in any language." His verse translation captures the many tones and strategies Krishna uses with Arjuna--strict and berating, detached and philosophical, tender and personable. "Listening guides" to each section follow the main text, and expand in accessible terms on the text and what is happening between the lines. Godsong is an instant classic in the field, from a poet of skill, fine intellect, and--perhaps most important--devotion.

The future is anything but certain in this alternately funny and heartbreaking contemporary story about food trucks, festivals, and first loves.It's easy to look at high school senior Oscar Olsson and think: lost. He hates school, struggles to read, and wants nothing to do with college. But Oscar is anything but lost---he knows exactly what he wants and exactly how to get it. Oscar and Farfar, the Swedish grandfather who's raised him, run a food truck together selling rullekebab and munkar, and Oscar wants to finish school so he can focus on the food truck full-time.It's easy to look at Mary Louise (Lou for short) Messinger and think: driven. AP everything, valedictorian in her sights, and Ivy league college aspirations. When Lou hijacks Oscar's carefully crafted schedule of independent studies and blocks of time in the Culinary Lab, Oscar is roped into helping Lou complete her over-ambitious, resume-building service project-reducing food waste in Central Adams High School. While Lou stands to gain her Girl Scout Gold Award, Oscar will be faced with a mountain of uneaten school apples and countless hours with a girl he can't stand.With the finish line in sight, a relationship he never expected, and festival season about to begin (for good), the unthinkable happens, and Oscar's future is anything but certain.

From the author of The Pixar Touch and Love and Hate in Jamestown comes the dramatic, untold story of the brilliant team who built the world's first digital electronic computer at Bletchley Park, during a critical time in World War II.Decoding the communication of the Nazi high command was imperative for the success of the Allied invasion of Normandy. The Nazi missives were encrypted by the "Tunny" cipher, a code that was orders of magnitude more difficult to crack than the infamous Enigma code. But Tommy Flowers, a maverick English working-class engineer, devised the ingenious, daring, and controversial plan to build a machine that could think at breathtaking speed and break the code in nearly real time. Together with the pioneering mathematician Max Newman and Enigma code-breaker Alan Turing, Flowers and his team produced--against the odds, the clock, and a resistant leadership--Colossus, the world's first digital electronic computer, the machine that would help bring the war to an end. With fascinating detail and illuminating insight, David A. Price's The Geniuses' War tells, for the first time, the mesmerizing story of the great minds behind Colossus, and chronicles their remarkable feats of engineering genius which ushered in the dawn of the digital age.

The riveting story of the conflict over same-sex marriage in the United States-the most significant civil-rights breakthrough of the new millennium. On June 26, 2015, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that state bans on gay marriage were unconstitutional, making same-sex unions legal across the United States. But the road to that momentous decision was much longer than many know. In this definitive account, Sasha Issenberg vividly guides us through same-sex marriage's unexpected path from the unimaginable to the inevitable. It is a story that begins in Hawaii in 1990, when a rivalry among local activists triggered a sequence of events that forced the state to justify excluding gay couples from marriage. In the White House, one president signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which elevated the matter to a national issue, and his successor tried to write it into the Constitution. Over 25 years, the debate played out across the country, from the first legal same-sex weddings in Massachusetts and the epic face-off over California's Proposition 8, and, finally, to the landmark Supreme Court decisions of United States v. Windsor and Obergefell v. Hodges. From churches to hedge funds, no corner of American life went untouched. This richly detailed narrative follows the coast-to-coast conflict through courtrooms and war rooms, bedrooms and boardrooms, to shed light on every aspect of a political and legal controversy that divided Americans like no other. Following a cast of characters that includes those who sought their own right to wed, those who fought to protect the traditional definition of marriage, and those who changed their minds about it, The Engagement is certain to become a seminal book on the modern culture wars.

A bountiful group of poems--direct, honest, and revelatory--that reflect on language, nature, old age, young love, Judaism, and our current politics, from one of our most read and admired poets"Words are my business," Marge Piercy begins her twentieth collection of poetry, a glance back at a lifetime of learning, loving, grieving, and fighting for the disenfranchised, and a look forward at what the future holds for herself, her family and friends, and her embattled country. In the opening section, Piercy tells of her childhood in Detroit, with its vacant lots and scrappy children, the bike that gave her wings, her ambition at fourteen to "gobble" down all knowledge, and a too-early marriage ("I put on my first marriage / like a girdle my skinny body / didn't need"). We then leap into the present, her "twilight zone," where she is "learning to be quiet," learning to give praise despite it all. There are funny poems about medicine ads with their dire warnings, and some possible plusses about being dead: "I'll never do another load of laundry . . ." There is "comfort in old bodies / coming together," in a partner's warmth--"You're always warm: warm hands / smooth back sleek as a Burmese cat./ Sunny weather outside and in."Piercy has long been known for her political poems, and here we have her thoughts on illegal immigrants, dying languages, fraught landscapes, abortion, President-speak. She examines her nonbeliever's need for religious holidays and spiritual depth, and the natural world is appreciated throughout. On the Way Out, Turn Off the Light is yet more proof of Piercy's love and mastery of language--it is moving, stimulating, funny, and full of the stuff of life.

A father and husband's meditation on love, adolescence, and the mysterious mechanisms of poetic creation, from the acclaimed poet.The poet's art is revealed in stages in this "making-of" book, where we watch as poems take shape--first as dreams or memories, then as drafts, and finally as completed works set loose on the world. In the long poem "Must We Mean What We Say," a woman reader narrates in prose the circumstances behind poems and snippets of poems she receives in letters from a stranger. Who made up whom? Chiasson, an acclaimed poetry critic, has invented a remarkable structure where the reader and a poet speak to one another, across the void of silence and mystery. He is also the father of teenaged sons, and this volume continues the autobiographical arc of his prior, celebrated volumes. One long section is about the age of thirteen and the dawning of desire, while the title poem looks at the crucial age of fifteen and the existential threat of climate change and gun violence, which alters the calculus of adolescence. Though the outlook is bleak, these poems register the glories of our moment: that there are places where boys can kiss each other and not be afraid; that small communities are rousing and taking care of each other; that teenagers have mobilized for a better world. All of these works emerge from the secretive imagination of a father as he measures his own adolescence against that of his sons and explores the complex bedrock of marriage. Chiasson sees a perilous world both navigated and enriched by the passionate young and by the parents--and poets--who care for them.

A new novel, funny, wise, moving, true, as only Lisa Alther can write ("she had me laughing at 4 in the morning"--Doris Lessing), set on a cruise ship, about a woman, a doctor, in charge of the ship''s clinic, recovering from the loss of her longtime female lover, a much-admired writer, and coping with the high-wire madcappery of cruise ship life as she reckons with her past and feels her way into the future.Dr. Jessie Drake, in her mid-sixties, following the sudden deaths of her parents and Kat, her partner of twenty years, has fled the Vermont life she has known for decades.In an effort to escape the oppressive constancy of grief, she accepts a job from an old flame from her residency in New York City''s Roosevelt Hospital, and agrees to assist Ben as the ship''s doctor on a British liner. Jesse boards in Hong Kong and as the Amphitrite sails throughout Southeast Asia and the Middle East, cruise ship antics ensue. Jessie is lulled back into a long-ago romance with the ship''s co-doctor, and both she and her new/old beau become enmeshed with the ship''s lead (female) singer/entertainer. Among the passengers who fling socialized behavior aside on the high seas: a former Florida beauty queen (Miss Florida Power and Light) on a second honeymoon with her husband, as she causes high-velocity scandal, while juggling onboard affairs with a suicidal golf pro, and a defrocked priest hired as the liner''s ''Gentleman Host'', until she vanishes--poof!--from the ship off the coast of Portugal . . . As the ship sails through the Gulf of Aden, and into a possible hijacking by Somali pirates, Jessie retreats into her lover''s journals, written during her final months, journals filled with sketches of potential characters, observations on life and love--as well as drafts of a long new poem in-progress, "Swan Song," that seems to be about being in love with someone else, someone new. As Jessie''s grief turns to suspicion about the woman she thought she knew so well, her illumination of the poem''s meaning begins to lift the constraints of the past and make clear the way toward the future.

A multifaceted history of affirmative action from its inception through the past five decades.From acclaimed legal historian, author of a biography of Louis Brandeis ("Remarkable"--Anthony Lewis, NYROB; "Definitive"--Jeffrey Rosen, The New Republic) and Dissent in the Supreme Court ("Riveting"--Dahlia Lithwick, NYTBR), a history of affirmative action, from its beginning in 1961 with John F. Kennedy''s Executive Order 10925, creating the President''s Committee on Equal Employment Opportunity, and mandating federal contractors to take "affirmative action" to ensure that there be no discrimination by "race, creed, color, or national origin."     In this important and ambitious book, Urofsky writes about the affirmative action cases decided by the Supreme Court, cases that upheld as well as struck down particular plans, and those cases that affected both governmental and private entities.      He writes in detail about the societal impact of affirmative action--how it has divided society, separating not only those for and against, but also splitting traditional allies.      Urofsky''s book explores affirmative action in relation to education, how nearly every public university in the country has at one time or another instituted some form of affirmative action plan, some successful, others not; and looks at whether affirmative action programs have benefited minorities. Urofsky''s book looks at whether shifts over time can be discerned and if those changes can be attributed to affirmative action programs. The book explores as well the issue with regards to race and women, and if the question of economic and social advancement is different for each.      More than ever before, affirmative action remains an important and divisive issue in American society, a divide as large and perhaps less bridgeable than abortion; a public policy question still (alas) very much alive.

Love, science, and politics collide in this sharp assessment of who we are now, in a generous selection of work by the award-winning poet.The terminator--the line, perpendicular to the equator, that divides night from day--is the organizing concept for this collection, which examines a world where "pert, post-apocalyptic / entertainment trades have trod the pocked / planet raw." Kenney's division of light verse from darker poems serves to remind us that what makes us laugh is often dead serious, and what's most serious can be best understood through wordplay, an ironic eye, the cleaving and joining magically effected by metaphor. With grace and candor, Richard Kenney thumbs through our troubles like a precious but scratched collection of vinyl: "the nature of emotion's analog, while languages are digital." From "Siri, Why Do I Wear a Necktie?" to the eternal springing of love ("Magnetic swipe to the blinking lock / is me to you"), Kenney reminds us that art's the best weapon to maintain our wits in very challenging times.

Celebrate a century of children's book illustration!For families, art lovers, and history buffs alike, Leonard S. Marcus's visual history tour of 100 years of children's book illustration gathers in one glorious volume the posters of the annual Children's Book Week!Featuring work from early luminaries such as N. C. Wyeth and Marcia Brown to more contemporary illustrators like David Wiesner, Mary GrandPré, Christian Robinson, and Jillian Tamaki, this beautiful collection showcases the conceptual and iconic images that have defined children's books for generations of young readers. While the posters within these pages are linked in their resounding advocacy for young people's literacy, they are distinguished by the styles and mediums of their creators and by the historical, social, and cultural influences of their times. Renowned historian Leonard S. Marcus traces these developments in the children's book field with incisive descriptions to accompany each poster. Children's Book Week has grown over the past one hundred years from a modest grassroots effort to a full-throttle nationwide annual celebration of literacy and the pleasures of reading. The posters in this book beautifully emphasize Book Week's mission, with slogans such as "Build the Future with Books," "Get Lost in a Book," and "One World, Many Stories."