Books published by Picador USA

New York Times Book Review Notable Book of the Year"A new masterpiece of American literature." -Dennis Lehane, Entertainment Weekly"A Prayer for the Dying reads like the amazing, unrelenting love child of Shirley Jackson and Cormac McCarthy. It's twisted proof that God will do worse to test a faithful man than the devil would ever do to punish a sinner." -Chuck PalahniukSet in Friendship, Wisconsin, just after the Civil War, A Prayer for the Dying tells of a horrible epidemic that is suddenly and gruesomely killing the town's residents and setting off a terrifying paranoia. Jacob Hansen, Friendship's sheriff, undertaker, and pastor, is soon overwhelmed by the fear and anguish around him, and his sanity begins to fray. Dark, poetic, and chilling, Stewart O'Nan's A Prayer for the Dying examines the effect of madness and violence on the morality of a once-decent man.

A GREAT AMERICAN WRITER'S CONFRONTATION WITH A GREAT EUROPEAN CRITIC-A PERSONAL AND INTELLECTUAL AWAKENINGA hundred years ago, the Viennese satirist Karl Kraus was among the most penetrating and prophetic writers in Europe: a relentless critic of the popular media's manipulation of reality, the dehumanizing machinery of technology and consumerism, and the jingoistic rhetoric of a fading empire. But even though his followers included Franz Kafka and Walter Benjamin, he remained something of a lonely prophet, and few people today are familiar with his work. Thankfully, Jonathan Franzen is one of them.In The Kraus Project, Franzen not only presents his definitive new translations of Kraus but also annotates them spectacularly, with supplementary notes from the Kraus scholar Paul Reitter and the Austrian writer Daniel Kehlmann. Kraus was a notoriously cantankerous and difficult author, and in Franzen he has found his match: a novelist unafraid to voice unpopular opinions strongly, a critic capable of untangling Kraus's often dense arguments to reveal their relevance to contemporary America. Interwoven with Franzen's survey of today's cultural and technological landscape is an intensely personal recollection of the author's first year out of college, when he fell in love with Kraus.Painstakingly wrought, strikingly original in form, The Kraus Project is a feast of thought, passion, and literature.

The poet and visual artist Mina Loy has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism-in Florence as Gertrude Stein's friend and Marinetti's lover; in New York as Marcel Duchamp's co-conspirator and Djuna Barnes's confidante; in Mexico with the greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke's riveting, authoritative biography, Becoming Modern, brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism-and one woman's important contribution to it.

Nobel Prize winner Peter Handke''s autobiographical novel My Year in No-Man''s Bay is "a meditation on two decades of a writer''s life culminating in a solitary, sobering year of reckoning" (Publishers Weekly).In his most substantial novel to date, Handke tells the story of an Austrian writer--a man much like Handke himself--who undergoes a "metamorphosis" from self-assured artist into passive "observer and chronicler." He explores the world and describes his many severed relationships, from his tenuous contact with his son, to a failed marriage to "the Catalan," to a doomed love affair with a former Miss Yugoslavia. As the writer sifts through his memories, he is also under pressure to complete his next novel, but he cannot decide how to come to terms with both the complexity of the world and the inability of his novel to reflect it.

Will Barrett (also the hero of Percy's The Last Gentleman) is a lonely widower suffering from a depression so severe that he decides he doesn't want to continue living. But then he meets Allison, a mental hospital escapee making a new life for herself in a greenhouse. The Second Coming is by turns touching and zany, tragic and comic, as Will sets out in search of God's existence and winds up finding much more.

Drawing on more than six decades' worth of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, Willard Spiegelman reflects with candid humor and sophistication on growing old. Senior Moments is a series of discrete essays that, when taken together, constitute the life of a man who, despite Western cultural notions of aging as something to be denied, overcome, and resisted, has continued to relish the simplest of pleasures: reading, looking at art, talking, and indulging in occasional fits of nostalgia while also welcoming what inevitably lies ahead.Senior Moments is a foray into the felicity and follies that age brings; a consideration of how and what one reads or rereads in late adulthood; the eagerness for, and disappointment in, long-awaited reunions, at which the past comes alive in the present. It is guaranteed to stimulate, stir, and restore.

In the prison business, all roads lead to Texas. A pioneer in criminal justice severityΓÇöfrom assembly-line executions to supermax isolation, from mandatory sentencing to prison privatizationΓÇöTexas is the most locked-down state in the most incarcerated country in the world. Texas Tough, a sweeping history of American imprisonment from the days of slavery to the present, explains how a plantation-based penal system once dismissed as barbaric became a template for the nation. Drawing on the individual stories as well as authoritative research, Texas Tough reveals the true origins of America''s prison juggernaut and points toward a more just and humane future.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning Arab-American journalist looks at the Iraq war from the perspective of ordinary Iraqi citizens--representing a variety of religious and political beliefs from all levels of society--confronted by the dislocations, hardships, tragedies, and harsh realities of the conflict. Reprint. 75,000 first printing.

A portrait of modern Africa. It offers an exploration of how, and whether, the past can be laid to rest.

A collection of stories in which the collision of the old and new south, of antique and modern, resonate with the depth and power of ancient myths.

Middle East expert Stephen P. Cohen traces U.S. policy in the region from the breakup of the Ottoman Empire to the present. A century ago, there emerged two dominant views regarding the uses of America's power: Woodrow Wilson urged America to promote national freedom and self-determination-in stark contrast to his predecessor, Theodore Roosevelt, who had advocated a vigorous foreign policy based on national self-interest. In concise, pointed chapters, Cohen offers a lucid primer on the complexities of the region and an eye-opening commentary on how different Middle East Countries have struggled to define themselves in the face of America's stated idealism and its actual realpolitik.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICEFollowing the trail of espionage and technological innovation, and making use of newly opened archives, Michael D. Gordin provides a new understanding of the origins of the nuclear arms race and fresh insight into the problem of proliferation.On August 29, 1949, the first Soviet test bomb, dubbed "First Lightning," exploded in the deserts of Kazakhstan. This surprising international event marked the beginning of an arms race that would ultimately lead to nuclear proliferation beyond the two superpowers of the Soviet Union and the United States.With the use of newly opened archives, Michael D. Gordin folows a trail of espionage, secrecy, deception, political brinksmanship, and technical innovation to provide a fresh understanding of the nuclear arms race.

A Library Journal Best Sci-Tech Book of the YearIf environmental destruction continues at its current rate, a third of all plants and animals could disappear by 2050-along with earth's life-support ecosystems, which provide food, water, medicine, and natural defenses against climate change.Now Caroline Fraser offers the first definitive account of a visionary crusade to confront this crisis: rewilding. Breathtaking in scope and ambition, rewilding aims to save species by restoring habitats, reviving migration corridors, and brokering peace between people and predators. A "methodical, lyrical" (Sacramento News & Review) story of scientific discovery and grassroots action, Rewilding the World offers hope for a richer, wilder future.

The conventional story of the end of the Cold War is simple: Ronald Reagan waged an aggressive campaign against communism, outspent his opponent, and forced Mikhail Gorbachev to "tear down this wall."In There Is No Freedom Without Bread!, Russian-born historian Constantine Pleshakov proposes a different interpretation. The revolutions that took place in 1989 were the result of politicking, tensions between Moscow and local governments, compromise between revolutionary leaders and communist old-timers, and the will and anger of the people. In a dramatic narrative culminating in that whirlwind year, Pleshakov challenges the received wisdom and argues that 1989 was as much about national civil wars and internal struggles for power as it was about the Eastern Europeans throwing off the yoke of Moscow.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE WILLIAM SAROYAN INTERNATIONAL PRIZE FOR WRITINGFalling in love at first sight with a mirror in a Rhode Island auction, Maryalice Huggins sets out to discover its history and learns that it was likely passed down through generations of the illustrious Brown family. Certain of the mirror's prestige, she goes up against the leading lights of the fascinating high-end antiques world and discovers that the value of a beautiful object and its market value are not the same thing at all. As Huggins concludes her "delightful" (Jacki Lyden, NPR) quest of sleuthing, research, and obsession, she learns the true meaning of art.

In 2007, the International Rescue Committee (IRC), which brings relief to countries in the wake of war, wanted to understand what really happened to women, in post-conflict zones. On behalf of the IRC, the author travelled through Africa, East Asia, and the Middle East, lending cameras to women. This title features the photographs they had taken.

"They'd never kill a reporter...." On the morning of April 29, 1948, a West Side pier hiring boss was shot on his way to work. The murder reminded the New York Sun's city editor of a similar docks killing from the year before, and so he called over his best general assignment man, Malcolm "Mike" Johnson, telling him, "Lots of unrest down there. Maybe you can get a story out of it." Johnson certainly did, discovering the greatest story of his long career, and a "waterfront jungle" with "rich pickings for criminal gangs." His crime series ran on the Sun's front page for twenty-four days in the fall of 1948, raising a national scandal and bringing death threats on him and his family. Johnson alleged the existence of an international crime "syndicate," at a time when J. Edgar Hoover would not admit that such a syndicate, let alone a Mafia, existed. Herein, Nathan Ward tells the original Mob story, "revealing a spiderweb of union corruption and outright gangsterism....His story has everything" (New York Sun), making Dark Harbor a modern true crime classic.

In a corrupt America reeling from an economic collapse, a shadow civil war is gathering. On one side is James Sands, a billionaire and government crony harassed by civil opposition and armed militants. Standing against him is Lando, a twenty-something urban guerrilla, who leads the Army of the Republic on a campaign of bombing.

Chief Inspector Espinosa can't shake thoughts of this latest hapless victim. Who would target a penniless man who posed no physical threat? Focusing his inquiry on a group of wealthy guests who dined at a nearby mansion on the night of the murder, Espinosa carefully interrogates his way into the lives of his suspects.

In December 1875 the steamship Deutschland left Bremen, bound for America. On board were five nuns, exiled by a ban on religious orders, bound to begin their lives anew in Missouri - their journey would end when the Deutschland ran aground at the mouth of the Thames and sank. This title tells their harrowing story.