Who is Allah? What makes Him unique? And what does He ask of those who submit to His teachings? The God of the Qur'an revises and perfects: His purpose is to make whole what had been corrupted or lost from the practices and scriptures of the earlier Abrahamic religions. Setting passages from the Hebrew Bible, the New Testament, and the Qur'an side by side, Miles illuminates what is unique about Allah, His teachings and His temperament, and in doing...

Karr breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, opening our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminating the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.

Orwell's classic novel of one man's nightmare odyssey through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but individual thought and memory.

"Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year -- King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific...

"In addition to being among the most celebrated of contemporary filmmakers, Quentin Tarantino is possibly the most joyously infectious movie lover alive. For years he has touted in interviews his eventual turn to writing books about films. Now, with Cinema Speculation, the time has come, and the results are everything his passionate fans -- and all movie lovers -- could have hoped for. Organized around key American films from the 1970s, all of which...

"A one-of-a-kind celebration of America's greatest comic strip--and the life lessons it can teach us--from a stellar array of writers and artists. Over the span of fifty years, Charles M. Schulz created a comic strip that is one of the indisputable glories of American popular culture--hilarious, poignant, inimitable. Some twenty years after the last strip appeared, the characters Schulz brought to life in Peanuts continue to resonate with millions...

Federico García Lorca wrote the Gypsy Ballads between 1924 and 1927. When the book was published it caused a sensation in the literary world. Drawing on the traditional Spanish ballad form, Lorca described his Romancero Gitano as 'the poem of Andalucía...A book that hardly expresses visible Andalusia at all, but where hidden Andalucía trembles'. Seeking to relate the nature of his proud and troubled region of Spain, he drew on a traditional gypsy...