Back Bay Books

<p>Homeland Elegies</p>

<p>This "beautiful novel . . . has echoes of&nbsp;The Great Gatsby": an immigrant father and his son search for belonging—in post-Trump America, and with each other (Dwight Garner,&nbsp;New York Times).</p>

<p>One of the&nbsp;New York&nbsp;Times&nbsp;10 Best&nbsp;Books of the Year&nbsp;

One of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2020

A Best Book of 2020 * Entertainment Weekly * Washington Post * O Magazine * New York Times Book Review * Publishers Weekly * NPR * The Economist * Shelf Awareness * Library Journal * St. Louis Post-Dispatch * Slate

Finalist for the 2021 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction</p>

<p>A deeply personal work about identity and belonging in a nation coming apart at the seams,&nbsp;Homeland Elegies&nbsp;blends fact and fiction to tell an epic story of longing and dispossession in the world that 9/11 made. Part family drama, part social essay, part picaresque novel, at its heart it is the story of a father, a son, and the country they both call home.</p>

<p>Pulitzer Prize-winning author Ayad Akhtar forges a new narrative voice to capture a country in which debt has ruined countless lives and the gods of finance rule, where immigrants live in fear, and where the nation's unhealed wounds wreak havoc around the world. Akhtar attempts to make sense of it all through the lens of a story about one family, from a heartland town in America to palatial suites in Central Europe to guerrilla lookouts in the mountains of Afghanistan, and spares no one—least of all himself—in the process.</p>

<p>"Passionate, disturbing, unputdownable." —Salman Rushdie</p>

<p>Wealth Secrets: How the Rich Got Rich</p>

<p>Discover how the superwealthy made it to the top (and you can too!)</p>

<p>From the richest Romans to the robber barons to today's bankers and tech billionaires, Sam Wilkin offers Freakonomics-esque insights into what it really takes to make a fortune. These stories of larger-than-life characters, strategies, and sacrifices reveal how the wealthiest did it, usually by a passion for finding loopholes, working around bureaucratic systems, and creating obstacles to competitors.</p>

<p>Wealth Secrets of the One Percent gets at the heart of our feelings about the 1% of top income earners and the roughly 0.0001% who achieve billionaire status: we love to hate them, but we'd love to be them. Wilkin's insight into the sources of wealth is thought-provoking and rigorous, and he reveals that behind almost every great fortune is a "wealth secret" -- a moneymaking technique designed to defeat the forces of market competition.</p>

<p>Move Fast And Break Things: How Facebook, Google, And Amazon Cornered Culture And Undermined Democracy</p>

<p>The book that started the Techlash.</p>

<p>A stinging polemic that traces the destructive monopolization of the Internet by Google, Facebook and Amazon, and that proposes a new future for musicians, journalists, authors and filmmakers in the digital age.</p>

<p>Move Fast and Break Things is the riveting account of a small group of libertarian entrepreneurs who in the 1990s began to hijack the original decentralized vision of the Internet, in the process creating three monopoly firms -- Facebook, Amazon, and Google -- that now determine the future of the music, film, television, publishing and news industries.</p>

<p>Jonathan Taplin offers a succinct and powerful history of how online life began to be shaped around the values of the men who founded these companies, including Peter Thiel and Larry Page: overlooking piracy of books, music, and film while hiding behind opaque business practices and subordinating the privacy of individual users in order to create the surveillance-marketing monoculture in which we now live.</p>

<p>The enormous profits that have come with this concentration of power tell their own story. Since 2001, newspaper and music revenues have fallen by 70 percent; book publishing, film, and television profits have also fallen dramatically. Revenues at Google in this same period grew from $400 million to $74.5 billion. Today, Google's YouTube controls 60 percent of all streaming-audio business but pay for only 11 percent of the total streaming-audio revenues artists receive. More creative content is being consumed than ever before, but less revenue is flowing to the creators and owners of that content.</p>

<p>The stakes here go far beyond the livelihood of any one musician or journalist. As Taplin observes, the fact that more and more Americans receive their news, as well as music and other forms of entertainment, from a small group of companies poses a real threat to democracy.</p>

<p>Move Fast and Break Things offers a vital, forward-thinking prescription for how artists can reclaim their audiences using knowledge of the past and a determination to work together. Using his own half-century career as a music and film producer and early pioneer of streaming video online, Taplin offers new ways to think about the design of the World Wide Web and specifically the way we live with the firms that dominate it.</p>

<p>The Economists' Hour: How The False Prophets Of Free Markets Fractured Our Society</p>

<p>‘A well-reported and researched history of the ways in which plucky economists helped rewrite policy in America and Europe and across emerging markets.’ The Economist</p>

<p>‘A highly readable, exhilaratingly detailed biographical account.’ Sunday Telegraph</p>

<p>As the post-World War II economic boom began to falter in the late 1960s, a new breed of economists gained influence and power. Over time, their ideas reshaped the modern world, curbing governments, unleashing corporations and hastening globalization.</p>

<p>Their fundamental belief? That governments should stop trying to manage the economy.</p>

<p>Their guiding principle? That markets would deliver steady growth and broad prosperity.</p>

<p>But the economists’ hour failed to deliver on its premise. The single-minded embrace of markets has come at the expense of economic equality, the health of liberal democracy and of future generations. Across the world, from both right and left, the assumptions of the once-dominant school of free-market economic thought are being challenged, as we count the costs as well as the gains of its influence.</p>

<p>In The Economists’ Hour, acclaimed New York Times writer Binyamin Appelbaum provides both a reckoning with the past and a call for a different future.</p>

<p>‘A reminder of the power of ideas to shape the course of history.’ New Yorker</p>

<p>Circe</p>

<p>"A bold and subversive retelling of the goddess's story," this 1 New York Times bestseller is "both epic and intimate in its scope, recasting the most infamous female figure from the Odyssey as a hero in her own right" (Alexandra Alter, The New York Times).</p>

<p>In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe is a strange child -- not powerful, like her father, nor viciously alluring like her mother. Turning to the world of mortals for companionship, she discovers that she does possess power -- the power of witchcraft, which can transform rivals into monsters and menace the gods themselves.</p>

<p>Threatened, Zeus banishes her to a deserted island, where she hones her occult craft, tames wild beasts and crosses paths with many of the most famous figures in all of mythology, including the Minotaur, Daedalus and his doomed son Icarus, the murderous Medea, and, of course, wily Odysseus.</p>

<p>But there is danger, too, for a woman who stands alone, and Circe unwittingly draws the wrath of both men and gods, ultimately finding herself pitted against one of the most terrifying and vengeful of the Olympians. To protect what she loves most, Circe must summon all her strength and choose, once and for all, whether she belongs with the gods she is born from, or the mortals she has come to love.</p>

<p>With unforgettably vivid characters, mesmerizing language, and page-turning suspense, Circe is a triumph of storytelling, an intoxicating epic of family rivalry, palace intrigue, love and loss, as well as a celebration of indomitable female strength in a man's world.</p>

<p>1 New York Times Bestseller -- named one of the Best Books of the Year by NPR, the Washington Post, People, Time, Amazon, Entertainment Weekly, Bustle, Newsweek, the A.V. Club, Christian Science Monitor, Refinery 29, Buzzfeed, Paste, Audible, Kirkus, Publishers Weekly, Thrillist, NYPL, Self, Real Simple, Goodreads, Boston Globe, Electric Literature, BookPage, the Guardian, Book Riot, Seattle Times, and Business Insider.</p>