This Book Needs No Title: A Budget of Living Paradoxes is a 1980 collection of essays about logic, paradoxes, and philosophy, by Raymond Smullyan. It was first published by Prentice-Hall.
In 2023, it was reissued by What Is the Name of This Press, with a new foreword by Donald Knuth. [1]
Kirkus Reviews called it "funny" and "provocative", commending Smullyan's descriptions of Zen and noting that the book could appeal to both children and adults, but conceded that Smullyan's work may be an "acquired taste". [2]
The Washington Post has described "This Book Needs No Title" as "tantalizing", [3] while Michael Dirda has declared that (along with Smullyan's earlier "What is the Name of this Book") it has "the cleverest of all titles", positing that Smullyan may have been inspired by Denis Diderot's "Ceci n'est pas un conte". [4]
Martin Gardner was an American popular mathematics and popular science writer with interests also encompassing scientific skepticism, micromagic, philosophy, religion, and literature – especially the writings of Lewis Carroll, L. Frank Baum, and G. K. Chesterton. He was also a leading authority on Lewis Carroll. The Annotated Alice, which incorporated the text of Carroll's two Alice books, was his most successful work and sold over a million copies. He had a lifelong interest in magic and illusion and in 1999, MAGIC magazine named him as one of the "100 Most Influential Magicians of the Twentieth Century". He was considered the doyen of American puzzlers. He was a prolific and versatile author, publishing more than 100 books.
Raymond Merrill Smullyan was an American mathematician, magician, concert pianist, logician, Taoist, and philosopher.
Ægypt is a fantasy tetralogy written by American author John Crowley. The series describes the life and work of Pierce Moffett, a history professor who prepares a manuscript for publication even as it prepares him for some as-yet unknown destiny, all set amidst strange and subtle Hermetic manipulations among the Faraway Hills at the border of New York, New Jersey and Pennsylvania.
Donald Heiney was a sailor and academic as well as a prolific and inventive writer using the pseudonym of MacDonald Harris for fiction.
Letters to Judy: What Your Kids Wish They Could Tell You is a book published by Judy Blume in 1986. The book is a collection of letters from readers of her children's books, primarily children and teenagers, who wrote to Blume about problems like rejection by peers, feelings of neglect at home, or confusion about puberty, as well as more serious issues like living with disabilities, having family members be incarcerated, or surviving sexual abuse. Also included in the book are autobiographical essays about Blume's own experiences.
Michael Dirda is a book critic for the Washington Post. He has been a Fulbright Fellow and won a Pulitzer Prize in 1993.
English, August: An Indian Story is a novel by Indian author Upamanyu Chatterjee written in English, first published in 1988. It was adapted into a film of the same name in 1994. The novel portrays the struggle of a civil servant who is posted in a rural area and is considered to be a very authentic portrayal of the state of Indian youth in the 1980s. Chatterjee, who became a civil servant in 1983, provides key insight into the disparity between rural and urban lived experiences witnessed in his generation. The character Agastya Sen can also be seen in the sequel of this novel The Mammaries of the Welfare State.
Ayad Akhtar is an American playwright, novelist, and screenwriter of Pakistani heritage, awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for Drama. His work has received two Tony Award nominations for Best Play, an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the Edith Wharton Citation for Merit in Fiction. Akhtar's writing covers various themes including the American-Muslim experience, religion and economics, immigration, and identity. In 2015, The Economist wrote that Akhtar's tales of assimilation "are as essential today as the work of Saul Bellow, James Farrell, and Vladimir Nabokov were in the 20th century in capturing the drama of the immigrant experience."
The Swerve: How the World Became Modern is a 2011 book by Stephen Greenblatt and winner of the 2012 Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction and 2011 National Book Award for Nonfiction.
Peter Frankopan is a British historian, writer, and hotelier. He is a professor of global history at Worcester College, Oxford and the Director of the Oxford Centre for Byzantine Research. He is a fellow of the Royal Asiatic Society. He is best known for his 2015 book The Silk Roads.
The Sojourn is a 2011 debut novel by Andrew Krivak which was shortlisted for the National Book Award for Fiction. The novel is a Family Saga which deals with American emigrant to Austria-Hungary, Jozef Vinich who gets dragged into World War I. Multiple reviewers compared the novel favourably to A Farewell to Arms.
A Gentle Madness: Bibliophiles, Bibliomanes, and the Eternal Passion for Books is a 1995 nonfiction book of book collecting case studies by Nicholas A. Basbanes. It was a 1995 National Book Critics Circle Award finalist.
Alec Nevala-Lee is an American biographer, novelist, and science fiction writer. He was a Hugo and Locus Award finalist for the group biography Astounding: John W. Campbell, Isaac Asimov, Robert A. Heinlein, L. Ron Hubbard, and the Golden Age of Science Fiction. His most recent book is Inventor of the Future, a biography of the architectural designer and futurist Buckminster Fuller, which was selected by Esquire as one of the fifty best biographies of all time. He is currently at work on a biography of the physicist Luis W. Alvarez.
The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach to Living a Good Life is a 2016 nonfiction self-help book by American blogger and author Mark Manson. The book covers Manson's belief that life's struggles give it meaning and argues that typical self-help books offer meaningless positivity which is neither practical nor helpful, thus improperly approaching the problems many individuals face. It was a New York Times and Globe and Mail bestseller.
From Holmes to Sherlock: The Story of the Men and Women Who Created an Icon is a non-fiction book by Mattias Boström which explores the history of Sherlock Holmes and Sherlock fandom, originally published in 2017. It was nominated for an Edgar Award in the category of "Best Critical/Biographical" by the Mystery Writers of America. It won an Agatha Award for "Best Nonfiction" in 2018.
The Adventure of the Peculiar Protocols: Adapted from the Journals of John H. Watson, M.D. is a Sherlock Holmes pastiche novel by Nicholas Meyer, published in 2019. It takes place after Meyer's other Holmes pastiches, The Seven-Per-Cent Solution, The West End Horror, and The Canary Trainer. It is Meyer's first Holmes pastiche in 26 years.
Mycroft and Sherlock is a mystery novel by Kareem Abdul-Jabbar and Anna Waterhouse. It is the second novel in their "Mycroft Holmes" series utilizing Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's characters of Mycroft and Sherlock Holmes. Having focused solely on Mycroft in the first novel, Abdul-Jabbar and Waterhouse were curious about the relationship between Mycroft and his brother and recognized that the sequel would need the introduction of Sherlock.
"Ike at the Mike" is an alternate history short story by Howard Waldrop. It was first published in Omni, in June 1982.
Erika Fatland is a Norwegian anthropologist and writer who has written multiple critically-acclaimed books, including Sovietistan and The Border.
Mark Edmundson is an American author and professor at the University of Virginia. He received a B.A from Bennington College in 1974 and a Ph.D from Yale University in 1985. Edmundson specializes in Romanticism, Poetry, and 19th-Century English and American Literature. He is the author of fifteen books, and his essays appear in The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, Harper's Magazine, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and The New York Times Magazine. Edmundson was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship and was a National Endowment for the Humanities/Daniels Family Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Virginia.