We also participate in hundreds of "off-site" Author Events each year, as the official bookseller for The Free Library of Philadelphia Lecture Series and The Author Events Program at the National Constitution Center among others, and we sponsor our own events in partnership with Friends Select School in their modern four hundred seat auditorium. Signed books may be reserved in advance and are often available after the appearances as well. Thank you for shopping at your favorite independent bookshop.

Join us at the Free Library this March for events with Hattie Gossett, Chinua Achebe and Dave Eggers. The featured author at the National Constitution Center this month is former Speaker of the House Newt Gingrich.

Title of Event: World Affairs Council - Douglas Feith - War and Decision
When: Friday, May 16, 2008 12:45 PM
Location: Union League of Philadelphia, 140 S. Broad Street, Philadelphia, PA 19103
Phone: 215-561-4700
Description: Admission: Members - $55 lunch & program; $20 program only; Non-members - $65 lunch & program; $25 program only; FREE limited seating for students only.

In the post- 9/11 world, the Bush administration has adopted a broad ideological struggle against terrorism. As undersecretary of defense from July 2001 until August 2005, Douglas Feith was an integral player in the planning of the administration's war on terror, including the military campaigns in Afghanistan and Iraq. Drawing on his experience as a Pentagon insider, he joins us to offer a first-hand perspective on how the U.S. government's strategy was devised, as outlined in his new book War and Decision: Inside the Pentagon at the Dawn of the War on Terrorism.

Schedule: 11:30am - Cash bar reception; 12pm - luncheon; 12:45pm - program; 1:45pm - book signing
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Affect Imagery Consciousness: The Complete Edition: Two Volumes by Tomkins, Silvan S. .,."brilliant..."--Malcolm Gladwell, Author of "Blink" Tomkins's magnum opus, "Affect Imagery Consciousness," was published by Springer Publishing Company in four volumes over 30 years. When Tomkins began writing the book in the 1950's, American psychology was dominated by psychoanalytic and behaviorist theories--neither of which placed much importance on the role of basic emotions in everyday human behavior. Tomkins challenged the status quo by developing--over the span of more than 1000 pages--a theory of consciousness and motivation that placed emotion at the core of the human experience. Because so few psychologists were studying emotion at that time, Tomkins drew liberally from other academic disciplines to help formulate his ideas and support his arguments: evolutionary biology, ethology, cybernetics, literature, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and neurophysiology, among others. In the process, Tomkins practically invented the field of "nonverbal behavior" through close observation of emotional expressions in people, including his own infant son. His work was a brilliantly eccentric pastiche of ideas that adhered to no strict disciplinary or ideological boundaries. In time, however, "AIC" came to prominence through the research of his disciples, notably Paul Ekman and Carroll Izzard, who went on to become major researchers in the psychology of emotion. Today, Tomkins's book is influential not just in psychology but in philosophy, sociology, communication studies, even in "affective computing." Springer Publishing is delighted to re-release Tomkins's magisterial work in a beautiful new two-volume hardcover set, with a new prologue from prominent psychiatrist Donald L. Nathanson.The first volume of the set (978-0-8261-4404-1) contains the first two volumes of "AIC," "The Positive Affects" and "The Negative Affects" while the second volume (978-0-8261-4406-5) includes the final two volumes, "The Negative Affects: Fear and Anger" and "Cognition: Duplication and Transformation of Information,"

The Age of Shiva by Suri, Manil Meera is a modern woman who is determined to take her life into her own hands, even if it means mean making one mistake after another. Manil Suri's places the young woman's life against the background of modern India -- with its combustible mixture of religion and politics. With this second novel, he displays an enormous versatility in style as well as subject.--Carla Cohen, Politics &Prose Books &Coffee (Washington, DC)

Time and Materials: Poems 1997-2005 by Hass, Robert The poems in Robert Hass's new collection--his first to appear in a decade--are grounded in the beauty and energy of the physical world, and in the bafflement of the present moment in American culture. This work is breathtakingly immediate, stylistically varied, redemptive, and wise. His familiar landscapes are here--San Francisco, the Northern California coast, the Sierra high country--in addition to some of his oft-explored themes: art; the natural world; the nature of desire; the violence of history; the power and limits of language; and, as in his other books, domestic life and the conversation between men and women. New themes emerge as well, perhaps: the essence of memory and of time. The works here look at paintings, at Gerhard Richter as well as Vermeer, and pay tribute to his particular literary masters, friend Czesław Miłosz, the great Swedish poet Tomas Transtromer, Horace, Whitman, Stevens, Nietszche, and Lucretius. We are offered glimpses of a surpris-ingly green and vibrant twenty-first-century Berlin; of the demilitarized zone between the Koreas; of a Bangkok night, a Mexican desert, and an early summer morning in Paris, all brought into a vivid present and with a passionate meditation on what it is and has been to be alive. "It has always been Mr. Hass's aim," the "New York Times Book Review" wrote, "to get the whole man, head and heart and hands and every-thing else, into his poetry." Every new volume by Robert Hass is a major event in poetry, and this beautiful collection is no exception.