“Engrossing … Bound to be compared to Kathryn Stockett’s best-selling The Help, this historical novel probes complex issues of freedom and slavery.”
—Library Journal, starred review

“Like” Susan Hill on Facebook to be entered to win The Woman in Black Movie Sweepstakes. Ten randomly selected winners will receive a movie prize pack including an official poster, t-shirt, black veil, and paperback edition of the book. The sweepstakes will end on February 9, 2012.

Click to read an excerpt from the book and to download our reading group guide.

“Like” Susan Hill on Facebook to be entered to win The Woman in Black Movie Sweepstakes. Ten randomly selected winners will receive a movie prize pack including an official poster, t-shirt, black veil, and paperback edition of the book. The sweepstakes will end on February 9, 2012.

Click to read an excerpt from the book and download our reading group guide.

Your humble Borzoi Cook and an expert from Books for Better Living, a wellness blog, came together to prepare two dishes from the Neelys’ menu: love potions and sexy seafood pasta.

After peeling and deveining the shrimp and scrubbing clean the mussels for the pasta dish, we decided to take a quick love potion break.

Drinking vodka cocktails before dinner has been assembled seemed like a decadent—if not slightly dangerous—proposition, but Katie from Books for Better Living assured me that pomegranates are rich in antioxidants. Well, in that case:

The red sauce for the pasta couldn’t be easier to prepare, nor more tasty. Take one can of crushed tomatoes, a couple cloves of minced garlic, some red-pepper flakes, and white wine. Stir over heat, and voila!

Next, add the seafood.

Once the mussels have opened, and the shrimps have taken on a pinkish hue, add a pound of cooked linguine and toss to combine.

Tada! Now you have an alluring Valentine’s Day dinner. For a wine pairing, I recommend a nice dry rosé.

To view the full recipes for the love potion and sexy seafood pasta, check out the Neelys’ full menu on Scribd. I guarantee you’ll want to pick up Pat and Gina’s The Neelys’ Celebration Cookbook, so you can try their belly-filling, heart-warming menus for all the joyous occasions 2012 will bring. Hint: if you’re still casting about for a perfect Super Bowl Sunday dish, you’ll want to see the Neelys’ menu, which includes jalapeño poppers, wings, potato skins, chili mac, brownies, and beer cocktails. Yowza.

Yours in cooking,
Pam Cortland

P.S. For more free recipes from Knopf’s cookbooks, subscribe to the Borzoi Cooks newsletter, written by yours truly!

For all the monumental documentation that Watergate generated—uncountable volumes of committee records, court transcripts, and memoirs—it falls at last to a novelist to perform the work of inference (and invention) that allows us to solve some of the scandal’s greatest mysteries (who did erase those eighteen-and-a-half minutes of tape?) and to see this gaudy American catastrophe in its human entirety.

In Watergate, Thomas Mallon conveys the drama and high comedy of the Nixon presidency through the urgent perspectives of seven characters we only thought we knew before now, moving readers from the private cabins of Camp David to the klieg lights of the Senate Caucus Room, from the District of Columbia jail to the Dupont Circle mansion of Theodore Roosevelt’s sharp-tongued ninety-year-old daughter (“The clock is dick-dick-dicking”), and into the hive of the Watergate complex itself, home not only to the Democratic National Committee but also to the president’s attorney general, his recklessly loyal secretary, and the shadowy man from Mississippi who pays out hush money to the burglars.

Praised by Christopher Hitchens for his “splendid evocation of Washington,” Mallon achieves with Watergate a scope and historical intimacy that surpasses even what he attained in his previous novels, as he turns a “third-rate burglary” into a tumultuous, first-rate entertainment.

Watergate goes on sale February 21st!

So begins Guilt, Ferdinand von Schirach’s tense, riveting collection of stories based on real crimes he has known. In these brief, succinct tales, von Schirach calls into question the nature of guilt and the toll it takes—or fails to take—on ordinary people. In “The Illuminati,” the popular mean crowd at an all-boys’ boarding school wages a vicious attack against an outsider schoolmate, and ends up accidentally killing the boy’s beloved teacher. Attempting to hurdle through a midlife crisis, a housewife begins to steal trivial things no one will miss, an act that gives her a rush and staves off depression in “Desire.” And in “Snow,” an old man whose home is used as a way station for a heroin ring agrees to protect the identity of the lead drug runner, who receives his comeuppance in due course.

Compassionate and seen with the same cool, controlled eye that propelled Ferdinand von Schirach’s debut collection, Crime, onto best-seller lists, Guilt is a stunning follow-up from one of Germany’s finest new writers.

Ferdinand von Schirach was born in Munich in 1964. Since 1994, he has worked as a criminal defense lawyer in Berlin. Among his clients have been the former member of the Politburo Günter Schabowski, the former East German spy Norbert Juretzko, and members of the underworld.

Praise for Borrow:

“Informed and articulate…. An essential story of the American economy…. [Hyman] comprehensively examines the role of debt in shaping the American economy, as well as the rise and recent precipitous decline of the nation’s middle class…. A critical academic investigation into an obscure arena of American historiography that has largely been neglected. But it is also an accessible story concerning a timely economic reality of today’s American experience.”
—Newark Star-Ledger

“We learn from historian Hyman that when debt became a commodity to be bought and sold, it enabled the growth of the twentieth-century economy. Americans increasingly relied on expected future income from wages rather than cash to make consumer purchases. The author traces consumer debt beginning in the 1910s and through the 1920s, when personal loans became legal and mortgages were in demand…. This is an excellent book.”
—Booklist

“Intelligently analyzing both the economics and the social meaning of debt, Hyman grounds these developments in commercial imperatives and an evolving consumer culture, and links them to deeper economic upheavals…. Stocked with colorful personalities and trenchant insights, Hyman’s lucid, entertaining, and timely treatise illuminates the murky processes by which debt became the troubled center of economic life.”
—Publishers Weekly

Click to read an excerpt from the book.

WHAT:
HISTORY OF A PLEASURE SEEKER

WHEN:
Published by Knopf February 14, 2012

WHY:
“Richard Mason displays a sharp eye and a wit to rival Oscar Wilde.
“An ambitious young raconteur coaxes the passion out of a desiccated family in turn-of-the-century Amsterdam.
“Of his cunning protagonist, Richard Mason writes, ‘The adventures of adolescence had taught Piet Barol that he was extremely attractive to most women and to many men.’ He adds: ‘He was old enough to be pragmatic about this advantage, young enough to be immodest…’ Piet is far more used to poverty and hardship than he is to the life of luxury in Europe’s La Belle Époque. But he is above all ambitious and trained to navigate the world of privilege by his late mother.
“So it is that Piet infiltrates the household of Maarten Vermeulen-Sickerts, one of the wealthiest men in Amsterdam. Maarten’s sex-starved wife Jacobina hires Piet to tutor their son Egbert, a boy who becomes hysterical outside his own home. Though playing a dangerous game—the image of a man walking a tightrope is threaded through the narrative—Piet loses no time in pursuing all pleasures, be it music, fine food, wealth or the charms of his employer’s wife.
“A provocative and keenly funny portrait of a rake with an agenda all his own.”
—KIRKUS REVIEWS

“This bildungsroman is as smart as it is seductive.”
—Annie Bostrom, BOOKLIST

“An engaging portrait of an individual, a family, and a time.”
—Barbara Hoffert, LIBRARY JOURNAL (a starred review)

Media Resources:
About the book | Author bio | Download the jacket

Publicity:
Kathy Zuckerman | 212-572-2105 | kzuckerman@randomhouse.com

To hear the music, learn the historical context, and look into the world of this novel, email Piet@Barol.com