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Books published by publisher A. A. Knopf

  • Running with Sherman: The Donkey with the Heart of a Hero

    Christopher McDougall

    eBook (Knopf, Oct. 15, 2019)
    "A delight, full of heart and hijinks and humor . . . McDougall is a gifted storyteller who gets to the heart of the human-animal connection." --John Grogan, author of Marley & Me: Life and Love with the World's Worst DogFrom the best-selling author of Born to Run, a heartwarming story about training a rescue donkey to run one of the most challenging races in America, and, in the process, discovering the life-changing power of the human-animal connection.When Chris McDougall agreed to take in a donkey from an animal hoarder, he thought it would be no harder than the rest of the adjustments he and his family had made after moving from Philadelphia to the heart of Pennsylvania Amish country. But when he arrived, Sherman was in such bad shape he could barely move, and his hair was coming out in clumps. Chris decided to undertake a radical rehabilitation program designed not only to heal Sherman's body but to heal his mind as well. It turns out the best way to soothe a donkey is to give it a job, and so Chris decided to teach Sherman how to run. He'd heard about burro racing--a unique type of race where humans and donkeys run together in a call-back to mining days--and decided he and Sherman would enter the World Championship in Colorado.Easier said than done. In the course of Sherman's training, Chris would have to recruit several other runners, both human and equine, and call upon the wisdom of burro racers, goat farmers, Amish running club members, and a group of irrepressible female long-haul truckers. An entire community comes together to help save Sherman and, along the way, Chris shows us the joy of a life with animals.
  • Sibley's Birding Basics: How to Identify Birds, Using the Clues in Feathers, Habitats, Behaviors, and Sounds

    David Allen Sibley

    Paperback (Knopf, Oct. 1, 2002)
    From the renowned author of the New York Times best seller The Sibley Guide to Birds, a comprehensive, beautifully illustrated guide to identifying birds in the field--an essential companion for birders of all skill and experience levels.The Sibley Guide to Birds and The Sibley Guide to Bird Life and Behavior are both universally acclaimed as the new standard source of species information. And now David Sibley, America’s premier birder and best-known bird artist, turns his attention to the general characteristics that influence the appearance of all birds, unlocking the clues to their identity.In 200 beautifully rendered illustrations and 16 essays, this scientifically precise volume distills the essence of Sibley’s own experience and skills, providing a solid introduction to “naming” the birds. Birding Basics reviews how one can get started as a birder--the equipment necessary, where and when to go birding, and perhaps most important, the essential things to look for when birds appear in the field--as well as the basic concepts of bird identification and the variations that can change the appearance of a bird over time or in different settings. Sibley also provides critical information on the aspects of avian life that differ from species to species: feathers (color, arrangement, shape, molt), behavior and habitat, and sounds.With Sibley as your guide, when you learn how to interpret what the feathers, the anatomical structure, the sounds of a bird tell you—when you know the clues that show you why there’s no such thing as “just a duck”—birding will be more fun, and more meaningful. An essential addition to the Sibley shelf!
  • Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites: A Cookbook

    Deb Perelman

    Hardcover (Knopf, Oct. 24, 2017)
    Deb Perelman, award-winning blogger and New York Times best-selling author of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook, understands that a happy discovery in the kitchen has the ability to completely change the course of your day. Whether we’re cooking for ourselves, for a date night in, for a Sunday supper with friends, or for family on a busy weeknight, we all want recipes that are unfussy to make with triumphant results. Deb thinks that cooking should be an escape from drudgery. Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites presents more than one hundred impossible-to-resist recipes—almost all of them brand-new, plus a few favorites from her website—that will make you want to stop what you’re doing right now and cook. These are real recipes for real people—people with busy lives who don’t want to sacrifice flavor or quality to eat meals they’re really excited about. You’ll want to put these recipes in your Forever Files: Sticky Toffee Waffles (sticky toffee pudding you can eat for breakfast), Everything Drop Biscuits with Cream Cheese, and Magical Two-Ingredient Oat Brittle (a happy accident). There’s a (hopelessly, unapologetically inauthentic) Kale Caesar with Broken Eggs and Crushed Croutons, a Mango Apple Ceviche with Sunflower Seeds, and a Grandma-Style Chicken Noodle Soup that fixes everything. You can make Leek, Feta, and Greens Spiral Pie, crunchy Brussels and Three Cheese Pasta Bake that tastes better with brussels sprouts than without, Beefsteak Skirt Steak Salad, and Bacony Baked Pintos with the Works (as in, giant bowls of beans that you can dip into like nachos). And, of course, no meal is complete without cake (and cookies and pies and puddings): Chocolate Peanut Butter Icebox Cake (the icebox cake to end all icebox cakes), Pretzel Linzers with Salted Caramel, Strawberry Cloud Cookies, Bake Sale Winning-est Gooey Oat Bars, as well as the ultimate Party Cake Builder—four one-bowl cakes for all occasions with mix-and-match frostings (bonus: less time spent doing dishes means everybody wins). Written with Deb’s trademark humor and gorgeously illustrated with her own photographs, Smitten Kitchen Every Day is filled with what are sure to be your new favorite things to cook.
  • The Sibley Guide to Birds

    David Allen Sibley

    Flexibound (Knopf, March 11, 2014)
    “Undoubtedly the finest guide to North American birds.”—Guy McCaskie, Birding The publication of The Sibley Guide to Birds, First Edition quickly established David Allen Sibley as the author and illustrator of the nation’s supreme and most comprehensive guide to birds. Used by millions of birders from novices to the most expert, The Sibley Guide became the standard by which natural history guides are measured. The highly anticipated second edition builds on this foundation of excellence, offering massively expanded and updated information, new paintings, new and rare species, and a new, elegant design. The second edition of this handsome, flexibound volume offers a wealth of improvements and updates: • All illustrations reproduced 15 to 20 percent larger for better detail. • Includes nearly 7,000 paintings digitally remastered from original art for enhanced print quality. • Expanded text includes habitat information and voice description for every species and more tips on finding birds in the field. • More than 600 new paintings, including illustrations of 115 rare species and additional paintings of common species and regional populations. • More than 700 updated maps of ranges, showing winter, summer, year-round, migration, and rare ranges. • 85 bird family pages now cross-referenced to species accounts. • Revised taxonomic order and most current common names for every species. The Sibley Guide to Birds, second edition, brings the genius of David Allen Sibley to the world once again in a thoroughly updated and expanded volume that every birder must own.
  • Madhur Jaffrey's Instantly Indian Cookbook: Modern and Classic Recipes for the Instant Pot®

    Madhur Jaffrey

    Hardcover (Knopf, May 7, 2019)
    “One of the best cookbooks to come out of the Instant Pot craze. It’s full of those timeless Indian recipes Jaffrey is known for . . . The flavor to ease factor ratio in these recipes is undoubtedly high, and, as always, Jaffrey’s calm, nurturing voice guides you through each step.” —Priya Krishna, Bon Appetit Master Indian cooking at home with more than seventy recipes from the multi-James Beard Award–winning author who “introduced the world to Indian food” (Epicurious). For more than forty years, Madhur Jaffrey has been revered as the “queen of Indian cooking” (Saveur). Here she shares inviting, easy-to-follow recipes—some entirely new, others reworked classics—for preparing fantastic Indian food at home. While these dishes are quick and easy to prepare, they retain all the rich complexity for which Jaffrey’s food has always been known, making this the only Indian cookbook with recipes designed for the Instant Pot you’ll ever need. RECIPES: From classics like butter chicken and buttery dal to new sure-to-be-favorites like kale cooked in a Kashmiri style and Goan-style clams, these recipes capture the flavorful diversity of Indian cuisine. EASY-TO-FOLLOW: Written with the clarity and precision for which Jaffrey has always been known, these are flavor-forward recipes that make the most of the Instant Pot’s unique functionality. A DIFFERENT KIND OF COOKBOOK: Rather than simply adapting recipes for one-pot cooking, Jaffrey has selected the essential dishes best suited for preparing using the Instant Pot, and created some all-new delectable dishes that make the most of its strengths. BEYOND THE INSTANT POT: Also included are thirteen bonus, no-special-pot needed recipes for the chutneys, salads, and relishes you need to complete any Indian meal. Think avocado-radish salad, fresh tomato chutney, and yogurt and apple raita. SPICES AND SPECIAL INGREDIENTS: Jaffrey provides a list of pantry essentials, from asafetida to whole spices, as well as recipes for her own garam masala blend and more. TIPS: Here too is Jaffrey’s advice on the best way to make rice, cook meat and fish in your Instant Pot, and more, based on her own extensive testing.
  • Horizon

    Barry Lopez

    Hardcover (Knopf, March 19, 2019)
    ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR:THE NEW YORK TIMES • NPR • THE GUARDIANFrom pole to pole and across decades of lived experience, National Book Award-winning author Barry Lopez delivers his most far-ranging, yet personal, work to date. Horizon moves indelibly, immersively, through the author’s travels to six regions of the world: from Western Oregon to the High Arctic; from the Galápagos to the Kenyan desert; from Botany Bay in Australia to finally, unforgettably, the ice shelves of Antarctica. Along the way, Lopez probes the long history of humanity’s thirst for exploration, including the prehistoric peoples who trekked across Skraeling Island in northern Canada, the colonialists who plundered Central Africa, an enlightenment-era Englishman who sailed the Pacific, a Native American emissary who found his way into isolationist Japan, and today’s ecotourists in the tropics. And always, throughout his journeys to some of the hottest, coldest, and most desolate places on the globe, Lopez searches for meaning and purpose in a broken world.
  • Sibley Birds West: Field Guide to Birds of Western North America

    David Allen Sibley

    Paperback (Knopf, March 29, 2016)
    COMPLETELY REVISED AND UPDATED: From renowned birder, illustrator, and New York Times best selling author David Sibley, the most authoritative guide to the birds of the West, in a portable format that is perfect for the field.Compact and comprehensive, this guide features 715 bird species, plus regional populations, found west of the Rocky Mountains. Entries include stunningly accurate illustrations--more than 5,046 in total--with descriptive captions pointing out the most important field marks. Each entry has been updated to include the most current information concerning frequency, nesting, behavior, food and feeding, voice description, and key identification features. Here too are more than 652 updated maps drawn from information contributed by 110 regional experts across the continent, and showing winter, summer, year-round, migration, and rare ranges.This new and improved edition includes: • Updated habitat, description, behavior, and conservation text for each species account and all family pages. • New and revised illustrations of species and regional forms. • New design featuring species accounts in columns, allowing for better comparison and more illustrations and text. • Current taxonomic order and up-to-date common names. • All maps revised to reflect the most current range information. • More species and rarities included.
  • A Field Guide to American Houses

    Virginia Savage McAlester

    Paperback (Knopf, Nov. 10, 2015)
    Now in paperback: the fully expanded, updated, and freshly designed second edition of the most comprehensive and widely acclaimed guide to domestic architecture: in print since its original publication in 1984, and acknowledged everywhere as the unmatched, essential guide to American houses.This revised edition includes a section on neighborhoods; expanded and completely new categories of house styles with photos and descriptions of each; an appendix on "Approaches to Construction in the 20th and 21st Centuries"; an expanded bibliography; and 600 new photographs and line drawings.
  • The Second Sleep: A novel

    Robert Harris

    eBook (Knopf, Nov. 19, 2019)
    From the internationally best-selling author of Fatherland and the Cicero Trilogy--a chilling and dark new thriller unlike anything Robert Harris has done before.1468. A young priest, Christopher Fairfax, arrives in a remote Exmoor village to conduct the funeral of his predecessor. The land around is strewn with ancient artefacts--coins, fragments of glass, human bones--which the old parson used to collect. Did his obsession with the past lead to his death? Fairfax becomes determined to discover the truth. Over the course of the next six days, everything he believes--about himself, his faith, and the history of his world--will be tested to destruction.
  • Designing Your Life: How to Build a Well-Lived, Joyful Life

    Bill Burnett, Dave Evans

    eBook (Knopf, Sept. 20, 2016)
    #1 New York Times Bestseller An inspiring and thought-provoking graduation gift: At last, a book that shows you how to build—design—a life you can thrive in, at any age or stage Designers create worlds and solve problems using design thinking. Look around your office or home—at the tablet or smartphone you may be holding or the chair you are sitting in. Everything in our lives was designed by someone. And every design starts with a problem that a designer or team of designers seeks to solve. In this book, Bill Burnett and Dave Evans show us how design thinking can help us create a life that is both meaningful and fulfilling, regardless of who or where we are, what we do or have done for a living, or how young or old we are. The same design thinking responsible for amazing technology, products, and spaces can be used to design and build your career and your life, a life of fulfillment and joy, constantly creative and productive, one that always holds the possibility of surprise. "Designing Your Life walks readers through the process of building a satisfying, meaningful life by approaching the challenge the way a designer would. Experimentation. Wayfinding. Prototyping. Constant iteration. You should read the book. Everyone else will." —Daniel Pink, bestselling author of Drive “This [is] the career book of the next decade and . . . the go-to book that is read as a rite of passage whenever someone is ready to create a life they love.” —David Kelley, Founder of IDEO “An empowering book based on their popular class of the same name at Stanford University . . . Perhaps the book’s most important lesson is that the only failure is settling for a life that makes one unhappy. With useful fact-finding exercises, an empathetic tone, and sensible advice, this book will easily earn a place among career-finding classics.” —Publishers Weekly
  • National Audubon Society Field Guide to North American Birds, Western Region

    Miklos D. F. Udvardy, Jr. John Farrand

    Turtleback (Knopf, Aug. 15, 1994)
    The bestselling photographic field guide--a birding bible for more than four million enthusiasts.Virtually every bird found in western North America is brought to life in this portable guide, an essential companion in the field and a staple in any birdwatcher's library. It features a durable vinyl binding and brilliant full-color photographic identification pictures arranged for quick access and definitive text, including information on the bird's voice, nesting habits, habitat, range, and interesting behaviors. Accompanying range maps; overhead flight silhouettes; sections on bird-watching, accidental species, and endangered birds make the National Audubon Society's Field Guide to North American Birds the most comprehensive available. Note: the Eastern Edition generally covers states east of the Rocky Mountains, while the Western Edition covers the Rocky Mountain range and all the states to the west of it.
  • There There: A novel

    Tommy Orange

    Hardcover (Knopf, June 5, 2018)
    ONE OF THE 10 BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR—THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEWWINNER OF THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZEOne of the Best Books of the Year: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, O, The Oprah Magazine, San Francisco Chronicle, Entertainment Weekly, The Boston Globe, GQ, The Dallas Morning News, Buzzfeed, BookPage, Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Kirkus Reviews NEW YORK TIMES BEST-SELLER Tommy Orange’s “groundbreaking, extraordinary” (The New York Times) There There is the “brilliant, propulsive” (People Magazine) story of twelve unforgettable characters, Urban Indians living in Oakland, California, who converge and collide on one fateful day. It’s “the year’s most galvanizing debut novel” (Entertainment Weekly). As we learn the reasons that each person is attending the Big Oakland Powwow—some generous, some fearful, some joyful, some violent—momentum builds toward a shocking yet inevitable conclusion that changes everything. Jacquie Red Feather is newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind in shame. Dene Oxendene is pulling his life back together after his uncle’s death and has come to work at the powwow to honor his uncle’s memory. Opal Viola Victoria Bear Shield has come to watch her nephew Orvil, who has taught himself traditional Indian dance through YouTube videos and will to perform in public for the very first time. There will be glorious communion, and a spectacle of sacred tradition and pageantry. And there will be sacrifice, and heroism, and loss. There There is a wondrous and shattering portrait of an America few of us have ever seen. It’s “masterful . . . white-hot . . . devastating” (The Washington Post) at the same time as it is fierce, funny, suspenseful, thoroughly modern, and impossible to put down. Here is a voice we have never heard—a voice full of poetry and rage, exploding onto the page with urgency and force. Tommy Orange has written a stunning novel that grapples with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and profound spirituality, and with a plague of addiction, abuse, and suicide. This is the book that everyone is talking about right now, and it’s destined to be a classic.