Books published by publisher Arcade

Book of the Year, 2018 Saltire Literary AwardsA CrimeReads Best True Crime Book of the MonthFor fans of Caitlin Doughty, Mary Roach, Kathy Reichs, and CSI shows, a renowned forensic scientist on death and mortality.Dame Sue Black is an internationally renowned forensic anthropologist and human anatomist. She has lived her life eye to eye with the Grim Reaper, and she writes vividly about it in this book, which is part primer on the basics of identifying human remains, part frank memoir of a woman whose first paying job as a schoolgirl was to apprentice in a butcher shop, and part no-nonsense but deeply humane introduction to the reality of death in our lives. It is a treat for CSI junkies, murder mystery and thriller readers, and anyone seeking a clear-eyed guide to a subject that touches us all.Cutting through hype, romanticism, and cliché, she recounts her first dissection; her own first acquaintance with a loved one’s death; the mortal remains in her lab and at burial sites as well as scenes of violence, murder, and criminal dismemberment; and about investigating mass fatalities due to war, accident, or natural disaster, such as the 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami. She uses key cases to reveal how forensic science has developed and what her work has taught her about human nature.Acclaimed by bestselling crime writers and fellow scientists alike, All That Remains is neither sad nor macabre. While Professor Black tells of tragedy, she also infuses her stories with a wicked sense of humor and much common sense.

Winner of the IgNobel Prize in physics and the 2004 American Institute of Physics Science Writing Award, Len Fisher showed just how much fun science can be in his enthusiastically praised debut, How to Dunk a Doughnut. In this new work, he reveals that science sometimes takes a path through the ridiculous and the bizarre to discover that Nature often simply does not follow common sense. One experiment, involving a bed, platform scales, and a dying man, seemed to prove that the soul weighed the same as a slice of bread. But other, no less fanciful experiments and ideas led to the fundamentals of our understanding of movement, heat, light, and energy, and such things as the discovery of electricity, and the structure of DNA; improved engines; and the invention of computers. As in his previous book, Fisher uses personal stories and examples from everyday life, as well as humor, to make the science accessible. He touches on topics from lightning to corsets and from alchemy to Frankenstein and water babies, but he may not claim the last word on the weight of the soul!

King Solomon, the Bible’s wisest king, possessed extraordinary wealth. The grand temple he built in Jerusalem was covered in gold from the porch to the inner sanctum, where the Ark of the Covenant was kept. Long before H. Rider Haggard’s classic adventure novel King Solomon’s Mines unleashed gold fever more than a century ago, many had sought to find the source of the great king’s wealth. In this new adventure—“a hybrid of Indiana Jones and Herodotus” (Sunday Times, London)—Tahir Shah tries his hand at the quest. Intrigued by a map he finds in a shop not far from the site of the temple, Shah assembles a multitude of clues to the location of Solomon’s mines. Some come from ancient texts, including the Septuagint, the earliest form of the Bible, and some from geological, geographical, and folkloric sources. All point across the Red Sea to Ethiopia, the land of the Queen of Sheba, Solomon’s lover, who bore Solomon’s son Menelik and founded Ethiopia’s imperial line. Shah’s trail takes him on a wild ride—by taxi, bus, camel, donkey, and Jeep—that is sure to delight all travelers.

Loet Velmans was seventeen when the Germans invaded Holland. He and his family fled to London on the Dutch Coast Guard cutter Seaman’s Hope and then sailed to the Dutch East Indies—now Indonesia—where he joined the Dutch army. In March 1942, the Japanese invaded the archipelago and made prisoners of the Dutch soldiers. For the next three and a half years Velmans and his fellow POWs toiled in slave labor camps, building a railroad through the dense jungle on the Burmese-Thailand border so the Japanese could invade India. Some 200,000 POWs and slave laborers died building this Death Railway. Velmans, though suffering from malaria, dysentery, malnutrition, and unspeakable mistreatment, never gave up hope. Fifty-seven years later he returned to revisit the place where he should have died and where he had buried his closest friend. From that emotional visit sprung this stunning memoir.Long Way Back to the River Kwai is a simply told but searing memoir of World War II—a testimonial to one man’s indomitable will to live that will take its place beside the Diary of Ann Frank, Bridge over the River Kwai, and Edith’s Story.

A Distinguished and Bestselling Historian and Army Veteran Revisits the Culture War that Raged around the Selection of Maya Lin's Design for the Vietnam Memorial A Rift in the Earth tells the remarkable story of the ferocious “art war” that raged between 1979 and 1984 over what kind of memorial should be built to honor the men and women who died in the Vietnam War. The story intertwines art, politics, historical memory, patriotism, racism, and a fascinating set of characters, from those who fought in the conflict and those who resisted it to politicians at the highest level. At its center are two enduring figures: Maya Lin, a young, Asian-American architecture student at Yale whose abstract design won the international competition but triggered a fierce backlash among powerful figures; and Frederick Hart, an innovative sculptor of humble origins on the cusp of stardom. James Reston, Jr., a veteran who lost a close friend in the war and has written incisively about the conflict's bitter aftermath, explores how the debate reignited passions around Vietnam long after the war’s end and raised questions about how best to honor those who fought and sacrificed in an ill-advised war. Richly illustrated with photographs from the era and design entries from the memorial competition, A Rift in the Earth is timed to appear alongside Ken Burns's eagerly anticipated PBS documentary, The Vietnam War. “The memorial appears as a rift in the earth, a long polished black stone wall, emerging from and receding into the earth."—Maya Lin "I see the wall as a kind of ocean, a sea of sacrifice. . . . I place these figures upon the shore of that sea." —Frederick Hart

Best Crime Novel of the Year--Joy Ride through the Tattoo Underworld of Portland's Old Town.The night world of Old Town, Portland, Oregon, has gone mad in the grip of gentrification, and at the center of it all is Lucky Supreme, a seedy tattoo parlor, whose proprietor is a street-bred artist with a unique approach to problem solving. Darby Holland has enough on his radar, but when some flash (tattoo artwork) stolen from him resurfaces in California he can't help himself. His efforts to reclaim it set him on a dangerous path, dragging along his delightfully eccentric colleagues, including the brains behind his brawn, Delia, a twiggy vinyl-clad punk genius secretly from the other side of the tracks. No one knows why the art signed "Roland Norton, Panama, 1955" is worth anything or how it came to hang on the walls of a tattoo shop in Portland, Oregon. Only the deranged former owner can say--and he's not talking. Before the wrecking balls swing through Old Town in the name of "progress," Darby must settle old scores and face new demons to save his reputation, his shop, and his sanity. He has secrets of his own, and a tattoo shop in Old Town was a perfect place to hide, but when cash, lies, crime, and history collide, Darby Holland will need his ramshackle skill set, his wits, and a lot of luck to rise to the top of a human food chain, or be eaten alive.Lucky Supreme is an intuitive thrill ride from start to finish in the spirit of Elmore Leonard and Dennis Lehane. It is the first of a trilogy featuring Darby Holland, Delia, and the other unforgettable nocturnal residents of Old Town. Jeff Johnson is a hugely entertaining new voice in noir.

The 25 Best Thriller Books of the Summer—New York PostBest New Books Coming Out Summer 2018 —Southern Living46 Great Books to Read This Summer—NylonDazzling Debuts"—WYPR, "The Weekly Reader"8 New Books You Should Read This June—vulture.comSummer Thrillers That Will Have You at the Edge of Your Chaise Lounge—Refinery29What We Read, Watched, and Listened to in May—Outside “Furious and electric . . . a fever dream."—Publishers Weekly, *Starred Review!*Breaking Bad meets No Country for Old Men... Ever since their father's untimely death five years before, Wyatt Smith and his inseparably close twin sister, Lucy, have scraped by alone on their family's isolated ranch in Box Elder County, Utah. That is until one morning when, just after spotting one of their steers lying dead in the field, Wyatt is hit in the arm by a hail of gunfire that takes four more cattle with it. The shooter: a fever-eyed, fearsome girl-child with a TEC-9 in her left hand and a worn shotgun in her right. They hold the girl captive, but she breaks loose overnight and heads south into the desert. With the dawning realization that the loss of cattle will mean the certain loss of the ranch, Wyatt feels he has no choice but to go after her and somehow find restitution for what's been lost. Wyatt's decision sets him on an epic twelve-day odyssey through a nightmarish underworld he only half understands; a world that pitches him not only against the primordial ways of men and the beautiful yet brutally unforgiving landscape, but also against himself. As he winds his way down from the mountains of Box Elder to the mesas of Monument Valley and back, Wyatt is forced to look for the first time at who he is and what he’s capable of, and how those hard truths set him irrevocably apart from the one person he’s ever really known and loved. Steeped in a mythic, wildly alive language of its own, and gripping from the first gunshot to the last, Rough Animals is a tour de force from a powerful new voice.

* * FINALIST FOR THE WWA 2019 Award for BEST WESTERN CONTEMPORARY NOVEL * * Told from the perspective of a high school girl and a football coach, Broken Field reveals the tensions that tear at the fabric of a small town when a high school hazing incident escalates and threatens a championship season. Set on the high prairies of Montana, in small towns scattered across vast landscapes, the distances in Broken Field are both insurmountable and deeply internalized. Life is dusty and hard, and men are judged by their labor. Women have to be tougher yet. That’s what sixteen-year-old Josie Frehse learns as she struggles to meet the expectations of her community while fumbling with her own desires. Tom Warner coaches the Dumont Wolfpack, an eight-man football team, typical for such small towns. Warner is stumbling through life, numbed by the death of his own young son and the dissolution of his marriage. But he’s jolted into taking sides when his star players are accused of a hazing incident that happened right under his nose. The scandal divides and ignites the town and in Broken Field, Jeff Hull brilliantly gives breadth and depth to both sides of this fractured community, where the roots of bullying reach deep, secrets are buried, and, in a school obsessed with winning, everyone loses.

"Creepy crawling" was the Manson Family's practice of secretly entering someone's home and, without harming anyone, leaving only a trace of evidence that they had been there, some reminder that the sanctity of the private home had been breached. Now, author Jeffrey Melnick reveals just how much the Family creepy crawled their way through Los Angeles in the sixties and then on through American social, political, and cultural life for close to fifty years, firmly lodging themselves in our minds. Even now, it is almost impossible to discuss the sixties, teenage runaways, sexuality, drugs, music, California, and even the concept of family without referencing Manson and his "girls." Not just another history of Charles Manson, Creepy Crawling explores how the Family weren't so much outsiders but emblematic of the Los Angeles counterculture freak scene, and how Manson worked to connect himself to the mainstream of the time. Ever since they spent two nights killing seven residents of Los Angeles—what we now know as the "Tate-LaBianca murders"—the Manson family has rarely slipped from the American radar for long. From Emma Cline's The Girls to the recent TV show Aquarius, the family continues to find an audience. What is it about Charles Manson and his family that captivates us still? Author Jeffrey Melnick sets out to answer this question in this fascinating and compulsively readable cultural history of the Family and their influence from 1969 to the present.

Together with Picasso and Matisse, Georges Braque is unquestionably one of the three great pillars of twentieth-century art. Here is the first full-length biography of this remarkable figure. A pioneer of modern art and founder of Cubism, Georges Braque was a creative genius and tireless innovator, constantly pushing back the boundaries of the possible. In this magisterial work, Alex Danchev taps a wide range of new sources to reveal the heart and mind of one who helped usher in the greatest revolution in the ways of seeing since the Renaissance and changed the face of modern art.

“With Secrets, Nuruddin Farah solidifies his reputation as one of the world’s great writers.”—Ishmael ReedSet against the backdrop of the civil war in Somalia, this stunningly ambitious novel was a Los Angeles Times Book Review Best Fiction of the Year Selection. In Mogadiscio, the dictator is preparing to flee and clans are moving into the city, which rattles with machine gun fire. Society is collapsing under the weight of its own perversities. Unexpectedly, Kalaman, a businessman who owns a computer store, receives a visit from his childhood crush, who has returned from America to take him up on an old pledge—and have his child. The arrival of his house guest pulls Kalaman back into a past he thought he had escaped, rife with doubts and secrets that go deep into his heritage.In a dazzling display of storytelling genius, Nuruddin Farah weaves together myth and magic, shape shifters and tribal wisdom, frank sexuality and lyrical prose as Kalaman revisits his own coming of age story and finds the heartbreaking tale of his famliy’s lost innocence amid the ravages of authoritarianism. With Secrets, the culmination of his Blood in the Sun trilogy, Farah draws readers through the rifts that have torn across Somali society and into the culture and mindset of his troubled country.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade, Yucca, and Good Books imprints, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in fiction—novels, novellas, political and medical thrillers, comedy, satire, historical fiction, romance, erotic and love stories, mystery, classic literature, folklore and mythology, literary classics including Shakespeare, Dumas, Wilde, Cather, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Scientists are in the business of trying to understand the world. Exploring commonplace phenomena, they have uncovered some of nature’s deepest laws. We can in turn apply these laws to our own lives, to better grasp and enhance our performance in daily activities as varied as cooking, home improvement, sports—even dunking a doughnut! This book makes the science of the familiar a key to opening the door for those who want to know what scientists do, why they do it, and how they go about it. Following the routine of a normal day, from coffee and breakfast to shopping, household chores, sports, a drink, supper, and a bath, we see how the seemingly mundane can provide insight into the most profound scientific questions. Some of the topics included are the art and science of dunking; how to boil an egg; how to tally a supermarket bill; the science behind hand tools; catching a ball or throwing a boomerang; the secrets of haute cuisine, bath (or beer) foam; and the physics of sex. Fisher writes with great authority and a light touch, giving us an entertaining and accessible look at the science behind our daily activities.