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Books published by publisher Farrar Straus and Giroux

  • The Poetry of Pablo Neruda

    Pablo Neruda, Ilan Stavans

    Paperback (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, April 1, 2005)
    The most comprehensive English-language collection of work ever by "the greatest poet of the twentieth century--in any language" (Gabriel García Márque)"In his work a continent awakens to consciousness." So wrote the Swedish Academy in awarding the Nobel Prize to Pablo Neruda, the author of more than thirty-five books of poetry and one of Latin America's most revered writers, lionized during his lifetime as "the people's poet."This selection of Neruda's poetry, the most comprehensive single volume available in English, presents nearly six hundred poems, scores of them in new and sometimes multiple translations, and many accompanied by the Spanish original. In his introduction, Ilan Stavans situates Neruda in his native milieu as well as in a contemporary English-language one, and a group of new translations by leading poets testifies to Neruda's enduring, vibrant legacy among English-speaking writers and readers today.
  • The Pout-Pout Fish Look-and-Find Book

    Deborah Diesen

    Hardcover (Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), March 20, 2018)
    An interactive seek-and-find book, starring the New York Times-bestselling Pout-Pout Fish and all his friends!The bestselling Pout-Pout Fish series now includes a seek-and-find book! Young guppies will delight in searching for Mr. Fish, his friends, and a playful collection of objects hidden in the pictures. Each page is packed with undersea artwork, and points out specific items or characters for readers to find. The Pout-Pout Fish Look-and-Find Book is sure to keep fans entertained for hours, and turn little pouts into big smiles!
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  • Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

    Peter Godfrey-Smith

    eBook (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Dec. 6, 2016)
    Although mammals and birds are widely regarded as the smartest creatures on earth, it has lately become clear that a very distant branch of the tree of life has also sprouted higher intelligence: the cephalopods, consisting of the squid, the cuttlefish, and above all the octopus. In captivity, octopuses have been known to identify individual human keepers, raid neighboring tanks for food, turn off lightbulbs by spouting jets of water, plug drains, and make daring escapes. How is it that a creature with such gifts evolved through an evolutionary lineage so radically distant from our own? What does it mean that evolution built minds not once but at least twice? The octopus is the closest we will come to meeting an intelligent alien. What can we learn from the encounter? In Other Minds, Peter Godfrey-Smith, a distinguished philosopher of science and a skilled scuba diver, tells a bold new story of how subjective experience crept into being—how nature became aware of itself. As Godfrey-Smith stresses, it is a story that largely occurs in the ocean, where animals first appeared. Tracking the mind’s fitful development, Godfrey-Smith shows how unruly clumps of seaborne cells began living together and became capable of sensing, acting, and signaling. As these primitive organisms became more entangled with others, they grew more complicated. The first nervous systems evolved, probably in ancient relatives of jellyfish; later on, the cephalopods, which began as inconspicuous mollusks, abandoned their shells and rose above the ocean floor, searching for prey and acquiring the greater intelligence needed to do so. Taking an independent route, mammals and birds later began their own evolutionary journeys. But what kind of intelligence do cephalopods possess? Drawing on the latest scientific research and his own scuba-diving adventures, Godfrey-Smith probes the many mysteries that surround the lineage. How did the octopus, a solitary creature with little social life, become so smart? What is it like to have eight tentacles that are so packed with neurons that they virtually “think for themselves”? What happens when some octopuses abandon their hermit-like ways and congregate, as they do in a unique location off the coast of Australia?By tracing the question of inner life back to its roots and comparing human beings with our most remarkable animal relatives, Godfrey-Smith casts crucial new light on the octopus mind—and on our own.
  • A Peculiar Peril

    Jeff VanderMeer

    eBook (Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), July 7, 2020)
    A Peculiar Peril is a head-spinning epic about three friends on a quest to protect the world from a threat as unknowable as it is terrifying, from the Nebula Award–winning and New York Times bestselling author of Annihilation, Jeff VanderMeer. Jonathan Lambshead stands to inherit his deceased grandfather’s overstuffed mansion—a veritable cabinet of curiosities—once he and two schoolmates catalog its contents. But the three soon discover that the house is filled with far more than just oddities: It holds clues linking to an alt-Earth called Aurora, where the notorious English occultist Aleister Crowley has stormed back to life on a magic-fueled rampage across a surreal, through-the-looking-glass version of Europe replete with talking animals (and vegetables). Swept into encounters with allies more unpredictable than enemies, Jonathan pieces together his destiny as a member of a secret society devoted to keeping our world separate from Aurora. But as the ground shifts and allegiances change with every step, he and his friends sink ever deeper into a deadly pursuit of the profound evil that is also chasing after them.
  • Tractor Mac Builds a Barn

    Billy Steers

    Paperback (Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), Sept. 6, 2016)
    Tractor Mac is used to driving across the fields-after all, what good are wheels if you can't use them? So he's disappointed when Farmer Bill parks him to run a saw mill and he sees that all of the other animals and machines around him are very busy with their chores on the farm. But when Farmer Bill finally unhooks him from the sawmill, Tractor Mac turns to see what work he has done-and he finds out that he helped raise a whole barn!
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  • A Unicorn Named Sparkle: A Picture Book

    Amy Young

    Hardcover (Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), July 5, 2016)
    Handpicked by Amazon kids’ books editor, Seira Wilson, for Prime Book Box – a children’s subscription that inspires a love of reading.When Lucy sees an ad in the newspaper for a unicorn, she sends in her twenty-five cents and waits four to six long weeks for her very own unicorn to arrive. She imagines the flowers that she'll braid into his beautiful pink mane, and she even picks the perfect name for him: Sparkle. But when Sparkle arrives, his ears are too long, his horn is too short, he smells funny--and oh, he has fleas. Lucy isn't pleased, but in the end she warms up to Sparkle and realizes that even though he wasn't exactly the unicorn she wanted, he might be just the one she needs.
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  • Everything That Rises Must Converge

    Flannery O'Connor

    Paperback (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Jan. 1, 1965)
    Flannery O'Connor was working on Everything That Rises Must Converge at the time of her death. This collection is an exquisite legacy from a genius of the American short story, in which she scrutinizes territory familiar to her readers: race, faith, and morality. The stories encompass the comic and the tragic, the beautiful and the grotesque; each carries her highly individual stamp and could have been written by no one else.
  • Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension: A Mathematician's Journey Through Narcissistic Numbers, Optimal Dating Algorithms, at Least Two Kinds of Infinity, and More

    Matt Parker

    Paperback (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Nov. 24, 2015)
    A revolutionary book from the stand-up mathematician that makes math fun again―now in paperback!Math is boring, says the mathematician and comedian Matt Parker. Part of the problem may be the way the subject is taught, but it's also true that we all, to a greater or lesser extent, find math difficult and counterintuitive. This counterintuitiveness is actually part of the point, argues Parker: the extraordinary thing about math is that it allows us to access logic and ideas beyond what our brains can instinctively do―through its logical tools we are able to reach beyond our innate abilities and grasp more and more abstract concepts. In the absorbing and exhilarating Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension, Parker sets out to convince his readers to revisit the very math that put them off the subject as fourteen-year-olds. Starting with the foundations of math familiar from school (numbers, geometry, and algebra), he takes us on a grand tour, from four dimensional shapes, knot theory, the mysteries of prime numbers, optimization algorithms, and the math behind barcodes and iPhone screens to the different kinds of infinity―and slightly beyond. Both playful and sophisticated, Things to Make and Do in the Fourth Dimension is filled with captivating games and puzzles, a buffet of optional hands-on activities that entice us to take pleasure in mathematics at all levels. Parker invites us to relearn much of what baffled us in school and, this time, to be utterly enthralled by it.
  • Walter's Wonderful Web: A First Book About Shapes

    Tim Hopgood

    Hardcover (Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), Aug. 16, 2016)
    A determined little spider named Walter is trying to make a sturdy web that will stand up to the blustery wind. The webs he makes at first are woven in special shapes--a triangle, a square, a circle--but they are still wibbly-wobbly. Can Walter make a web that is both wonderful and strong? This simple, vibrant adventure is a lively companion to our two previous Tim Hopgood "first books": Wow! Said the Owl, about colors; and Hooray for Hoppy!, about the five senses.
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  • A Giacometti Portrait

    James Lord

    Paperback (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, July 1, 1980)
    When we look at a painting hanging on an art gallery wall, we see only what the artist has chosen to disclose--the finished work of art. What remains mysterious is the process of creation itself--the making of the work of art. Everyone who has looked at paintings has wondered about this, and numerous efforts have been made to discover and depict the creative method of important artists. A Giacometti Portrait is a picture of one of the century's greatest artists at work.James Lord sat for eighteen days while his friend Alberto Giamcometti did his portrait in oil. The artist painted, and the model recorded the sittings and took photographs of the work in its various stages. What emerged was an illumination of what it is to be an artist and what it was to be Giacometti--a portrait in prose of the man and his art. A work of great literarydistinction, A Giacometti Portrait is, above all, a subtle and important evocation of a great artist.
  • Hiking with Nietzsche: On Becoming Who You Are

    John Kaag

    Hardcover (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, Sept. 25, 2018)
    "A stimulating book about combating despair and complacency with searching reflection." --Heller McAlpin, NPR.org Named a Best Book of 2018 by NPR. One of Lit Hub's 15 Books You Should Read in September and one of Outside's Best Books of FallA revelatory Alpine journey in the spirit of the great Romantic thinker Friedrich NietzscheHiking with Nietzsche: Becoming Who You Are is a tale of two philosophical journeys―one made by John Kaag as an introspective young man of nineteen, the other seventeen years later, in radically different circumstances: he is now a husband and father, and his wife and small child are in tow. Kaag sets off for the Swiss peaks above Sils Maria where Nietzsche wrote his landmark work Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Both of Kaag’s journeys are made in search of the wisdom at the core of Nietzsche’s philosophy, yet they deliver him to radically different interpretations and, more crucially, revelations about the human condition.Just as Kaag’s acclaimed debut, American Philosophy: A Love Story, seamlessly wove together his philosophical discoveries with his search for meaning, Hiking with Nietzsche is a fascinating exploration not only of Nietzsche’s ideals but of how his experience of living relates to us as individuals in the twenty-first century. Bold, intimate, and rich with insight, Hiking with Nietzsche is about defeating complacency, balancing sanity and madness, and coming to grips with the unobtainable. As Kaag hikes, alone or with his family, but always with Nietzsche, he recognizes that even slipping can be instructive. It is in the process of climbing, and through the inevitable missteps, that one has the chance, in Nietzsche’s words, to “become who you are."
  • Carl's Birthday

    Alexandra Day

    Board book (Farrar, Straus and Giroux (BYR), Sept. 1, 1997)
    Happy birthday, Carl! But can Mom surprise him? No way. As hard as Mom tries, Madeleine and her canine babysitter extraordinaire are hot on her trail, tasting the party punch, peeking at presents, and adding some of their own favorite decorations.
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