Books in Norton Paperback series

The international bestseller―don't compete without it! A major bestseller in Japan, Financial Times Top Ten book of the year, Book-of-the-Month Club bestseller, and required reading at the best business schools, Thinking Strategically is a crash course in outmaneuvering any rival. This entertaining guide builds on scores of case studies taken from business, sports, the movies, politics, and gambling. It outlines the basics of good strategy making and then shows how you can apply them in any area of your life.

Set in the near future, The Wanting Seed is a Malthusian comedy about the strange world overpopulation will produce. Tristram Foxe and his wife, Beatrice-Joanna, live in their skyscraper world where official family limitation glorifies homosexuality. Eventually, their world is transformed into a chaos of cannibalistic dining-clubs, fantastic fertility rituals, and wars without anger. It is a novel both extravagantly funny and grimly serious.

"This is the Confucius translation for our time."―Jonathan Mirsky, The Times [London] In this terse, brilliant translation, Simon Leys restores the human dimension to Confucius. He emerges a full-blooded character with a passion for politics and a devotion to the ideals of a civilization he saw in decline. Leys's notes draw Confucius into conversation with the great thinkers of the Western tradition. In all, this volume provides new readers the perfect introduction to a classic work.

"It is a book that does not invite comparisons. . . . Its excellence is individual, intrinsic; it measures itself against itself."--Saturday Review of Literature Julia Martin is at the end of her rope in Paris. Once beautiful, she was taken care of by men. Now after leaving her last lover, she is running out of luck and chances. A visit to London to see her ailing mother and distrustful sister bring her stark life into full focus. A masterful and terrifying tale from one of the truest voices in twentieth-century fiction.

"A towering landmark of postwar Realism. . . . A sustained work of prose so lucid and fine it seems less written than carved." ― David Foster Wallace Otto and Sophie Bentwood live childless in a renovated Brooklyn brownstone. The complete works of Goethe line their bookshelf, their stainless-steel kitchen is newly installed, and their Mercedes is parked curbside. But after Sophie is bitten on the hand while trying to feed a half-starved neighborhood cat, a series of small and ominous disasters begin to plague their lives. The fault lines of their marriage are revealed ― echoing the fractures of society around them, slowly wrenching itself apart. First published in 1970 to wide acclaim, Desperate Characters stands as one of the most dazzling and rigorous examples of the storyteller's craft in postwar American literature ― a novel that, according to Irving Howe, ranks with "Billy Budd, The Great Gatsby, Miss Lonelyhearts, and Seize the Day."