The Sound Of No Hands Clapping

With a major motion picture of How to Lose Friends and Alienate People about to be released (starring Simon Pegg, Kirsten Dunst, and Jeff Bridges), there has never been a better time to savor this laugh-out-loud memoir from everyone’s favorite “professional failurist.” The Sound of No Hands Clapping finds Toby pursuing a glamorous career in Hollywood while trying to balance his new life as a husband and parent. Failure-and fatherhood-have never been funnier.

When even his friends refer to him as 'a balding, bug-eyed opportunist with the looks of a beach ball, the charisma of a glove-puppet and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane,' the odds of Toby Young scoring - in any sense - appear to be slim. But then HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS, his memoir about failing to take Manhattan, becomes an international bestseller. Now Tinseltown beckons. After receiving a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity from a Hollywood producer, Toby sets his sights anew on a high-flying career, this time on the West Coast. But it doesn't take long for Toby's self-sabotaging instincts to reassert themselves. On the home front, though, things are looking up: Toby persuades his girlfriend to marry him and move to Los Angeles - but then she decides to abandon her promising legal career in order to become a full-time housewife . . . and mother. Toby's hapless attempts to pursue a glamorous showbiz career while buried in nappies will strike a chord with all modern fathers struggling to find the right work/life balance . . . and with their exasperated wives. Failure - and fatherhood - have never been funnier.

A unique insider's account of day-to-day life inside a Tibetan monastery, The Sound of Two Hands Clapping reveals to Western audiences the fascinating details of monastic education. Georges B. J. Dreyfus, the first Westerner to complete the famous Ge-luk curriculum and achieve the distinguished title of geshe, weaves together eloquent and moving autobiographical reflections with a historical overview of Tibetan Buddhism and insights into its teachings.

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In 1995 high-flying British journalist Toby Young left London for New York to become a contributing editor at Vanity Fair. Other Brits had taken Manhattan-Alistair Cooke then, Anna Wintour now-so why couldn't he? But things didn't quite go according to plan. Within the space of two years he was fired from Vanity Fair, banned from the most fashionable bar in the city, and couldn't get a date for love or money. Even the local AA group wanted nothing to do with him. How to Lose Friends and Alienate People is Toby Young's hilarious account of the five years he spent looking for love in all the wrong places and steadily working his way down the New York food chain, from glossy magazine editor to crash-test dummy for interactive sex toys. But it's more than "the longest self-deprecating joke since the complete works of Woody Allen" (Sunday Times); it's also a seditious attack on the culture of celebrity from inside the belly of the beast. And there's even a happy ending, as Toby Young marries-"for proper, noncynical reasons," as he puts it-the woman of his dreams. "Some people are lucky enough to stumble across the right path straight away; most of us only discover what the right one is by going down the wrong one first." "I'll rot in hell before I give that little bastard a quote for his book." -- Julie Burchill "A relentlessly brilliant book-a What Makes Sammy Run for the twenty-first century . . . the funniest, cleverest, most touching new book I've read for as long as I can remember." -- Julie Burchill, The Spectator

FROM THE WINNER OF THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2014 In the winter of 1954, in a construction camp in the remote Tasmanian highlands, when Sonja Buloh was three years old and her father was drinking too much, her mother disappeared into a blizzard never to return. Thirty-five years later, Sonja returns to the place of her childhood to visit her drunkard father. The shadows of the past begin to intrude ever more forcefully into the present, changing forever his living death and her ordered life.

In a room above a bizarre German museum, and far from the prying eyes of strangers, lives in Old Man. Caretaker by day, by night he enjoys the sound of silence, broken only by the occasional crunch of a spider between his teeth. Little Hands Clapping brings the Old Man together with the respectable Doctor Ernst Fröhlicher, his dog Hans and a cast of grotesque and hilarious townsfolk who find themselves involved in a crime so outrageous it will shock the world. From its sinister opening to its explosive denouement, Little Hands Clapping blends lavishly entertaining storytelling with Rhodes’s macabre imagination, entrancing originality and magical touch.