New York City provides the setting for these fourteen vivid stories. In one, an attorney’s stony heart begins to soften the day he is attacked by a homeless man on the High Line. In another, a world-class ballerina’s love is won and lost. In yet another, Bouquet, a celebrated fashion photographer, ponders the picture she took in war of an orphaned boy in the Peruvian Andes. Pat, a so-so novelist, finally discovers his muse on the uptown 1 train at Canal Street. Rodney, a Cuban refugee, mourns his father Wilfredo and the wonders of Wilfredo’s splendid music.

Le Grand Tango is the definitive biography of Argentine composer and musician Astor Piazzolla, whose genius is nothing if not controversial. The debate still rages as to whether he reinvented tango or if his music is indeed tango at all. This new updated and expanded “Anniversary Edition,” published twenty-five years after Piazzolla’s death, includes new material from both authors, updates on the Piazzolla family and legacy, and new photographs.

Born in a seacoast town in Argentina in 1921, Piazzolla spent most of his childhood in the East Village of New York, returning to Argentina at sixteen, already a talented bandoneon player. He would take tango music to new, jazz and classical-influenced heights that were rejected in Argentina but celebrated in Europe and on the international stage. By his death in 1992, he had millions of fans, including some of the most accomplished musicians in the world.

It’s 1965. A young surgeon is drafted into the U.S. Navy and sent to Vietnam, where he finds himself closer than he ever imagined to the carnage of war. He performs operations while under fire and sees wounds that can barely be contemplated. Marines are dying on the operating table in front of him. The small-town moral certainties he grew up believing in may themselves succumb to the ravages he is witnessing. More than anything, he wants to make it home to marry the woman he loves.

From Marie Antoinette during her final days in prison, to Charlotte Robespierre, the sister of the man responsible for ordering hundreds to the guillotine, women on both sides of the revolution were bound together by a common nightmare. Join Stanford professor Marilyn Yalom, as she uncovers first-person accounts of more than eighty remarkable women memoirists—all ages and backgrounds, all victims of the French Revolution.

Infamous Mexican muralist Jesús Lázaro comes to San Francisco from Mexico, where he had painted the exteriors of churches despite objections by the Catholic Church and the Mexican government. The artist sees the massive cathedral of Saint Mary of The Assumption of San Francisco, at the corner of Gough and Geary Streets, and determines he must paint the entire exterior with grand murals. Archbishop Ruben Mullins refuses the artist, and therein lies the conflict. The dispute sparks protests in the street, gets the attention of the Vatican, sets off a disastrous love triangle, and may or may not invoke the wrath of God.