From the author of Paris to the Moon — one man’s quest for the meaning of food in a time obsessed with what to eat.

Never before have we cared so much about food. It preoccupies our popular culture, our fantasies, even our moralizing — “You still eat meat?” How could the land of Chef Boyardee have come so far overnight? And where can we possibly go from here?

Locating our table ancestry in France, Adam Gopnik traces our rapid evolution from commendable awareness to manic compulsion and how, on the way, we lost sight of a timeless truth: what goes on around the table — families, friends, lovers coming together, or breaking apart; conversation across the simplest or grandest board — is always more important than what we put on the table.

Gently satirizing the entire human comedy of the comestible, The Table Comes First seeks to liberate us from the twin clutches of puritanical guilt and cable TV glitz. It is the delightful beginning of a new conversation about the way we eat now.

A taste for winter, a love of winter — “a mind for winter” — is for many a part of the modern human condition. International bestselling author Adam Gopnik does for this storied season what he did for the City of Light in the New York Times bestseller Paris to the Moon. Here he tells the story of winter in five parts: Romantic Winter, Radical Winter, Recuperative Winter, Recreational Winter, and Remembering Winter. In this stunningly beautiful meditation, Gopnik touches on a kaleidoscope of subjects, from the German romantic landscape to the politics of polar exploration to the science of ice. And in the end, he pays homage to what could be a lost season — and thus, a lost collective cultural history — due to the threat of global warming. Through delicate, enchanting, and intricate narrative detail, buoyed by his trademark gentle wit, Gopnik draws us into another magical world and makes us look at it anew.

Ten-year-old Rose lives in New York, the city of bright lights and excitement, and a seemingly endless variety of people, architecture, and food — where extraordinary things happen every day on every block. But Rose wasn't born in New York; she was adopted as an infant from a far-away country. Though Rose loves her home and her adopted family, sometimes she can't help but feel different, like she's meant to be somewhere else.

Then one day in Central Park, Rose sees something truly extraordinary: a crystal staircase rising out of the lake, and two small figures climbing the shimmering steps before vanishing like a mirage. Only it's wasn't a mirage. Rose is being watched — recruited — by representatives of U Nork, a hidden city far more spectacular than its sister city New York. In U Nork, Dirigibles and zeppelins skirt dazzling skyscrapers that would dwarf the Crysler building. Impeccably dressed U Norkers glide along the sidewalks in roller skates. Rose can hardly take it all in.

Then she learns the most astonishing thing about U Nork. Its citizens are in danger, and they need Rose's help, and hers alone...

In a masterful new fantasy evocative of Alice in Wonderland, the brilliant novelist, essayist and critic, Adam Gopnik, explores the powerful themes of identity and the meaning of home, with stunning illustrations from Bruce McCall.

On February 12, 1809, two men were born an ocean apart: Abraham Lincoln in a one-room Kentucky log cabin; Charles Darwin on an English country estate. Each would see his life’s work inspire a stark change in mankind’s understanding of itself. In this bicentennial twin portrait, Adam Gopnik shows how these two giants, who never met, altered the way we think about death and time — about the very nature of earthly existence.

Each man had stirred a moral cataclysm. With Lincoln, the great tide of blood he released to save the Union left Americans reeling from violence that seemed senseless. Meanwhile, Darwin’s revelations of evolution and deep time, contradicting biblical history, had revoked the promise of eternal life and final judgment. But each man would also use his singular genius for words to offer refuge from the unbearable thought of a life without meaning. Together, through their writings, Lincoln and Darwin would become midwives to a new kind of hope and faith that sustains us to this day. Filled with little-known stories and unfamiliar characters, Angels and Ages reveals these men, whom we think we know, in a new, shared light, a light that also makes plain the unacknowledged origins of our modern vision and liberal values.

Following the best-selling Paris to the Moon, Through the Children’s Gate follows the Gopnik family’s adventures against the panorama of a different though no less storied city as they attempt to make a new home for themselves.

Autumn 2000: After five years in Paris, Adam Gopnik and his family move back to a New York that seems, at first, safer and shinier than ever. Here in the wondrously strange “neighborhood” of Manhattan we observe the triumphs and travails of father, mother, son, and daughter; and of the teachers, coaches, therapists, adversaries, and friends who round out the extended urban family. From Bluie, a goldfish fated to meet a Hitchcockian end, to Charlie Ravioli, an imaginary playmate who, being a New Yorker, is too busy to play, the Gopniks’ new home is under the spell of the sort of characters only the city’s unique civilization of childhood could produce.

Not long after their return, the fabric of living will be rent by the events of 9/11. But like a magic garment, it will reweave itself, reviving normalcy in a world where Jewish jokes mingle with debates about the problem of consciousness, the price of real estate, and the meaning of modern art. Along the way, a beloved teacher and coach who radiates a distinctively local light even when he faces death embodies the impermanence and the transcendence of life.

Elegant and exultantly alert to the minute miracles that bring a place to life, and written with Gopnik’s signature mix of mind and heart, Through the Children’s Gate is a chronicle, by turns tender and hilarious, of a family taking root in the unlikeliest patch of earth.

In The King in the Window, one of America's most celebrated writers turns his talents to a fantasy novel for children and grownups that is part Madeline, part Matrix — an intelligent and charming adventure story set in the city Gopnik writes about so magnificently. Oliver Parker is a ten-year-old American boy miserably stuck in Paris. Intimidated by his French school, Oliver longs to return home. Until one January night, wearing a paper crown and looking out the window, he sees an amazing vision — the reflection of a boy in an ancient French doublet gazing back at him. Oliver's pursuit of the boy leads him to a terrifying secret. He learns he has kingly powers and with no weapons other than his mind, must take on an extraordinary mission . . .

With wonderful characters, high comedy, and a thrilling narrative, The King in the Window is an intelligent fantasy adventure embodying the battle between good and evil.

From the earliest years of the American republic, Paris has provoked an extraordinary American literary response. An almost inevitable destination for writers and thinkers, Paris has been many things to many Americans: a bastion of old-world traditionalism, a hot-bed of revolutionary ideologies in politics and art, and above all a space in which to cultivate an openness to life and love impossible at home. Through stories, letters, memoirs, poems and journalism, Americans in Paris distills three centuries of vigorous, glittering, and powerfully emotional writing about the place that Henry James called "the most brilliant city in the world" and that Ernest Hemingway characterized as "a moveable feast."

In 1995, Adam Gopnik, his wife, and their infant son left the familiar comforts and hassles of New York City for the urbane glamour of Paris. In the grand tradition of Stein, Hemingway, Baldwin, and Liebling, Gopnik set out to enjoy the storied existence of an American in Paris — walks down the paths of the Tuileries, philosophical discussions in cafes, and afternoon jaunts to the Musee d'Orsay.

But as readers of Gopnik's beloved and award-winning "Paris Journal" in The New Yorker know, there was also the matter of raising a child and carrying on with la vie quotidienne — the daily, slightly less fabled life. As Gopnik discovers in this funny and tender account, the dual processes of navigating a foreign city and becoming a parent are not completely dissimilar — both promise new routines, new languages, and a new set of rules by which each day is to be lived. With singular wit and insight, Gopnik manages to weave the magical with the mundane in this wholly delightful book that Entertainment Weekly deemed "magisterial."