Literary collections

Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein

by Gertrude Stein

"This collection, a retrospective exhibit of the work of a woman who created a unique place for herself in the world of letters, contains a sample of practically every period and every manner in Gertrude Stein's...

The Disappointment Artist: Essays

by Jonathan Lethem

In a volume he describes as "a series of covert and not-so-covert autobiographical pieces," Jonathan Lethem explores the nature of cultural obsession—from western films and comic books, to the music of Pink...

The Colossus of New York

by Colson Whitehead

In a dazzlingly original work of nonfiction, the award-winning novelist Colson Whitehead re-creates the exuberance, the chaos, the promise, and the heartbreak of New York. Here is a literary love song that will...

You Tell Your Dog First

by Alison Pace

You Tell Your Dog First…

About the date you just had…about the questionable results of a medical test…about the good and the bad…about everything.

For years, award-winning author Alison Pace...

Sex in Seattle: An Essay on Grey's Anatomy

by Jacqueline Carey

From Grey's Anatomy 101: Seattle Grace, Unauthorized: Jacqueline Carey explores the presence of sex in Grey's Anatomy and how it informs character interactions in a way that is refreshingly realistic.

A Novelist and a Zombie Walk Into a Bar: Translating The Walking Dead to Prose

by Jay Bonansinga

From Triumph of The Walking Dead: Robert Kirkman's Zombie Epic on Page and Screen: Jay Bonansinga explores the translation of comic books into novels.

A Few Blown Fuses Before the Night is Over: An Essay on True Blood

by Jacob Clifton

From A Taste of True Blood: The Fangbanger's Guide: Jacob Clifton discusses the "guide" figure and the effect V has on characters' relationships.

Stretching My Mind: The Collected Essays of Edward Albee

by Edward Albee

America’s most important living playwright, Edward Albee, has been rocking our country’s moral, political and artistic complacency for more than 50 years. Beginning with his debut play, The Zoo Story (1958),...

Chronicle of a Plague, Revisited: AIDS and Its Aftermath

by Andrew Holleran

Andrew Holleran’s Ground Zero, first published in 1988 and consisting of 23 Christopher Street essays from the earliest years of the AIDS crisis, was hailed by the Washington Post as “one of the best dispatches...

Farther Away

by Jonathan Franzen

Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom was the runaway most-discussed novel of 2010, an ambitious and searching engagement with life in America in the twenty-first century. In The New York Times Book Review, Sam Tanenhaus...

Outlaw Cook

by John Thorne & Matt Lewis Thorne

In essays ranging from his earliest cooking lessons in a cold-water walk-up apartment on New York's Lower East Side to opinions both admiring and acerbic on the food writers of the past ten years, John Thorne...

Mouth Wide Open

by John Thorne & Matt Lewis Thorne

Ever since his first book, Simple Cooking, and its acclaimed successors, Outlaw Cook, Serious Pig, and Pot on the Fire, John Thorne has been hailed as one of the most provocative, passionate, and accessible...

Serious Pig

by John Thorne & Matt Lewis Thorne

In this collection of essays, John Thorne sets out to explore the origins of his identity as a cook, going “here” (the Maine coast, where he’d summered as a child and returned as an adult for a decade’s...

Living, Thinking, Looking

by Siri Hustvedt

The internationally acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt has also produced a growing body of nonfiction. She has published a book of essays on painting (Mysteries of the Rectangle) as well as an interdisciplinary...

The Survival of the Bark Canoe

by John McPhee

In Greenville, New Hampshire, a small town in the southern part of the state, Henri Vaillancourt makes birch-bark canoes in the same manner and with the same tools that the Indians used. The Survival of the...

Silk Parachute

by John McPhee

A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE’S PROSE PIECES—IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES

The brief, brilliant essay “Silk Parachute,” which first appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become...

A Roomful of Hovings and Other Profiles

by John McPhee

In this unique book, John McPhee takes us into the world of several fascinating people. His inimitable style reveals the intricate details of his characters lives.

Encounters with the Archdruid

by John McPhee

The narratives in this book are of journeys made in three wildernesses - on a coastal island, in a Western mountain range, and on the Colorado River in the Grand Canyon. The four men portrayed here have different...

Moral Grandeur and Spiritual Audacity

by Abraham Joshua Heschel & Susannah Heschel

This first collection of Heschel's essays - compiled, edited and with an introduction by his daughter Susannah Heschel, is a stunning reminder of the virtuosity of one of the most well respected minds in Judaic...

Basin and Range

by John McPhee

The first of John McPhee’s works in his series on geology and geologists, Basin and Range is a book of journeys through ancient terrains, always in juxtaposition with travels in the modern world—a history...