Literary collections

The Pine Barrens

by John McPhee & James Graves

Most people think of New Jersey as a suburban-industrial corridor that runs between New York and Philadelphia. Yet in the low center of the state is a near wilderness, larger than most national parks, which...

Levels of the Game

by John McPhee

This account of a tennis match played by Arthur Ashe against Clark Graebner at Forest Hills in 1968 begins with the ball rising into the air for the initial serve and ends with the final point. McPhee provides...

The Deltoid Pumpkin Seed

by John McPhee

This is the fascinating story of the dream of a completely new aircraft, a hybrid of the plane and the rigid airship - huge, wingless, moving slowly through the lower sky. John McPhee chronicles the perhaps...

The Crofter and the Laird

by John McPhee & James Graves

When John McPhee returned to the island of his ancestors—Colonsay, twenty-five miles west of the Scottish mainland—a hundred and thirty-eight people were living there. About eighty of these, crofters and...

The Curve of Binding Energy

by John McPhee

Theodore Taylor was one of the most brilliant engineers of the nuclear age, but in his later years he became concerned with the possibility of an individual being able to construct a weapon of mass destruction...

Pieces of the Frame

by John McPhee

Pieces of the Frame is a gathering of memorable writings by one of the greatest journalists and storytellers of our time. They take the reader from the backwoods roads of Georgia, to the high altitude of Ruidoso...

Giving Good Weight

by John McPhee

"You people come into the market—the Greenmarket, in the open air under the down pouring sun—and you slit the tomatoes with your fingernails. With your thumbs, you excavate the cheese. You choose your stringbeans...

La Place de la Concorde Suisse

by John McPhee

La Place de la Concorde Suisse is John McPhee's rich, journalistic study of the Swiss Army's role in Swiss society. The Swiss Army is so quietly efficient at the art of war that the Isrealis carefully patterned...

Table of Contents

by John McPhee

First published in book form 1985, Table of Contents is a collection of eight pieces written by John McPhee between 1981 and 1984. Geographically and thematically, they range from Alaska to New Jersey, describing,...

Heirs of General Practice

by John McPhee

Heirs of General Practice is a frieze of glimpses of young doctors with patients of every age—about a dozen physicians in all, who belong to the new medical specialty called family practice. They are people...

Rising from the Plains

by John McPhee

Bestselling author McPhee takes us on another exciting geological excursion with this engaging account of life--past and present--in the high plains of Wyoming.

The Control of Nature

by John McPhee

While John McPhee was working on his previous book, Rising from the Plains, he happened to walk by the engineering building at the University of Wyoming, where words etched in limestone said: "Strive on--the...

The Ransom of Russian Art

by John McPhee

In the 1960's and 1970's, American professor Norton Dodge forayed on his own in the Soviet Union, bought the work of underground "unofficial" artists, and brought it out himself or arranged to have it shipped...

Irons in the Fire

by John McPhee

In this collection John McPhee once agains proves himself as a master observer of all arenas of life as well a powerful and important writer.

The Second John McPhee Reader

by John McPhee & David Remnick

This second volume of The John McPhee Reader includes material from his eleven books published since 1975, including Coming into the Country, Looking for a Ship, The Control of Nature, and the four books on...

Rereadings

by Anne Fadiman

Is a book the same book-or a reader the same reader-the second time around? The seventeen authors in this witty and poignant collection of essays all agree on the answer: Never.

The editor of Rereadings is Anne...

The Return of Simple

by Langston Hughes

Jesse B. Simple, Simple to his fans, made weekly appearances beginning in 1943 in Langston Hughes' column in the Chicago Defender. Simple may have shared his readers feelings of loss and dispossession, but he...

Pulphead

by John Jeremiah Sullivan

A New York Times Notable Book for 2011 One of Entertainment Weekly's Top 10 Nonfiction Books of the Year 2011A Time Magazine Top 10 Nonfiction book of 2011A Boston Globe Best Nonfiction Book of 2011One of Library...

Writing in the Dark

by David Grossman & Jessica Cohen

Recent essays on Israel, literature, and language from one of the country's most respected and best-loved voices Throughout his career, David Grossman has been a voice for peace and reconciliation between Israel...

My Heart is Boundless: Writings of Abigail May Alcott, Louisa's Mother

by Eve Laplante

Little Women’s “Marmee” is one of the most recognizable mothers in American literature. But the real woman behind the fiction—Louisa May Alcott’s own mother, Abigail—has for more than a century remained...