Literary collections

The Book That Changed My Life: 71 Remarkable Writers Celebrate the Books That Matter Most to Them

by Roxanne J. Coady

Now in paperback, a delightful collection of essays on the transformative power of reading In The Book That Changed My Life, our most admired writers, doctors, professors, religious leaders, politicians, chefs,...

The Portable Charles W. Chesnutt

by Charles W. Chesnutt

Collections from two of our most influential African American writers-under the general editorship of Henry Louis Gates, Jr. An icon of nineteenth-century American fiction, Charles W. Chesnutt-an incisive storyteller...

Once Again to Zelda: The Stories Behind Literature's Most Intriguing Dedications

by Marlene Wagman-Geller

A fascinating look at the stories behind the dedications of 50 literary classics.

Mary Shelley dedicated Frankenstein to her father, her greatest champion. Charlotte Brönte dedicated Jane Eyre to William Makepeace...

Great Philosophers Who Failed at Love

by Andrew Shaffer

Few people have failed at love as spectacularly as the great philosophers. Although we admire their wisdom, history is littered with the romantic failures of the most sensible men and women of every age, including:...

The Selected Letters of Thornton Wilder

by Thornton Wilder, Jackson R. Bryer & Robin Gibbs Wilder

The author of such classics as Our Town and The Bridge of San Luis Rey, Thornton Wilder was a born storyteller and dramatist—rare talents on glorious display in this volume of more than three hundred letters...

The Collected Prose

by Zbigniew Herbert

Polish poet and essayist Zbigniew Herbert easily stands beside Nobel Prize laureates Milosz and Szymborska as part of a remarkable literary tradition. Though Herbert is very much an Eastern European writer,...

In Rough Country: Essays and Reviews

by Joyce Carol Oates

In twenty-nine provocative essays, Joyce Carol Oates maps the "rough country" that is both the treacherous geographical and psychological terrain of the writers she so cogently analyzes—Flannery O'Connor,...

Smothered in Hugs: Essays, Interviews, Feedback, and Obituaries

by Dennis Cooper

Selected from the range of Cooper's essays and reportage in Artforum, Bookforum, Detour, Interview, LA Weekly, Spin, and the Village Voice, among other publications, Smothered in Hugs presents the best nonfiction...

Who Is Mark Twain?

by Mark Twain

Who Is Mark Twain? is a collection of twenty six wickedly funny, thought-provoking essays by Samuel Langhorne Clemens—aka Mark Twain—none of which have ever been published before, and all of which are completely...

Scout, Atticus, and Boo: A Celebration of Fifty Years of To Kill a Mockingbird

by Mary McDonagh Murphy

To Kill a Mockingbird may well be our national novel. It is the first adult novel that many of us remember reading, one book that millions of us have in common. It sells nearly a million copies a year, more...

The Best American Crime Reporting 2009

by Jeffrey Toobin, Otto Penzler & Thomas H. Cook

Thieves, liars, and killers—it's a criminal world out there, and someone has to write about it. A thrilling collection of the year's best reportage by the aces of the true-crime genre, The Best American Crime...

The Italian American Reader

by Bill Tonelli

This anthology -- the first general-reader collection of writing by Italian American authors -- is part manifesto, part Sunday dinner. A gathering of voices old and new, some speak in the accents of another...

A Dream Deferred

by Shelby Steele

From the author of the award-winning bestseller The Content of Our Character comes a new essay collection that tells the untold story behind the polarized racial politics in America today. In A Dream Deferred...

Under the Duvet

by Marian Keyes

From the acclaimed bestselling author of Sushi for Beginners and Angels comes a collection of personal essays on shopping, writing, moviemaking, motherhood and all the assorted calamities involved in being a...

Paper Trails: The Life and Times of Pete Dexter

by Pete Dexter

In the 1970s and 1980s, before he earned national acclaim for his award-winning novels, Pete Dexter was a newspaper columnist. Every week, in a few hundred words, Dexter cut directly to the heart of the American...

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction 1975

by Annie Dillard

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Blue Ridge valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "mystery, death, beauty, violence."...

Schmucks!

by Raoul Felder & Jackie Mason

Jackie Mason, one of the true kings of comedy, and his partner in crime, federal prosecutor and celebrity attorney Raoul Felder, go after America's lowlifes, scumbags, and everything else that really gets on...

High Tide in Tucson: Essays from Now or Never

by Barbara Kingsolver

"There is no one quite like Barbara Kingsolver in contemporary literature," raves the Washington Post Book World, and it is right. She has been nominated three times for the ABBY award, and her critically acclaimed...

Yuan Mei: Eighteenth Century Chinese Poet

by The Arthur Waley Estate & Arthur Waley

First published in 1956.

Arthur Waley here presents an engrossing account of the works and life of Yuan Mei (1716-1797), the best-known poet of his time. Gaiety is the keynote of his works and the poet was a...

Small Wonder

by Barbara Kingsolver

In her new essay collection, the beloved author of High Tide in Tucson brings to us out of one of history's darker moments an extended love song to the world we still have. From its opening parable gleaned from...