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Traces Remain: Essays and Explorations
By Charles Nicholl. 2012
In these wonderfully stylish and eclectic essays, Charles Nicholl pursues the fugitive traces of the past with the skill and…
relish that have earned him a reputation as one of the finest literary and historical detectives of our time.His subjects range from a murder-case in Renaissance Rome to the disappearance of Jim Thompson in 1960s Malaya, from the boyhood of Christopher Marlowe to the crimes of Jack the Ripper, from the remnants of a lost Shakespeare play to the last days of the poet-boxer Arthur Cravan in a Mexican fishing port.Full of insights, curiosities and unexpected discoveries, these thirty pieces written over two decades show the author of The Lodger and Leonardo da Vinci at his inquisitive best.Tortured: Abused and neglected by Britain’s most sadistic mum. This is my story of survival.
By Victoria Spry. 2015
As a child, Victoria Spry was brutally beaten, neglected and starved by the woman she called Mummy.To the outside world…
Eunice Spry was a devoted parent, but behind closed doors she was an evil tyrant. Instead of protecting, loving and caring for Victoria, she forced bleach and urine down her throat, knocked out her teeth, tied her up naked and made her live in squalor. It took eighteen years of heartache and despair before she found the courage to expose her mum.Tortured is Victoria’s gripping story of survival.The Best American Travel Writing 2021 (The Best American Series)
By Jason Wilson. 2021
&“The beauty of good writing is that it transports the reader inside another person&’s experience in some other physical place…
and culture,&” writes Padma Lakshmi in her introduction, &“and, at its best, evokes a palpable feeling of being in a specific moment in time and space.&” The essays in this year&’s Best American Travel Writing are an antidote to the isolation of the year 2020, giving us views into experiences unlike our own and taking us on journeys we could not take ourselves. From the lively music of West Africa, to the rich culinary traditions of Muslims in Northwest China, to the thrill of a hunt in Alaska, this collection is a treasure trove of diverse places and cultures, providing the comfort, excitement, and joy of feeling elsewhere. THE BEST AMERICAN TRAVEL WRITING 2021 INCLUDES KIESE MAKEBA LAYMON • LESLIE JAMISON • BILL BUFORD • JON LEE ANDERSON • MEGHAN DAUM LIGAYA MISHAN • PAUL THEROUX and othersThe Best American Short Stories 2013 (The Best American Series)
By Elizabeth Strout. 2013
&“As our vision becomes more global, our storytelling is stretching in many ways. Stories increasingly change point of view, switch…
location, and sometimes pack as much material as a short novel might,&” writes guest editor Elizabeth Strout. &“It&’s the variety of voices that most indicates the increasing confluence of cultures involved in making us who we are.&” The Best American Short Stories 2013 presents an impressive diversity of writers who dexterously lead us into their corners of the world. In &“Miss Lora,&” Junot Díaz masterfully puts us in the mind of a teenage boy who throws aside his better sense and pursues an intimate affair with a high school teacher. Sheila Kohler tackles innocence and abuse as a child wanders away from her mother, in thrall to a stranger she believes is the &“Magic Man.&” Kirstin Valdez Quade&’s &“Nemecia&” depicts the after-effects of a secret, violent family trauma. Joan Wickersham&’s &“The Tunnel&” is a tragic love story about a mother&’s declining health and her daughter&’s helplessness as she struggles to balance her responsibility to her mother and her own desires. New author Callan Wink&’s &“Breatharians&” unsettles the reader as a farm boy shoulders a grim chore in the wake of his parents&’ estrangement.&“Elizabeth Strout was a wonderful reader, an author who knows well that the sound of one&’s writing is just as important as and indivisible from the content,&” writes series editor Heidi Pitlor. &“Here are twenty compellingly told, powerfully felt stories about urgent matters with profound consequences.&”Poor People
By William T. Vollmann. 2007
That was the simple yet groundbreaking question William T. Vollmann asked in cities and villages around the globe. The result…
of Vollmann's fearless inquiry is a view of poverty unlike any previously offered.Poor People struggles to confront poverty in all its hopelessness and brutality, its pride and abject fear, its fierce misery and quiet resignation, allowing the poor to explain the causes and consequences of their impoverishment in their own cultural, social, and religious terms. With intense compassion and a scrupulously unpatronizing eye, Vollmann invites his readers to recognize in our fellow human beings their full dignity, fallibility, pride, and pain, and the power of their hard-fought resilience.Some images that appeared in the print edition of this book are unavailable in the electronic edition due to rights reasons.Burn This Book: Notes on Literature and Engagement
By Toni Morrison. 2009
Published in conjunction with the PEN American Center, Burn This Book is a powerful collection of essays that explore the…
meaning of censorship and the power of literature to inform the way we see the world, and ourselves.As Americans we often take our freedom of speech for granted. When we talk about censorship we talk about China, the former Soviet Union, or the Middle East. But recent political developments—including the passage of the Patriot Act—have shined a spotlight on profound acts of censorship in our own backyard. Burn This Book features a sterling roster of award-winning writers offering their incisive, uncensored views on this most essential topic, including such revered literary heavyweights as Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, Orhan Pamuk, David Grossman, and Nadine Gordimer, among others.Both provocative and timely, Burn This Book is certain to inspire strong opinions and ignite spirited, serious dialogue.Collecting Himself: James Thurber on Writing and Writers, Humor and Himself
By Michael J. Rosen. 1989
“Thurber is. . . a landmark in American humor. . . he is the funniest artist who ever lived.” — New…
RepublicJames Thurber spent most of his career at the New Yorker magazine, drawing cartoons and writing essays and stories. Collecting Himself is a one-of-a-kind compilation of James Thurber's vintage writings, featuring previously unanthologized articles, essays, interviews, reviews, cartoons, parodies, as well as Thurber's reflections on his work in theater and at the New Yorker. An eclectic body of work that offers a glimpse into Thurber the man, the philosopher, and the critic.In this breathtaking cultural history filled with exclusive, never-before-revealed details, celebrated rock journalist Joel Selvin tells the definitive story of…
the Rolling Stones’ infamous Altamont concert, the disastrous historic event that marked the end of the idealistic 1960s.In the annals of rock history, the Altamont Speedway Free Festival on December 6, 1969, has long been seen as the distorted twin of Woodstock—the day that shattered the Sixties’ promise of peace and love when a concertgoer was killed by a member of the Hells Angels, the notorious biker club acting as security. While most people know of the events from the film Gimme Shelter, the whole story has remained buried in varied accounts, rumor, and myth—until now.Altamont explores rock’s darkest day, a fiasco that began well before the climactic death of Meredith Hunter and continued beyond that infamous December night. Joel Selvin probes every aspect of the show—from the Stones’ hastily planned tour preceding the concert to the bad acid that swept through the audience to other deaths that also occurred that evening—to capture the full scope of the tragedy and its aftermath. He also provides an in-depth look at the Grateful Dead’s role in the events leading to Altamont, examining the band’s behind-the-scenes presence in both arranging the show and hiring the Hells Angels as security.The product of twenty years of exhaustive research and dozens of interviews with many key players, including medical staff, Hells Angels members, the stage crew, and the musicians who were there, and featuring sixteen pages of color photos, Altamont is the ultimate account of the final event in rock’s formative and most turbulent decade.Black Birds in the Sky: The Story and Legacy of the 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre
By Brandy Colbert. 2021
A searing new work of nonfiction from award-winning author Brandy Colbert about the history and legacy of one of the…
most deadly and destructive acts of racial violence in American history: the Tulsa Race Massacre. Winner, Boston Globe-Horn Book Award. In the early morning of June 1, 1921, a white mob marched across the train tracks in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and into its predominantly Black Greenwood District—a thriving, affluent neighborhood known as America's Black Wall Street. They brought with them firearms, gasoline, and explosives.In a few short hours, they'd razed thirty-five square blocks to the ground, leaving hundreds dead. The Tulsa Race Massacre is one of the most devastating acts of racial violence in US history. But how did it come to pass? What exactly happened? And why are the events unknown to so many of us today?These are the questions that award-winning author Brandy Colbert seeks to answer in this unflinching nonfiction account of the Tulsa Race Massacre. In examining the tension that was brought to a boil by many factors—white resentment of Black economic and political advancement, the resurgence of white supremacist groups, the tone and perspective of the media, and more—a portrait is drawn of an event singular in its devastation, but not in its kind. It is part of a legacy of white violence that can be traced from our country's earliest days through Reconstruction, the Civil Rights movement in the mid–twentieth century, and the fight for justice and accountability Black Americans still face today.The Tulsa Race Massacre has long failed to fit into the story Americans like to tell themselves about the history of their country. This book, ambitious and intimate in turn, explores the ways in which the story of the Tulsa Race Massacre is the story of America—and by showing us who we are, points to a way forward.YALSA Honor Award for Excellence in NonfictionThe Writer's Library: The Authors You Love on the Books That Changed Their Lives
By Nancy Pearl, Jeff Schwager. 2020
NEW & NOTEWORTHY ~ THE NEW YORK TIMES With a Foreword by Susan Orlean, twenty-three of today's living literary legends, including Donna…
Tartt, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Andrew Sean Greer, Laila Lalami, and Michael Chabon, reveal the books that made them think, brought them joy, and changed their lives in this intimate, moving, and insightful collection from "American's Librarian" and recipient of the National Book Foundation's Literarian Award for Outstanding Service Nancy Pearl and noted playwright Jeff Schwager that celebrates the power of literature and reading to connect us all.Before Jennifer Egan, Louise Erdrich, Luis Alberto Urrea, and Jonathan Lethem became revered authors, they were readers. In this ebullient book, America’s favorite librarian Nancy Pearl and noted-playwright Jeff Schwager interview a diverse range of America's most notable and influential writers about the books that shaped them and inspired them to leave their own literary mark. Illustrated with beautiful line drawings, The Writer’s Library is a revelatory exploration of the studies, libraries, and bookstores of today’s favorite authors—the creative artists whose imagination and sublime talent make America's literary scene the wonderful, dynamic world it is. A love letter to books and a celebration of wordsmiths, The Writer’s Library is a treasure for anyone who has been moved by the written word. The authors in The Writer’s Library are:Russell BanksTC BoyleMichael ChabonSusan ChoiJennifer EganDave EggersLouise ErdrichRichard FordLaurie FrankelAndrew Sean GreerJane HirshfieldSiri HustvedtCharles JohnsonLaila LalamiJonathan LethemDonna TarttMadeline MillerViet Thanh NguyenLuis Alberto UrreaVendela VidaAyelet WaldmanMaaza MengisteAmor TowlesScreen Tests: Stories and Other Writing
By Kate Zambreno. 2019
Best Book of 2019: Nylon, Domino, Bustle, Book Riot, Buzzfeed, Vol. 1 BrooklynA new work equal parts observational micro-fiction and…
cultural criticism reflecting on the dailiness of life as a woman and writer, on fame and failure, aging and art, from the acclaimed author of Heroines, Green Girl, and O Fallen Angel.In the first half of Kate Zambreno’s astoundingly original collection Screen Tests, the narrator regales us with incisive and witty swatches from a life lived inside a brilliant mind, meditating on aging and vanity, fame and failure, writing and writers, along with portraits of everyone from Susan Sontag to Amal Clooney, Maurice Blanchot to Louise Brooks. The series of essays that follow, on figures central to Zambreno’s thinking, including Kathy Acker, David Wojnarowicz, and Barbara Loden, are manifestoes about art, that ingeniously intersect and chime with the stories that came before them."If Thomas Bernhard's and Fleur Jaeggy's work had a charming, slightly misanthropic baby—with Diane Arbus as nanny—it would be Screen Tests. Kate Zambreno turns her precise and meditative pen toward a series of short fictions that are anything but small. The result is a very funny, utterly original look at cultural figures and tropes and what it means to be a human looking at humans.”—Amber Sparks“In Screen Tests, a voice who both is and is not the author picks up a thread and follows it wherever it leads, leaping from one thread to another without quite letting go, creating a delicate and ephemeral and wonderful portrait of how a particular mind functions. Call them stories (after Lydia Davis), reports (after Gerald Murnane), or screen tests (inventing a new genre altogether like Antoine Volodine). These are marvelously fugitive pieces, carefully composed while giving the impression of being effortless, with a quite lovely Calvino-esque lightness, that are a joy to try to keep up with.”—Brian EvensonThe Best American Short Stories 2014 (The Best American Series)
By Heidi Pitlor. 2014
“The literary ‘Oscars’ features twenty outstanding examples of the best of the best in American short stories.” — Shelf Awareness…
for ReadersThe Best American Short Stories 2014 will be selected by national best-selling author Jennifer Egan, who won the 2011 Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction for A Visit from the Goon Squad, heralded by Time magazine as “a new classic of American fiction.” Egan “possesses a satirist’s eye and a romance novelist’s heart” (New York Times Book Review).The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 (The Best American Series)
By Daniel Handler. 2014
“Lively, eclectic and surprising.” — Minneapolis Star TribuneDaniel Handler, aka Lemony Snicket, author of the enormously popular young adult series A Series of…
Unfortunate Events, takes over as editor for this volume. He will work with the students of 826 Valencia and 826 Michigan writing labs to compile new fiction, nonfiction, poetry, comics, and other category-defying gems, ensuring that “if you need to fall in love with reading again — or just want a reminder that high school students deserve a lot more than their reading lists give them — then this is the book for you” (Bust).The Best American Essays 2021 (The Best American Series)
By Robert Atwan. 2021
A collection of the year&’s best essays, selected by award-winning journalist and New Yorker staff writer Kathryn Schulz&“The world is abundant…
even in bad times,&” guest editor Kathryn Schulz writes in her introduction, &“it is lush with interestingness, and always, somewhere, offering up consolation or beauty or humor or happiness, or at least the hope of future happiness.&” The essays Schulz selected are a powerful time capsule of 2020, showcasing that even if our lives as we knew them stopped, the beauty to be found in them flourished. From an intimate account of nursing a loved one in the early days of the pandemic, to a masterful portrait of grieving the loss of a husband as the country grieved the loss of George Floyd, this collection brilliantly shapes the grief, hardship, and hope of a singular year.The Best American Essays 2021 includes ELIZABETH ALEXANDER • HILTON ALS • GABRIELLE HAMILTON • RUCHIR JOSHI • PATRICIA LOCKWOOD• CLAIRE MESSUD • WESLEY MORRIS • BETH NGUYEN • JESMYN WARD and othersA Few Red Drops: The Chicago Race Riot of 1919
By Claire Hartfield. 2018
This mesmerizing narrative nonfiction draws on contemporary accounts as it traces the roots of an explosion that had been building…
for decades in race relations, politics, business, and clashes of culture.Coretta Scott King Award winner * Carter G. Woodson Book Award from the National Council for the Social StudiesOn a hot day in July 1919, five black youths went swimming in Lake Michigan, unintentionally floating close to the "white" beach. An angry white man began throwing stones at the boys, striking and killing one.Racial conflict on the beach erupted into days of urban violence that shook the city of Chicago to its foundations. A Few Red Drops is "readable, compelling history," The Horn Book wrote, adding that the book uses "meticulously chosen archival photos, documents, newspaper clippings, and quotes from multiple primary sources."Includes archival photos and prints, source notes, bibliography, and an index.The Best American Essays 2020 (The Best American Series)
By André Aciman, Robert Atwan. 2020
A collection of the year&’s best essays selected by André Aciman, author of the worldwide bestseller Call Me by Your Name. &“An…
essay is the child of uncertainty,&” André Aciman contends in his introduction to The Best American Essays 2020. &“The struggle to write what one hopes is entirely true, and the long incubation every piece of writing requires of a writer who is thinking difficult thoughts, are what ultimately give the writing its depth, its magnitude, its grace.&” The essays Aciman selected center on people facing moments of deep uncertainty, searching for a greater truth. From a Black father&’s confrontation of his son&’s illness, to a divorcée&’s transcendent experience with strangers, to a bartender grieving the tragic loss of a friend, these stories are a master class not just in essay writing but in empathy, artfully imbuing moments of hardship with understanding and that elusive grace. The Best American 2020 Essays includes RABIH ALAMEDDINE • BARBARA EHRENREICH • LESLIE JAMISON JAMAICA KINCAID • ALEX MARZANO-LESNEVICH • A. O. SCOTT • JERALD WALKER • STEPHANIE POWELL WATTS and othersThoughts on Peace in an Air Raid
By Virginia Woolf. 2009
'The Germans were over this house last night and the night before that. Here they are again. It is a…
queer experience, lying in the dark and listening to the zoom of a hornet, which may at any moment sting you to death. It is a sound that interrupts cool and consecutive thinking about peace. Yet it is a sound - far more than prayers and anthems - that should compel one to think about peace. Unless we can think peace into existence we - not this one body in this one bed but millions of bodies yet to be born - will lie in the same darkness and hear the same death rattle overhead.'Throughout history, some books have changed the world. They have transformed the way we see ourselves - and each other. They have inspired debate, dissent, war and revolution. They have enlightened, outraged, provoked and comforted. They have enriched lives - and destroyed them. Now Penguin brings you the works of the great thinkers, pioneers, radicals and visionaries whose ideas shook civilization and helped make us who we are.Thomas And Jane Carlyle: Portrait of a Marriage
By Rosemary Ashton. 1842
They were the most remarkable couple in London: the great sage Carlyle, with his vehement prophecies, and his witty, sardonic…
wife Jane. It was a strong, close, mutually admiring yet often mutually antagonistic partnership, fascinating to all who observed it. The Carlyles lived at the heart of English life in mid-Victorian London, but both were outsiders, a largely self-educated Scottish pair who took a sometimes caustic look at the society they so influenced - Carlyle through his copious writings, and both through their network of acquaintances and correspondents. Carlyle's fame was confirmed by his Sartor Resartus of 1843, The French Revolution, his lectures on heroes and hero-worship and by his radical account of contemporary industrial Britain in Past and Present, 1843. Both husband and wife were great letter-writers, Carlyle commenting on the matters of the day, dashing off pen portraits of those he met and Jane with her brilliant stories and her sharp, dry humour. Yet despite her brilliance, Jane suffered, especially from Carlyle's infatuation with the lion-hunting Lady Ashburton, and the tensions in their marriage grew. The letters they wrote, both to each other and to others, make theirs the most well-documented marriage of the nineteenth century and give us an unequalled portrait of a famously unhappy marriage. This moving and vivid biography describes their relationship with each other, from their first meeting in 1821 to Jane's death in 1866, and also their relationship with the world outside. Rosemary Ashton's inimitable blend of rigorous scholarship, warm sensitivity and lively wit makes this not only a portrait of a marriage but a picture of a whole age, elegant, erudite and entertaining.That Peckham Boy: Growing Up, Getting Out and Giving Back
By Kenny Imafidon. 2023
'Kenny's story shows us that we all have the potential to achieve extraordinary things. What a hero.' Bear Grylls'If you…
are compelled by a hero's journey, then Kenny Imafidon is a hero for this generation.' Simon SinekFor fans of Poverty Safari and Skint Estate, That Peckham Boy is a real-life manifesto calling for positive change for those on the fringes of society.'When you're writing the story of your life, make sure you're holding the pen. In this life you can be whoever you want to be.'Two days after his eighteenth birthday, Kenny Imafidon was charged with the murder of a seventeen-year-old boy in south-east London. The middle child of a single mother with ambitions for her children, Kenny grew up near an estate in Peckham where deprivation and hopelessness were rife, and gang culture flourished in his community. Kenny faced a minimum of thirty years behind bars - longer than the life he had lived.When the case against Kenny collapsed, he quickly realised that his name was still inextricably linked with a horrific crime he hadn't committed. He decided to rewrite his story. It began with The Kenny Report, which he delivered to the House of Commons and which detailed the experiences of marginalised young people who drift into gangs, and has led to extensive work with charities, communities and policy-makers that is helping to change the narratives of other young people just like Kenny.A candid and unfiltered take on some of the most challenging topics that define our times, That Peckham Boy is a personal manifesto exploring what it means to be young, Black and poor in the city. It is shaped by Kenny's difficult childhood, his transformative time in prison, and the people and conversations that took him from being on trial for murder into the company of some of the most successful people in the world.Tell Me the Truth About Love: 13 Tales from Couple Therapy
By Susanna Abse. 2022
'Brilliant and touching' Maggie O'Farrell'A must-read for everyone wanting to understand more about what makes us fall in - and…
out - of love' Philippa Perry'A charming, useful, kind book about the pains and hopes of relationships' Alain de BottonDrawing on over 30 years of therapeutic encounters with people facing hurdles in their love lives, former Chair of the British Psychoanalytic Council Susanna Abse takes us deep inside one of the most fascinating realms there is: other people's relationships.Candid and captivating, each chapter is inspired by a classic, timeless story. Parents blow their straw house down; Rapunzel yearns for companionship but remains trapped in her castle. Couples strive to navigate the fall from Eden, the bitter taste of the poison apple and strangers in their beds.From dealing with infidelity to navigating our changing role within a single relationship over the course of a lifetime, Tell Me the Truth About Love sheds vivid light on the human heart, and its struggle to both embrace life's greatest gift and protect itself from pain. Inside, you will find solace, wisdom and unparalleled insight into how, and why, we love.