Product Description: Donald Davis has remarked that he “didn’t learn stories, I just absorbed them” from a family of traditional storytellers that has lived on the same western North Carolina land since 1781. Considered by many to be the father of family tales, Donald turns the focus of his newest collection on his own father, Joe...read more

Product Description: Ranging from the shattered gentility of Edith Wharton's heroines to racial confrontation in the songs of Nina Simone, American Rhapsody presents a kaleidoscopic story of the creation of a culture. Here is a series of deeply involving portraits of American artists and innovators who have helped to shape the country in the modern age...read more

Product Description: Contemporary publishing, e-media, and writing owe much to an unsung hero who worked in the trenches of the culture industry (for pulp magazines, Hollywood films, and advertising) and caroused and collaborated with the avant-garde throughout the first half of the twentieth century...read more

Kate Braestrup's life was transformed by the loss of her husband; now Kate faces the possibility that she may lose her son.As a young mother Kate Braestrup discovered the fierce protectiveness that accompanies parenthood. In the intervening years--through mourning her husband and the joy of remarriage and a blended family-Kate has absorbed the rewards and complications of that spirit. But when her eldest son joins the Marines, Kate is at a crossroads: Can she reconcile her desire to protect her children with her family's legacy of service? Can parents balance the joy of a child's independence with the fear of letting go? As Kate examines the twinned emotions of faith and fear-inspired by the families she meets as a chaplain and by her son's journey towards purpose and familyhood-she learns that the threats we can't predict will rip us apart and knit us together.

A funny, frisky, often outrageous book about love, literature, and modern life—and a wink of the eye toU and I, Nicholson Baker’s classic book about John Updike—by an award-winning author called “wonderfully bright” by The New York Times Book Review.Nearly twenty-five years ago, Nicholson Baker published U and I, the fretful and handwringing—but also groundbreaking—tale of his literary relationship with John Updike. U and I inspired a whole sub-genre of engaging, entertaining writing about reading, but what no story of this type has ever done is tell its tale from the moment of conception, that moment when you realize that there is a writer out there in the world that you must read—so you read them. B & Me is that story, the story of J.C. Hallman discovering and reading Nicholson Baker, and discovering himself in the process. Our relationship to books in the digital age, the role of art in an increasingly commodified world, the power great writing has to change us, these are at the core of Hallman's investigation of Baker—questions he's grappled with, values he's come to doubt. But in reading Baker's work, Hallman discovers the key to overcoming the malaise that has been plaguing him, through the books themselves and what he finds and contemplates in his attempts to understand them and their enigmatic author: sex, book jackets, an old bed and breakfast, love, Monica Lewinsky, Paris, marriage, more sex, the logistics of libraries. In the spirit of Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage and Elif Batuman's The Possessed, B & Me is literary self-archaeology: a funny, irreverent, incisive story of one reader's desperate quest to restore passion to literature, and all the things he learns along the way.

Product Description: The New York Times bestseller from the beloved author of A Three Dog Life—an exhilarating, superbly written memoir on friendship, family, creativity, tragedy, and the richness of life: “If you only read one book this year, make it this one” (Ann Patchett)...read more

Product Description: An homage to the West and to two great writers who set the standard for all who celebrate and defend it.Archetypal wild man Edward Abbey and proper, dedicated Wallace Stegner left their footprints all over the western landscape. Now, award-winning nature writer David Gessner follows the ghosts of these two remarkable writer-environmentalists from Stegner's birthplace in Saskatchewan to the site of Abbey's pilgrimages to Arches National Park in Utah, braiding their stories and asking how they speak to the lives of all those who care about the West...read more

Product Description: Ernest Hemingway is a mythic writer and alpha male. As a hunter and conservationist, he drew greatly from the strong example of Theodore Roosevelt, and he much enjoyed teaching newcomers to shoot and hunt. Including short excerpts from Hemingway's works, these stories of his guns and rifles tell us as much about him as a lifelong, expert hunter and shooter and as a man...read more

Product Description: It is difficult to think of two twentieth century books by one author that have had as much influence on American culture when they were published as Alex Haley's monumental bestsellers, The Autobiography of Malcolm X (1965), and Roots (1976)...read more