Literary Collection Books
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The 60s: The Story of a Decade
The New Yorker Magazine
(Hardcover)
List Price: $35.00 Our Price: $15.09
This fascinating anthology collects notable New Yorker pieces from the most tumultuous years of the twentieth century - including work by James Baldwin, Pauline Kael, Sylvia Plath, Roger Angell, and Muriel Spark - alongside new assessments of the 1960s by some of today’s finest writers.Here are real-time accounts of these years, brought to immediate and profound life: Calvin Trillin reports on the integration of Southern universities, E. B. White and John Updike wrestle with the enormity of the Kennedy assassination, and Jonathan Schell travels with American troops into the jungles of Vietnam. Some of the truly timeless works of American journalism came out of The New Yorker that decade, including Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring, and James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time, all excerpted here. The arts, too, underwent an extraordinary transformation, with the magazine publishing such indelible short story masterpieces as John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” and John Updike’s “A & P”; iconic poems by Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton; and in-depth profiles of crucial cultural figures like Bob Dylan, Allen Ginsberg, Mike Nichols and Elaine May, and Muhammad Ali (when he was still Cassius Clay). This collection of groundbreaking pieces is also given contemporary context by current New Yorker writers, resulting in an incomparable portrait of a truly galvanizing era.Including contributions by Renata Adler • Roger Angell • Hannah Arendt • James Baldwin • Truman Capote • Rachel Carson • John Cheever • Mavis Gallant • Pauline Kaell • Jane Kramer • John McPhee • Sylvia Plath • Muriel Spark • Calvin Trillin • John Updike • E. B. WhiteAnd featuring new perspectives by Jennifer Egan • Malcolm Gladwell • Dana Goodyear • Adam Gopnik • Jill Lepore • Larissa MacFarquhar • Evan Osnos • George Packer • Kelefa Sanneh
97,196 Words: Essays
Carrere, Emmanuel
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Our Price: $10.79
A selection of the best short work by France's greatest living nonfiction writerNo one writes nonfiction like Emmanuel Carrère. Although he takes cues from such literary heroes as Truman Capote and Janet Malcolm, Carrère has, over the course of his career, reinvented the form in a search for truth in all its guises. Dispensing with the rules of genre, he takes what he needs from every available form or discipline - be it theology, historiography, fiction, reportage, or memoir - and fuses it under the pressure of an inimitable combination of passion, curiosity, intellect, and wit. With an oeuvre unique in world literature for its blend of empathy and playfulness, Carrère stands as one of our most distinctive and important literary voices.97,196 Words introduces Carrère’s shorter works to an English-language audience. Featuring more than thirty extraordinary essays written over an illustrious twenty-five-year period of Carrère’s creative life, this collection shows an exceptional mind at work. Spanning continents, histories, and personal relationships, and treating everything from American heroin addicts to the writing of In Cold Blood, from the philosophy of Philip K. Dick to a single haunting sentence in a minor story by H. P. Lovecraft, from Carrère’s own botched interview with Catherine Deneuve to the week he spent following the future French president Emmanuel Macron, 97,196 Words considers the divides between truth, reality, and our shared humanity as it explores remarkable events and eccentric lives, including Carrère’s own.
The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
Dillard, Annie
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.99 Our Price: $6.25
The Abundance includes the best of Annie Dillard's essays, delivered in her fierce and muscular prose. Intense, vivid, and fearless, her work endows the true and seemingly ordinary aspects of life with beauty and irony. These essays invite readers into sweeping landscapes, to join her in exploring the complexities of time and death, often with wry humor. On one page, an eagle falls from the sky with a weasel attached to its throat; on another, a man walks into a bar.Marking the vigor of this powerful writer, The Abundance highlights Annie Dillard's elegance of mind.
The Abundance: Narrative Essays Old and New
Dillard, Annie
(Hardcover)
List Price: $25.99 Our Price: $9.79
In recognition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself.
Air Traffic: A Memoir of Ambition and Manhood in America
Pardlo, Gregory
(Hardcover)
List Price: $26.95 Our Price: $4.89
From the beloved Pulitzer Prize-winning poet: an extraordinary memoir and blistering meditation on fatherhood, race, addiction, and ambition. Gregory Pardlo's father was a brilliant and charismatic man--a leading labor organizer who presided over a happy suburban family of four. But when he loses his job following the famous air traffic controllers' strike of 1981, he succumbs to addiction and exhausts the family's money on more and more ostentatious whims. In the face of this troubling model and disillusioned presence in the household, young Gregory rebels. Struggling to distinguish himself on his own terms, he hustles off to Marine Corps boot camp. He moves across the world, returning to the United States only to take a job as a manager-cum-barfly at his family's jazz club. Air Traffic follows Gregory as he builds a life that honors his history without allowing it to define his future. Slowly, he embraces the challenges of being a poet, a son, and a father as he enters recovery for alcoholism and tends to his family. In this memoir, written in lyrical and sparkling prose, Gregory tries to free himself from the overwhelming expectations of race and class, and from the tempting yet ruinous legacy of American masculinity. Air Traffic is a richly realized, deeply felt ode to one man's remarkable father, to fatherhood, and to the frustrating yet redemptive ties of family. It is also a scrupulous, searing examination of how manhood can be fashioned in our cultural landscape.
And Yet...
Hitchens, Christopher
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Our Price: $8.69
The seminal, uncollected essays by the late Christopher Hitchens, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller God Is Not Great, showcase the notorious contrarian’s genius for rhetoric and his sharp rebukes to tyrants and the ill-informed everywhere.
Approaching Eye Level
Gornick, Vivian
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $7.09
Vivian Gornick's Approaching Eye Level is a brave collection of personal essays that finds a quintessentially contemporary woman (urban, single, feminist) trying to observe herself and the world without sentiment, cynicism, or nostalgia. Whether walking along the streets of New York or teaching writing at a university, Gornick is a woman exploring her need for conversation and connection - with men and women, colleagues and strangers. She recalls her stint as a waitress in the Catskills and a failed friendship with an older woman and mentor, and reconsiders her experiences in the feminist movement, while living alone, and in marriage.Turning her trademark sharp eye on herself, Gornick works to see her part in things - how she has both welcomed and avoided contact, and how these attempts at connections have enlivened and, at times, defeated her. First published in 1996, Approaching Eye Level is an unrelentingly honest collection of essays that finds Gornick at her best, reminding us that we can come to know ourselves only by engaging fully with the world.
The Areas of My Expertise
Hodgman, John
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.00 Our Price: $4.39
Hot on the heels of the #1 bestsellers The Onion's Our Dumb Century and Jon Stewart's America comes The Areas of My Expertise, the brilliant and uproarious #15 bestseller (i.e., a runaway phenomenon in its own right - no, seriously) - a lavish compendium of handy reference tables, fascinating trivia, and sage wisdom - all of it completely unresearched, completely undocumented and (presumably) completely untrue, fabricated by the illuminating, prodigious imagination of John Hodgman, certifiable genius.
Arguably: Essays
Hitchens, Christopher
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Our Price: $8.89
For nearly four decades, Hitchens showed readers how to grapple with the principles of reason, tolerance, and skepticism that define the formations of civilization. Legions of readers, admirers and detractors alike, have learned to read Hitchens with awe at his felicity of language, his enviable wit, and his readiness.
The Art of the Personal Essay
Lopate, Phillip
(Paperback)
List Price: $17.95 Our Price: $8.89
The first anthology devoted to the literary form known as the personal essay. A compilation of more than 60 selections by such masters as Plutarch, Montaigne, Orwell, Baldwin, Tanizaki, and Woolf, as well as contemporary personal essayists from throughout the world.
The Associated Press Stylebook and Briefing on Media Law 2017
Associated Press
(Paperback)
List Price: $21.99 Sale: $1.71
The style of The Associated Press is the gold standard for news writing. With The Associated Press Stylebook in hand, you can learn how to write and edit with the clarity and professionalism for which the agency's writers and editors are famous. Fully revised and updated to reflect the latest changes in writing style, this new edition contains more than 3,000 A-to-Z entries detailing the AP's rules on grammar, spelling, capitalization, abbreviation, and word and numeral usage. You'll find answers to such wide-ranging questions as:• When should the names of government bodies be spelled out and when should they be abbreviated?• What are the general definitions of the major religious movements?• Which companies do the big media conglomerates own?• Who are all the members of the British Commonwealth?• How should box scores for baseball games be filed?• What constitutes "fair use"?• What exactly does the Freedom of Information Act cover?With invaluable additional sections on the unique guidelines for business and sports reporting and on how you can guard against libel land copyright infringement, The AP Stylebook is the one reference that all writers, editors, and students cannot afford to be without.
ATTENTION: Dispatches from a Land of Distraction
Cohen, Joshua
(Paperback)
List Price: $20.00 Our Price: $7.59
One of Granta’s Best of Young American Novelists, Joshua Cohen arrives with his first collection of nonfiction, the culmination of two decades of writing and thought about life in the digital age. In essays, memoir, criticism, diary entries, and letters—many appearing here for the first time—Cohen covers the full depth and breadth of modern life: politics, literature, art, music, travel, the media, and psychology, and subjects as diverse as Google, Donald Trump, Bernie Sanders, fictional animals, Gustav Mahler, Aretha Franklin, John Zorn, landscape photography, fake Caravaggios, Wikipedia, Gertrude Stein, Edward Snowden, Jonathan Franzen, Olympic women’s fencing, Atlantic City casinos, the closing of the Ringling Bros. circus, and Azerbaijan. Throughout ATTENTION, Cohen directs his sharp gaze at home and abroad, calling upon his extraordinary erudition and unrivaled ability to draw connections between seemingly unlike things to show us how to live without fear in a world overflowing with information. In each piece, he projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his, and a voice as witty, profound, and distinct as any in American letters.At this crucial juncture in history, ATTENTION is a guide for the perplexed—a handbook for anyone hoping to bring the wisdom of the past into the culture of the future.
Autumn
Knausgaard, Karl Ove
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Our Price: $7.35
Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter. He adds one short piece per day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerizing intensity that have become his trademark. This tender and deeply personal book is beautifully illustrated by Vanessa Baird, and is the first of four volumes marveling at the vast, unknowable universe around us.
Autumn
Knausgaard, Karl Ove
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Our Price: $5.99
From one of the masters of contemporary literature comes the first in an autobiographical quartet based on the four seasons. Autumn begins with a letter Karl Ove Knausgaard writes to his unborn daughter. He adds one short piece pr day, describing the material and natural world with the precision and mesmerizing intensity that have become his trademark. The sun, wasps, jellyfish, eyes, lice - the stuff of everyday life is the fodder for his art. Nothing is too small or too great to escape his attention. A beautifully illustrated personal encyclopedia on everything from chewing gum to the stars, Autumn shows us how vast, unknowable, and wondrous the world is.
Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies
Kluwe, Chris
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Our Price: $3.29
Hi. In your hands, right now, you hold the culmination of thousands of years of human intelligence, ingenuity, and brilliance. Now put your goddamn phone down and pay attention to my book. What is in my book, you ask? (I'm really glad you asked, by the way, because now I get to tell you.) Time travel. Gay marriage. Sportsballing. Futuristic goggles that DO NOTHING. Tiny brags from my publisher, stuff like: "This is an uproarious, uncensored take on empathy, personal responsibility, and what it means to be human." Excessive brags about myself: "An extraordinarily clever, punishingly funny, sharp-tongued blogosphere star, NFL player, husband and father, one-time violin prodigy, voracious lifetime reader, obsessive gamer, and fearless champion of personal freedom." Oh, and also an essay on the Pope's Twitter account. Honestly, if that doesn't draw you in, there's no hope left for humanity. I also give my own funeral eulogy, in case you were hoping I'd go away and die now! So please, join me in the glorious art of windmill tilting by reading this "collection of rousing, uncensored personal essays, letters, and stories" (I have no idea why that's in quotes). Join the herd of Beautifully Unique Sparkleponies. (You know you want to.)
Best African American Fiction: 2009
Early, Gerald (Edt)
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $7.79
"Best African American Fiction" brings together short fiction by well known and up-and coming young writers to watch.
Best Food Writing 2017
Hughes, Holly
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.99 Sale: $2.46
From small-town bakeries to big city restaurants, Best Food Writing offers a bounty of everything in one place. For eighteen years, Holly Hughes has scoured both the online and print world to serve up the finest collection of food writing. This year, Best food Writing delves into the intersection of fine dining and food justice, culture and ownership, tradition and modernity; as well as profiles on some of the most fascinating people in the culinary world today. Once again, these standout essays--compelling, hilarious, poignant, illuminating--speak to the core of our hearts and fill our bellies. Whether you're a fan of Michel Richard or Guy Fieri--or both--there's something for everyone here. Take a seat and dig in.
Between Eternities: And Other Writings (Vintage International)
Marias, Javier
(Paperback)
List Price: $15.95 Our Price: $5.49
A new, exhilarating collection of critical and personal writings--spanning more than twenty years of work--from the internationally renowned author of The Infatuations and A Heart So White. Javier Marías is a tireless examiner of the world around us: essayist, novelist, translator, voracious reader, enthusiastic debunker of pretension, and vigorous polymath. He is able to discover what many of us fail to notice or have never put into words, and he keeps looking long after most of us have turned away. This new collection of essays--by turns literary, philosophical, and autobiographical--journeys from the crumbling canals of Venice to the wide horizons of the Wild West, and Marías captures each new vista with razor-sharp acuity and wit. He explores, with characteristic relish, subjects ranging from soccer to classic cinema, from comic books and toy soldiers to mortality and memory, from "The Most Conceited of Cities" to "Why Almost No One Can Be Trusted," making each brilliantly and inimitably his own. Trenchant and wry, subversive and penetrating, Between Eternities is a collection of dazzling intellectual curiosity, offering a window into the expansive mind of the man so often said to be Spain's greatest living writer.
Big Shoes: In Celebration of Dads and Fatherhood
Al Roker
(Hardcover)
List Price: $19.95 Our Price: $2.29
From Al Roker and friends, a new book in celebration of Dad, just in time for Father's Day! Bestselling author and beloved Today show personality Al Roker teams up with his celebrity friends to share personal thoughts, stories, and reflections on fathers and fatherhood in this heartwarming collection. A dad is always there to provide support and encouragement just when it's needed most, as well as help teach us some of life's most invaluable lessons -- from how to fly a kite and pitch a tent to how to change a tire, negotiate a raise, or take on our first big home improvement project. Now it's time to say thank you! In Big Shoes, Al Roker and 45 other well-known personalities share personal stories about how their fathers have been there for them during times of both adversity and triumph, and the countless large and small ways they've shaped their lives throughout the years. These essays remind us of the important -- and lasting -- legacy of our dads, even as we've grown up and gone on to start families of our own. A stellar group of contributors reflects on the importance of fathers and fatherhood, including: --Matt Lauer --Katie Couric --Beau Bridges --Bonnie Rait --Kris Kristofferson --Lemony Snicket (aka Daniel Handler) --Bradley Whitford --Robert Mondavi --Dr. Dean Ornish --B.D. Wong --and many more!
Bit Rot: Stories and Essays
Coupland, Douglas
(Hardcover)
List Price: $27.00 Our Price: $4.39
A thought-provoking, binge-worthy new collection of essays, stories, and musings from Douglas Coupland, Bit Rot explores the different ways in which twentieth-century notions of the future are being shredded, and it is a literary gem of the digital age."Bit rot" is a term used in digital archiving to describe the way digital files can spontaneously and quickly decompose. As Douglas Coupland writes, "Bit rot also describes the way my brain has been feeling since 2000, as I shed older and weaker neurons and connections and enhance new and unexpected ones." Bit Rot the book is a fascinating meditation on the ways in which humanity tries to make sense of our shifting consciousness. Coupland, just like the Internet, mixes forms to achieve his ends. Short fiction is interspersed with essays on all aspects of modern life. The result is addictively satisfying for Coupland's established fanbase hungry for his observations about our world, and a revelation to new readers of his work. For almost three decades, his unique pattern recognition has powered his fiction, his phrase-making, and his visual art. Every page of Bit Rot is full of wit, surprise, and delight. Reading Bit Rot feels a lot like bingeing on Netflix... you can't stop with just one.
Black Is the Body: Stories from My Grandmother's Time, My Mother's Time, and Mine
Bernard, Emily
(Hardcover)
List Price: $25.95 Our Price: $10.55
"I am black--and brown, too," writes Emily Bernard. "Brown is the body I was born into. Black is the body of the stories I tell."And the storytelling, and the mystery of Bernard's storytelling, of getting to the truth, begins with a stabbing in a New England college town. Bernard writes how, when she was a graduate student at Yale, she walked into a coffee shop and, along with six other people, was randomly attacked by a stranger with a knife ("I remember making the decision not to let the oddness of this stranger bother me"). "I was not stabbed because I was black," she writes (the attacker was white), "but I have always viewed the violence I survived as a metaphor for the violent encounter that has generally characterized American race relations. There was no connection between us, yet we were suddenly and irreparably bound by a knife, an attachment that cost us both: him, his freedom; me, my wholeness."Bernard explores how that bizarre act of violence set her free and unleashed the storyteller in her ("The equation of writing and regeneration is fundamental to black American experience"). She writes in Black Is the Body how each of the essays goes beyond a narrative of black innocence and white guilt, how each is anchored in a mystery, and how each sets out to discover a new way of telling the truth as the author has lived it. "Blackness is an art, not a science. It is a paradox: intangible and visceral; a situation and a story. It is the thread that connects these essays, but its significance as an experience emerges randomly, unpredictably . . . Race is the story of my life, and therefore black is the body of this book."And what most interests Bernard is looking at "blackness at its borders, where it meets whiteness in fear and hope, in anguish and love."
Blended: Writers on the Stepfamily Experience
Waltz, Samantha (Edt)
(Paperback)
List Price: $16.00 Our Price: $5.99
Blended explores stepfamilies from the inside out through the perspectives of thirty writers who know what it’s like first hand. Sometimes funny, often poignant, and always deeply personal, the stories in Blended capture the essence of stepfamilies in all of their weird and wonderful varieties. The journeys range from the first encounters between new step-relatives, to marriages, honeymoons, daily experiences, and divorces. The diverse voices in Blended reflect the realities of today’s world, in which yesterday’s ideas of family structures and types just don’t cut it anymore. Parents, children, siblings, aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins: all of these relationships change when families are melded into one, and the writers of Blended help explore the truth of what these new relationships look like, and, especially, feel like. Blended offers something for everyone: laughter, wisdom, empathy, and guidance, and, above all, the knowledge that you are not alone.
Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells: The Best of Early Vanity Fair
Carter, Graydon (Edt)
(Paperback)
List Price: $18.00 Our Price: $7.35
Offering readers an inebriating swig from the great cocktail shaker of the Roaring Twenties—the Jazz Age, the age of Gatsby—Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers, and Swells showcases unforgettable writers in search of how to live well in a changing era. Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter introduces these fabulous pieces written between 1913 and 1936, when the magazine published a Murderers’ Row of the world’s leading literary lights, including: F. Scott Fitzgerald on what a magazine should be Clarence Darrow on equality e. e. cummings on Calvin Coolidge D. H. Lawrence on women Djuna Barnes on James Joyce John Maynard Keynes on the collapse in money value Dorothy Parker on a host of topics, from why she hates actresses to why she hasn’t married
Bond vs. Bond - The Many Faces of 007
Simpson, Paul
(Hardcover)
List Price: $28.00 Our Price: $3.89
Who is your favorite Bond? Whether you love Sean Connery, Roger Moore, or even Timothy Dalton, you are going to love Bond vs. Bond. A fully comprehensive guide, Bond vs. Bond compares and contrasts all of the various ways Ian Fleming's iconic British Secret Service agent, code name 007, has been interpreted through the years, from the books and movies to the guns and gadgets. Spanning from Fleming's 1953 book Casino Royale to Sam Mendes' 2012 film Skyfall, Bond vs. Bond features every incarnation of 007. Paul Simpson, co-author of Middle-earth Envisioned and That's What They Want You to Think, adds side-by-side comparisons of the weapons and gadgets, the heroines and femme fatales, and more! You'll be riveted with the expanse of Bond knowledge, facts and lore in these pages. This is definitely a book that no Bond fan should be without!
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