"In light of Russia's aggressive 2022 invasion of Ukraine, Goodbye, Eastern Europe is a crucial, elucidative read, a sweeping epic chronicling a thousand years of strife, war, and bloodshed--from pre-Christianity to the fall of Communism--illuminating the remarkable cultural significance and richness of a place perpetually lost to the margins of history. Eastern Europe, the moniker, has gone out of fashion since the fall of the Soviet Union. Ask someone...

The best-selling author offers a new collection of satirical and humorous essays that chronicle his own life and ordinary moments that turn beautifully absurd, including how he coped with the pandemic, his thoughts on becoming an orphan in his seventh decade, and the battle-scared America he discovered when he resumed touring.

"In Everything and Less, acclaimed critic Mark McGurl discovers a dynamic scene of literary experimentation in an unlikely location: in the realms of self-publishing created by Amazon. Reclaiming several works of self-published fiction from the abyss of critical disregard, McGurl offers a Copernican revolution in the world of letters: rather than giving central importance to the critically lionized highbrows-Colson Whitehead, Don DeLillo, Elena Ferrante,...

A WONDROUS BOOK OF MCPHEE'S PROSE PIECES-IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADES The brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker over a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing. In the nine other pieces here- highly varied in length and theme-McPhee ranges with his characteristic humor and intensity through lacrosse, long-exposure view-camera photography, the weird foods...

Essays inspired by Chabon's interactions with his four children and his own father illuminate the meaning, magic, and mysteries of fatherhood.

"The highly original, blistering, and unconventional memoir by the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sympathizer, which has now sold over one million copies worldwide. With insight, humor, formal invention, and lyricism, in A Man of Two Faces Viet Thanh Nguyen rewinds the film of his own life. He expands the genre of personal memoir by acknowledging larger stories of refugeehood, colonization, and ideas about Vietnam and America, writing with his...

Taking laughter's revelatory capacity as a starting point, and rooted in Nuar Alsadir's experience as a poet and psychoanalyst, Animal Joy is an ode to spontaneity and feeling alive. "Laughter shakes us out of our deadness. An outburst of spontaneous laughter is an eruption from the unconscious that, like political resistance, poetry, or self-revelation, expresses a provocative, impish drive to burst free from external constraints. Taking laughter's...

Blending literature and memoir, Ann Patchett, author of State of Wonder, Run, and Bel Canto, examines her deepest commitments-to writing, family, friends, dogs, books, and her husband-creating a resonant portrait of a life in This is the Story of a Happy Marriage. This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage takes us into the very real world of Ann Patchett's life. Stretching from her childhood to the present day, from a disastrous early marriage to a...

Letters to Camondo is a collection of imaginary letters from Edmund de Waal to Moise de Camondo, the banker and art collector who created a spectacular house in Paris, now the Mus�ee Nissim de Camondo, and filled it with the greatest private collection of French eighteenth-century art. The Camondos were a Jewish family from Constantinople, "the Rothschilds of the East," who made their home in Paris in the 1870s and became philanthropists, art collectors,...

“[A] collection of Clive James’s essays on a variety of literary topics . . . This is sanity, humor and acuity in the face of death” (The Wall Street Journal).
 
In 2010, Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that “if you don’t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do,” James moved his library to his...