Vikar Jerome steps into the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock ’n’ roll, sex, drugs, and — far more important to him — the decline of the movie studios and the rise of the independent director. Jerome will become a film editor of astonishing vision. Then through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the astonishing secret that lies in every movie ever made.

    In this new work, The Last Novel, an elderly author (referred to only as "Novelist") announces that since this will be his final effort, he has "carte blanche to do anything he damned well pleases."Pressed by solitude and age, Novelist's preoccupations inevitably turn to the stories of other artists — their genius, their lack of recognition, and their deaths. Keeping his personal history out of the story as much as possible, Novelist creates an incantatory stream of fascinating triumphs and failures from the lives of famous and not-so-famous painters, writers, musicians, sports figures, and scientists.As Novelist moves through his last years, a minimalist self-portrait emerges, becoming an intricate masterpiece from David Markson's astonishing imagination. Through these startling, sometimes comic, but often tragic anecdotes we unexpectedly discern the entire shape of a man's life.

    Now, The Library of America collects On the Road together with four other autobiographical “road books” published during a remarkable four-year period.The Dharma Bums (1958), at once an exploration of Buddhist spirituality and an account of the Bay Area poetry scene, is notable for its thinly veiled portraits of Kerouac’s acquaintances, including Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, and Kenneth Rexroth. The Subterraneans (1958) recounts a love affair set amid the bars and bohemian haunts of San Francisco. Tristessa (1960) is a melancholy novella describing a relationship with a prostitute in Mexico City. Lonesome Traveler (1960) collects travel essays that evoke journeys in Mexico and Europe, and concludes with an elegiac lament for the lost world of the American hobo. Also included in Road Novels are selections from Kerouac’s journal, which provide a fascinating perspective on his early impressions of material eventually incorporated into On the Road.

    When she's not getting locked in a root cellar, bringing frogs to church, or taking wild buggy rides, she's setting fireflies free and trying out new skateboards in all the wrong places. Kids will love this fun new series-full of adventure and mischief-by bestselling author, Wanda E. Brunstetter. Visit www.rachelyoderbooks.com to play online games, learn Amish words, and learn more about the Rachel Yoder Series! Other books in the Rachel Yoder series include Back to School, Out of Control, New Beginnings.

    Ex-lawyer Jack Gorse walls off his inner life with elaborate rituals and routines. Threatened with eviction from his longtime apartment and caught off-guard by an attraction to a near stranger, he takes steps that lead to the dramatic dissolution of the existence he's known.

    Two of his novels, Joe and Father and Son, won the Southern Book Critics Circle Award for fiction.Brown wrote with compassion, humor, and unflinching honesty about the struggles of rural and small-town working-class southerners. Twenty-nine years old when his writing career began, Brown's plainspoken style, sharp eye for detail, and keen ear for dialogue quickly established him as one of the most respected and compelling new voices in contemporary southern literature.Conversations with Larry Brown brings together interviews Brown gave between 1988 and 2004. The collection includes interview material from a full-length film documentary about Brown's life and work as well as two previously unpublished pieces. Across these conversations, Brown offers insights into all of his books and several of his short stories.

    It includes biographies of some of history's greatest leaders, geniuses, scientists, healers, artists and inventors.

    Through his unique, richly textured, and brilliantly realized novels, stories, parodies, satires, fables, and essays, Barthelme redefined a generation of American letters. To John Hawkes, he was “one of our greatest of all comic writers.” Robert Coover called him “one of our great citizens of contemporary world letters.” And to Thomas Pynchon, who coined the term Barthelismo, his work conveyed something of “the clarity and sweep, the intensity of emotion, the transcendent weirdness of the primary experience.”This collection presents all of Barthelme's previously unpublished and uncollected short fiction, as well as work not published in his two compendium editions, Sixty Storiesand Forty Stories. Highlights of Flying to America include three unpublished stories, “Among the Beanwoods,” “Heather,” and “Pandemonium”; fourteen stories never before available in book form-from his first published story, “Pages from the Annual Report” (1959), to his last, “Tickets” (1989); and the long out-of-print Sam's Bar, with illustrations by Seymour Chwast. With Flying to America, fans and new readers alike have the huge pleasure of a new collection from one of America's great literary masters.

    By the time the Gulf War broke out, in the winter of 1991, I was well on my way to a breakdown. By the summer, with the help of my buddy Ed Orr, I was in a therapy program at the Vets Center in uptown Seattle." Red Eagle's extraordinary book deals directly with Native American experience of the Vietnam war and offers a healing and redemptive force in the face of violence and its aftermath.