This volume encapsulates the finest work from Seeing Things (1991) with its lines of loss and revelation; The Spirit Level (1996) where we experience "the poem as ploughshare that turns time / Up and over."; the landmark translation of Beowulf (1999); Electric Light (2001), a book of origins and oracles; and his final collections, District and Circle (2006) and Human Chain (2010), which limn the interconnectedness of being, our lifelines to our inherited past.

    Her razor-sharp wit combines with her acute powers of observation to produce social and political commentary that will have you in stitches even as it informs and provokes you to think seriously about the topics she discusses. In Best White, Davis offers advice on life’s tricky issues; discusses the perils of being a ‘Best White’; laments the fact that society does not have a universally adopted form of greeting, such as the high five; explores the intricacies of social media and internet dating; considers the future of reading and tackles a range of controversial topics in between.

    Twenty of America’s bestselling memoirists share their innermost thoughts and hard-earned tips with veteran author Meredith Maran, revealing what drives them to tell their personal stories, and the nuts and bolts of how they do it. Speaking frankly about issues ranging from turning oneself into an authentic, compelling character to exposing hard truths, these successful authors disclose what keeps them going, what gets in their way, and what they love most—and least—about writing about themselves.

    This unique volume includes Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (in which he suggests that Hemingway has found God), and newly collected gems, such as the acerbic essay “On Criticism” and the beguiling “Note on A Fable.” It also contains eloquently opinionated public letters on everything from race relations and the nature of fiction to wild-squirrel hunting on his property. This is the most comprehensive collection of Faulkner’s brilliant non-fiction work, and a rare look into the life of an American master.

    He has played everyone from Ned Ryerson in "Groundhog Day" to Sandy Ryerson in "Glee." He has amused thousands with his true stories on "The Tobolowsky Files" at Slashfilm.com. Here he shares some homespun philosophy and more true stories that prove tales of sex, drugs, and rock and roll are often the most humiliating and almost always the most enjoyable.

    Combining memoir with artistic and philosophical musings, the poet and National Book Critics Circle Award winner (for My Alexandria) begins by confessing his obsession with the 17th-century Dutch still life that serves as the title of this book. As he analyzes the items depicted in the painting, he skillfully introduces his thoughts on our intimate relationships to objects and subsequently explains how they are often inextricably bound to the people and places of an individual lifetime. Further defined by imperfections attained from use, each object from an aging oak table to a chipped blue and white china platter forms a springboard for reflection. Doty intersperses personal reminiscences throughout, but he always returns to the subject of still-life painting and its silent eloquence. Doty's observations on balance, grief, beauty, space, love, and time are imparted with wisdom and poetic grace.Books like this, that address the sources of creation and the sources of our humanness, come along once in a decade. -Susan Salter Reynolds, Los Angeles Times"This small book is as wise, sensitive, intense, and affecting as anything I have read in recent years." -Doris Grumbach, author of Fifty Days of Solitude"A gem." -Library Journal"Mark Doty's prose is insistently exploratory, yet every aside, every detour, turns into pertinence, and it all seems effortless, as though the author were wondering, and marveling, aloud." -Bernard Cooper, author of Truth Serum"A dazzling accomplishment, its radiance bred of lucid attention and acute insight. The subject is the profoundly personal act of perception translated into description. Doty succeeds in rendering this most contemplative of arts-the still life-into a riveting drama." -Patricia Hampl, author of I Could Tell You Stories

    They're so ridiculous you may think they're fiction. Like the time I went to a drive-in X-rated movie without realizing my parents were in the next car. Or the time I let my kid throw a rock through our living room window. There's the time I bought a camouflage thong in a bait shop and the time I ruined a kid's birthday party. And the other time I ruined a kid's birthday party. I can't guarantee that these stories will make you laugh, but I can guarantee that I didn't make them up.

    Edited and with a Preface by Gunther Stuhlmann

    In Why We Need Love, Simon Van Booy curates an enlightening collection of excerpts, passages, and paintings, presenting works by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, John Donne, William Blake, George Eliot, Emily Dickinson, O. Henry, W. B. Yeats, James Joyce, E. E. Cummings, Anaïs Nin, Marc Chagall, J. Krishnamurti, and others.Provocative and eye-opening, Why We Need Love is one of three slim selections of philosophical texts and excerpts—along with Why We Fight and Why Our Decisions Don’t Matter—introduced and contextualized by acclaimed author Simon Van Booy (Love Begins in Winter, The Secret Lives of People in Love).

    She covered civil rights demonstrations in the 1960s, places where she lived, locations she traveled to, theater she had seen, and murder trials that gripped her. She wrote sketches for various occasions and countless essays about literature, her greatest passion. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor. The continuous attention to language, the structure of observations, the line of interpretation— Hardwick deserves to be read and reread for the clarity of her perceptions and her enduring assessments of literature and society, and simply for the beauty of her writing alone.Edited and with an introduction by Darryl Pinckney, The Collected Essays of Elizabeth Hardwick gathers more than fifty essays for a retrospective of this writer or moral courage, as Joan Didion called her. Hardwick’s readings define literature itself.

    Her column, Rock, Etc., ran for seven years and established Willis as a leader in cultural commentary and a pioneer in the nascent and otherwise male-dominated field of rock criticism. As a writer for a magazine with a circulation of nearly half a million, Willis was also the country’s most widely read rock critic. With a voice at once sharp, thoughtful, and ecstatic, she covered a wide range of artists—Bob Dylan, The Who, Van Morrison, Elvis Presley, David Bowie, the Rolling Stones, Creedence Clearwater Revival, Joni Mitchell, the Velvet Underground, Sam and Dave, Bruce Springsteen, and Stevie Wonder—assessing their albums and performances not only on their originality, musicianship, and cultural impact but also in terms of how they made her feel.Because Willis stopped writing about music in the early 1980s—when, she felt, rock ’n’ roll had lost its political edge—her significant contribution to the history and reception of rock music has been overshadowed by contemporary music critics like Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, and Dave Marsh. Out of the Vinyl Deeps collects for the first time Willis’s Rock, Etc. columns and her other writings about popular music from this period (includingliner notes for works by Lou Reed and Janis Joplin) and reasserts her rightful place in rock music criticism.More than simply setting the record straight, Out of the Vinyl Deeps reintroduces Willis’s singular approach and style—her use of music to comment on broader social and political issues, critical acuity, vivid prose, against-the-grain opinions, and distinctly female (and feminist) perspective—to a new generation of readers. Featuring essays by the New Yorker’s current popular music critic, Sasha Frere-Jones, and cultural critics Daphne Carr and Evie Nagy, this volume also provides a lively and still relevant account of rock music during, arguably, its most innovative period.

    Two of the stories—later revised for What We Talk About When We Talk About Love—are particularly notable in that between the first and the final versions, we see clearly the astounding process of Carver’s literary development.

    Organized in six parts (Childhood; Youth; Early Marriage and Bachelorhood; Teaching and Work; Fiction; Politics, Religion, Movies, Books, Cities; The Style of Middle Age) Getting Personal tells two stories: the development of Lopate's career as a writer and the story of his life.

    As might be expected, the main interest of these writings is that they illuminate new facets of his usual subject matter."--The New York Times Book Review"A new single work for American readers that stands among the very finest."--The Nation

    It's how you conduct your friendships and present yourself to the world. Every day, you're creating a formidable body of personal written work. This generation's unprecedented comfort level with the written word has led to a fearless new American literature. These collected essays, at last, offer a key to understanding the inscrutable teenage girl-one of the most mislabeled and underestimated members of society, argues editor and writer Amy Goldwasser, whose work has appeared in Seventeen, Vogue, The New York Times, and The New Yorker. And while psychologists and other experts have tried to explain the teen girl in recent years, no book since Ophelia Speaks has given her the opportunity to speak for herself-until now. In this eye-opening collection, nearly sixty teenage girls from across the country speak out, writing about everything from post-Katrina New Orleans to Johnny Depp; from learning to rock climb to starting a rock band; from the loneliness of losing a best friend to the loathing or pride they feel about their bodies. Ranging in age from 13 to 19, and hailing from Park Avenue to rural Nevada, Georgia to Hawaii, the girls in RED-whose essays were selected from more than 800 contributions-represent a diverse spectrum of socioeconomic, political, racial, and religious backgrounds, creating a rich portrait of life as a teen girl in America today. Revealing the complicated inner lives, humor, hopes, struggles, thrills, and obsessions of this generation, RED ultimately provides today's teen girl with much-needed community, perspective, and validation-and helps the rest of us to better understand her.