Throughout the year, Goldstein asks weighty questions that would stump a person less seasoned. For example: What is it about a McRib that drives people crazy? Can we replace extending an olive leaf with extending an olive jar? How much wisdom can we glean from episodes of Welcome Back, Kotter? His friends and family, many of them known through their appearances on WireTap, weigh in with hilarious results as Goldstein eats, sleeps, and watches bad TV all the way to his date with destiny.

    In my case, blinking my left eyelid is my only means of communication.’In December 1995, Jean-Dominique Bauby, editor-in-chief of French ‘Elle’ and the father of two young children, suffered a massive stroke and found himself paralysed and speechless, but entirely conscious, trapped by what doctors call ‘locked-in syndrome’. Using his only functioning muscle – his left eyelid – he began dictating this remarkable story, painstakingly spelling it out letter by letter.His book offers a haunting, harrowing look inside the cruel prison of locked-in syndrome, but it is also a triumph of the human spirit.

    Determined, controversial, and visionary, she creatively worked to bridge the gap between her own culture and mainstream American society and advocated for Native rights on a national level. Susan Rose Dominguez provides a new introduction to this edition.

    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.

    His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.” Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America’s Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin’s nonfiction ever published.With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as “The Harlem Ghetto,” “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “Many Thousands Gone,” and “Stranger in the Village.”Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political. “One writes,” he stated, “out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.” With singular eloquence and unblinking sharpness of observation he lived up to his credo: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America’s racial divide and an impassioned call to “end the racial nightmare…and change the history of the world.” The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essays—nine of them previously uncollected—include some of Baldwin’s earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.

    In The Nasty Bits, he serves up a well-seasoned hellbroth of candid, often outrageous stories from his worldwide misadventures. Whether scrounging for eel in the backstreets of Hanoi, revealing what you didn't want to know about the more unglamorous aspects of making television, calling for the head of raw food activist Woody Harrelson, or confessing to lobster-killing guilt, Bourdain is as entertaining as ever. Bringing together the best of his previously uncollected nonfiction--and including new, never-before-published material--The Nasty Bits is a rude, funny, brutal and passionate stew for fans and the uninitiated alike. Anthony Bourdain is the author of seven books including the bestselling Kitchen Confidential and A Cook's Tour. A thirty-year veteran of professional kitchens, he is the host of No Reservations on the Discovery Channel, and the executive chef at Les Halles in Manhattan. He lives in New York City.Praise for Anthony Bourdain: Bourdain's enthusiasm is so intense that it practically explodes off the page . . . Bourdain shows himself to be one of the country's best food writers. His opinions are as strong as his language, and his tastes as infectious as his joy.--New York Times Book Review[Writes] the kind of book you read in one sitting, then rush about annoying your coworkers by declaiming whole passages.--USA TodayBourdain's prose is utterly riveting, swaggering with stylish machismo and a precise ear for kitchen patois.--New York magazine