Calling poets away from civilization, back towards the wilderness, Lasky brazenly urges artists away from conceptual programs, resurrecting imagination and faith-in-the-uncertain as saviors from mediocrity.

    For reasons of space, the Weekly must often slightly truncate the pieces and also sees fit to change the name of the piece. So, what you read there isn’t always what I sent them. This is one of the reasons I wanted to put this book out. Also, knowing there are a lot of people out there without the time to go to some website and read something every week, I thought it would be a good idea to have the articles all in one place. I hope you enjoy the book and thank you. - Henry

    Guest editor David Maraniss, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist and author, has assembled a fresh crop of the people and stories that dominated the sports world in 2006.Michael Lewis gives a behind-the-scenes look at the legendary football coach Bill Parcells. Bob Hohler delves in the murky waters of modern amateur basketball, where teams blatantly dole out cash to players and shoe companies set their sights on prospects as young as twelve. William Rhoden traces the fate of an unknown filly injured on the racetrack. Jeff MacGregor describes the unforgettable Friars Club roast of boxing's provocative promoter Don King. Daniel Coyle follows a forty-year-old Slovene soldier who might be the world’s best ultra-endurance athlete. L. Jon Wertheim tells of a young pro-basketball player who found himself wrestling the shoe bomber Richard Reid to the ground during a transatlantic flight. And Derek Zumsteg provides a hilarious and utterly original in-depth account of the baseball career of Bugs Bunny, “the greatest banned player ever.”These pieces and many more go beyond the spotlight, revealing the people and issues that make sports so relevant and important to all of us.The white coon / Larry Brown --Bugs Bunny, greatest banned player ever / Derek Zumsteg --Ready for some fútbol? / Oscar Casares --The game of the year / Chris Ballard --Filling in the pieces of Jake Scott / Dave Hyde --Fading away / Wright Thompson --Deal of the century / John Klima --An unknown filly dies, and the crowd just shrugs / William C. Rhoden --Let us now raze famous men / Jeff MacGregor --Only medal for Bode is fool's gold / Sally Jenkins --That which does not kill me makes me stranger / Daniel Coyle --Polite when in neutral / Mimi Swartz --Snook / Ian Frazier --Blank Monday / William Finnegan --What keeps Bill Parcells awake at night / Michael Lewis --The madness of John Chaney / Robert Huber --The real deal in so many ways / Michael Wilbon --$neaker war / Bob Hohler --Baseball for life / Sara Corbett --A new game plan / Eli Saslow --The Saturday game / Eric Neel --Playing 4 keeps / Bryan Smith --The ultimate assist / L. Jon Wertheim --In Iraq, soccer field is no longer a refuge / Bruce Wallace --A moment of silence / Steve Friedman --Team Hoyt starts again / John Brant --The big show by little people / Paul Cullum --Talking turkey / Bill Buford

    Along the way, he takes us on an exploration of lost islands, mythical realms, and the medieval world. Eco also sheds light on the indignant reviews of James Joyce’s Ulysses by fascist journalists of the 1920s and 1930s, and provides a lively examination of Saint Thomas Aquinas’s notions about the soul of an unborn child, censorship, violence, and WikiLeaks. These are essays full of passion, curiosity, and obsessions by one of the world’s most esteemed scholars and critically acclaimed, best-selling novelists.

    Taking his title from the wounded cry of the once great Max Bialystock in The Producers -- “Look at me now! Look at me now! I’m wearing a cardboard belt!” -- Epstein gives us his largest and most comprehensive collection to date.Writing as a memoirist, polemicist, literary critic, and amused observer of contemporary culture, he uses to deft and devastating effect his signature gifts: wide-ranging erudition, sparkling humor, and a penetrating intelligence. In personally revealing essays about his father and about his years as a teacher, in deeply considered examinations of writers from Paul Valery to Truman Capote, and in incisive take-downs of such cultural pooh-bahs as Harold Bloom and George Steiner, this remarkable collection presents us with the best work of our country’s most singular talent, engaged with the richness and variety of life, witty in his response to the world, and always entertaining.

    The poet trains to hear clearly and, as much as possible, without interruption, the voice of his or her mind, the voice that gathers, packs with meaning, and unpacks the language he or she knows. It can take a long time to learn to let this voice speak without getting in its way. This slow learning, the growth of this habit of inner attentiveness, is poetic development, and it is the substance of the poet’s art. Of course, this growth is rarely steady, never linear, and is sometimes not actually growth but diminishment—that’s all part of the compelling story of a poet’s way forward. —from the Introduction“The staggering thing about a life’s work is it takes a lifetime to complete,” Craig Morgan Teicher writes in these luminous essays. We Begin in Gladness considers how poets start out, how they learn to hear themselves, and how some offer us that rare, glittering thing: lasting work. Teicher traces the poetic development of the works of Sylvia Plath, John Ashbery, Louise Glück, and Francine J. Harris, among others, to illuminate the paths they forged—by dramatic breakthroughs or by slow increments, and always by perseverance. We Begin in Gladness is indispensable for readers curious about the artistic life and for writers wondering how they might light out—or even scale the peak of the mountain.

    They are about guns, campaign buttons, and a cabin in the Vermont woods that stinks of wood smoke and kerosene -- and about their associations of pleasure, menace, and regret.The resulting volume may be compared to the plays that have made Mamet famous: it is finely crafted and deftly timed, and its precise language carries an enormous weight of feeling.

    This is Coyote's country--a landscape of the imagination, where nothing is as it appears.

    Many of the 25 short stories, autobiographical sketches and essays in Quite Early One Morning, a volume planned by Thomas shortly before his death, were read by him on such occasions. They are alive with his verbal magic, his intense perception of life, his gargantuan humor and with the very ring of his voice.Included in this collection of prose pieces are such favorites as the hilarious “A Visit to America,” the account of a small boy’s marvelous day’s outing—“A Story,” and the memorable “A Child’s Christmas in Wales,” which has been called ‘the twentieth century Christmas Carol.’ Other pieces show Thomas’s power as a sensitive critic of poetry and as an exponent of his own intent as a poet.

    In these pages both everyday riders and pros tell their stories of freak accidents, animal attacks, sabotage, idiotic decisions, eerie or unexplained incidents, and other jaw dropping, adrenalin-pumping calamities. These stories bring to life the strange things possibilities that await, once we step on the pedals of our road, mountain, or commuter bikes. A sampling of misadventures in this collection includes the stories of: the mountain biker who follows a bull and then gets gored by it; the twenty African Americans who pioneered cycle touring by completing a Transamerica ride in 1897, but wait - this story gets strange...; the large rat that leapt on top of a woman's bike and slapped her repeatedly with its tail; an inside-the-head narration by a professional racer as he rides a brutal race, and then gets humiliated in changing room afterwards; the recreational cyclist who accidentally rides deep into a prison yard; the computer programmer who crashes a stationary bike during his first spin class; the bike messenger who can't call it quits even after getting hit by eight cars; and, the man who carefully spreads out tacks on the route of an all female race in an attempt to get a date. These stories will make you wonder, drop you to the floor laughing and leave you shaking your head with disbelief.

    Rowling's popular character, Severus Snape, and the roles he played in the Harry Potter series.

    But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last nonfiction collection, The Language of the Night. And what a mind — strong, supple, disciplined, playful, ranging over the whole field of its concerns, from modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos, with an eloquence, wit, and precision that makes for exhilarating reading.

    Featuring brand new stories and some old favorites, many of these tell-all, gritty tales were originally published on the blog Make It MAD between 2010 and 2012, and have been rereleased in their originality for this special print and digital anthology.

    What is it about J. D. Salinger and his body of work that has left such a lasting mark on American fiction? And who better to answer that question than the current generation of writers?Here are fourteen of the most vital voices in the contemporary American fiction scene pulling no punches in response to a writer who continues to beguile, charm, fascinate, and frustrate generations of readers. Contributors Walter Kirn, Ren? Steinke, Charles D’Ambrosio, Emma Forrest, Aleksander Hemon, Lucinda Rosenfeld, Amy Sohn, John McNally, Karen E. Bender, Thomas Beller, Benjamin Anastas, Aimee Bender, Joel Stein, and Jane Mendelsohn turn themselves inside out as they discuss their personal reactions to reading Salinger classics–not only The Catcher in the Rye but also Franny and Zooey, Raise High the Roofbeams, Carpenters, and the short stories–and explore, with begrudging gratitude, how Salinger helped to form the deepest reaches of their literary imaginations.

    Kennedy Jr., from The Atlantic Monthly “Watching the Detectives” by Jay Kirk, from Harper’s Magazine “For the Love of God” by Jon Krakauer, from GQ “Chief Bratton Takes on LA” by Heather Mac Donald, from City Journal “Not Guilty by Reason of Afghanistan” by John H. Richardson, from Esquire “Megan’s Law and Me” by Brendan Riley, from Details “Unfortunate Con” by Mark Schone, from The Oxford American “To Kill or Not to Kill” by Scott Turow, from The New Yorker