Stretching between these figures is a cast of artists, writers, and scientists--mostly women, mostly queer--whose public contribution has risen out of their unclassifiable and often heartbreaking private relationships to change the way we understand, experience, and appreciate the universe. Among them are the astronomer Maria Mitchell, who paved the way for women in science; the sculptor Harriet Hosmer, who did the same in art; the journalist and literary critic Margaret Fuller, who sparked the feminist movement; and the poet Emily Dickinson.Emanating from these lives are larger questions about the measure of a good life and what it means to leave a lasting mark of betterment on an imperfect world: Are achievement and acclaim enough for happiness? Is genius? Is love? Weaving through the narrative is a set of peripheral figures--Ralph Waldo Emerson, Charles Darwin, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Herman Melville, Frederick Douglass, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Walt Whitman--and a tapestry of themes spanning music, feminism, the history of science, the rise and decline of religion, and how the intersection of astronomy, poetry, and Transcendentalist philosophy fomented the environmental movement.

    But we know the hopes, dreams, fears, and wonder expressed in all her columns, for most of us share them. With her NEW YORK TIMES-based column, "LIFE IN THE 30s," Anna Quindlen vaulted to national attention, and this wonderful collection shows why.As she proved in OBJECT LESSONS and THINKING OUT LOUD, Anna Quindlen's views always fascinate.

    Agoraphobia, the challenges of parenting a child with special needs, and the legacy of a formidable father all shaped that journey. In these deeply personal and instructive essays, the author of the internationally acclaimed If I loved you, I would tell you this and Life Drawing explores the making of art through the experiences of building a life. Engaging, challenging, and moving, Crash Course is full of insight into how to write—and why.From "Autumn, 1972, A Moment at Which I Became a Writer":I sense, even now, the reverberations of a kind of shattering of my foundation and a quick rebuild, a change at a molecular level of who I understood myself to be. No longer someone who could look at another person without wondering what their life was like, but someone with a new curiosity about what people's stories might actually be.Robin Black is the author of the story collection, If I loved you, I would tell you this and the novel Life Drawing, both critically acclaimed, and both published in multiple languages. She has developed a loyal, enthusiastic following for her essays on life and writing, online and in such publications as the New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, and O Magazine. She lives with her husband in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where the house is always open for their three grown children.

    After gaining admission to Oxford, and moving to the United States to become a journalist, through several love affairs, then marriage and family, Mead read and reread Middlemarch. The novel, which Virginia Woolf famously described as "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people," offered Mead something that modern life and literature did not.In this wise and revealing work of biography, reporting, and memoir, Rebecca Mead leads us into the life that the book made for her, as well as the many lives the novel has led since it was written. Employing a structure that deftly mirrors that of the novel, My Life in Middlemarch takes the themes of Eliot's masterpiece--the complexity of love, the meaning of marriage, the foundations of morality, and the drama of aspiration and failure--and brings them into our world. Offering both a fascinating reading of Eliot's biography and an exploration of the way aspects of Mead's life uncannily echo that of Eliot herself.

    When Pearlman was fifty, he was bitten on the hand by a dog in Mexico and for two years got so sick that he thought he would die. When he recovered, he felt so different that he decided he needed a new name. He began calling himself Poppa Neutrino, after the itinerant particle that is so small it can hardly be detected. To Neutrino, the particle represents the elements of the hidden life that assert themselves discreetly.Inspired by Thor Heyerdahl and Kon-Tiki, Neutrino is the only man ever to build a raft from garbage he found on the streets of New York and sail it across the North Atlantic. The New York Daily News described the accomplishment as “the sail of the century.” National Geographic broadcast an account of the trip as part of its series on extreme adventures. And now he is on a quest to cross the Pacific on a raft. If he makes it, he plans to continue around the world. No one has ever sailed around the world on a raft. Meanwhile, he has invented the Neutrino Clock Offense, an unstoppable football play, which a former coach of the New York Jets describes as being as innovative as the forward pass.The philosophical underpinnings of Neutrino’s existence are what he calls Triads, a concept worked out after years of reading and reflection. He believes that each person, to be truly happy, must define his or her three deepest desires and pursue them remorselessly. Freedom, Joy, and Art are Neutrino’s three.The Happiest Man in the World is a lavish, exotic, funny, and deeply serious book about a man who has led a life of profound engagement and ceaseless adventure.

    Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source of the writer’s inspiration—do subjects haunt those that might bring them back to life until the writer submits? Or does something “happen” to us, a sudden ignition of a burning flame? Can the appearance of a muse-like Other bring about a writer’s best work?In Soul at the White Heat, Oates deploys her keenest critical faculties, conjuring contemporary and past voices whose work she deftly and creatively dissects for clues to these elusive questions. Virginia Woolf, John Updike, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, J.M. Coetzee, Margaret Atwood, Joan Didion, Zadie Smith and many others appear as predecessors and peers—material through which Oates sifts in acting as literary detective, philosopher, and student. The book is at its most thrilling when watching the writer herself at work, and Oates provides rare insight into her own process, in candid, self-aware dispatches from the author’s own writing room. The New York Times Book Review has raved, “who better than Joyce Carol Oates . . . to explicate the craft of writing?” Longtime admirers of Joyce Carol Oates’s novels as well as her prose will discover much to be inspired by and obsess upon themselves in this inventive collection from an American master.

    Then her life was irreversibly transformed—and so was her philosophy. In this wholly unexpected personal account, the author of A Vindication of Love: Reclaiming Romance for the Twenty-first Century (2009) offers us a Vindication of Life as inspiring as it is heartbreaking. The story of Cristina and her little daughter, Eurydice, is a tale of redemption and self-reinvention. It is about expanding definitions of love--and it is about confronting death. Not least, it speaks to us of life’s sweeping ironies: Sometimes bad luck is the new good luck, and the realization of your worst fears may be the greatest gift you can receive.Biography: Nehring first acquired national attention through her fiery criticism in the pages of Harper's Magazine, The Atlantic Monthly and The New York Times Book Review. A "compassionate contrarian," she won many awards for her politically incorrect cultural and literary essays. Her first book, A Vindication of Love (Harper Collins, 2009) argues for a bolder, braver, wilder form of modern loving, drawing extensively on literary and historical analysis. It was published to wide acclaim and translated into several languages. Nehring also works as a travel writer for Condé Nast Traveler, and holds a Ph.D. in English from the University of California, Los Angeles. She lives in Paris and Los Angeles.

    This edition also includes Sinclair's series of texts on the mythology of place called Suicide Bridge.

    Includes several lectures and two interviews.

    . . ."   With the candor and often hilarious outlook that have made her a beloved commentator on NPR, Marion Winik takes the reader on an unforgettable journey through modern parenthood, with all of its attendant anxieties and joys.        A single mother with two small boys, Winik knows exactly what she's talking about, from battles over breakfast and bedtime to the virtues of pre-packaged food and weightier issues like sex education and sibling rivalry. Part memoir and part survival guide, The Lunch-Box Chronicles is an engaging philosophy of parenting from a staunch realist, who knows that kids and their parents both will inevitably fall far short of perfection, and that a "good enough mom" really is, in fact, good enough.

    Drawing from his eleven collections and including twenty-three previously unpublished poems, Search Party is the essential compilation of this beloved poet's work. Edited by his son, Sebastian Matthews, and William Matthews's friend and fellow poet Stanley Plumly (who also introduces the book), Search Party is an excellent introduction to the poet and his glistening riffs on twentieth-century topics from basketball to food to jazz.

    From an important new American writer comes this powerful collection of personal essays on fear, creativity, art, faith, academia, the Internet, and justice.In this poignant and inciting collection of literary essays, Megan Stielstra tells stories to ward off fears both personal and universal as she grapples toward a better way to live. In her titular piece “The Wrong Way To Save Your Life,” she answers the question of what has value in our lives—a question no longer rhetorical when the apartment above her family’s goes up in flames. “Here is My Heart” sheds light on Megan’s close relationship with her father, whose continued insistence on climbing mountains despite a series of heart attacks leads the author to dissect deer hearts in a poetic attempt to interrogate her own feelings about mortality. Whether she's imagining the implications of open-carry laws on college campuses, recounting the story of going underwater on the mortgage of her first home, or revealing the unexpected pains and joys of marriage and motherhood, Stielstra's work informs, impels, enlightens, and embraces us all. The result is something beautiful—this story, her courage, and, potentially, our own.Intellectually fierce and viscerally intimate, Megan Stielstra's voice is witty, wise, warm, and above all, achingly human.“Stielstra is a masterful essayist.”—Roxane Gay, author of Bad Feminist and Hunger

    . . at once biting and vulnerable, nostalgic without ever veering off into sentimentality." --Refinery29 "Always vital, clever, and seductive, Addonizio is a secular Anne Lamott, a spiritual aunt to Lena Dunham." --BooklistA dazzling, edgy, laugh-out-loud memoir from the award-winning poet and novelist that reflects on writing, drinking, dating, and more Kim Addonizio is used to being exposed. As a writer of provocative poems and stories, she has encountered success along with snark: one critic dismissed her as "Charles Bukowski in a sundress." ("Why not Walt Whitman in a sparkly tutu?" she muses.) Now, in this utterly original memoir in essays, she opens up to chronicle the joys and indignities in the life of a writer wandering through middle age.Addonizio vividly captures moments of inspiration at the writing desk (or bed) and adventures on the road--from a champagne-and-vodka-fueled one-night stand at a writing conference to sparsely attended readings at remote Midwestern colleges. Her crackling, unfiltered wit brings colorful life to pieces like "What Writers Do All Day," "How to Fall for a Younger Man," and "Necrophilia" (that is, sexual attraction to men who are dead inside). And she turns a tender yet still comic eye to her family: her father, who sparked her love of poetry; her mother, a former tennis champion who struggled through Parkinson's at the end of her life; and her daughter, who at a young age chanced upon some erotica she had written for Penthouse.At once intimate and outrageous, Addonizio's memoir radiates all the wit and heartbreak and ever-sexy grittiness that her fans have come to love--and that new readers will not soon forget.