When she finally emerged from the coma, she recognized everyone in her life except her husband, Kim. Starting all over, they built a new love and dedicated their lives to each other all over again.

    Wallace was capable of writing . . .about subjects from tennis to politics to lobsters, from the horrors of drug withdrawal to the small terrors of life aboard a luxury cruise ship, with humour and fervour and verve' Michiko Kakutani, The New York TimesDavid Foster Wallace wrote the novels The Pale King, Infinite Jest, and The Broom of the System and three story collections. His nonfiction includes Consider the Lobster and A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again. He died in 2008.

    In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor.com. Now this volumes presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series.Among Walton's many subjects here are the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by "mainstream"; the underappreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field's many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely readable, engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers.

    Rowling delivered a deeply affecting commencement speech at Harvard University. Now published for the first time in book form, VERY GOOD LIVES presents J.K. Rowling's words of wisdom for anyone at a turning point in life. How can we embrace failure? And how can we use our imagination to better both ourselves and others?Drawing from stories of her own post-graduate years, the world famous author addresses some of life's most important questions with acuity and emotional force.

    Anne’s College, Oxford. Her lectures took the shape of this set of discursive stories. Refusing to be tied down to either fiction or the essay form, Artful is narrated by a character who is haunted—literally—by a former lover, the writer of a series of lectures about art and literature.A hypnotic dialogue unfolds, a duet between and a meditation on art and storytelling, a book about love, grief, memory, and revitalization. Smith’s heady powers as a fiction writer harmonize with her keen perceptions as a reader and critic to form a living thing that reminds us that life and art are never separate.Artful is a book about the things art can do, the things art is full of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness. It glances off artists and writers from Michelangelo through Dickens, then all the way past postmodernity, exploring every form, from ancient cave painting to 1960s cinema musicals. This kaleidoscope opens up new, inventive, elastic insights—on the relation of aesthetic form to the human mind, the ways we build our minds from stories, the bridges art builds between us. Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world and a meaningful contribution to that worth in itself. There has never been a book quite like it.

    Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary. Split into four sections—"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling"—Changing My Mind invites readers to witness the world from Zadie Smith's unique vantage. Smith casts her acute eye over material both personal and cultural, with wonderfully engaging essays-some published here for the first time-on diverse topics including literature, movies, going to the Oscars, British comedy, family, feminism, Obama, Katharine Hepburn, and Anna Magnani. In her investigations Smith also reveals much of herself. Her literary criticism shares the wealth of her experiences as a reader and exposes the tremendous influence diverse writers—E. M. Forster, Zora Neale Hurston, George Eliot, and others—have had on her writing life and her self-understanding. Smith also speaks directly to writers as a craftsman, offering precious practical lessons on process. Here and throughout, readers will learn of the wide-ranging experiences—in novels, travel, philosophy, politics, and beyond—that have nourished Smith's rich life of the mind. Her probing analysis offers tremendous food for thought, encouraging readers to attend to the slippery questions of identity, art, love, and vocation that so often go neglected. Changing My Mind announces Zadie Smith as one of our most important contemporary essayists, a writer with the rare ability to turn the world on its side with both fact and fiction. Changing My Mind is a gift to readers, writers, and all who want to look at life more expansively.

    Packed with the most effective skills for assessing and treating anxiety, this workbook can be used alone or as a supplement to therapy to help you develop a full arsenal of skills for quieting worried thoughts and putting yourself back in control.This new edition has been thoroughly updated with the latest anxiety research and medications, and also includes new therapeutic techniques that have been proven effective for the treatment of anxiety and anxiety-related conditions. Each worksheet in this book will help you learn the skills you need to manage your anxiety and start living more freely than you ever thought possible. With this workbook, you'll learn a range of proven methods for overcoming anxiety, such as relaxation and breathing techniques, challenging negative self-talk and mistaken beliefs, and imagery and real-life desensitization. In addition, you will learn how to make lifestyle, nutrition, and exercise changes and cultivate skills for preventing and coping with and preventing panic attacks.

    And if any is left, I buy food and clothing." — --Desiderius Erasmus — Those who share Erasmus's love of those curious bundles of paper bound together between hard or soft covers know exactly how he felt. These are the people who can spend hours browsing through a bookstore, completely oblivious not only to the passage of time but to everything else around them, the people for whom buying books is a necessity, not a luxury. A Passion for Books is a celebration of that love, a collection of sixty classic and contemporary essays, stories, lists, poems, quotations, and cartoons on the joys of reading, appreciating, and collecting books.This enriching collection leads off with science-fiction great Ray Bradbury's Foreword, in which he remembers his penniless days pecking out Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter, conjuring up a society so frightened of art that it burns its books. This struggle--financial and creative--led to his lifelong love of all books, which he hopes will cosset him in his grave, "Shakespeare as a pillow, Pope at one elbow, Yeats at the other, and Shaw to warm my toes. Good company for far-travelling."Booklovers will also find here a selection of writings by a myriad of fellow sufferers from bibliomania. Among these are such contemporary authors as Philip Roth, John Updike, Umberto Eco, Robertson Davies, Nicholas Basbanes, and Anna Quindlen; earlier twentieth-century authors Christopher Morley, A. Edward Newton, Holbrook Jackson, A.S.W. Rosenbach, William Dana Orcutt, Robert Benchley, and William Targ; and classic authors such as Michel de Montaigne, Gustave Flaubert, Petrarch, and Anatole France.Here also are entertaining and humorous lists such as the "Ten Best-Selling Books Rejected by Publishers Twenty Times or More," the great books included in Clifton Fadiman and John Major's New Lifetime Reading Plan, Jonathan Yardley's "Ten Books That Shaped the American Character," "Ten Memorable Books That Never Existed," "Norman Mailer's Ten Favorite American Novels," and Anna Quindlen's "Ten Big Thick Wonderful Books That Could Take You a Whole Summer to Read (but Aren't Beach Books)."Rounding out the anthology are selections on bookstores, book clubs, and book care, plus book cartoons, and a specially prepared "Bibliobibliography" of books about books.Whether you consider yourself a bibliomaniac or just someone who likes to read, A Passion for Books will provide you with a lifetime's worth of entertaining, informative, and pleasurable reading on your favorite subject--the love of books.A Sampling of the Literary Treasures in A Passion for BooksUmberto Eco's "How to Justify a Private Library," dealing with the question everyone with a sizable library is inevitably asked: "Have you read all these books?"Anatole Broyard's "Lending Books," in which he notes, "I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock."Gustave Flaubert's Bibliomania, the classic tale of a book collector so obsessed with owning a book that he is willing to kill to possess it.A selection from Nicholas Basbanes's A Gentle Madness, on the innovative arrangements Samuel Pepys made to guarantee that his library would survive "intact" after his demise.Robert Benchley's "Why Does Nobody Collect Me"--in which he wonders why first editions of books by his friend Ernest Hemingway are valuable while his are not, deadpanning "I am older than Hemingway and have written more books than he has."George Hamlin Fitch's extraordinarily touching "Comfort Found in Good Old Books," on the solace he found in books after the death of his son.A selection from Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life, in which she shares her optimistic view on the role of reading and the future of books in the computer age.Robertson Davies's "Book Collecting," on the difference between those who collect rare books because they're valuable and those who collect them because they love books, ultimately making it clear which is "the collector who really matters."

    Writing fiction is a similar process. Sometimes it might take a while before the story gets some balance and moves forward. Sometimes the story takes off as if motor-driven, then crashes into something not foreseen or expected. Learning to be a writer is all about finding your legs, and doing your best to convince onlookers that you know what you're doing and where you're going.In Pep Talks, Warnings & Screeds, acclaimed Southern story writer and novelist George Singleton serves up everything you ever need to know to become a real writer (meaning one who actually writes), in bite-sized aphorisms. It's Nietzsche's Beyond Good & Evil meets Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird. It's cough syrup that tastes like chocolate cake. In other words, don't expect to get better unless you get a good dose of it, maybe two.Accompanied by more than fifty original full-color illustrations by novelist Daniel Wallace, these laugh-out-loud funny, candid, and surprisingly useful lessons will help you find your own writerly balance so you can continue to move forward.

    Her name is Wild Woman, but she is an endangered species. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Ph.D., Jungian analyst and cantadora storyteller shows how women's vitality can be restored through what she calls "psychic archeological digs" into the ruins of the female unconsious. Using multicultural myths, fairy tales, folk tales, and stories, Dr. Estes helps women reconnect with the healthy, instinctual, visionary attributes of the Wild Woman archetype.Dr. Estes has created a new lexicon for describing the female psyche. Fertile and life-giving, it is a psychology of women in the truest sense, a knowing of the soul.

    And your next, and your next... The technique I share within these pages is extremely easy to learn and do. You will be able to start using it now, today, and see immediate differences in your writing.It's also a fast read. I've condensed the book down to just a handful of pages, so you can read it all in less than an hour. I know what it's like to try and improve my writing by reading books on how to write. Too much time is lost wading through pages and pages of filler. And the more of these books that we read, the thicker our brains become, with too many details and steps and opinions. This book is different. Read it over lunch, and then go try it out. You'll see for yourself that it works.Here is a bit more about why Tell, Don't Show! is truly worth your time.First of all, the words will come much easier. I promise it. I've seen it transform the writing of many students and friends over the years, and before that, my own writing. The technique is so simple that you won't have any excuse for not using it the next time you sit down to write. It's a real pleasure to write this way. Forget about being a suffering writer. With this one little technique, you'll actually learn to love the process of writing.And do you ever wonder why you aren't writing so much? Do you think that if you could write faster, much faster, you'd want to write more? We're not talking about blindly banging away at the keys, but rather, quickly penning powerful stories and novels in a fraction of the time it takes you right now. That is, if you're even writing now. The truth is that when our writing is too slow and introspective, we lose momentum, and sooner or later, we finally stop. Don't do that. Write faster. The technique I'm sharing in this book will show you how to write faster and a lot more than you are now.Finally, by using this technique, you'll find your creativity expanding by the hour, by the day! It will free up your imagination to focus on the big picture, lifting you up and away from both micromanagement and nitpickiness, such common traps during first drafts. Your stories will grow richer and deeper, and you'll find yourself seeing your characters and settings more vividly. Subtext and subplots will rise up and beg for your attention. And this is just the beginning.You'll find all of the above and much more in Tell, Don't Show!

    From finding daily surrender in the autumn and daily hope in the winter, to daily bloom and daily spark in the spring and summer, you will always find fresh beautiful words for your day. With a flexible, non-dated structure, Only Love Today offers life-giving words that remind you of the tools you already possess and insights you already have as you seek to find:Clarity when you're conflictedUnity when you're dividedFaith when you're uncertainRest when your soul is wearyMeaning in the meaninglessand a reset button directing you back to what matters mostRegardless of what you're experiencing or what season you're in, you'll find wisdom, encouragement, strength, vision, and clarity to live for what really matters.

     Many authors are frustrated because there are so many options for self-publishing, and they don't know which one to choose or what will be best for their book. Others spend thousands of dollars to publish and end up broken-hearted with the result. But it doesn't have to be this way. I've spent the last seven years self-publishing bestselling fiction and non-fiction books and in 2011, I left my day job to become a full-time author entrepreneur. I've made lots of mistakes along the way, but through the process of self-publishing 17 books, I've learned the most effective way to publish and market your books. In this book, I'll share everything with you. The book includes: - What you need to know before you self-publish - Why self-publishing an ebook is a good idea - How to format an ebook - Exclusivity and going direct - How to self-publish an ebook - Why self-publish a print book - Print-on-demand will change your life - What you need to know before you print - How to self-publish a print book - What to do if you want help with the publishing process - After self-publishing - How much does it cost to self-publish? - How do you get paid when you self-publish? - Book marketing principles - How to market fiction - How to market non-fiction Plus, links to more useful resources. If you're ready to successfully self-publish, then download a sample or buy now. You can also get your free Author 2.0 Blueprint and mini-course at TheCreativePenn.com/blueprint (just copy and paste into your browser)

    Reprinted here for the first time is Franzen's controversial l996 investigation of the fate of the American novel in what became known as "the Harper's essay," as well as his award-winning narrative of his father's struggle with Alzheimer's disease, and a rueful account of his brief tenure as an Oprah Winfrey author.

    Now he returns with a beautiful, haunting novel about the family we love and the chances we miss.For One More Day is the story of a mother and a son, and a relationship that covers a lifetime and beyond. It explores the question: What would you do if you could spend one more day with a lost loved one? As a child, Charley "Chick" Benetto was told by his father, "You can be a mama's boy or a daddy's boy, but you can't be both." So he chooses his father, only to see the man disappear when Charley is on the verge of adolescence. Decades later, Charley is a broken man. His life has been crumbled by alcohol and regret. He loses his job. He leaves his family. He hits bottom after discovering his only daughter has shut him out of her wedding. And he decides to take his own life.He makes a midnight ride to his small hometown, with plans to do himself in. But upon failing even to do that, he staggers back to his old house, only to make an astonishing discovery. His mother, who died eight years earlier, is still living there, and welcomes him home as if nothing ever happened..What follows is the one "ordinary" day so many of us yearn for, a chance to make good with a lost parent, to explain the family secrets, and to seek forgiveness. Somewhere between this life and the next, Charley learns the astonishing things he never knew about his mother and her sacrifices. And he tries, with her tender guidance, to put the crumbled pieces of his life back together.Through Albom's inspiring characters and masterful storytelling, readers will newly appreciate those whom they love and may have thought they'd lost in their own lives. For One More Day is a book for anyone in a family, and will be cherished by Albom's millions of fans worldwide.