A man's promising fourth date ends in the emergency room. A female lawyer with bipolar disorder experiences the highs and lows of dating. A widower hesitates about introducing his children to his new girlfriend. A divorcée in her seventies looks back at the beauty and rubble of past relationships.These are just a few of the people who tell their stories in Modern Love, Revised and Updated, featuring dozens of the most memorable essays to run in The New York Times "Modern Love" column since its debut in 2004.Some of the stories are unconventional, while others hit close to home. Some reveal the way technology has changed dating forever; others explore the timeless struggles experienced by anyone who has ever searched for love. But all of the stories are, above everything else, honest. Together, they tell the larger story of how relationships begin, often fail, and--when we're lucky--endure.Edited by longtime "Modern Love" editor Daniel Jones and featuring a diverse selection of contributors--including Mindy Hung, Trey Ellis, Ann Hood, Deborah Copaken, Terri Cheney, and more--this is the perfect book for anyone who's loved, lost, stalked an ex on social media, or pined for true romance: In other words, anyone interested in the endlessly complicated workings of the human heart.

    From suffragettes to school girls, from spoken word superstars to civil rights activists, from aristocratic ladies to kitchen maids, these are voices that deserve to be heard.Collected by anthologist Ana Sampson She is Fierce: Brave, Bold and Beautiful Poems by Women contains an inclusive array of voices, from modern and contemporary poets. Immerse yourself in poems from Maya Angelou, Nikita Gill, Wendy Cope, Ysra Daley-Ward, Emily Bronte, Carol Ann Duffy, Fleur Adcock, Liz Berry, Jackie Kay, Hollie McNish, Imtiaz Dharker, Helen Dunmore, Emily Dickinson, Mary Oliver, Christina Rossetti, Margaret Atwood and Dorothy Parker, to name but a few!Featuring short biographies of each poet, She is Fierce is a stunning collection and an essential addition to any bookshelf.The anthology is divided into the following sections:Roots and Growing Up FriendshipLoveNature Freedom, Mindfulness and JoyFashion, society and body image Protest, courage and resistanceEndings

    In “Disparity,” for example, Yu Hua illustrates the mind-boggling economic gaps that separate citizens of the country. In “Copycat,” he depicts the escalating trend of piracy and imitation as a creative new form of revolutionary action. And in “Bamboozle,” he describes the increasingly brazen practices of trickery, fraud, and chicanery that are, he suggests, becoming a way of life at every level of society. Characterized by Yu Hua’s trademark wit, insight, and courage, China in Ten Words is a refreshingly candid vision of the “Chinese miracle” and all its consequences, from the singularly invaluable perspective of a writer living in China today.

    Not a typical tourist, she prefers indoor spaces, seeing Paris go by on TV or watching from her window the ever-changing displays of men's designer clothing across the boulevard. Or she roams the streets, caught between nostalgia and a competing sense of the present day, between Paris's rich cultural traditions and the realities of Western imperialism. Disillusioned by her inability to reconcile these contradictions and by her own part in perpetuating them, she assembles in her journal pieces of the present, past, of art, philosophy, of herself, and of the world outside her.

    Internationally famous Czech photographer Jan Saudek is no exception, and equally as uncompromising in pursuit of his own unique vision. For over four decades Saudek has created a parallel photographic universe, a two-dimensional home full of longing, peopled with the most extraordinary characters and colored by desire. The timeless strength of his hand-tinted photographs lies in their poetic compositions and their forceful?at times ribald?pictorial language, with its overtones of medieval genre pictures and Baroque mythology. Rejecting the traditional beauty in his famous nude photographs, Saudek shows the distinctively different: old women, fat women, children; real people in tableaux vivants that remind us of everything from surreal early movies to fin-de-siecle carnival nights. They exist outside time, a uniquely colored and almost mythical theater of dreams. Covering his debut in the 1950s through his lesser-known work to recent images, this dazzling collection offers us the true "velvet revolution," fertile and unsettling images from the dreams we might still have. The author: Daniela Mr?zkov?, critic and editor of the Czech magazines Revue fotografie and Fotografie-Magaz?n, is the author of sixteen books on photography published in the Czech Republic and abroad, and the curator of around fifty photography exhibitions. She has been a member of international juries, and has authored film and television documentaries on photography and photographers. She hasfollowed Jan Saudek's work since his early years and is the author of Saudek's first Czech monograph, The Theatre of Life.

    Thirty years later, a resident of the United States, he won the National Book Award for his novel Waiting, completing a trajectory that has established him as one of the most admired exemplars of world literature. Ha Jin’s journey raises rich and fascinating questions about language, migration, and the place of literature in a rapidly globalizing world—questions that take center stage in The Writer as Migrant, his first work of nonfiction. Consisting of three interconnected essays, this book sets Ha Jin’s own work and life alongside those of other literary exiles, creating a conversation across cultures and between eras. He employs the cases of Alexander Solzhenitsyn and Chinese novelist Lin Yutang to illustrate the obligation a writer feels to the land of his birth, while Joseph Conrad and Vladimir Nabokov—who, like Ha Jin, adopted English for their writing—are enlisted to explore a migrant author’s conscious choice of a literary language. A final essay draws on V. S. Naipaul and Milan Kundera to consider the ways in which our era of perpetual change forces a migrant writer to reconceptualize the very idea of home. Throughout, Jin brings other celebrated writers into the conversation as well, including W. G. Sebald, C. P. Cavafy, and Salman Rushdie—refracting and refining the very idea of a literature of migration. Simultaneously a reflection on a crucial theme and a fascinating glimpse at the writers who compose Ha Jin’s mental library, The Writer as Migrant is a work of passionately engaged criticism, one rooted in departures but feeling like a new arrival.

    Editors Elissa Washuta and Theresa Warburton ground this anthology of essays by Native writers in the formal art of basket weaving. Using weaving techniques such as coiling and plaiting as organizing themes, the editors have curated an exciting collection of imaginative, world-making lyric essays by twenty-seven contemporary Native writers from tribal nations across Turtle Island into a well-crafted basket.Shapes of Native Nonfiction features a dynamic combination of established and emerging Native writers, including Stephen Graham Jones, Deborah Miranda, Terese Marie Mailhot, Billy-Ray Belcourt, Eden Robinson, and Kim TallBear. Their ambitious, creative, and visionary work with genre and form demonstrate the slippery, shape-changing possibilities of Native stories. Considered together, they offer responses to broader questions of materiality, orality, spatiality, and temporality that continue to animate the study and practice of distinct Native literary traditions in North America.

    His novels The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman became instant classics upon publication. Here, with Wormholes, for the first time is a representative gathering of Fowles's fugitive and intensely personal nonfiction writings: essays, literary criticism, commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs, and musings. It is a delicious sampling of the various matters that have plagued, preoccupied, or delighted Fowles throughout his life.

    It is the first anthology of Chinese philosophy to cover its entire historical development. It provides substantial selections from all the great thinkers and schools in every period--ancient, medieval, modern, and contemporary--and includes in their entirety some of the most important classical texts. It deals with the fundamental and technical as well as the more general aspects of Chinese thought. With its new translation of source materials (some translated for the first time), its explanatory aids where necessary, its thoroughgoing scholarly documentation, this volume will be an indispensable guide for scholars, for college students, for serious readers interested in knowing the real China.

    Stone's poems blend the personal with dimensions of the larger world in a manner reminiscent of the late William Stafford. Few poets have this gift for taking the workings of ordinary life and fusing them with a poetic process that sustains intense emotion, allowing human experience to be felt through the mysteries of language.... Ruth Stone belongs to every generation of poets who have taken the responsibility to give back to the world." —The Bloomsbury Review"This volume rightly secures (Stone's) status as a sui generis treasure who has survived poverty, a lack of formal education, profound personal tragedy, and decades of obscurity to emerge as a pre-eminent American poet who is still writing vital poems at the age of ninety-three." —Harvard ReviewWhat Love Comes To, a finalist for the 2009 Pulitzer Prize in poetry, gathers nearly half a century of poems from a National Book Award-winning poet who, over the course of her career, has written in a wide range of voices and forms. Drawing from eleven previous volumes, this collection offers a trajectory through that career, presenting Ruth Stone from her early formal lyrics, through fierce feminist and political poems, to her most recent meditations on blindness and aging. Stone, at age ninety-two, returns often to the theme of loss in her work, all the while maintaining what the Vermont poet laureate nominations committee calls “a sense of survival surpassing poverty and grief. . . . Her poetry’s irrepressible humor and intellectual curiosity are unique among contemporary American poets.”What Love Comes To is the perfect entry point into Stone’s world of serious laughter; of uncertainty and insight; of mystery and acceptance.When I forget to weep,I hear the peeping tree toadscreeping up the bark.Love lies asleepand dreams that everythingis in its golden net;and I am caught there, too,when I forget.A recipient of the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award, Ruth Stone has taught at numerous American universities. The author of eleven books of poetry, she has lived in Vermont since 1957.

    What is this craving that overpowers all else? What is it like to be addicted, and what does it take to get straight or sober? In this new and expanded edition of a widely praised collection, an outstanding roster of courageous writers present vivid renderings of the addiction experience in all its highs and lows.These first-person accounts describe battles with alcohol, heroin, smoking, food, gambling, and sex. Some contributors still struggle with their habits; others have managed to defeat them; two lost their lives to addiction's ravages. This is a book about compulsion, recovery, and struggle: a potent concoction that will have readers hooked.Contributors include Lorna Crozier, Peter Gzowski, Patrick Lane, Evelyn Lau, John Newlove, Stephen Reid, David Adams Richards, Lois Simmie, Sheri-D Wilson, and Marnie Woodrow.

    Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a multi-faceted portrait of the literary icon who, in turn, belongs to us.This collection of original essays covers the turf that made Didion a sensation―Hollywood and Patty Hearst; Malibu, Manson and the Mojave; the Summer of Love and the Central Park Five―while bringing together some of the finest voices of today’s Los Angeles and beyond. Slouching Towards Los Angeles is a love letter and thank you note; personal memoir and social commentary; cultural history and literary critique. Fans of Didion, lovers of California, and fellow writers alike will all find something to dig into, in this rich exploration of the inner and outer landscapes Joan Didion traveled, shaping our own journeys in the process.

    Life in a homeless camp in Austin. A young woman whose résumé reads, “Topless Chick, Uncredited.” Remorselessly unsentimental, Kevin D. Williamson is a chronicler of American underclass dysfunction unlike any other. From the hollows of Eastern Kentucky to the porn business in Las Vegas, from the casinos of Atlantic City to the heroin rehabs of New Orleans, he depicts an often brutal reality that does not fit nicely into any political narrative or comfort any partisan. Coming from the world he writes about, Williamson understands it in a way that most commentators on American politics and culture simply can’t. In these sometimes savage and often hilarious essays, he takes readers on a wild tour of the wreckage of the American republic—the “white minstrel show” of right-wing grievance politics, progressive politicians addicted to gambling revenue, the culture of passive victimhood, and the reality of permanent poverty. Unsparing yet never unsympathetic, Big White Ghetto provides essential insight into an enormous but forgotten segment of American society.

    With shades of wit, insomnia, and terror, The Midnight becomes a kind of dialogue in which the prose and poetry sections seem to be dreaming fitfully of each other.

    From the trilogy's darker themes of violence and social control to fashion and weaponry, the collection's exploration of the Hunger Games reveals exactly how rich, and how perilous, protagonist Katniss' world really is.• How does the way the Games affect the brain explain Haymitch's drinking, Annie's distraction, and Wiress' speech problems?• What does the rebellion have in common with the War on Terror?• Why isn't the answer to "Peeta or Gale?" as interesting as the question itself?• What should Panem have learned from the fates of other hedonistic societies throughout history and what can we?The Girl Who Was On Fire covers all three books in the Hunger Games trilogy.