Hedgefund and Wolves in Chic Clothing firmly believes in Woody Allen’s magical math equation: Comedy = Tragedy + Time. Sometimes I Feel Like a Nut is a delightful collection of essays and observations based on Jill Kargman’s family, her phobias (vans, mimes, clowns), and her ability to use humor as a tool to get past life’s obstacles, making the fun times funnier and the tough times bearable. Fans of David Sedaris, Sloane Crosley, and Nora Ephron will rejoice, howl, and sympathize

    At eighteen, fate would take his remaining family, sending him on the road with three hundred dollars and into the life of a Depression Era migrant worker, but his appetite for knowledge--history, science, mankind--remained and became the basis for his insights on human nature. Filled with timeless aphorisms and entertaining stories, Truth Imagined tracks Hoffer's years on the road, which served as the breeding ground for his most fertile thoughts.

    Hocking was one of the last true giants of American philosophy and a direct intellectual descendent of William James, the father of American philosophy and psychology, with whom Kaag feels a deep kinship. It is James’s question “Is life worth living?” that guides this remarkable book.The books Kaag discovers in the Hocking library are crawling with insects and full of mold. But he resolves to restore them, as he immediately recognizes their importance. Not only does the library at West Wind contain handwritten notes from Whitman and inscriptions from Frost, but there are startlingly rare first editions of Hobbes, Descartes, and Kant. As Kaag begins to catalog and read through these priceless volumes, he embarks on a thrilling journey that leads him to the life-affirming tenets of American philosophy—self-reliance, pragmatism, and transcendence—and to a brilliant young Kantian who joins him in the restoration of the Hocking books.Part intellectual history, part memoir, American Philosophy is ultimately about love, freedom, and the role that wisdom can play in turning one’s life around.

    Sanity and Grace: A Journey of Suicide, Survival, and Strength

     MAX PERKINS: Editor of Genius by A. Scott Berg took the literary world by storm upon its publication in 1978, garnering rave reviews and winning the National Book Award. A meticulously-researched and engaging portrait of the man who introduced the public to the greatest writers of this century, Berg's biography stands as one of the finest books on the publishing industry ever written. Unavailable for the last few years, MAX PERKINS is now being re-released (on the fiftieth anniversary of the great editor's death. The driving force behind such literary superstars as F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and Thomas Wolfe, Max Evarts Perkins was the most admired book editor in the world. From the first major novel he edited (Fitzgerald's This Side of Paradise) to the last (James Jones's bestselling From Here to Eternity), Perkins revolutionized American literature. Perkins was tirelessly committed to nurturing talent no matter how young or unproven the writer. Filled with colorful anecdotes about everything from Perkins's struggles to convince the old guard at Scribners to publish his visionary (and often controversial) authors to his falling out with one of his most brilliant discoveries, Thomas Wolfe, MAX PERKINS reveals with insight and humor the professional and personal life of one of the most legendary figures in the history of American publishing. Given unprecedented access to the correspondence between Perkins and his writers, Berg has fashioned a compellingly thorough biography that is as entertaining as it is informative. A vivid portrait of one man's life and a revealing behind-the-scenes look at the creation of literature, A. Scott Berg's MAX PERKINS: Editor of Genius is a masterful achievement in scholarship and writing.

    

    Now, for the first time, she chronicles her groundbreaking tenure as editor in chief of Gourmet, during which she spearheaded a revolution in the way we think about food.When Condé Nast offered Ruth Reichl the top position at America's oldest epicurean magazine, she declined. She was a writer, not a manager, and had no inclination to be anyone's boss. And yet . . . Reichl had been reading Gourmet since she was eight; it had inspired her career. How could she say no?This is the story of a former Berkeley hippie entering the corporate world and worrying about losing her soul. It is the story of the moment restaurants became an important part of popular culture, a time when the rise of the farm-to-table movement changed, forever, the way we eat. Readers will meet legendary chefs like David Chang and Eric Ripert, idiosyncratic writers like David Foster Wallace, and a colorful group of editors and art directors who, under Reichl's leadership, transformed stately Gourmet into a cutting-edge publication. This was the golden age of print media—the last spendthrift gasp before the Internet turned the magazine world upside down.Complete with recipes, Save Me the Plums is a personal journey of a woman coming to terms with being in charge and making a mark, following a passion and holding on to her dreams—even when she ends up in a place she never expected to be.

    His family is another inspiration. You Can't Kill the Rooster is a portrait of his brother, who talks incessant hip-hop slang to his bewildered father. And no one hones a finer fury in response to such modern annoyances as restaurant meals presented in ludicrous towers of food and cashiers with six-inch fingernails.

    Twenty of America’s bestselling memoirists share their innermost thoughts and hard-earned tips with veteran author Meredith Maran, revealing what drives them to tell their personal stories, and the nuts and bolts of how they do it. Speaking frankly about issues ranging from turning oneself into an authentic, compelling character to exposing hard truths, these successful authors disclose what keeps them going, what gets in their way, and what they love most—and least—about writing about themselves.

    At ten she was a caregiver to her dying mother. As an adolescent, an All-Star high school, college, and professional softball player. As a young adult, a fitness competition winner, beauty pageant contestant, and model. And as a grown woman, a high-achieving Lieutenant in the Marines, in charge of an entire platoon while deployed in Iraq.Meanwhile, Theresa was battling bulimia nervosa, an internal struggle which ultimately cut short her military service when she was voluntarily evacuated from combat. Theresa’s journey to wellness required the bravery to ask for help, to take care of herself first, and abandon the idea of “perfect.” In Warrior, she lays bare all of these lives in intimate and vivid detail, examining extremely personal and sometime painful moments and how, by finally accepting the help of others, she learned to make herself whole. From growing up in a log cabin outside Seattle to facing down the enemy in Iraq, Theresa’s journey demonstrates that good health and happiness is a daily, intentional act that requires persistence and commitment.Theresa hopes that through sharing her story, she will help inspire others to empower themselves, embrace their inner warrior and re-define strength. Startling and funny, terrifying and triumphant, heartbreaking and inspirational, Warrior is at heart a story of perseverance and success—of a determined woman who is model for everyone struggling to conquer their own demons. Theresa shows that asking for help can be an act of courage, and that we are stronger than we think when faced with seemingly impossible odds.

    Now she brings her vast experience, good cheer, and finely sharpened pencils to help the rest of us in a boisterous language book as full of life as it is of practical advice.Between You & Me features Norris's laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage—comma faults, danglers, "who" vs. "whom," "that" vs. "which," compound words, gender-neutral language—and her clear explanations of how to handle them. Down-to-earth and always open-minded, she draws on examples from Charles Dickens, Emily Dickinson, Henry James, and the Lord's Prayer, as well as from The Honeymooners, The Simpsons, David Foster Wallace, and Gillian Flynn. She takes us to see a copy of Noah Webster's groundbreaking Blue-Back Speller, on a quest to find out who put the hyphen in Moby-Dick, on a pilgrimage to the world's only pencil-sharpener museum, and inside the hallowed halls of The New Yorker and her work with such celebrated writers as Pauline Kael, Philip Roth, and George Saunders.Readers—and writers—will find in Norris neither a scold nor a softie but a wise and witty new friend in love with language and alive to the glories of its use in America, even in the age of autocorrect and spell-check. As Norris writes, "The dictionary is a wonderful thing, but you can't let it push you around."

    With the college’s future at stake, she battled conservative faculty, ossified traditions, and doubtful funders to turn Smith into a place committed to preparing young women for the new realities of the future. Through it all, Conway served as an inspiration to thousands of students, while balancing the demands of her public role against the private pressures of coping with her husband’s bipolar disorder. A moving tribute to the value of single-sex education and to one woman’s achievements, A Woman’s Education is sure to become a classic.

    The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.' In the first instalment of Clive James's memoirs, we meet the young Clive, dressed in short trousers, and wrestling with the demands of school, various relatives and the occasional snake, in the suburbs of post-war Sydney.

    In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death, Guibert documents with speed and intensity his diagnosis and disintegration from AIDS and elegizes a character based on Michel Foucault.The first half of To Write As If Already Dead is a novella in the mode of a detective story, searching after the mysterious disappearance of an online friendship after an intense dialogue on anonymity, names, language, and connection. The second half, a notebook documenting the doubled history of two bodies amid another historical plague, continues the meditation on friendship, solitude, time, mortality, precarity, art, and literature.Throughout this rigorous, mischievous, thrilling not-quite study, Guibert lingers as a ghost companion. Zambreno, who has been pushing the boundaries of literary form for a decade, investigates his methods by adopting them, offering a keen sense of the energy and confessional force of Guibert's work, an ode to his slippery, scarcely classifiable genre. The book asks, as Foucault once did, "What is an author?" Zambreno infuses this question with new urgency, exploring it through the anxieties of the internet age, the ethics of friendship, and "the facts of the body" illness, pregnancy, and death.

    From Esther Martin, owner of the scariest bar in Baltimore, to the playwright Tennessee Williams; from the atheist leader Madalyn Murray O'Hair to the insane martyr Saint Catherine of Siena; from the English novelist Denton Welch to the timelessly appealing singer Johnny Mathis--these are the extreme figures who helped the author form his own brand of neurotic happiness. Role Models is a personal invitation into one of the most unique, perverse, and hilarious artistic minds of our time.