This Is Running for Your Life: Essays


Michelle Orange - 2012
    Orange's essays range from the critical to the journalistic to the deeply personal; she seamlessly combines stories from her own life with incisive analysis as she explores everything from the intimacies we develop with celebrities and movie characters to the troubled creation of the most recent edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. With the insight of a young Joan Didion and the empathy of a John Jeremiah Sullivan, Orange dives into popular culture and the status quo and emerges with a persuasive and provocative book about how we live now. Her singular voice will resonate for years to come.

Against Interpretation and Other Essays


Susan Sontag - 1966
    Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the famous essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as well as her impassioned discussions of Sartre, Camus, Simone Weil, Godard, Beckett, Lévi-Strauss, science-fiction movies, psychoanalysis, and contemporary religious thought.This edition has a new afterword, "Thirty Years Later," in which Sontag restates the terms of her battle against philistinism and against ethical shallowness and indifference.

Heroines


Kate Zambreno - 2012
    Taking the self out feels like obeying a gag order - pretending an objectivity where there is nothing objective about the experience of confronting and engaging with and swooning over literature." - from HeroinesOn the last day of December, 2009 Kate Zambreno began a blog called Frances Farmer Is My Sister, arising from her obsession with the female modernists and her recent transplantation to Akron, Ohio, where her husband held a university job. Widely reposted, Zambreno's blog became an outlet for her highly informed and passionate rants about the fates of the modernist "wives and mistresses." In her blog entries, Zambreno reclaimed the traditionally pathologized biographies of Vivienne Eliot, Jane Bowles, Jean Rhys, and Zelda Fitzgerald: writers and artists themselves who served as male writers' muses only to end their lives silenced, erased, and institutionalized. Over the course of two years, Frances Farmer Is My Sister helped create a community where today's "toxic girls" could devise a new feminist discourse, writing in the margins and developing an alternative canon.In Heroines, Zambreno extends the polemic begun on her blog into a dazzling, original work of literary scholarship. Combing theories that have dictated what literature should be and who is allowed to write it - from T. S. Eliot's New Criticism to the writings of such mid-century intellectuals as Elizabeth Hardwick and Mary McCarthy to the occasional "girl-on-girl crime" of the Second Wave of feminism - she traces the genesis of a cultural template that consistently exiles female experience to the realm of the "minor" and diagnoses women for transgressing social bounds. "ANXIETY: When she experiences it, it's pathological," writes Zambreno. "When he does, it's existential." By advancing the Girl-As-Philosopher, Zambreno reinvents feminism for her generation while providing a model for a newly subjectivized criticism.

Early Morning: Remembering My Father, William Stafford


Kim Stafford - 2002
    His first major collection--Traveling Through the Dark--won the National Book Award. He published more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose and was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress-a position now known as the Poet Laureate. Before his death in 1993, he gave his son Kim the greatest gift and challenge: to be his literary executor.In Early Morning, Kim creates an intimate portrait of a father and son who shared many passions: archery, photography, carpentry, and finally, writing itself. But Kim also confronts the great paradox at the center of William Stafford's life. The public man, the poet who was always communicating with warmth and feeling-even with strangers-was capable of profound, and often painful, silence within the family. By piecing together a collage of his personal and family memories, and sifting through thousands of pages of his father's daily writing and poems, Kim illuminates a fascinating and richly lived life.

Brando Unzipped: A Revisionist and Very Private Look at America's Greatest Actor


Darwin Porter - 2005
    Brando Unzipped is the definitive gossip guide to the late, great actor's life New York Daily News. Lurid, raunchy, perceptive, and certainly worth reading, it's one of the best show-biz biographies of the year. London's Sunday Times. Brando Unzipped received an Honorable Mention from Foreword Magazine in its Book of the Year competition, and it won a Silver Ippy award for Best Biography from the Independent Publisher's Association."

Three Weeks, Eight Seconds: The Epic Tour de France of 1989


Nige Tassell - 2017
    I could not see how it could happen' - Laurent Fignon'I didn't think. I just rode' - Greg LeMond'The finest cycle race I've ever seen' - Phil LiggettVeteran TV commentator Phil Liggett is right. The 1989 Tour de France is surely the greatest ever, a race that saw Greg LeMond overturn a 50-second deficit to Laurent Fignon on the final stage on the Champs Elysees to snatch the title by a mere eight seconds. After three weeks and more than 2,000 miles in the saddle, this remains the smallest margin of victory in the Tour's 100+ year history. But as dramatic as that Sunday afternoon on the streets of Paris was, the race wasn't just about that one time-trial. During the previous fortnight, the leader's yellow jersey had swapped back and forth between LeMond and Fignon in a titanic struggle for supremacy, a battle with more twists and turns than the maziest Alpine mountain pass. At no point during the entire three weeks were the pair separated by more than 53 seconds. And all this despite LeMond's body still carrying more than 30 shotgun pellets after a shooting accident two years previously. In Three Weeks, Eight Seconds, Nige Tassell brings one of cycling's most astonishing stories to life, examining that extraordinary race in all its multifaceted glory, with fresh first-hand testimony from riders, team bosses, commentators, journalists and family members. Among those offering exclusive new insight are Team LeMond, Pedro Delgado, Sean Kelly, Stephen Roche, Bjarne Riis, Andy Hampsten, Raul Alcala, Charly Mottet, Sean Yates and many more. Adrenaline and agony. Controversy and conflict. Torment and triumph.All human life is here.

The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes


Janet Malcolm - 1993
    Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm.

The Anatomy of Melancholy


Robert Burton - 1621
    Lewellyn Powys called it "the greatest work of prose of the greatest period of English prose-writing," while the celebrated surgeon William Osler declared it the greatest of medical treatises. And Dr. Johnson, Boswell reports, said it was the only book that he rose early in the morning to read with pleasure. In this surprisingly compact and elegant new edition, Burton's spectacular verbal labyrinth is sure to delight, instruct, and divert today's readers as much as it has those of the past four centuries.

Pity the Animal


Chelsea Hodson - 2014
    “How much can a body endure? Almost everything.” Chelsea Hodson is a 2012 PEN Center USA Emerging Voices Fellow. She is also the author of the chapbook Beach Camp, published by Swill Children in 2010. Her essays have been published in Black Warrior Review, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, Sex Magazine, and elsewhere. She lives in Brooklyn, New York. Watch the trailer here: http://vimeo.com/88997155

Zentangle 2: Scrapbooks, Sketchbooks, Journals, AJCs, Cards, Words, Borders


Suzanne McNeill - 2010
    With 25 new tangles, you will discover the possibilities of decorating words and turning simple line drawings such as butterflies and animals into exquisite art. Tantalizing color brings your art to life as the calming and reflective process of Zentangle brings your life into your art.

Too Soon To Tell


Calvin Trillin - 1995
    His short takes send us back to contemporary life refreshed and delighted.

On Being Blue


William H. Gass - 1975
    In a philosophical approach to color, William Gass explores man's perception of the color blue as well as its common erotic, symbolic, and emotional associations.

LCD Soundsystem's Sound of Silver


Ryan Leas - 2016
    On top of the genius singles and a longform composition for Nike, there was a trilogy of full-length albums. During that initial run, LCD Soundsystem-and the project's mastermind, James Murphy-were at the center of several 21st century developments in pop culture: indie music's growing mainstream clout, Brooklyn surpassing Manhattan as an epicenter of creativity in America, the collision and eventual erosion of genre perceptions, and the rapid and profound growth and impact of digital culture. Amidst this storm, Murphy crafted Sound Of Silver, the centerpiece of LCD's work.At the time of Sound Of Silver's creation and release, Murphy was a man closing in on 40 while fronting a critically-adored band still on the ascent. This album was the first place where he earnestly grappled with questions of aging, of being an artist, and the decisions we make with the time we have left. Anchored by a series of colossal, intense dance-rock songs, Sound Of Silver called upon the rhythms of New York City in order to draw out, dissect, and ultimately rip open these meditations. By the time LCD Soundsystem reunited in 2016, Sound Of Silver had already proven to be a generational touchstone, living on as a document of what it's like to be alive in the 21st century.

Still Standing: What I've learnt from a life lived differently


Jessica Quinn - 2021
    Her body has been completely restructured so that she could survive an aggressive cancer.Jess's leg was amputated just before her ninth birthday, and she has had to adapt to living with a prosthetic leg. The challenges Jess has faced ever since have given her a unique outlook. Growing up, she felt alone in her difference, but she has learnt that the one thing people have in common is that we are all different.She is on a mission to normalise 'different', speaking out on social media, creating diversity through her work as a model and helping people see we have a choice over how we respond to hardship.This is a story of body acceptance, finding ways to live through life's adversities, and perseverance.Jess's inspirational 'you've got this' attitude has seen her through every struggle she's faced. Her philosophy embraces the fact that none of us gets to keep the body we were born in; we all bear scars that become part of our stories. She's learnt to change the narrative and be grateful for what she can do, rather than focusing on the things she can't.

I GOT YOU: Restoring Confidence in Love and Relationships


Rob Hill Sr. - 2013
    It’s about you looking at yourself and finding ways to learn how to grow as an individual. I cannot tell you every single step you should take to get you to where you are trying to go in life. But what I can do is make sure you have enough confidence to trust your own judgments, regardless of past mistakes. I want you to understand that it’s okay to be exactly where you are right now, whether you are single or in a relationship. Appreciate where your journey is taking you, but be able to identify areas that need to change. I want you to read this book and have a better understanding of the present. I want you to know that trying to get it right is a constant process. We never arrive at a place of knowing it all. For as long as we are alive, we are challenged to grow, learn, evolve, and mature. Love is a decision, not a destination. It’s not something you stumble upon. You must choose to walk in it, give to it, and become it. Each of us travels a different path to find the love we are searching for. Some find what they are looking for instantly, while others must jump over a few hurdles before realizing they have finally found something special. In essence, we are all just working towards what we believe we deserve— our fair chance at love and happiness.