A Field Guide to Getting Lost draws on emblematic moments and relationships in Solnit's own life to explore the issues of wandering, being lost, and the uses of the unknown. The result is a distinctive, stimulating, and poignant voyage of discovery.

    Cynthia Kaplan, acclaimed author of Why I'm Like This, once again invites us into her no-holds-barred, take-no-prisoners world, casting her gimlet eye upon the current state of her affairs. Also of your affairs, and some other people's affairs, too. With her unique talent for wringing hilarity out of the most devastating situations (as well as, it must be admitted, the most trivial), Kaplan fearlessly takes on her family, intelligent design, Narnia, New England's deer population—all the important issues of the day.Journey with her as she humiliates herself in a variety of locales—a dude ranch, a hospital, Mystic Seaport, the offices of Comedy Central. Cower beside her as she confronts her inner (and outer) most fears. No threat is too small—pajamas, schnauzers, Disney cruises. No subject is sacrosanct—God, sex, The Nutcracker Suite. Kaplan has a worst-case scenario planned for, well, every scenario, including high school reunions and vacationing with your mother-in-law, a subject not covered in any of today's popular guidebooks. You might want to take notes, because Kaplan has that rare ability to write about her own life in a way that makes you feel as though she is writing about yours.Leave the Building Quickly is a raucously funny, moving, and honest look at the circumstances of our daily lives, the kind that inspire us to crouch in the linen closet at three in the morning. That's okay. Kaplan is there, too. And she's brought snacks.

    This bountiful collection, beautifully illustrated in full color, features articles, fiction, humor, poems, cartoons, cover art, drafts, and drawings from the magazine’s archives. Among the contributors are Margaret Atwood, T. Coraghessan Boyle, Roald Dahl, Wolcott Gibbs, Robert Graves, Emily Hahn, Ted Hughes, Jamaica Kincaid, Steven Millhauser, Haruki Murakami, Amy Ozols, Robert Pinsky, Jean Rhys, James Thurber, John Updike, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and E. B. White. Including a Foreword by Anthony Lane, this gorgeous keepsake will be a treasured gift for all cat lovers.Praise for The Big New Yorker Book of Cats  “The Book of Cats comes a year after The Big New Yorker Book of Dogs—a publishing slight that, though it stings, I’ll forgive, as the latest anthology was worth the wait. . . . Two standout articles feature real-life obsessives of ages past who reveal today’s Caturnet devotees—with their GIFs and Tumblrs and hastily aggregated listicles—for what they truly are: amateurs. . . . Eat your heart out, Cute Overload.”—The New York Times Book Review   “A beautiful hardcover.”—Jenny McCarthy, People   “This irresistible anthology of articles, poems, essays, fiction, cartoons, and covers pulled from the New Yorker is a veritable treasure trove for cat lovers. Just dive right in; with stories from the likes of John Updike, Maeve Brennan, Roald Dalhl, and Haruki Murakami interwoven with hilariously wry cartoons, one can’t help but be enthralled. A must-have.”—Modern Cat   “A shiny, well-fed tome . . . The anthology embodies the cat’s defining characteristic: its cluster of opposites, rolled together into a giant hairball of cultural attitudes—something, perhaps, at once uncomfortably and assuringly reflective of our own chronically conflicted selves.”—Brain Pickings   “This gorgeous book has earned a permanent spot on my coffee table. It is an absolute joy to read and browse through, and I know it will bring me hours and hours of pleasure for years to come. And it makes a purr-fect gift for the special cat lovers in your life.”—The Conscious Cat   “[A] sumptuous volume.”—The Dallas Morning News   “One need not own cats (or do cats own their owners?) or even be a pet lover to savor this feline-focused offering.”—The Sacramento Bee   “[A] fun collection of short stories, articles, humor, poems, and charming color covers from the magazine’s archives . . . [a] high-quality, attractive work.”—Library Journal   “Covers, cartoons, authors of pieces both longer and shorter, reflect current views of the feline subject in all its glory. . . . The quality, humor and variety make for another successful New Yorker collection.”—Kirkus Reviews  “An eminently giftable anthology.”—Publishers Weekly

    The author, a lifelong accumulator of books both ancient and modern, lives in a house large enough to accommodate his many thousands of books, as well as overspill from the libraries of his friends. While his musings on the habits of collectors past and present are learned, witty and instructive, his advice on cataloguing may even save the lives of those whose books are so prodigiously piled as to be a hazard... The Phantoms on the Bookshelves ranges from classical Greece to contemporary Iceland, from Balzac and Moby Dick to Google, offering up delicious anecdotes along the way. This elegantly produced volume will be a lasting delight to specialist collectors, librarians, bibliophiles and all those who treasure books.

    

    In part it is a memoir of the three "Factories" that influenced his development as a human being and as a writer, yet the events depicted within the book are fictionalized and conveyed with the poetic verve and playfulness of form that have made Shklovsky a major figure in twentieth-century world literature. In addition to its fictional and biographical elements, Third Factory includes anecdotes, rants, social satire, literary theory, and anything else that Shklovsky, with an artist's unerring confidence, chooses to include.

    From his studio in London, he starts by travelling to three "white hills" - sites in China, Germany and England that are key to porcelain's creation. But his search eventually takes him around the globe and reveals more than a history of cups and figurines; rather, he is forced to confront some of the darkest moments of twentieth-century history.Part memoir, part history, part detective story, The White Road chronicles a global obsession with alchemy, art, wealth, craft and purity. In a sweeping yet intimate style that recalls The Hare with Amber Eyes, de Waal gives us a singular understanding of "the spectrum of porcelain" and the mapping of desire.

    . ."Now available in paperback--a selection of revealing interviews from the award-winning National Public Radio showOriginating from WHYY-FM in Philadelphia and heard on more than 450 NPR stations, Fresh Air with Terry Gross has become a daily habit with millions of listeners nationwide--a must for anyone hoping to keep up with what's happening in the arts. Over the last twenty years, Terry's guests have included our most significant writers, actors, musicians, comics, and visual artists.For her first collection, Terry has chosen more than three dozen timeless interviews that prove to be as lively on the page as they were on the radio. Her questions--probing yet sensitive--encourage revelations from figures as diverse as John Updike, Isabella Rossellini, Conan OBrien, Samuel L. Jackson, Johnny Cash, and Nicolas Cage. And in her introduction, the generally self-effacing host of Fresh Air does something she wouldnt dream of doing on the air--she reveals a thing or two about herself.

    The award-winning writer Rachel Cusk describes a three-month journey around the Italy of Raphael and rented villas, of the Piero della Francesca trail and the tourist furnace of Amalfi, of soccer and the simple glories of pasta and gelato.With her husband and two children, Cusk uncovers the mystery of a foreign language, the perils and pleasures of unbelonging, and the startling thrill of discovery—at once historic and intimate. Both sharp and humane in its exploration of the desire to travel and to escape, of art and its inspirations, of beauty and ugliness, and of the challenge of balancing domestic life with creativity, The Last Supper is an astonishing memoir.

    A keepsake enjoyed by tea lovers for over a hundred years, The Book of Tea Classic Edition will enhance your enjoyment and understanding of the seemingly simple act of making and drinking tea.In 1906 in turn-of-the-century Boston, a small, esoteric book about tea was written with the intention of being read aloud in the famous salon of Isabella Gardner, Boston's most notorious socialite. It was authored by Okakura Kakuzo, a Japanese philosopher, art expert, and curator. Little known at the time, Kakuzo would emerge as one of the great thinkers of the early 20th century, a genius who was insightful, witty—and greatly responsible for bridging Western and Eastern cultures. Okakura had been taught at a young age to speak English and was more than capable of expressing to Westerners the nuances of tea and the Japanese Tea Ceremony.In The Book of Tea Classic Edition, he discusses such topics as Zen and Taoism, but also the secular aspects of tea and Japanese life. The book emphasizes how Teaism taught the Japanese many things; most importantly, simplicity. Kakuzo argues that tea-induced simplicity affected the culture, art and architecture of Japan.Nearly a century later, Kakuzo's The Book of Tea Classic Edition is still beloved the world over, making it an essential part of any tea enthusiast's collection. Interwoven with a rich history of Japanese tea and its place in Japanese society is a poignant commentary on Asian culture and our ongoing fascination with it, as well as illuminating essays on art, spirituality, poetry, and more. The Book of Tea Classic Edition is a delightful cup of enlightenment from a man far ahead of his time.

    Club, a painfully funny memoir as seen through the sturdy prism of pop culture—for fans of Chuck Klosterman and Augusten Burroughs. As  a  child  and  teenager,  Nathan  Rabin  viewed  pop culture as a life-affirming form of escape. As an adult, pop culture became his life. For more than a decade he’s served as head writer for The Onion A.V. Club, and here, by way of music, books, films, and television, he shares his too-strange-for-fiction life story.Using a specific book, song, album, film, or television show as a springboard to discuss a period in his life, Rabin recounts his Dickensian upbringing with biting wit and brutal, perhaps unwise candor. Throughout a traumatic childhood that sent him ricocheting from a mental hospital to a foster home to a group home for emotionally disturbed adolescents, Rabin reveals that not only did pop culture shape and mold him, it helped save him from suicidal depression, institu- tionalization, and parental abandonment. Perhaps the most entertaining book ever written about depression and sweet, sweet sexual humiliation, The Big Rewind is also an emotional tale of a motherless child’s search for family and acceptance and a darkly comic valentine to Rabin’s irascible, lovable, hard-luck dad.Featuring unexpected cameos by Billy Bob Thornton, a vomiting Topher Grace, and some dude named Barack Obama, The Big Rewind chronicles the surreal journey of Rabin’s life, and its intersection with the dizzying, maddening, wonderful world of entertainment.

    In his novels and stories, in letters to editors, friends, fellow artists, and critics, in interviews and in commissioned articles on the subject, Hemingway wrote often about writing. And he wrote as well and as incisively about the subject as any writer who ever lived…This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself.—From the Preface by Larry W. Phillips

    Homer's poems occupy, as Adam Nicolson writes "a third space" in the way we relate to the past: not as memory, which lasts no more than three generations, nor as the objective accounts of history, but as epic, invented after memory but before history, poetry which aims "to bind the wounds that time inflicts."The Homeric poems are among the oldest stories we have, drawing on deep roots in the Eurasian steppes beyond the Black Sea, but emerging at a time around 2000 B.C. when the people who would become the Greeks came south and both clashed and fused with the more sophisticated inhabitants of the Eastern Mediterranean.The poems, which ask the eternal questions about the individual and the community, honor and service, love and war, tell us how we became who we are.

    This exciting new series assembles key documents and criticism concerning these works that have so recently become central components of the American literature curriculum. Each casebook will reprint documents relating to the work's historical context and reception, present the best in critical essays, and when possible, feature an interview of the author. The series will provide, for the first time, an accessible forum in which readers can come to a fuller understanding of these contemporary masterpieces and the unique aspects of American ethnic, racial, or cultural experience that they so ably portray.Perhaps more than any other single text, Maya Angelou's I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings helped to establish the mainstream status of the renaissance in black women's writing. This casebook presents a variety of critical approaches to this classic autobiography, along with an exclusive interview with Angelou conducted specially for this volume and a unique drawing of her childhood surroundings in Stamps, Arkansas, drawn by Angelou herself.

    H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated by Auden. Indeed, the novelist, best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, calls the poet not only the greatest literary discovery of his life but also the best of guides on how to live. In this book, McCall Smith has written a charming personal account about what Auden has done for him — and what he just might do for you.Part self-portrait, part literary appreciation, the book tells how McCall Smith first came across the poet's work in the 1970s, while teaching law in Belfast, a violently divided city where Auden's "September 1, 1939," a poem about the outbreak of World War II, strongly resonated. McCall Smith goes on to reveal how his life has related to and been inspired by other Auden poems ever since. For example, he describes how he has found an invaluable reflection on life's transience in "As I Walked Out One Evening," while "The More Loving One" has provided an instructive meditation on unrequited love. McCall Smith shows how Auden can speak to us throughout life, suggesting how, despite difficulties and change, we can celebrate understanding, acceptance, and love for others.An enchanting story about how art can help us live, this book will appeal to McCall Smith's fans and anyone curious about Auden.