It's a book that has remained current for over half a century, fighting off critics and changing tastes in fiction. But do even its biggest fans know all there is to appreciate about The Great Gatsby?Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for "Fresh Air" and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon -- when we were "too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret" to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ("it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it," as she puts it). No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to "classic" (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender.With rigor, wit, and an evangelistic persuasiveness, Corrigan will leave readers inspired to grab their old paperback copies of Gatsby and re-experience this great novel in an entirely new light.

    She delves into the always uneasy, sometimes tragic relationship that exists between journalist and subject.

    In Adventurer at Heart he shares his life story, and provides a compelling and unique insight into this remarkable pursuit.It takes a Tour de France cyclist about 90 hours of cycling, spread over three weeks with rest days, to complete the race. An adventure race, however, can take up to 160 hours of non-stop racing over as much as six days, with virtually no sleep or rest. To excel at this sport requires an elite level of skill in mountain running, mountain biking, kayaking, rafting and navigation but, above all, an almost superhuman capacity to endure suffering and pain.Part-Samoan, Nathan was raised in Nelson, and it was as a wayward adolescent that he discovered outdoor adventure. Since then he has never looked back, and has been a full-time adventurer working as an outdoor educator, the owner of multiple adventure-based businesses, and a professional athlete.Nathan’s career has taken him all over the world, and he has raced in the deserts of Africa, Mexico and the Emirates, the plains of Tibet and China, and the peaks and valleys of Nepal, Ecuador, Brazil, Patagonia, Russia, the European Alps, and New Zealand.Adventurer at Heart is a story of courage and perseverance, and of overcoming tremendous challenges. Nathan Fa’avae is an outstanding New Zealander, and this book is an inspiring account of what it takes to become a world champion.

    Pirsig's Zen & the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance is an examination of how we live, a meditation on how to live better set around the narration of a summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest, undertaken by a father & his young son.

    

    In Dianetics 55!,L. Ron Hubbard takes this technology a step further, giving you basic knowledge you can use to increase understanding and ability in your life. Blocks to communication can destroy a marriage, a business relationship or a family. A person is as alive as he can communicate. Dianetics 55! includes L. Ron Hubbard's incredible basic principles of communication. Discover how you can use the data in this book to: Ensure your communication is easily understood by others so you can get your ideas across. Master the secrets and skills of effective communication. Build and improve lasting personal relationships. Increase your ability and competence for a happier and more successful life Dianetics provides the tools you need to break down the barriers to communication and understanding in your life and realize your true potential and ability.

    In this collection of correspondence—letters to publishers, editors, friends, and fellow writers—the writer shares his insights on the art of creation.On Writing reveals an artist brutally frank about the drudgery of work and canny and uncompromising about the absurdities of life—and of art. It illuminates the hard-edged, complex humanity of a true American legend and counterculture icon—the “laureate of American lowlife” (Time)—who stoically recorded society’s downtrodden and depraved. It exposes an artist grounded in the visceral, whose work reverberates with his central ideal: “Don't try.”Piercing, poignant, and often hilarious, On Writing is filled not only with memorable lines but also with Bukowski’s trademark toughness, leavened with moments of grace, pathos, and intimacy.

    As the defiant but sensitive young genius is creating his theory of relativity, a new conception of time, he imagines many possible worlds. In one, time is circular, so that people are fated to repeat triumphs and failures over and over. In another, there is a place where time stands still, visited by lovers and parents clinging to their children. In another, time is a nightingale, sometimes trapped by a bell jar.Now translated into thirty languages, Einstein’s Dreams has inspired playwrights, dancers, musicians, and painters all over the world. In poetic vignettes, it explores the connections between science and art, the process of creativity, and ultimately the fragility of human existence.

    This new edition has been updated by his friend and former Rolling Stone comrade Mitch Glazer and includes an epilogue about the memorial concerts for Timothy that James Taylor helped organize.

    With a Foreword by John P. McGovern. "Ours is a world that has multiplied in complexity beyond anything dreamed in Osler's day. Tension and anxiety, uncertainty and stress are the inevitable result of our civilizations' rapid advance, mental and emotional ills its hallmarks . . . contemporary man desperately needs to learn the lesson of 'sufficient unto the day.' A Way of Life offers an antidote, in the form of a life style. But is the goal attainable? Osler's own life, marked by brilliant achievement in many spheres, testifies to the efficacy of sound habits of work and discipline, established early and followed strictly within 'daytight compartmentsÂ�."Â�From the Foreword by John P. McGovern.

    G. Sebald died in a car accident at the age of fifty-seven, the literary world mourned the loss of a writer whose oeuvre it was just beginning to appreciate. Through published interviews with and essays on Sebald, award-winning translator and author Lynne Sharon Schwartz offers a profound portrait of the writer, who has been praised posthumously for his unflinching explorations of historical cruelty, memory, and dislocation. With contributions from poet, essayist, and translator Charles Simic, New Republic editor Ruth Franklin, Bookworm radio host Michael Silverblatt, and more, The Emergence of Memory offers Sebald’s own voice in interviews between 1997 up to a month before his death in 2001. Also included are cogent accounts of almost all of Sebald’s books, thematically linked to events in the contributors’ own lives.Contributors include Carole Angier, Joseph Cuomo, Ruth Franklin, Michael Hofmann, Arthur Lubow, Tim Parks, Michael Silverblatt, Charles Simic, and Eleanor Wachtel.

    It was in that brilliant city that Sigmund Freud began his long struggle to free people everywhere from the blindfolds & chains of their unknown natures. The Passions of the Mind is the story of an extraordinary man who proved that some of the most exciting challenges aren't met on the battlefield or on mountain peaks, but inside the hearts & minds of individuals. The story is told with great attention to accuracy. His research is recounted as meticulously as in a biography, tho it's fictionalized to allow readers understanding of feelings & thought processes. Freud was one of Vienna's most distinguished neurologists. He gave up a life of respectable affluence to become a daring researcher of uncharted seas in an effort to change forever our understanding of human motivations. He was a pioneer explorer of the dark frontiers of the sexual nature of humans, for which he was made a pariah. Includes Glossary & Bibliography. "This book involved six years of uninterrupted research & writing, yet the road was lighted at every turn, by the kindness & the generosity of almost everyone who had known Sigmund Freud or worked with him."-- Irving Stone.

    They are all versions of a bigger question: how do you live? How do you do the good or honourable thing, while flourishing and feeling happy? This question obsessed Renaissance writers, none more than Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-92), perhaps the first truly modern individual. A nobleman, public official, and wine-grower, he wrote free-roaming explorations of his thought and experience, unlike anything written before. He called them 'essays', meaning 'attempts' or 'tries'. Into them he put whatever was in his head: his tastes in wine and food, his childhood memories, the way his dog's ears twitched when dreaming, as well as the appalling events of the religious civil wars raging around him. The Essays was an instant bestseller, and more than four hundred years later, Montaigne's honesty and charm still draw people to him. Readers come to him in search of companionship, wisdom and entertainment--and in search of themselves. This book, a spirited and singular biography (and the first full life of Montaigne in English for nearly fifty years), relates the story of his life by way of the questions he posed and the answers he explored. It traces his bizarre upbringing (made to speak only Latin), youthful career and sexual adventures, travels, and friendships with the scholar and poet Etienne de La Boétie and with his adopted 'daughter', Marie de Gournay. And as we read, we also meet his readers--who for centuries have found in Montaigne an inexhaustible source of answers to the haunting question, 'how to live?'

    The problem with these libraries is that they contain books that are generally written by professionals for their peers. Where the Hell Is God? combines the best of the professional's insights with the author's own experience and insights to speculate on how believers can make sense of their Christian faith when experiencing tragedy and suffering. Starting with a very personal story of the author's sister being left a quadriplegic from a car accident twenty years ago, Where the Hell Is God? gently leads the reader through some "take-home" messages that are sane, sound, and practical. Among these messages are: God does not directly send pain, suffering, and disease. God does not punish us; God does not send accidents to teach us things, though we can learn from them; and God does not will earthquakes, floods, droughts, or other natural disasters. This concise, accessible, and experience-based book will help people who are suffering as well as those who minister to them and their families.

    What's not to love?David “Yeah Dave” Romanelli is kinda hip, kinda goofy, and occasionally really outrageous, an unlikely guru who is reinventing the quest for enlightenment. For Yeah Dave, the path to ecstasy doesn't require any previous experience with yoga, meditation, or wellness. He shows us how to find transcendence through everyday pleasures, like admiring the sunset or rocking out to your favorite band. “There is a place where the chocolate tastes sweeter, the music sounds better, the inspiration feels richer, and the visions look clearer,” writes Dave. “That place is the Moment.”Yeah Dave’s Guide to Livin’ the Moment offers an alternative to the crazy, over-stimulating, distracted world we live in today, a world in which we watch the news while eating, eye our email while conversing, and forget to notice the full moon while texting. On our mission for speed, movement, and stimulation, we risk missing our life. Yeah Dave’s book gives us our life back, one beautiful, delicious, and funny moment at a time.Yeah Dave’s Guide will make you laugh out loud while taking you someplace totally unexpected. Through hilarious vignettes about his dorky moves on the dance floor, his Crackberry addiction, and his tryst with Hot Horny Married Woman, he shares fresh and unforgettable wisdom. Without dogma or anything too “out there,” Dave makes you want to slow down the blur of modern life and find the full flavor, power, and passion that can only be found in the Moment.