All he has left behind is a cryptic note explaining that he's returned to their childhood town, a place Chloe never wants to see again.While trying to reach Nate, Chloe stumbles upon a notebook tucked inside his antique copy of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe." Written in code, the pages contain long-buried secrets from their past, and clues to why he went home after all these years. As Chloe struggles to decipher the notebook's hidden messages, she revisits the seminal moments of their youth: the day she met the enigmatic Sinclair children and the increasingly dangerous games they played to escape their troubled childhoods; the first time Nate kissed her, camped out on the beach like Robinson Crusoe; and the elaborate plan she and Nate devised, inspired by Romeo and Juliet, to break away from his oppressive father. As the reason for Nate's absence comes to light, the truth will forever shatter everything Chloe knows -- about her husband, his family, and herself.

    On the hundredth night, they shared pancakes to celebrate, but it soon became evident that neither wanted to let go of their storytelling ritual. So they decided to continue what they called "The Streak." Alice's father read aloud to her every night without fail until the day she left for college. Alice approaches her book as a series of vignettes about her relationship with her father and the life lessons learned from the books he read to her.Books included in the Streak included: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens, the Oz books by L. Frank Baum, Harry Potter by J. K. Rowling, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll, and Shakespeare's plays.

    This kind of work reminds us: it’s all there, love and disappointment and deep humor, latent in our language and its storehouses; but it takes a keen eye to connect the dots. Jez Burrows is keen indeed.”  —Robin Sloan, New York Times bestselling author of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour BookstoreGenre-bending and wildly inventive, Dictionary Stories is a giddy celebration of the originality, flexibility, and beauty of narrative. Love stories, horror stories, noir mysteries, recipes, eulogies, confessions, thrillers—each one a miniature literary remix of unlikely parts hidden in plain sight, created by flipping through the dictionary and knowing where to stop.

    As well as leafing through the well-known titles that have helped shape the world in which we live, Oliver Tearle also dusts off some of the more neglected items to be found hidden among the bookshelves of the past.You’ll learn about the forgotten Victorian novelist who outsold Dickens, the woman who became the first published poet in America and the eccentric traveller who introduced the table-fork to England. Through exploring a variety of books – novels, plays, travel books, science books, cookbooks, joke books and sports almanacs – The Secret Library highlights some of the most fascinating aspects of our history. It also reveals the surprising connections between various works and historical figures. What links Homer’s Iliad to Aesop’s Fables? Or Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack to the creator of Sherlock Holmes?The Secret Library brings these little-known stories to light, exploring the intersections between books of all kinds and the history of the Western world over 3,000 years.

    With the help of a savvy lawyer, he escaped justice for years until a relative shot him dead at the funeral of his last victim. Despite hundreds of witnesses, Maxwell’s murderer was acquitted–thanks to the same attorney who had previously defended the Reverend.Sitting in the audience during the vigilante’s trial was Harper Lee, who had traveled from New York City to her native Alabama with the idea of writing her own In Cold Blood, the true-crime classic she had helped her friend Truman Capote research seventeen years earlier. Lee spent a year in town reporting, and many more working on her own version of the case.Now Casey Cep brings this story to life, from the shocking murders to the courtroom drama to the racial politics of the Deep South.

    Nominated for a 2020 Goodreads Choice Award for Best CookbooksFrom celebrated blogger Sarah Kieffer of The Vanilla Bean Baking Blog!100 Cookies is a go-to baking book featuring 100 recipes for cookies and bars, organized into seven chapters.Chocolatey, fruity, crispy, chewy, classic, inventive—there's a foolproof recipe for the perfect treat for everyone in this cookie recipe book.• Introduces innovative baking techniques• Includes an entire chapter dedicated to Kieffer's "pan banging" technique that ensures crisp edges and soft centers for the most delicious cookies• Nearly every cookie dough recipe is accompanied by a photograph.Dessert recipes range from the Classic Chocolate Chip made three different ways, to bars, brownies, and blondies that reflect a wide range of flavors and global inspiration.This is the comprehensive-yet-charming cookbook every cookie lover (or those who love to bake cookies) needs.• Highly giftable with a textured case and a ribbon marker• Recipes include Marshmallow Peanut Butter Brownies, Olive Oil Sugar Cookies with Blood Orange Glaze, Red Wine Cherry Cheesecake Swirl Bars, and Pan-Banging Ginger Molasses, S'mores Cookies, Snickerdoodles, and more• A great pick for the home baker in search of a new bake sale recipe or someone who just loves cookies, as well as fans of Sarah Kieffer's blog and Instagram• Add it to the shelf with cookbooks like Sally's Cookie Addiction by Sally McKenney; Dorie's Cookies by Dorie Greenspan; and The Perfect Cookie: Your Ultimate Guide to Foolproof Cookies, Brownies & Bars by America's Test Kitchen

    Struggling to pay her college tuition, Hindman accepts a dream position in an award-winning ensemble that brings ready money. But the ensemble is a sham. When the group performs, the microphones are off while the music―which sounds suspiciously like the soundtrack to the movie "Titanic"―blares from a hidden CD player. Hindman, who toured with the ensemble and its peculiar composer for four years, writes with unflinching candor and humor about her surreal and quietly devastating odyssey. Sounds Like Titanic is at once a singular coming-of-age memoir about the lengths to which one woman goes to make ends meet and an incisive articulation of modern anxieties about gender, class, and ambition.

    Hector and Virgil think of their B&B as a refuge, a retreat, a haven, where folks may bring their own books or peruse the brothers' own substantial library. An antic blend of homespun and intellectual humor, Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast is a place readers will want to return to again and again.Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast, originally published by Douglas & McIntyre, won Canada's prestigious Stephen Lecock Award for Humour in 1994, and was published in hardcover by A Wyatt Book for St. Martin's Press in 1996. Its sequel, Bachelor Brothers' Bed & Breakfast Pillow Book, is a Canadian bestseller, and will be published in hardcover by A Wyatt Book in October 1997.

    But she soon encountered the jarring realities of life in one of the poorest counties in America, still disabled by the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow. In this stirring memoir, Kuo, the child of Taiwanese immigrants, shares the story of her complicated but rewarding mentorship of one student, Patrick Browning, and his remarkable literary and personal awakening.Convinced she can make a difference in the lives of her teenaged students, Michelle Kuo puts her heart into her work, using quiet reading time and guided writing to foster a sense of self in students left behind by a broken school system. Though Michelle loses some students to truancy and even gun violence, she is inspired by some such as Patrick. Fifteen and in the eight grade, Patrick begins to thrive under Michelle's exacting attention. However, after two years of teaching, Michelle feels pressure from her parents and the draw of opportunities outside the Delta and leaves Arkansas to attend law school.Then, on the eve of her law-school graduation, Michelle learns that Patrick has been jailed for murder. Feeling that she left the Delta prematurely and determined to fix her mistake, Michelle returns to Helena and resumes Patrick's education — even as he sits in a jail cell awaiting trial. Every day for the next seven months they pore over classic novels, poems, and works of history. Little by little, Patrick grows into a confident, expressive writer and a dedicated reader galvanized by the works of Frederick Douglass, James Baldwin, Walt Whitman, W.S. Merwin, and others. In her time reading with Patrick, Michelle is herself transformed, contending with the legacy of racism and the questions of what constitutes a "good" life and what the privileged owe to those with bleaker prospects.Reading with Patrick is an inspirational story of friendship, a coming-of-age story of both a young teacher and a student, a resonant meditation on education, race, and justice in the rural South, and a love letter to literature and its power to transcend social barriers.

    Tyrant shows that Shakespeare’s work remains vitally relevant today, not least in its probing of the unquenchable, narcissistic appetites of demagogues and the self-destructive willingness of collaborators who indulge their appetites.

    "There was waking, and there was sleeping. And then there were books," she writes, "a kind of parallel universe in which anything might happen and frequently did, a universe in which I might be a newcomer but never really a stranger. My real, true world." Later, she quotes editor Hazel Rochman: "Reading makes immigrants of us all. It takes us away from home, but, most important, it finds homes for us everywhere." Indeed, Quindlen's essays are full of the names of "friends," real or fictional—Anne of Green Gables and Heidi; Anthony Trollope and Jane Austen, to name just a few—who have comforted, inspired, educated, and delighted her throughout her life. In four short essays Quindlen shares her thoughts on the act of reading itself ("It is like the rubbing of two sticks together to make a fire, the act of reading, an improbable pedestrian task that leads to heat and light"); analyzes the difference between how men and women read ("there are very few books in which male characters, much less boys, are portrayed as devoted readers"); and cheerfully defends middlebrow literature:Most of those so-called middlebrow readers would have readily admitted that the Iliad set a standard that could not be matched by What Makes Sammy Run? or Exodus. But any reader with common sense would also understand intuitively, immediately, that such comparisons are false, that the uses of reading are vast and variegated and that some of them are not addressed by Homer.

    Now, in his first book, he presents a blistering collection of new and newly expanded essays--including the achingly funny viral hit "Things You Only Know When Both Your Parents Are Dead." In these pages, he travels to Saudi Arabia, where he acts as a perplexed bystander at a camel pageant; offers a survival guide for the modern dinner party (i.e. how to tactfully escape at the first sign of an adult board game); and gets pitted head-to-head, again and again, with an unpredictable, unpitying subspecies of Londoner: the landlord.Through it all, he shows that no matter how cruel the misfortune, how absurd the circumstance, there's always the soft punch of a lesson tucked within. This is a book for anyone who overshares, overthinks, has ever felt lost or confused--and who wants to have a good laugh about it.

    A hotbed for hip hop, underground culture, and unmatched creative energy, it spawned some of the most significant art of the 20th century. It was where Jean-Michel Basquiat became an avant-garde street artist and painter, swiftly achieving worldwide fame. During the years before his death at the age of 27, he shared his life with his lover and muse, Suzanne Mallouk. A runaway from an unhappy home in Canada, Suzanne first met Jean-Michel in a bar on the Lower East Side in 1980. Thus began a tumultuous and passionate relationship that deeply influenced one of the most exceptional artists of our time. In emotionally resonant prose, award-winning author Jennifer Clement tells the story of the passion that swept Suzanne and Jean-Michel into a short-lived, unforgettable affair. A poetic interpretation like no other, Widow Basquiat is an expression of the unrelenting power of addiction, obsession and love.

    Each emotionally involving story illuminates a different kind of love: star-crossed, intense, needy, eternal, unrequited, even comical. Wilder’s protagonists will be instantly recognizable to his fans: men and women who stumble into relationships that can fulfill them or knock them out cold. Which one it will be depends, often, on the smallest of gestures or reactions. Wilder’s stories include:• “In Love for the First Time,” about a lover so shy and studious that he’s a “funny duck” who has to be led by the hand by his equally inexperienced girlfriend• “About Being in Love,” featuring coarse but charming Buddy Silverman, who yearns for connection but looks for it in exactly the wrong kind of woman• “The Woman in the Red Hat,” who shows a writer who has only explored love in his books what the real thing feels like.

    G. Wodehouse is recognized as the greatest English comic writers of the twentieth century, rightly admired throughout the world and translated into more than thirty languages. Launched on the twenty-fifth anniversary of his death, this series presents each Overlook Wodehouse as the finest edition of the master’s work ever published—beautifully designed and faithful to the original. This season, Overlook is pleased to offer the latest two hilarious volumes. Louder and Funnier is a collection of articles written for Vanity Fair, with subjects ranging from Shakespeare and divorce to income tax and ocean liners. The Prince and Betty is an engrossing, hilarious story of an unscrupulous millionaire and his plans to build a casino in the Mediterranean. Revised by Wodehouse after the initial publication, it features the master’s signature reflections on the rich in one of his classic novels.