Each of its 49 chapters explores a specific site or intersection in the city, from the mighty Golden Gate Bridge to the raunchy Tenderloin to the soaring sea cliffs at Land's End.This unique approach captures the exhilarating experience of walking through San Francisco's sublime terrain, while at the same time tying that experience to a history as rollicking and unpredictable as the city herself. From her absurd beginnings as the most distant and moth-eaten outpost of the world's most extensive empire, to her instantaneous fame during the Gold Rush, from her apocalyptic destruction by earthquake and fire to her perennial embrace of rebels, dreamers, hedonists and misfits of all stripes, the City by the Bay has always followed a trajectory as wildly independent as the untrammeled natural forces that created her.This ambitious, eclectic, and beautifully written book draws on everything from on-the-ground reporting to obscure academic papers to the author's 40-year life in San Francisco to create a rich and insightful portrait of a magical corner of the world. Complete with hand-drawn maps ofthe 49locations, this handsome package will sit comfortably on the short shelf of enduring books about places, alongside E. B. White's Here is New York, Jose Saramago's Journey to Portugal, or Alfred Kazin's A Walker in the City.

    Wolfe's brilliant first book -- a collection of essays that introduced us to the Sixties, to extravagant new styles of life that had nothing to do with the "elite" culture of the past.

    Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned from a "blowup" -- an explosive, 2,000-degree firestorm 300 feet deep and 200 feet tall -- a deadly explosion of flame and wind rarely encountered and little understood at the time.  Only seconds ahead of the approaching firestorm, the foreman, R. Wagner Dodge, throws himself into the ashes of an "escape fire " - and survives as most of his confused men run, their last moments obscured by smoke. The parents of the dead cry murder, charging that the foreman's fire killed their boys.  Exactly what happened in Mann Gulch that day has been obscured by years of grief and controversy. Now a master storyteller finally gives the Mann Gulch fire its due as tragedy.     These first deaths among the Forest Service's elite firefighters prompted widespread examination of federal fire policy, of the field of fire science, and of the frailty of young men. For Maclean, who witnessed the fire from the ground in August of 1949,  and even then he knew he would one day become a part of its story.  It is a story of Montana, of the ways of wildfires, firefighters, and fire scientists, and especially of a crew, young and proud, who "hadn't learned to count the odds and to sense they might owe the universe a tragedy." This tale is also Maclean's own, the story of a writer obsessed by a strange and human horror, unable to let the truth die with these young men, searching for the last - and lasting - word. A canvas on which to tell many stories, including the story of his research into the story itself. And finally Nature's violence colliding with human fallibility.      Haunted by these deaths for forty years, Norman Maclean returned to the scene with two of the survivors and pursues the mysteries that Mann Gulch has kept hidden since 1949.  From the words of witnesses, the evidence of history, and the research of fire scientists, Maclean at last assembles the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy; in his last work that consumed 14 years of his life, and earned a 1992 National Book Critics Circle Award.       The excruciating detail of this book makes for a sobering reading experience. Maclean -- a former University of Chicago English professor and avid fisherman -- also wrote A River Runs Through It and Other Stories , which is set along the Missouri River, one gulch downstream from Mann Gulch.       "A magnificent drama of writing, a tragedy that pays tribute to the dead and offers rescue to the living.... Maclean's search for the truth, which becomes an exploration of his own mortality, is more compelling even than his journey into the heart of the fire. His description of the conflagration terrifies, but it is his battle with words, his effort to turn the story of the 13 men into tragedy that makes this book a classic."          —  from New York Times Book Review Editor's Choice, Best Books of 1992 The Men who Perished in the Mann Gulch Fire: Robert J. Bennett
Eldon E. Diettert
James O. Harrison
William J. Heilman
Phillip R. McVey
David R. Navon
Leonard L. Piper
Stanley J. Reba
Marvin L. Sherman
Joseph B. Sylvia
Henry J. Thol, Jr.
Newton R. Thompson
Silas R. Thompson Survivors of the Fire: R. Wagner Dodge, foreman
Walter B. Rumsey
Robert W. Sallee

    The second section contains the grand master's ruminations on the SF genre itself. And the final section is comprised of Asimov's thoughts on the craft and writing of science fiction.

    From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine to Murakami's 1Q84 it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the writer's own life to the creation of the story, influential contemporary events and philosophies, and the meaning that can be extracted from the details of the work. With hundreds of pieces of original artwork, illustration and cartography, as well as a detailed overview of the plot and a "Dramatis Personae" for each work, Literary Wonderlands is a fascinating read for lovers of literature, fantasy, and science fiction.

    She has written a stunningly original book of essays whose concerns range from the most minimal and personal subjects to the most encompassing matters of art and culture. The titles themselves speak to the volume's uniqueness: "On lice," "On sleeping in the theater," "On motherhood and stools (the furniture kind)," "Greek masks and Bell's palsy."100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write is a book in which chimpanzees, Chekhov, and child care are equally at home. A vibrant, provocative examination of the possibilities of the theater, it is also a map to a very particular artistic sensibility, and an unexpected guide for anyone who has chosen an artist's life.

    Join author Douglas Adams and zoologist Mark Carwardine as they take off around the world in search of exotic, endangered creatures.

    This rich treasury includes Tolkien's most beloved short fiction plus his essay on fantasy. Publisher's Note Tolkien's Magic Ring, by Peter S. Beagle The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth Beorhthelm's Son Tree and Leaf On Fairy-Stories Leaf by Niggle Farmer Giles of Ham The Adventures of Tom Bombadil The Adventures of Tom Bombadil Bombadil Goes Boating Errantry Princess Mee The Man in the Moon Stayed Up Too Late The Man in the Moon Came Down Too Soon The Stone Troll Perry-the-Winkle The Mewlips Oliphaunt Fastitocalon Cat Shadow-bride The Hoard The Sea-Bell The Last Ship

    Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience. From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we’ve come from, and who we are, and where we are going.” Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir, T. S. Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and Annie Dillard.Foreword / by Robert Atwan --Introduction / by Joyce Carol Oates --Corn-pone opinions / Mark Twain --Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois --Law of acceleration / Henry Adams --Stickeen / John Muir --Moral equivalent of war / William James --Handicapped / Randolph Bourne --Coatesville / John Jay Chapman --Devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams --Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot --Pamplona in July / Ernest Hemingway --Hills of Zion / H.L. Mencken --How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston --Old stone house / Edmund Wilson --What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein --Crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald --Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber --Ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright --Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee --Figure a poem makes / Robert Frost --Once more to the lake / E.B. White --Insert flap "A" and throw away / S.J. Perelman --Bop / Langston Hughes --Future is now / Katherine Anne Porter --Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy --Marginal world / Rachel Carson --Notes of a native son / James Baldwin --Brown wasps / Loren Eiseley --Sweet devouring / Eudora Welty --Hundred thousand straightened nails / Donald Hall --Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr. --Putting daddy on / Tom Wolfe --Notes on "Camp" / Susan Sontag --Perfect past / Vladimir Nabokov --Way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday --Apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick --Illumination rounds / Michael Herr --I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou --Lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas --Search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee --Doomed in their sinking / William H. Gass --No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston --Looking for Zora / Alice Walker --Women and honor: some notes on lying / Adrienne Rich --White album / Joan Didion --Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez --Solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich --Total eclipse / Annie Dillard --Drugstore in winter / Cynthia Ozick --Okinawa: the bloodiest battle of all / William Manchester --Heaven and nature / Edward Hoagland --Creation myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould --Life with daughters: watching the miss America Pageant / Gerald Early --Disposable rocket / John Updike --hey all just went away / Joyce Carol Oates --Graven images / Saul Bellow --Biographical notes --Appendix: Notable twentieth-century American literary nonfiction

    The apprehensive scribe's quest is to capture on paper the fiercest of all literary beasts -- Moby Dick -- in the form of a workable screenplay so the great director can begin filming.But from the moment he sets foot on Irish soil, the author embarks on an unexpected odyssey. Meet congenial IRA terrorists, tippling men of the cloth impish playwrights, and the boyos at Heeber Finn's pub. In a land where myth is reality, poetry is plentiful, and life's misfortunes are always cause for celebration, Green Shadows, White Whale is the grandest tour of Ireland you'll ever experience -- with the irrepressible Ray Bradbury as your enthusiastic guide.

    Defiant, funny and courageously honest, High Tide in Tucson is an engaging and immensely readable collection from one of the most original voices in contemporary literature.'Possessed of an extravagantly gifted narrative voice, Kingsolver blends a fierce and abiding moral vision with benevolent and concise humour. Her medicine is meant for the head, the heart, and the soul.' New York Times Book Review

    How does an artist accomplish such an achievement, connecting deeply with an audience never met? In this groundbreaking book, one of our culture’s beloved artists offers a detailed account of her own creative process, inspirations, and unexpected connections. Patti Smith, a National Book Award-winning author, first presents an original and beautifully crafted tale of obsession—a young skater who lives for her art, a possessive collector who ruthlessly seeks his prize, a relationship forged of need both craven and exalted. She then takes us on a second journey, exploring the sources of her story. We travel through the South of France to Camus’s house, and visit the garden of the great publisher Gallimard where the ghosts of Mishima, Nabokov, and Genet mingle. Smith tracks down Simone Weil’s grave in a lonely cemetery, hours from London, and winds through the nameless Paris streets of Patrick Modiano’s novels. Whether writing in a café or a train, Smith generously opens her notebooks and lets us glimpse the alchemy of her art and craft in this arresting and original book on writing.The Why I Write series is based on the Windham-Campbell Lectures, delivered annually to commemorate the awarding of the Donald Windham-Sandy M. Campbell Literature Prizes at Yale University.

    With subjects ranging from the writer’s own “migrant childhood” to the need to protect what remains of the great western wilderness (which Stegner dubs “the geography of hope”) to poignant profiles of western writers such as John Steinbeck and Norman Maclean, this collection is a riveting testament to the power of place. At the same time it communicates vividly the sensibility and range of this most gifted of American writers, historians, and environmentalists.

    Landmarks is about the power of language to shape our sense of place. It is a field guide to the literature of nature, and a glossary containing thousands of remarkable words used in England, Scotland, Ireland and Wales to describe land, nature and weather. Travelling from Cumbria to the Cairngorms, and exploring the landscapes of Roger Deakin, J. A. Baker, Nan Shepherd and others, Robert Macfarlane shows that language, well used, is a keen way of knowing landscape, and a vital means of coming to love it.

    Eula Biss explores race in America and her response to the topic is informed by the experiences chronicled in these essays -- teaching in a Harlem school on the morning of 9/11, reporting for an African American newspaper in San Diego, watching the aftermath of Katrina from a college town in Iowa, and settling in Chicago's most diverse neighborhood.As Biss moves across the country from New York to California to the Midwest, her essays move across time from biblical Babylon to the freedman's schools of Reconstruction to a Jim Crow mining town to post-war white flight. She brings an eclectic education to the page, drawing variously on the Eagles, Laura Ingalls Wilder, James Baldwin, Alexander Graham Bell, Joan Didion, religious pamphlets, and reality television shows.These spare, sometimes lyric essays explore the legacy of race in America, artfully revealing in intimate detail how families, schools, and neighborhoods participate in preserving racial privilege. Faced with a disturbing past and an unsettling present, Biss still remains hopeful about the possibilities of American diversity, "not the sun-shininess of it, or the quota-making politics of it, but the real complexity of it."