In these sharp, hilariously entertaining, and vividly observed pieces, Ephron illuminates an era with wicked honesty and insight. From the famous “A Few Words About Breasts” to important pieces on her time working for the New York Post and Gourmet Magazine, these essays show Ephron at her very best.

    Celebrate all the holidays–and then some–with renowned storyteller Kevin Kling, whose sense of the ridiculous never gets in the way of his appreciation for human nature.

    From the moment powerful men started falling to the #MeToo movement, the lamentations began: this is feminism gone too far, this is injustice, this is a witch hunt. In The Witches Are Coming, firebrand author of the New York Times bestselling memoir and now critically acclaimed Hulu TV series Shrill, Lindy West, turns that refrain on its head. You think this is a witch hunt? Fine. You’ve got one.In a laugh-out-loud, incisive cultural critique, West extolls the world-changing magic of truth, urging readers to reckon with dark lies in the heart of the American mythos, and unpacking the complicated, and sometimes tragic, politics of not being a white man in the twenty-first century. She tracks the misogyny and propaganda hidden (or not so hidden) in the media she and her peers devoured growing up, a buffet of distortions, delusions, prejudice, and outright bullsh*t that has allowed white male mediocrity to maintain a death grip on American culture and politics-and that delivered us to this precarious, disorienting moment in history.West writes, “We were just a hair’s breadth from electing America’s first female president to succeed America’s first black president. We weren’t done, but we were doing it. And then, true to form—like the Balrog’s whip catching Gandalf by his little gray bootie, like the husband in a Lifetime movie hissing, ‘If I can’t have you, no one can’—white American voters shoved an incompetent, racist con man into the White House.”We cannot understand how we got here-how the land of the free became Trump’s America—without examining the chasm between who we are and who we think we are, without fact—checking the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves and each other. The truth can transform us; there is witchcraft in it. Lindy West turns on the light.

    Half of the essays are brand new, the others are all reworked and rewritten, based on pieces that were originally published in Golf Digest. Often biting, usually cranky, always hilarious and surprising—this is Dan Jenkins at his best, writing about the sport he loves the most.      "I've always wanted to do something for the golfer who has everything. I thought about a suede golf cart, or maybe a pair of cashmere Footjoys. Then I settled on writing this book." So begins Dan Jenkins's latest—and funniest—collection of golf essays. The book consists of thirty-eight essays, all of them, as Dan says in the first essay, are "literally throbbing with opinion."     In this book Dan delves into the greatest rounds of golf he's ever seen; the funniest things said on a golf course; the rivalries on tour and in the press box; the game's most magical moments—and its most absurd. Unplayable Lies is an ode to the game Jenkins loves. But it is Dan Jenkins, so nothing—even the game of golf—can escape his wrath, his critical eye, or his acerbic pen. The best way to describe it is to turn the book over to Mr. Jenkins:      In "Titanic and I"—probably the most hilarious and surprising essay in the book, telling true stories of Titanic Thompson: gambler, golf hustler, accused murderer, legendary storyteller—Dan explains how Titanic would win a wager by saying he could knock a bird off a telephone wire: "Titanic would drop a ball on the ground and take out his four-wood, waggle it, and pretend to aim at the bird on the wire. When some sucker would bet him he couldn't do it, Ti would pull out a gun he carried and shoot the bird off the wire."     In "The Greatest Rounds": "Show me a man who doesn't know what Arnold did in the last round of the '60 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, and I'll show you a soccer fan in Paraguay."     This is a perfect follow up to His Ownself. It even has an Introduction by Sally Jenkins, one of the country's top sportswriters and Dan's own darling daughter.

    The commentary will contain background on the poems or more deeply delve into themes or topics discussed in the poems themselves. The spiritual seeker as well as the mature in faith will both benefit from the poems.

    Now, in the “unknown, unanticipated galaxy” of very old age, he is writing searching essays that startle, move, and delight. In the transgressive and horrifyingly funny “No Smoking,” he looks back over his lifetime, and several of his ancestors’ lifetimes, of smoking unfiltered cigarettes, packs of them every day. Hall paints his past: “Decades followed each other — thirty was terrifying, forty I never noticed because I was drunk, fifty was best with a total change of life, sixty extended the bliss of fifty . . .” And, poignantly, often joyfully, he limns his present: “When I turned eighty and rubbed testosterone on my chest, my beard roared like a lion and gained four inches.” Most memorably, Hall writes about his enduring love affair with his ancestral Eagle Pond Farm and with the writing life that sustains him, every day: “Yesterday my first nap was at 9:30 a.m., but when I awoke I wrote again.”

    Demetri's first literary foray features longer-form essays and conceptual pieces (such as Protagonists' Hospital, a melodrama about the clinic doctors who treat only the flesh wounds and minor head scratches of Hollywood action heroes), as well as his trademark charts, doodles, drawings, one-liners, and lists (i.e., the world views of optimists, pessimists and contortionists), Martin's material is varied, but his unique voice and brilliant mind will keep readers in stitches from beginning to end.

    Borrowing from a well-known improve game, Mochrie takes the first and last lines from familiar classics and reimagines everything in between. With the same engaging humour he exhibits on stage, television, and film, he takes the reader in bizarre and hilarious new directions, using the original writer's words as a launch and landing point. Imagine A Tale of Two Cities in which Wile E. Coyote gets his revenge on the Road Runner, Dr. Seuss's The Cat in the Hat with zombies, or The Night Before Christmas with a time travelling twist. Imagine Sherlock Holmes devising a foolproof method for eliciting laughter and then taking the stage at a Victorian comedy club in Old London.This inspired collection is comical, quirky, and clever classic Mochrie.

    Life certainly isn't. The sole inevitability of existence, the only sure consequence of being alive, is death. In these eloquent and surprising essays, twenty writers face this fact, among them Geoff Dyer, who describes the ghost bikes memorializing those who die in biking accidents; Jonathan Safran Foer, proposing a new way of punctuating dialogue in the face of a family history of heart attacks and decimation by the Holocaust; Mark Doty, whose reflections on the art-porn movie Bijou lead to a meditation on the intersection of sex and death epitomized by the AIDS epidemic; and Joyce Carol Oates, who writes about the loss of her husband and faces her own mortality. Other contributors include Annie Dillard, Diane Ackerman, Peter Straub, and Brenda Hillman.

    Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of an ordinary family that somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century. The family’s pursuit of a quiet, civilized, ordinary life—during such atrocious times—is itself a strange odyssey.In dialogue with thinkers like Roland Barthes, W. G. Sebald, Susan Sontag, and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various genres—essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue, and history—Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers a bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.

    File Under:Life,Death,Vertigo.Sparrows,Saints,and Morphine.

    It is divided into three parts: the first is introduced by a powerful prayer for the dead of 9/11; the second by a searching meditation on Martin Luther King Jr., and the last by a heart-wrenching eulogy for James Baldwin. In the writings and speeches included here, Morrison takes on contested social issues: the foreigner, female empowerment, the press, money, "black matter(s)," and human rights. She looks at enduring matters of culture: the role of the artist in society, the literary imagination, the Afro-American presence in American literature, and in her Nobel lecture, the power of language itself. And here too is piercing commentary on her own work (including The Bluest Eye, Sula, Tar Baby, Jazz, Beloved, and Paradise) and that of others, among them, painter and collagist Romare Bearden, author Toni Cade Bambara, and theater director Peter Sellars. In all, The Source of Self-Regard is a luminous and essential addition to Toni Morrison's oeuvre.

    A Slip of the Keyboard brings together for the first time the finest examples of Pratchett's non fiction writing, both serious and surreal: from musings on mushrooms to what it means to be a writer (and why banana daiquiris are so important); from memories of Granny Pratchett to speculation about Gandalf's love life, and passionate defences of the causes dear to him.With all the humour and humanity that have made his novels so enduringly popular, this collection brings Pratchett out from behind the scenes of the Discworld to speak for himself - man and boy, bibliophile and computer geek, champion of hats, orang-utans and Dignity in Dying.

    From a mistreated horse to an emotionally starved child and back again, a torrent of love washes away their barren places. Kim's ranch is a place where this miracle happens over and over again. It is a place where the impossible flourishes, where dreams survive the inferno of reality - a place where hope rises.Where Wounded Spirits Run Free Follow a horse where no one else can tread, through the minefield of pain that surrounds a broken child's soul. From a mistreated horse to an emotionally starved child and back again, a torrent of love revives their barren places.In the presence of unconditional love, a mute girl speaks for the first time. A defiant teenager teaches a horse to trust again...and opens his own heart to love. A rescued horse gives a dying man his last wish. A battered girl finds love and protection in the friendship of a battered horse...Come visit a place where the impossible flourishes, where dreams survive the inferno of reality--a place where hope rises.

    Whether the subject is barbershop mythology or a meditation on the circumstances of one's own conception, Fulghum makes us a little more aware of the richness, fullness, and joyousness of life.