Barbara Kingsolver has entertained and touched the lives of legions of readers with her critically acclaimed and bestselling novels The Bean Trees, Animal Dreams, and Pigs in Heaven. In these twenty-five newly conceived essays, she returns once again to her favored literary terrain to explore the themes of family, community, and the natural world. With the eyes of a scientist and the vision of a poet, Barbara Kingsolver writes about notions as diverse...

A #1 best-selling author shows how a boy from small-town New York made it to literary stardom. How did a kid whose dad lived in the poorhouse become the most successful storyteller in the world? On the morning he was born, he nearly died. His dad grew up in the Pogey--the Newburgh, New York, poorhouse. He worked at a mental hospital in Massachusetts, where he met the singer James Taylor and the poet Robert Lowell. While he toiled in advertising hell,...

"The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays"-- ""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious...

Stephen King reflects on how his writing has helped him through difficult times and describes various aspects of the art of writing.

"A Mystery of Mysteries is a brilliant biography of Edgar Allan Poe that examines the renowned author's life through the prism of his mysterious death and its many possible causes. It is a moment shrouded in horror and mystery. Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7, 1849, at just forty, in a painful, utterly bizarre manner that would not have been out of place in one of his own tales of terror. What was the cause of his untimely death, and what happened...

Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a "lifelong endeavor," or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice -- Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women...

"His name is synonymous with high-stakes wilderness survival stories. Now, beloved author Gary Paulsen portrays a series of life-altering moments from his turbulent childhood as his own original survival story. If not for his summer escape from a shockingly neglectful Chicago upbringing to a North Woods homestead at age five, there never would have been a Hatchet. Without the encouragement of the librarian who handed him his first book at age thirteen,...

Thirty years ago Tobias Wolff wrote a memoir that changed the form. This Boys Life is the story of the young, tough-on-the-outside but vulnerable Toby Wolff. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother travel from Florida to Utah to a small village in Washington state, with many stops along the way. As each place doesn't quite work out, they pick up to find somewhere new. In the story of their journey, Wolff masterfully recreates...

Fisher comes clean (well, sort of) with the crazy truth that is her life, in her first-ever memoir.

"John Hodgman--New York Times bestselling author, semi-famous personality, deranged millionaire, increasingly elderly husband, father, and human of earth--has written a memoir about his cursed travels through two wildernesses: from the woods of his home of Massachusetts, birthplace of rage, to his exile on the coast of Maine, so-called 'Vacationland,' home to the most painful beaches on earth. Vacationland is also about John's wandering in the metaphoric...