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Gore Vidal - novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialist - is America’s premier man of letters. No other writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay.

Ralph Waldo Emerson is one of the most important figures in the history of American thought, religion, and literature. The vitality of his writings and the unsettling power of his example continue to influence us more than a hundred years after his death. Now Robert D. Richardson Jr. brings to life an Emerson very different from the old stereotype of the passionless Sage of Concord.

DIGITAL EXCLUSIVE: Includes 5 additional poems only available on the digital download. “Billy Collins puts the ‘fun’ back in ‘profundity.’ ”—Alice Fulton From the two-term Poet Laureate of the United States Billy Collins comes his first compilation of new and selected poems in...

Director David Fishelson transforms Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov and The Idiot into spellbinding drama that illuminates both titanic novels. In The Brothers Karamazov, the passionate brothers spring to life, led by their roué of a father ¿ who entertains himself by drinking, womanizing, and pitting his three sons against each other. The men have plenty to fight over, including the alluring Grushenka.

A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller...

A "vivid and visceral, gritty and magical, dark and soaring” (Meg Gardiner) novel from one of the most electrifying voices in contemporary crime fiction, Gabino Iglesias, this deeply honest story follows several, lost, desperate folk in the heart of the southwest. In this mosaic horror/crime...

Forty-something widow Jessie Tucker is beloved throughout Lexington, Alabama, for her kind heart and endless generosity. But she feels it’s past time she rewarded herself—especially when upstanding Hubert Wiggins tragically loses his wife and son. Making herself indispensable, yet discouraged by Hubert’s lack of romantic interest, Jessie cooks up a deception she knows will make pious Hubert do right by her …

In the spirit of Khaled Hosseini, Nadia Hashimi and Shilpi Somaya Gowda comes this powerful debut from a talented new voice a sweeping, emotional journey of two childhood friends in Mumbai, India, whose lives converge only to change forever one fateful night. India, 1986: Mukta, a ten-year-old...

This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.

“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.” —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books The best-known book by Cuba’s most important...

On November 22, 1963, three great men died within a few hours of each other: C. S. Lewis, John F. Kennedy, and Aldous Huxley. All three believed, in different ways, that death is not the end of human life. Suppose they were right, and suppose they met after death. How might the conversation go? Peter Kreeft imagines their discussion as a part of The Great Conversation that has been going on for centuries. Does human life have meaning? Is it possible to know about life after death? What if one could prove that Jesus was God?

Nkechi was a good Nigerian American girl. She did everything right. Went to med school. Made plans. Then life happened. And plans changed. A first-generation coming-of-age journey of love, loss, and growing into adulthood, Good Grief follows Nkechi as she navigates Pennsylvania’s suburbs alongside her childhood crush, her would-be-philosopher brother, and her immigrant parents.

August is Ghost Month in Taiwan - a time to commemorate the dead: Burn incense, visit shrines, honor ancestors, and avoid unlucky situations, large purchases, and bodies of water. Jing-nan, a young man who runs a food stand in a bustling Taipei night market, doesn't consider himself superstitious, but this August is going to haunt him no matter what he does. He is shocked to the core when he learns his ex-girlfriend from high school has been murdered.

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring and popular book, E. B. White was obeying that oft-repeated maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats - White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. In The Story of Charlotte's Web, Michael Sims shows how White solved what critic Clifton Fadiman once called "the standing problem of the juvenile-fantasy writer: how to find, not another Alice, but another rabbit hole."

Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.

Through her transcendent imagery, distinct punctuation, experimental slant rhyme, and wordplay, Emily Dickinson set herself apart from every other poet of her time. These essential works - thematically divided into poems on life, nature, love, and time and eternity - reveal a keen, humorous observer whose art, like the artist herself, defied tradition.

From the creator of the iconic "Cathy" comic strip comes her first collection of funny, wise, poignant, and incredibly honest essays about being a woman in what she lovingly calls "the panini generation." As the creator of "Cathy," Cathy Guisewite found her way into the hearts of readers more...

After twenty years of anguish, after twenty years of pain, defense attorney Joe Hennessy has the chance to confront the man who ordered the murder of his ten-year-old son. In Charleston, South Carolina, Hennessy uncovers evidence that Senator Richard Longhouse has links to his son's unsolved murder. Desperate to know the truth, Hennessy digs deep into the past, following the evidence trail into the criminal underworld. Clashing with corrupt cops, dishonest politicians, and ruthless felons, Hennessy uncovers information that has been buried for twenty years.

Benjamin Alire Sáenz's stories reveal how all borders—real, imagined, sexual, human, the line between dark and light, addict and straight—entangle those who live on either side. Take, for instance, the Kentucky Club on Avenida Juárez two blocks south of the Rio Grande. It's a touchstone for each of Sáenz's stories. His characters walk by, they might go in for a drink or to score, or they might just stay there for a while and let their story be told. Sáenz knows that the Kentucky Club, like special watering holes in all cities, is the contrary to borders.

It's the summer of '74 . . . Richard Nixon has resigned from office, CB radios are the hot new thing, and in the great state of Texas two cousins hatch a plan to drive $1 million worth of stolen weed to Idaho, where some lunatic is gearing up to jump Snake River Canyon on a rocket-powered motorcycle. But with a vengeful sheriff on their tail and the revered and feared marijuana kingpin of Central Texas out to get his stash back, Chuck and Dean are in for the ride of their lives—if they can make it out alive . . .