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Once again, David Sedaris brings together a collection of essays so uproariously funny and profoundly moving that his legions of fans will fall for him once more. He tests the limits of love when Hugh lances a boil from his backside, and pushes the boundaries of laziness when, finding the water shut off in his house in Normandy, he looks to the water in a vase of fresh cut flowers to fill the coffee machine. From armoring the windows with LP covers...
2) Calypso
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Personal essays share the author's adventures after buying a vacation house on the Carolina coast and his reflections on middle age and mortality.
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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...
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"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature....
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"This is my last column, after a year that has scared and inspired me.." With these words, Elena Ferrante bid farewell to her year-long collaboration with the Guardian newspaper. For a full year, she wrote weekly articles, the subjects of which had been suggested by Guardian editors, making the writing process a sort of prolonged interlocution. The subjects ranged from first love to climate change, from enmity among women to the experience of seeing...
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Features 22 recordings, including 2 live performances by the author. Live recording of "Repeat after me," "Who is the chef." and "Six to eight black men" can also be heard on David Sedaris live at Carnegie Hall. Live recording of "Roaster at the Hitchin 'Post" and "Six to eight black men."
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"The View from the Cheap Seats brings together... more than sixty pieces of his outstanding nonfiction. Analytical yet playful, erudite yet accessible, this cornucopia explores a broad range of interests and topics, including (but not limited to): authors past and present; music; storytelling; comics; bookshops; travel; fairy tales; America; inspiration; libraries; ghosts; and the title piece, at turns touching and self-deprecating, which recounts...
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A blazingly intelligent first book of essays from the award-winning author of Open City and Every Day Is for the Thief
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Time • The Guardian • Harper's Bazaar • San Francisco Chronicle • The Atlantic • Financial Times • Kirkus
Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and...
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
Time • The Guardian • Harper's Bazaar • San Francisco Chronicle • The Atlantic • Financial Times • Kirkus
Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay and...
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"Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the tennis court with Serena Williams and the soccer field with Zinedine Zidane, online, on TV--everywhere, all the time. The accumulative stresses come...
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Williams weaves her observations in the naturalist field and her personal experience--as a woman, a Westerner, and a Mormon--into a resonant manifesto on behalf of the landscapes she loves, making clear as well that, through our disregard of this world, we have lost an essential connection to our deepest selves.
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"Few contemporary writers ask the questions about faith, morality, and God that Christian Wiman does, and even fewer--perhaps none--do so with his urgency and eloquence. Wiman, an award-winning poet and the author of My Bright Abyss, lays the motion of his mind on the page in this genre-defying work, an indivisible blend of poetry, criticism, theology, and searing memoir. As Marilynne Robinson wrote, "[Wiman's] poetry and his scholarship have a purifying...
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"In this collection of essays, Wyoming rancher Bob Budd takes both a sweeping and intimate look at the land he loves, its people, its history, and its future. As a rancher, he has a unique perspective on what makes the land special and how best to preserve it for the future. Describing details like the color of sagebrush, the sudden appearance of river otters, the smell of dirt, and the people who make up the land, he also talks about how ranches...
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Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.
"One of the most celebrated and revered writers in the history of American literature gives us a new nonfiction collection--a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades. The...
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The characteristic heart and punch-packing observations are back, but with a newfound coat of maturity. A thin coat. More of a blazer, really. Fans of I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number know Sloane Crosley's life as a series of relatable but madcap misadventures. In Look Alive Out There, whether it's scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on Gossip Girl, befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel...
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"Here, in these four crisp essays on writing and reading by the internationally bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lying Life of Adults, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of "bad language" and suggests ways in which it has long excluded women's truth; she proposes a choral fusion...
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"A collection of poetry by Paisley Rekdal"--
"In 2018, Utah Poet Laureate Paisley Rekdal was commissioned to write a poem commemorating the 150th anniversary of the transcontinental railroad. The result is West: A Translation--an unflinching hybrid collection of poems and essays that draws a powerful, necessary connection between the railroad's completion and the Chinese Exclusion Act (1882-1943). Carved into the walls of the Angel Island Immigration...
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An inspired weaving of indigenous knowledge, plant science, and personal narrative from a distinguished professor of science and a Native American whose previous book, Gathering Moss, was awarded the John Burroughs Medal for outstanding nature writing. As a botanist and professor of plant ecology, Robin Wall Kimmerer has spent a career learning how to ask questions of nature using the tools of science. As a Potawatomi woman, she learned from elders,...