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Essays

Wonderlands

Wonderlands

Baxter, Charles
$17.00

Searching and erudite new essays on writing from the author of Burning Down the House.

Charles Baxter's new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference.

The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other fabulist writers, to how request moments function in a story. Baxter is equally at home tackling a thorny matter such as charisma (which intersects with political figures like the disastrous forty-fifth US president) as he is bringing new interest to subjects such as list-making in fiction.

Amid these craft essays, an interlude of two personal essays--the story of a horrifying car crash and an introspective "letter to a young poet"--add to the intimate nature of the book. The final essay reflects on a lifetime of writing, and closes with a memorable image of Baxter as a boy, waiting at the window for a parent who never arrives and filling that absence with stories. Wonderlands will stand alongside his prior work as an insightful and lasting work of criticism.

War Diary

War Diary

Belorusets, Yevgenia
$16.95
The young artist and writer Yevgenia Belorusets was in her hometown of Kyiv when Putin's "special military operation" against Ukraine began on the morning of February 24, 2022. With the shelling of Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odessa, and Kherson, the war with Russia had clearly, irreversibly begun: "I thought, this has been allowed to happen, it is a crime against everything human, against a great common space where we live and hope for a future." With power and clarity, the War Diary of Yevgenia Belorusets documents the long beginning of the devastation and its effects on the ordinary residents of Ukraine; what it feels like to interact with the strangers who suddenly become your "countrymen"; the struggle to make sense of a good mood on a spring day; the new danger of a routine coffee run. First published in the German newspaper Der Spiegel and then translated and released each day on the site ISOLARII (and on Artforum), the War Diary had an immediate impact worldwide: it was translated by an anonymous collective of writers on Weibo; read live by Margaret Atwood on International Women's Day; adapted for an episode of This American Life on NPR; and brought to the 2022 Venice Biennale by President Zelensky as part of the pavilion "This is Ukraine: Defending Freedom."
How To Read and Why

How To Read and Why

Bloom, Harold
$16.00
Information is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom.
Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.
Where I Come From

Where I Come From

Bragg, Rick
$26.95
From the best-selling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of All Over but the Shoutin' and The Best Cook in the World, a collection of irresistible columns from Southern Living and Garden & Gun

Celebrated author and newspaper columnist Rick Bragg brings us an ode to the stories and history of the Deep South, filled with "eclectic nuggets about places and people he knows well" (USA Today) and written with honesty, wit, and deep affection.

A collection of wide-ranging and endearingly personal columns--from Bragg's love of Tupperware (his mother preferred margarine tubs and thought Tupperware was "just showing off") to the decline of country music, from the legacy of Harper Lee to the metamorphosis of the pickup truck to the best way to kill fire ants--Where I Come From is a book that will be treasured by fans old and new.

Written World And The Unwritten World

Written World And The Unwritten World

Calvino, Italo
$17.99

"Wonderful... Calvino's prose is sparkling as ever, and he approaches ideas with wit and an open mind, always ready to challenge a stale point of view. This anthology will delight Calvino fans old and new." --Publishers Weekly

A rich collection of essays offering an extraordinary global view of Calvino's approach to writing, reading, and interpreting literature.

An extraordinary collection of essays, forewords, articles, and interviews, The Written World and the Unwritten World displays the remarkable intelligence and razor-sharp wit of prolific Italian writer Italo Calvino as he explores the meaning of literature in a rapidly changing world. From classics to contemporary literature, from tradition to the avant-garde, Calvino masterfully explores reading, writing, and translating through careful and illuminating discussion of the works of Bakhtin, Brecht, Cortázar, Thomas Mann, Octavio Paz, Georges Perec, Salman Rushdie, Gore Vidal, and more. Drawn from Mondo scritto e mondo non scritto (2002), Sulla fiaba (1988), and other uncollected essays, this volume of previously untranslated work--now rendered in English by acclaimed translator Ann Goldstein--is a major statement in literary criticism.

Scott says: A sparkling collection of essays on the place of literature and writing in the modern world. Extraordinary!

Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

Dear Memory: Letters on Writing, Silence, and Grief

Chang, Victoria
$25.00

A Kirkus Best Book of October 2021

From poet Victoria Chang, a collection of literary letters and mementos on the art of remembering across generations.

For Victoria Chang, memory "isn't something that blooms, but something that bleeds internally." It is willed, summoned, and dragged to the surface. The remembrances in this collection of letters are founded in the fragments of stories her mother shared reluctantly, and the silences of her father, who first would not and then could not share more. They are whittled and sculpted from an archive of family relics: a marriage license, a letter, a visa petition, a photograph. And, just as often, they are built on the questions that can no longer be answered.

Dear Memory is not a transcription but a process of simultaneously shaping and being shaped, knowing that when a writer dips their pen into history, what emerges is poetry. In carefully crafted collages and missives on trauma, loss, and Americanness, Victoria Chang grasps on to a sense of self that grief threatens to dissipate.

In letters to family, past teachers, and fellow poets, as the imagination, Dear Memory offers a model for what it looks like to find ourselves in our histories.

Other Honors for Dear Memory:

An Electric Literature Favorite Nonfiction Book of 2021

A TIME Magazine Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021

A Los Angeles Times Most Anticipated Book of Fall 2021

A Literary Hub Most Anticipated Book of 2021An NPR Most Anticipated Book of October 2021

Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness

Home in Florida: Latinx Writers and the Literature of Uprootedness

Delgado, Anjanette
$26.95

Independent Publisher Book Awards, Silver Medal
for Anthology

National Indie
Excellence Awards, Finalist in the Anthology Category

International Latino Book Awards, Gold Medal for Best Fiction (Multi-Author)

International Latino Book Awards, Honorable Mention, Best Nonfiction (Multi-Author)


A powerful collection of contemporary voices


Showcasing a variety of voices shaped in and by a place that has been for them a crossroads and a land of contradictions, Home in Florida presents a selection of the best literature of displacement and uprootedness by some of the most talented contemporary Latinx writers who have called Florida home.



Featuring fiction, nonfiction, and poetry by Richard Blanco, Jaquira Díaz, Patricia Engel, Jennine Capó Crucet, Reinaldo Arenas, Judith Ortiz Cofer, and many others, this collection of renowned and award-winning contributors includes several who are celebrated in their countries of origin but have not yet been discovered by readers in the United States. The writers in this volume--first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants to Florida from Cuba, Mexico, Honduras, Perú, Argentina, Chile, and other countries--reflect the diversity of Latinx experiences across the state.



Editor Anjanette Delgado characterizes the work in this collection as literature of uprootedness, literatura del desarraigo, a Spanish literary tradition and a term used by Reinaldo Arenas. With the heart-changing, here-and-there perspective of attempting life in environments not their own, these writers portray many different responses to displacement, each occupying their own unique place on what Delgado calls a spectrum of belonging.



Together, these writers explore what exactly makes Florida home for those struggling between memory and presence. In these works, as it is for many people seeking to make a new life in the United States, Florida is the place where the uprooted stop to catch their breath long enough to wonder, "What if I stayed? What if here could one day be my home?"


Contributors: Daniel
Reschinga Ana Menéndez Frances Negrón Muntaner Hernán Vera Álvarez Liz
Balmaseda Ariel Francisco Andreina Fernandez Amina Lolita Gautier PhD Jennine
Capó-Crucet Dainerys Machado Vento Carlos Harrison Legna Rodríguez
Iglesias Judith Ortiz Cofer Chantel Acevedo Guillermo Rosales Achy
Obejas Alex Segura Patricia Engel Anjanette Delgado Mia Leonin Carlos
Pintado Nilsa Ada Rivera Natalie Scenters-Zapico Pedro Medina León Caridad
Moro-Gronlier Aracelis González Asendorf Michael García-Juelle Jaquira
Díaz José Ignacio Chascas-Valenzuela Raúl Dopico Javier Lentino Yaddyra
Peralta

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Let Me Tell You What I Mean

Didion, Joan
$23.00
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEAR - NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER - From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics, California robber barons, women, and her own self-doubt.

With a forward by Hilton Als, these twelve pieces from 1968 to 2000, never before gathered together, offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary figure. They showcase Joan Didion's incisive reporting, her empathetic gaze, and her role as an articulate witness to the most stubborn and intractable truths of our time (The New York Times Book Review).

Here, Didion touches on topics ranging from newspapers (the problem is not so much whether one trusts the news as to whether one finds it), to the fantasy of San Simeon, to not getting into Stanford. In Why I Write, Didion ponders the act of writing: I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking, what I'm looking at, what I see and what it means. From her admiration for Hemingway's sentences to her acknowledgment that Martha Stewart's story is one that has historically encouraged women in this country, even as it has threatened men, these essays are acutely and brilliantly observed. Each piece is classic Didion: incisive, bemused, and stunningly prescient.

Both Doug and Elsie loved this book. Doug says: Classic Didion, as if the essays  were held in casks and distilled to single-malt maturity. The flavors are ginger-rich like a potion in the hands of a  shaman. Do not miss these previously  uncollected essays from 1968-2000. 

Slouching Towards Bethlehem : Essays

Didion, Joan
$17.00
White Album

White Album

Didion, Joan
$17.00

Nora says: I was prompted to re-read Didion after hearing of her passing, and am once again moved by her intellect, her observations, her style. The White Album is a great place to start if you haven't read her non-fiction yet. Critics have pointed to the pieces on the sixties and James Jones' Hawaii as prime examples of her idiosyncratic style , but for my money, Many Mansions (Ronald Reagan's failed Governor's mansion project) and Quiet Days In Malibu (orchid breeding), are right up there!


 

"Didion is an original journalistic talent who can strike at the heart, or the absurdity, of a matter in our contemporary wasteland with quick, graceful strokes." –San Francisco Chronicle

 

"We tell ourselves stories in order to live . . . We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely, especially if we are writers, by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images . . . Or at least we do for a while."

 

First published in 1979, The White Album is a mosaic—of people, places, events—from the late 1960s and 1970s. Among other artifacts and personalities from those years, it includes the dark journeys and impulses of the Manson family, a Black Panther Party press conference, portraits of Doris Lessing and Georgia O'Keeffe, the romance of water in an arid landscape, and a visit to the disorienting city of Bogota—a varied and vibrant portrait of the times as seen through Joan Didion's clear-eyed perspective. With commanding sureness of mood and language, she exposes the realities and dreams of that age of self discovery whose spiritual center was California.