Art & Literature

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a modern American classic....

How did a boy from small-town New York become the world’s most successful writer? How does he do it? He has always wanted to write the kind of novel that would be read and reread so many times that the binding breaks and the book literally falls apart....

Immensely helpful and illuminating to any aspiring writer, this special edition of Stephen King’s critically lauded, million-copy best seller shares the experiences, habits, and convictions that have shaped him and his work....

David Sedaris' new collection of essays - including live recordings! - tells a most unconventional life story. It begins with a North Carolina childhood filled with speech-therapy classes...

Leonardo da Vinci created the two most famous paintings in history, The Last Supper and the Mona Lisa. But in his own mind, he was just as much a man of science and engineering....

​For more than forty years, Katie Couric has been an iconic presence in the media world. In her brutally honest, hilarious, heartbreaking memoir, she reveals what was going on behind the scenes of her sometimes tumultuous personal and professional life....

She got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world, all alone....

This is the book that changed America....

This definitive biography of Anna Wintour follows the steep climb of an ambitious young woman who would—with singular and legendary focus—become one of the most powerful people in media....

“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....

An exhilarating new collection from the award-winning author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville, Festival Days presents Jo Ann Beard at the height of her powers, using her flawless prose to reveal all that is tender and timeless beneath the way we live now....

In The Year of Magical Thinking, Didion explores with electric honesty and passion a private yet universal experience....

From the only American journalist ever to have been admitted to the insular Tokyo Metropolitan Police press club: a unique look at Japanese culture from the underbelly up....

Thoreau's classic account of the solitary life describes his attempts to simplify his life and sort out his priorities by living alone in a cabin beside Walden Pond for nearly two years....

A deeply personal memoir about one woman’s journey to finding her voice and rewriting her story by the creator and host of the award-winning podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books....

A lifelong worrier, Philpott always kept an eye out for danger, a habit that only intensified when she became a parent. But she looked on the bright side, too, believing that as long as she cared enough, she could keep her loved ones safe....

Goodwin describes the broken friendship between Teddy Roosevelt and his chosen successor, William Howard Taft....

Intriguing, disturbing, and powerful, Unbelievable is an unprecedented eyewitness account of the 2016 election from an intelligent, dedicated journalist at the center of it....

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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....

First published in 1979, The White Album records indelibly the upheavals and aftermaths of the 1960s....

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works....

When 11-year-old James Renner fell in love with Amy Mihaljevic, the missing girl seen on posters all over his neighborhood, it was the beginning of a lifelong obsession with true crime....

The Vanity Fair Diaries is the story of an Englishwoman barely out of her 20s who arrives in New York City with a dream....

Like nearly one in five people, Matt Haig suffers from depression. Reasons to Stay Alive is his inspiring account of how, minute by minute and day by day, he overcame the disease....

New York Times best-selling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote's never-published final novel, Answered Prayers....

In 1816, when eighteen-year old Mary Godwin began writing Frankenstein, the idea that a woman could dream up such a tale was as far-fetched as raising a being from the dead. But Mary wasn't just any woman. The daughter of two notorious radicals, Mary had become an outcast from English society when she was only sixteen. A lifelong advocate for the rights of women, she refused to be governed by social conventions, running away with a married man, having children out of wedlock, and authoring books, stories, and essays that broke literary conventions.

This overlooked work of Lawrence contains both beautiful descriptions of his travels in Italy during this period as well as a thoroughly engrossing portrait of a man, M, who he meets and can't quite get away from for months until the end. This true story grabs at you on several levels. Originally published as the introduction to M's work, Memoirs of the Foreign Legion, it stands on its own.

Following the unprecedented and universal acclaim for The Lord of the Rings, the respected academic and world-renowned Tolkien scholar Professor Tom Shippey presents us with a fascinating and informed companion to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, in particular focusing on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Written in a clear and accessible style, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century reveals why all of these books will be timeless.

In 1922 Agatha Christie set sail on a 10-month voyage around the British Empire with her husband as part of a trade mission to promote the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition. Leaving her two-year-old daughter behind with her sister, Agatha set sail at the end of January and did not return until December, but she kept up a detailed weekly correspondence with her mother, describing in detail the exotic places and people she encountered as the mission travelled through South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada.

By a series of coincidences, Mark Kurlansky’s life has always been intertwined with Ernest Hemingway's legend, starting with being in Idaho the day of Hemingway’s death. The Importance of Not Being Ernest explores the intersections between Hemingway’s and Kurlansky’s lives, resulting in creative accounts of two inspiring writing careers. Travel the world with Mark Kurlansky and Ernest Hemingway in this personal memoir, where Kurlansky details his ten years in Paris and his time as a journalist in Spain.

In the Nłeʔkepmxcín language, spíləx̣m are remembered stories, often shared over tea in quiet hours between Elders. Rooted within the British Columbia landscape, and with an almost tactile representation of being on the land and water, Spíləx̣m explores resilience, reconnection, and narrative memory through stories. Captivating and deeply moving, this story basket of memories tells one Indigenous woman’s journey of overcoming adversity and colonial trauma to find strength through creative works and traditional perspectives of healing, transformation, and resurgence.

James Marsh tells of his evolution from a troubled childhood to a long career in publishing that culminated in the creation of The Canadian Encyclopedia—what one reviewer called “the intellectual equivalent of the building of the CPR.” Through friendships, curiosity, the insights of a charismatic psychiatrist, his passion for books, and the intimate encounters with the authors he met, he championed a diverse and inclusive view of Canada, which was used to draw the great minds of an impossible nation together in a common national enterprise.

In the public imagination, Ernest Hemingway looms larger than life. But the actual person behind the legend has long remained elusive. Now, his son Patrick shares the letters they exchanged over two decades, offering a glimpse into how one of America’s most iconic writers interacted with his children. These letters reveal a father who wished for his children to share his interests—hunting, fishing, travel—and a son who was receptive to the experiences his father offered. 

The riveting biography of Burl Osborne, former chairman of The Associated Press and publisher of The Dallas Morning News, who waged and won one of the last great newspaper wars in the U.S., Burl is the story of one man’s unlikely rise from the coal mines of Appalachia to the pinnacle of journalism. 

Everyone knows Frank Herbert’s Dune. One of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, winning awards, selling millions of copies around the world. Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s eldest son, tells the provocative story of his father’s extraordinary life in this honest and loving chronicle. He has also brought to light all the events in Herbert’s life that would find their way into speculative fiction’s greatest epic.

My Boy Jack is the extraordinary story of Kipling's search for his son. John Kipling was reported missing in the Battle of Loos on the Western Front in 1915. His father, Rudyard, had pulled strings to get his myopic son into the firing line. Devastated at the loss of his only son, Rudyard undertook the sad mission to find John's grave but tragically never succeeded in his quest.

Much attention has been paid to so-called late style—but what about last style? When does last begin? How early is late? When does the end set in? In this endlessly stimulating investigation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes and musicians who've mattered to him throughout his life. 

My sand life, my pebble life. My life measured out in tides, coming in and going out. My life measured out in games of trying to spot the sea first. My life measured out in the delicious and indulgent sadness that comes from leaving a holiday cottage for the last time and for the first time in several days it isn’t raining, but at least the kids have had a great time and, let’s face it, so have you.

William Morris was a giant of the Victorian age, and his beautiful creations and provocative philosophies are still with us today: but his wife, Jane, is too often relegated to a footnote. In truth, Jane and William's personal and creative partnership was the central collaboration of both their lives. The homes they made together were works of art in themselves, and the great labour of their lives was life itself: through their houses and the objects they filled them with, they explored how we all might live a life more focused on beauty and fulfilment.

Polly Morland was clearing her late mother’s house when she found a battered paperback fallen behind the family bookshelf. Opening it, she was astonished to see an old photograph of the remote, wooded valley in which she lives. The book was A Fortunate Man, John Berger’s classic account of a country doctor working in the same valley more than half a century earlier. This chance discovery led Morland to the remarkable doctor who serves that valley community today, a woman whose own medical vocation was inspired by reading the very same book as a teenager.