The Great Movies

Written by Roger Ebert

Format: Trade Paperback, 544 pages
Publisher: Three Rivers Press
On Sale: November 11, 2003
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-7679-1038-5 (0-7679-1038-9)

Roger Ebert, America's most visible film writer and critic, presents 100 essays collected from his biweekly newspaper feature called "The Great Movies". Each essay is a brilliant example of offering critical appreciation, analysis, and history that will send readers back to that film with a fresh set of eyes and renewed... Read more >

On Ugliness

Written by Umberto Eco

Format: Trade Paperback, 456 pages
Publisher: Rizzoli
On Sale: October 18, 2011
Price: $29.95
ISBN: 978-0-8478-3723-6 (0-8478-3723-8)

In the mold of his acclaimed History of Beauty, renowned cultural critic Umberto Eco’s On Ugliness is an exploration of the monstrous and the repellant in visual culture and the arts. What is the voyeuristic impulse behind our attraction to the gruesome and the horrible? Where does the magnetic appeal of... Read more >

Zeitoun

Written by Dave Eggers

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 15, 2010
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-38794-3 (0-307-38794-1)

A New York Times Notable Book
An O, The Oprah Magazine Terrific Read of the Year
A Huffington Post Best Book of the Year
A New Yorker Favorite Book of the Year
A Chicago Tribune Favorite Nonfiction Book of the Year
A Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year
A San... Read more >

The Collected Essays of Ralph Ellison

Written by Ralph Ellison
Preface by Saul Bellow
Edited by John Callahan

Format: Trade Paperback, 904 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: September 9, 2003
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-6826-2 (0-8129-6826-3)

Compiled, edited, and newly revised by Ralph Ellison’s literary executor, John F. Callahan, this Modern Library Paperback Classic includes posthumously discovered reviews, criticism, and interviews, as well as the essay collections Shadow and Act (1964), hailed by Robert Penn Warren as “a body of cogent and subtle commentary on the questions... Read more >

The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson

Written by Ralph Waldo Emerson
Edited by Brooks Atkinson
Introduction by Mary Oliver

Format: Trade Paperback, 880 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: September 12, 2000
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-78322-0 (0-679-78322-9)

The definitive collection of Emerson's major speeches, essays, and poetry, The Essential Writings of Ralph Waldo Emerson chronicles the life's work of a true "American Scholar."

As one of the architects of the transcendentalist movement, Emerson embraced a philosophy that championed the individual, emphasized independent thought, and prized "the splendid labyrinth of... Read more >

Nature and Walking

Written by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau

Format: Trade Paperback, 144 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: July 1, 1994
Price: $13.00
ISBN: 978-0-8070-1419-6 (0-8070-1419-2)

Together in one volume, Emerson’s Nature and Thoreau’s Walking, is writing that defines our distinctly American relationship to nature. Read more >

Language
The Cultural Tool
Written by Daniel L. Everett

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: December 11, 2012
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-47380-6 (0-307-47380-5)

For years, the prevailing opinion among academics has been that language is embedded in our genes, existing as an innate and instinctual part of us. In this bold and provocative study, linguist Daniel Everett argues that, like other tools, language was invented by humans and can be reinvented or lost. He... Read more >

Language
The Cultural Tool
Written by Daniel L. Everett

Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: March 13, 2012
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-37853-8 (0-307-37853-5)

A bold and provocative study that presents language not as an innate component of the brain—as most linguists do—but as an essential tool unique to each culture worldwide.

For years, the prevailing opinion among academics has been that language is embedded in our genes, existing as an innate and instinctual part of... Read more >

Essays, Speeches & Public Letters

Written by William Faulkner
Edited by James B. Meriwether

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: February 10, 2004
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7137-8 (0-8129-7137-X)

An essential collection of William Faulkner’s mature nonfiction work, updated, with an abundance of new material.

This unique volume includes Faulkner’s Nobel Prize acceptance speech, a review of Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea (in which he suggests that Hemingway has found God), and newly collected gems, such as the... Read more >

The Fatal Englishman
Three Short Lives
Written by Sebastian Faulks

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 12, 2002
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72744-3 (0-375-72744-2)

In The Fatal Englishman, his first work of nonfiction, Sebastian Faulks explores the lives of three remarkable men. Each had the seeds of greatness; each was a beacon to his generation and left something of value behind; yet each one died tragically young.

Christopher Wood, only twenty-nine when he killed himself, was... Read more >

As They Were

Written by M.F.K. Fisher

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 12, 1983
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-71348-9 (0-394-71348-6)

"Mary Frances Kennedy Fisher is a national treasure. For nearly 50 years she has been writing rare, fine prose about so many things that she is nearly impossible to define. . . . In As They Were she has collected a number of essays—she calls them ‘reports’—into an informal autobiography that... Read more >

Two Towns in Provence

Written by M.F.K. Fisher

Format: Trade Paperback, 512 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 12, 1983
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-394-71631-2 (0-394-71631-0)


Two Towns in Provence brings together M.F.K. Fisher's classic and unforgettable portraits of Aix-en-Provence and Marseille.

"Map of Another Town," this memoir of the French provincial capital of Aix-en-Provence is, as the author tells us, "my picture, my map, of a place and therefore of myself...just as much of its reality is... Read more >

The Archaeology of Knowledge

Written by Michel Foucault

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 12, 1982
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-71106-5 (0-394-71106-8)

Madness, sexuality, power, knowledge--are these facts of life or simply parts of speech?  The Archaeology of Knowledge begins at the level of "things said" and moves quickly to illuminate the connections between knowledge, language, and action in a style at once profound and personal.  A summing up of Foucault's own methodological assumptions, this... Read more >

The Foucault Reader

Written by Michel Foucault

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 12, 1984
Price: $18.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-71340-3 (0-394-71340-0)

Edited by Paul Rainbow.  Michel Foucault was one of the most influential thinkers in the contemporary world, someone whose work has affected the teaching of half a dozen disciplines ranging from literary criticism to the history of criminology. The Foucault Reader contains selections from each area of Foucault's work as well as... Read more >

The Order of Things
An Archaeology of Human Sciences
Written by Michel Foucault

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 29, 1994
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75335-3 (0-679-75335-4)

Foucault offers startling evidence that "man"--man as a subject of scientific knowledge--is at best a recent invention, the result of a fundamental mutation in our culture.  He cuts across disciplines and reaches back into the seventeenth century to show how classical systems of knowledge, which linked all of nature within a great... Read more >

Power/Knowledge
Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972-1977
Written by Michel Foucault

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 12, 1980
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-394-73954-0 (0-394-73954-X)

Edited and with an afterword by Colin Gordon.  In this set of essays and interviews, Foucault interprets his writings on such themes as sexuality, politics, and punishment, stressing the contribution of each to the magnificent--and terrifying--portrait of society that he is compiling.  As Foucault shows, what he has always been describing is the... Read more >

Mozart and Leadbelly

Written by Ernest J. Gaines

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 17, 2006
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9645-9 (1-4000-9645-6)

In this collection of stories and essays, the beloved author of the classic, best-selling novel A Lesson Before Dying shares the inspirations behind his books and his reasons for becoming a writer. Told in the simple and powerful prose that is a hallmark of his craft, these writings by Ernest J... Read more >

Life Sentences
Literary Judgments and Accounts
Written by William H Gass

Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: January 17, 2012
Price: $28.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-59584-3 (0-307-59584-6)

A dazzling new collection of essays—on reading, writing, form, and thought—from one of America’s master writers.

It begins with the personal, both past and present. It emphasizes Gass’s lifelong attachment to books and moves on to the more analytical, as he ponders the work of some of his favorite writers (among... Read more >

A Place to Live
and other selected essays of
Written by Natalia Ginzburg
Translated by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: June 3, 2003
Price: $12.95
ISBN: 978-1-58322-570-7 (1-58322-570-6)

Arguably one of Italy’s greatest contemporary writers, Natalia Ginzburg has been best known in America as a writer’s writer, quiet beloved of her fellow wordsmiths. This collection of personal essays chosen by the eminent American writer Lynne Sharon Schwartz from four of Ginzburg’s books written over the course of Ginzburg’s lifetime... Read more >

Wild Women Don't Wear No Blues

Written by Marita Golden

Format: Trade Paperback, 256 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: July 1, 1994
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-42401-1 (0-385-42401-9)

Bringing together fourteen African-American women, Marita Golden has compiled saucy and spicy essays that serve as an exploration into the contemporary black female psyche. Ranging in style from Audre Lorde's classic polemic on eroticism to Miriam DeCosta Willis's deeply moving essay on her husband's last years, "every single one of these... Read more >

Through the Children's Gate
A Home in New York
Written by Adam Gopnik

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 6, 2007
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7575-1 (1-4000-7575-0)

Not long after Adam Gopnik returned to New York at the end of 2000 with his wife and two small children, they witnessed one of the great and tragic events of the city’s history. In his sketches and glimpses of people and places, Gopnik builds a portrait of our altered New... Read more >

Little Saint

Written by Hannah Green

Format: Trade Paperback, 300 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: July 3, 2001
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-75747-1 (0-375-75747-3)

In the early 1970s, Hannah Green and her husband came upon a small village called Conques, curled like a conch shell in the mountains of south-central France. Entranced, she returned to this numinous place again and again, drawn to the story of the little saint whose spirit fills the lives of... Read more >

Hit Lit
Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century's Biggest Bestsellers
Written by James W. Hall

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: April 10, 2012
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7095-1 (0-8129-7095-0)

What do Michael Corleone, Jack Ryan, and Scout Finch have in common? Creative writing professor and thriller writer James W. Hall knows. Now, in this entertaining, revelatory book, he reveals how bestsellers work, using twelve twentieth-century blockbusters as case studies—including The Godfather, Gone with the Wind, To Kill a Mockingbird, and... Read more >

Compass Points
How I Lived
Written by Edward Hoagland

Format: Trade Paperback, 304 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 26, 2002
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70240-2 (0-375-70240-7)

Award—winning nature writer Edward Hoagland explores the people, places, events, and themes that have shaped him and work in this luminous memoir of a life richly lived.

From his childhood in rural Connecticut to some of the earth’s last remaining wilderness, from New York parties to Ringling Bros. and Barnum & Bailey’s... Read more >

Footsteps
Adventures of a Romantic Biographer
Written by Richard Holmes

Format: Trade Paperback, 292 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 30, 1996
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-77004-6 (0-679-77004-6)

Richard Holmes knew he had become a true biographer the day his bank bounced a check that he had inadvertently dated 1772. Because for the acclaimed chronicler of Shelley and Coleridge, biography is a physical pursuit, an ardent and arduous retracing of footsteps that may have vanished centuries before.

In this gripping... Read more >