The Letters of Noel Coward

Written by Noel Coward
Edited by Barry Day

Format: Trade Paperback, 804 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 10, 2009
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-39100-1 (0-307-39100-0)

Lavishly illustrated and annotated, this definitive collection of letters to and from Noël Coward provides a portrait of an age, from the Blitz to the Ritz and beyond.

Granted unlimited access to the Coward archive, Barry Day gathers correspondence between the incomparable Noël and his friends and enemies, the famous and infamous... Read more >

South with the Sun
Roald Amundsen, His Polar Explorations, and the Quest for Discovery
Written by Lynne Cox

Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: September 13, 2011
Price: $26.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-59340-5 (0-307-59340-1)

Roald Amundsen, “the last of the Vikings,” left his mark on the Heroic Era as one of the most successful polar explorers ever.

A powerfully built man more than six feet tall, Amundsen’s career of adventure began at the age of fifteen (he was born in Norway in 1872 to a... Read more >

Always in Pursuit
Fresh American Perspectives
Written by Stanley Crouch

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 16, 1999
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-70168-9 (0-375-70168-0)

Here is a brilliant new collection of essays on the sublime and the ridiculous in contemporary American culture and society, by one of the most important and compelling social commentators at work today.

"Fearless and engaging, a virtuoso at bringing the drive of natural speech into social criticism, Stanley Crouch transcends our... Read more >

Create Dangerously
The Immigrant Artist at Work
Written by Edwidge Danticat

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 20, 2011
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-94643-0 (0-307-94643-6)

A New York Times Notable Book
A Miami Herald Best Book of the Year

In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile.

Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who... Read more >

Auden

Written by Richard Davenport-Hines

Format: Trade Paperback, 444 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 15, 1999
Price: $19.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-74785-7 (0-679-74785-0)

In pursuit of the roots of and influences on Auden’s poetry and personality, Richard Davenport-Hines explores the experiences and issues of the poet's life. From Freud to Auden’s struggles to reconcile his homosexuality and his Christianity, from the heady intellectual life of Oxford in the 1920s to the devastation of post... Read more >

Adieux
A Farewell to Sartre
Written by Simone De Beauvoir

Format: Trade Paperback, 464 pages
Publisher: Pantheon
On Sale: February 12, 1985
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-0-394-72898-8 (0-394-72898-X)

“An intimate, personal, and honest portrait of a relationship unlike any other in literary history.” —Deirdre Bair, The Philadelphia Inquirer Read more >

How Proust Can Change Your Life

Written by Alain De Botton

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 28, 1998
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-77915-5 (0-679-77915-9)

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres—literary biography and self-help manual—in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.

Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one of the most important writers of our century, could provide us with such a rich source of insight into how best to... Read more >

Melville
His World and Work
Written by Andrew Delbanco

Format: Trade Paperback, 448 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 12, 2006
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70297-6 (0-375-70297-0)

With Moby-Dick Herman Melville set the standard for the Great American Novel, and with “Bartleby, the Scrivener,” Benito Cereno, and Billy Budd he completed perhaps the greatest oeuvre of any of our writers. Now Andrew Delbanco, hailed by Time as “America’s best social critic,” uses unparalleled historical and critical perspective to... Read more >

Learning to Live Finally
The Last Interview
Written by Jacques Derrida
Translated by Pascal-Anne Brault and Michael Naas

Format: Trade Paperback, 96 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: December 6, 2011
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-094-5 (1-61219-094-4)

With death looming, Jacques Derrida, the world’s most famous philosopher-known as the father of “deconstruction”-sat down with journalist Jean Birnbaum of the French daily Le Monde. They revisited his life’s work and his impending death in a long, surprisingly accessible, and moving final interview.

Sometimes called “obscure” and branded “abstruse” by his... Read more >

Hard Driving
The Wendell Scott Story
Written by Brian Donovan

Format: Trade Paperback, 328 pages
Publisher: Steerforth
On Sale: May 12, 2009
Price: $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-58642-160-1 (1-58642-160-3)

Hard Driving is the dramatic story of one man’s dogged determination to live the life he loved, and to compete, despite daunting obstacles, at the highest level of his sport.
Wendell Scott figured he was signing up for trouble when he became nascar’s version of

Jackie Robinson in the segregated 1950s. Some... Read more >

Jane Austen For Beginners

Written by Robert Dryden
Illustrated by Joe Lee

Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: For Beginners
On Sale: June 12, 2012
Price: $16.99
ISBN: 978-1-934389-61-4 (1-934389-61-7)

Jane Austen’s novels are a solid part of the literary canon and have never been out print. They have been made into many modern movies and are common household names; however, they are largely misunderstood by the general public. On the surface, Austen’s novels all involve characters from provincial communities in... Read more >

Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It

Written by Geoff Dyer

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 6, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3167-2 (1-4000-3167-2)

“A delightfully original book. . . . Dyer’s writing brims with offbeat insights that had me chuckling for hours later, or reading aloud to dinner companions.” —Tony Horowitz, The New York Times Book Review

“An irresistibly funny storyteller, [Dyer] is adept at fiction, essay, and reportage, but happiest when twisting all three... 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 >

Trading Twelves
The Selected Letters of Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
Written by Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray
Preface by Albert Murray
Edited by John Callahan
Introduction by John Callahan

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 15, 2001
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70805-3 (0-375-70805-7)

The correspondence between Ralph Ellison and Albert Murray begins in 1950 when Ellison is living in New York City, hard at work on his enduring masterpiece, Invisible Man, and Murray is a professor at Tuskegee Institute in Alabama. Mirroring a jam session in which two jazz musicians "trade twelves"—each improvising twelve... Read more >

Fanpire
The Twilight Saga and the Women Who Love it
Written by Tanya Erzen

Format: Hardcover, 184 pages
Publisher: Beacon Press
On Sale: October 30, 2012
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8070-0633-7 (0-8070-0633-5)

An author immerses herself in the frenzied fandom of Twilight, the young-adult vampire romance series that has captivated women of all ages.

Why have the Twilight saga’s representations of romance and relationships enchanted millions of fans and generated millions in revenue, selling everything from Barbie-type dolls to blockbuster films? Tanya Erzen–herself... Read more >

The Theatre of the Absurd

Written by Martin Esslin

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 6, 2004
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7523-2 (1-4000-7523-8)

“Exciting and stimulating...a very useful reference work and a standard text book.” —Literary Review

In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity... 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 >

Anna of All the Russias
A Life of Anna Akhmatova
Written by Elaine Feinstein

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 10, 2007
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-3378-2 (1-4000-3378-0)

In this definitive biography of the legendary Russian poet, Elaine Feinstein draws on a wealth of newly available material–including memoirs, letters, journals, and interviews with surviving friends and family–to produce a revelatory portrait of both the artist and the woman.

Anna Akhmatova rose to fame in the years before World War I... Read more >

Mordecai
The Life & Times
Written by Charles Foran

Format: Trade Paperback, 800 pages
Publisher: Vintage Canada
On Sale: July 5, 2011
Price: $21.95
ISBN: 978-0-676-97965-7 (0-676-97965-3)

Foran’s book is the definitive portrait of Mordecai Richler, the lion of Canadian literature, and the turbulent, changing times that nurtured him. It is also an extraordinary love story that lasted half a century.

Mordecai Richler won multiple Governor General’s Literary Awards, the Giller Prize, the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, among others, as... 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 >

Must You Go?
My Life with Harold Pinter
Written by Antonia Fraser

Format: Hardcover, 336 pages
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
On Sale: November 2, 2010
Price: $28.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-53250-1 (0-385-53250-4)

In this exquisite memoir, Antonia Fraser recounts the life she shared with the internationally renowned dramatist. In essence, it is a love story and a marvelously insightful account of their years together, beginning with their initial meeting when Fraser was the wife of a member of Parliament and mother of six... Read more >

The Long Embrace
Raymond Chandler and the Woman He Loved
Written by Judith Freeman

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 11, 2008
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-9517-9 (1-4000-9517-4)

Raymond Chandler was among the most original and enduring crime novelists of the twentieth century. Yet much of his pre-writing life, including his unconventional marriage, has remained shrouded in mystery. In this compelling, wholly original book, Judith Freeman sets out to solve the puzzle of who Chandler was and how he... Read more >

The World Is What It Is
The Authorized Biography of V.S. Naipaul
Written by Patrick French

Format: Trade Paperback, 592 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 3, 2009
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7980-3 (1-4000-7980-2)

The first major biography of V.S. Naipaul, the controversial and enigmatic Nobel laureate: a stunning writer whose only stated ambition was greatness, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred.

Beginning in rich detail in Trinidad, where Naipaul was born into an Indian family, Patrick French skillfully examines Naipaul’ s... Read more >

This I Believe
An A to Z of a Life
Written by Carlos Fuentes

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: May 16, 2006
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7254-2 (0-8129-7254-6)

In this masterly, deeply personal, and provocative book, the internationally renowned Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes, whose work has been called “a combination of Poe, Baudelaire, and Isak Dinesen” (Newsweek), steps back to survey the wellsprings of art and ideology, the events that have shaped our time, and his extraordinary life and... Read more >