Unstuck in Time
A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels
Written by Gregory D. Sumner

Format: Trade Paperback, 368 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: December 4, 2012
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-1-60980-430-5 (1-60980-430-9)

In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s best-known works--his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005)--to illustrate the quintessential American writer’s profound... Read more >

Unstuck in Time
A Journey Through Kurt Vonnegut's Life and Novels
Written by Gregory D. Sumner

Format: Hardcover, 368 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: November 8, 2011
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-60980-349-0 (1-60980-349-3)

In Unstuck in Time, Gregory Sumner guides us, with insight and passion, through a biography of fifteen of Kurt Vonnegut’s best known works, his fourteen novels starting with Player Piano (1952) all the way to an epilogue on his last book, A Man Without a Country (2005), to illustrate the quintessential... Read more >

David Hockney
The Biography
Written by Christopher Simon Sykes

Format: Hardcover, 384 pages
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
On Sale: April 17, 2012
Price: $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-53144-3 (0-385-53144-3)

Drawing on exclusive and unprecedented access to David Hockney’s extensive archives, notebooks, and paintings, interviews with family, friends, and on Hockney himself, Christopher Simon Sykes provides a colorful and intimate portrait of one of the most influential artists of the twentieth century.

Born in 1937, David Hockney grew up in a northern... Read more >

A Writer's Life
The Margaret Laurence Lectures
Written by The Writers' Trust of Canada

Format: Trade Paperback, 416 pages
Publisher: Emblem Editions
On Sale: May 24, 2011
Price: $22.95
ISBN: 978-0-7710-8928-2 (0-7710-8928-7)

For the past twenty-five years, the Writers’ Trust of Canada’s annual lecture series, the Margaret Laurence Memorial Lecture, has invited some of Canada’s most prominent authors to discuss the theme of “A Writer’s Life” in front of their peers. Hugh MacLennan, Mavis Gallant, Timothy Findley, W.O. Mitchell, Pierre Berton, P.K. Page... Read more >

The Invisible Woman
The Story of Nelly Ternan and Charles Dickens
Written by Claire Tomalin

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 30, 2012
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-80397-9 (0-345-80397-3)

Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857; she was 18, a hard-working actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep, and he was 45, the most lionized writer in England. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted thirteen years and destroyed Dickens’s marriage while effacing Nelly... Read more >

Jane Austen
A Life
Written by Claire Tomalin

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: April 27, 1999
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-76676-6 (0-679-76676-6)

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year

Here, firmly rooted in her own social setting for the first time, is the real Jane Austen--the shy woman willing to challenge convention, the woman of no pretensions who nevertheless called herself "formidable," a woman who could be frivolous and yet suffer from... Read more >

Samuel Pepys
The Unequalled Self
Written by Claire Tomalin

Format: Trade Paperback, 528 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 11, 2003
Price: $19.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72553-1 (0-375-72553-9)

For a decade, beginning in 1660, an ambitious young London civil servant kept an astonishingly candid account of his life during one of the most defining periods in British history. In Samuel Pepys, Claire Tomalin offers us a fully realized and richly nuanced portrait of this man, whose inadvertent masterpiece would... Read more >

Mark Twain's Other Woman
The Hidden Story of His Final Years
Written by Laura Skandera Trombley

Format: Trade Paperback, 352 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: March 8, 2011
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-47494-0 (0-307-47494-1)

Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, reveals the never-before-read letters and daily journals of Isabel Lyon, Mark Twain’s last personal secretary.

For six years, Isabel Lyon was responsible for running the aging Man in White’s chaotic household, nursing him through several illnesses and serving as his adoring... Read more >

yes I said yes I will Yes.
A Celebration of James Joyce, Ulysses, and 100 Years of Bloomsday
Edited by Nola Tully

Format: Trade Paperback, 160 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: May 11, 2004
Price: $14.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7731-1 (1-4000-7731-1)

On the fictional morning of June 16, 1904—Bloomsday, as it has come to be known—Mr. Leopold Bloom set out from his home at 7 Eccles Street and began his day's journey through Dublin life in the pages of James Joyce's novel of the century, Ulysses. On June 16, 2004, the 100th... Read more >

Due Considerations
Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike

Format: Trade Paperback, 736 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: September 30, 2008
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-49900-4 (0-345-49900-X)

“A drop of truth, of lived experience, glistens in each.” This is how John Updike, one of the world’s most acclaimed novelists, modestly describes his nonfiction work, the brilliant and graceful essays and criticism he has written for more than five decades. Due Considerations is his sixth collection, and perhaps the... Read more >

Due Considerations
Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike

Format: Hardcover, 736 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: October 23, 2007
Price: $40.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-26640-8 (0-307-26640-0)

John Updike’s sixth collection of essays and literary criticism opens with a skeptical overview of literary biographies, proceeds to five essays on topics ranging from China and small change to faith and late works, and takes up, under the heading “General Considerations,” books, poker, cars, and the American libido. The last... Read more >

Higher Gossip
Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike
Edited by Christopher Carduff

Format: Hardcover, 528 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: November 1, 2011
Price: $40.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-95715-3 (0-307-95715-2)

A collection both intimate and generous of the eloquent, insightful, beautifully written prose works that John Updike was compiling when he died in January 2009.

This collection of miscellaneous prose opens with a self-portrait of the writer in winter, a Prospero who, though he fears his most dazzling performances are behind him... Read more >

More Matter
Essays and Criticism
Written by John Updike

Format: Hardcover, 928 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: September 14, 1999
Price: $35.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-40630-0 (0-375-40630-1)

John Updike's fiftieth book and fifth collection of assorted prose, most of it first published in The New Yorker, brings together eight years' worth of essays, criticism, addresses, introductions, humorous feuilletons, and -- in a concluding section, "Personal Matters" -- paragraphs on himself and his work. More matter, indeed, in an... Read more >

Louis D. Brandeis
A Life
Written by Melvin Urofsky

Format: Trade Paperback, 976 pages
Publisher: Schocken
On Sale: September 4, 2012
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-0-8052-1195-5 (0-8052-1195-0)

As a young lawyer in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Louis Brandeis, born into a family of reformers who came to the United States to escape European anti-Semitism, established the way modern law is practiced. He was an early champion of the right to privacy and pioneer the idea... Read more >

The Lives of the Most Excellent Painters, Sculptors, and Architects

Written by Giorgio Vasari
Translated by Gaston du C. de Vere
Introduction by Philip Jacks

Format: Trade Paperback, 640 pages
Publisher: Modern Library
On Sale: February 14, 2006
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-76036-5 (0-375-76036-9)

A painter and architect in his own right, Giorgio Vasari (1511-74) achieved immortality for this book on the lives of his fellow Renaissance artists, first published in Florence in 1550. Although he based his work on a long tradition of biographical writing, Vasari infused these literary portraits with a decidedly modern... Read more >

The Last Empire
Essays 1992-2000
Written by Gore Vidal

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 11, 2002
Price: $17.95
ISBN: 978-0-375-72639-2 (0-375-72639-X)

Like his National Book Award—winning United States, Gore Vidal’s scintillating ninth collection, The Last Empire, affirms his reputation as our most provocative critic and observer of the modern American scene. In the essays collected here, Vidal brings his keen intellect, experience, and razor-edged wit to bear on an astonishing range of... Read more >

Point to Point Navigation
A Memoir
Written by Gore Vidal

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 9, 2007
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-307-27501-1 (0-307-27501-9)

In a witty and elegant autobiography that takes up where his bestelling Palimpsest left off, the celebrated novelist, essayist, critic, and controversialist Gore Vidal reflects on his remarkable life.

Writing from his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theatre, politics... Read more >

Kurt Vonnegut: The Last Interview
And Other Conversations
Written by Kurt Vonnegut

Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: December 16, 2011
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-090-7 (1-61219-090-1)

One of the great American iconoclasts holds forth on politics, war, books and writers, and his personal life in a series of interviews, including his last–for US Airways Magazine.

During his long career Kurt Vonnegut won international praise for his novels, plays, and essays. In this new anthology of conversations with Vonnegut–which... Read more >

Like Shaking Hands with God
A Conversation about Writing
Written by Kurt Vonnegut and Lee Stringer

Format: Trade Paperback, 80 pages
Publisher: Seven Stories Press
On Sale: December 21, 2010
Price: $9.95
ISBN: 978-1-60980-074-1 (1-60980-074-5)

Like Shaking Hands with God details a collaborative journey on the art of writing undertaken by two distinguished writers separated by age, race, upbringing, and education, but sharing common goals and aspirations. Rarely have two writers spoken so candidly about the intersection where the lives they live meet the art they... Read more >

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview
and Other Conversations
Written by David Foster Wallace

Format: Trade Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: December 5, 2012
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-206-2 (1-61219-206-8)

David Foster Wallace: The Last Interview and Other Conversations charts the growth, both personal and artistic, of a uniquely talented and cherished writer, frequently labelled the best of his generation. As well as Wallace’s last interview, given to the Wall Street Journal weeks before his death, the volume features a legendary... Read more >

The Richest Woman in America
Hetty Green in the Gilded Age
Written by Janet Wallach

Format: Hardcover, 304 pages
Publisher: Nan A. Talese
On Sale: September 25, 2012
Price: $27.95
ISBN: 978-0-385-53197-9 (0-385-53197-4)

A captivating biography of America's first female tycoon, Hetty Green, the iconoclast who forged one of the greatest fortunes of her time.

No woman in the Gilded Age made as much money as Hetty Green. At the time of her death in 1916, she was worth at least 100 million dollars, equal... Read more >

Mark Twain

Written by Geoffrey C. Ward, Ken Burns and Dayton Duncan

Format: Hardcover, 288 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: November 13, 2001
Price: $40.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-40561-7 (0-375-40561-5)

Ernest Hemingway called Huckleberry Finn “the best book we’ve ever had. There was nothing before. There’s been nothing as good since.” Critical opinion of this book hasn’t dimmed since Hemingway uttered these words; as author Russell Banks says in these pages, Twain “makes possible an American literature which would otherwise not... Read more >

Fathers and Sons
The Autobiography of a Family
Written by Alexander Waugh

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: May 13, 2008
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-7679-2748-2 (0-7679-2748-6)

If there is a literary gene, then the Waugh family most certainly has it—and it clearly seems to be passed down from father to son. The first of the literary Waughs was Arthur, who, when he won the Newdigate Prize for poetry at Oxford in 1888, broke with the family tradition... Read more >

A Scream Goes Through the House
What Literature Teaches Us About Life
Written by Arnold Weinstein

Format: Trade Paperback, 480 pages
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
On Sale: August 10, 2004
Price: $17.00
ISBN: 978-0-8129-7243-6 (0-8129-7243-0)

“For too long we have been encouraged to see culture as an affair of intellect, and reading as a solitary exercise. But the truth is different: literature and art are pathways of feeling, and our encounter with them is social, inscribing us in a larger community... Through art we discover that... Read more >

The House in France
A Memoir
Written by Gully Wells

Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: June 21, 2011
Price: $26.95
ISBN: 978-0-307-26980-5 (0-307-26980-9)

Set in Provence, London, and New York, this is a daughter’s brilliant and witty memoir of her mother and stepfather—Dee Wells, the glamorous and rebellious American journalist, and A. J. Ayer, the celebrated and worldly Oxford philosopher—and the life they lived at the center of absolutely everything.

Gully Wells takes us into... Read more >