Fiction Memoir

Death isn't the end. Marie didn't expect to be given the opportunity to go to a new universe when she died, but when it was offered she held to the offer with all her might. Taking the name of Talyn, she was accompanied to the new world by the goddess Melody as her assistant, as she seeks out a more rewarding life for herself, no matter what challenges may stand before her. Even if the introduction of some game mechanics and a goddess to her life has unanticipated consequences.

A large part of Goines' 39 years of life was spent being a successful pimp, a heif, an operator of corn liquor houses, an armed robber, and a small-time dope dealer. He lived the life of the streets, and out of that experience he created Prince, the anti-hero of Black Gangster. It's the story of the shocking underworld of Black organized crime and the fledgling Black "godfather" who goes from teenager ganglord to powerful Detroit mobster. Like the gangsters of the 1920s, he begins with bootlegging and branches out into every known crime.

When Harold Ross founded The New Yorker in 1925, he described it as a “comic weekly.” And although it has become much more than that, it has remained true in its irreverent heart to the founder’s description, publishing the most illustrious literary humorists of the modern era. This anthology gathers together, for the first time, the funniest work of more than seventy New Yorker contributors.

National Book Award finalist Ivan Doig had only a vague memory of his mother until he discovered a cache of her letters. They revealed a passionate, can-do woman who loved the lilting rhythm of words. A moving prequel to his acclaimed memoir This House of Sky, Doig’s Heart Earth highlights his childhood before his mother’s death and eloquently captures the texture of the American West, the fortunes of a family, and one woman’s indomitable spirit.

Le 19 mars 1944, Albert Camus et Maria Casarès se croisent chez Michel Leiris. L'ancienne élève du Conservatoire, originaire de La Corogne et fille d'un républicain espagnol en exil, n'a que vingt et un ans. L'écrivain vit alors seul à Paris, la guerre l'ayant tenu éloigné de son épouse Francine, enseignante à Oran. Sensible au talent de l'actrice, Albert Camus lui confie le rôle de Martha pour la création du Malentendu en juin 1944. Et durant la nuit du Débarquement, Albert Camus et Maria Casarès deviennent amants.

With this collection of more than 50 pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today’s most powerful and original voices. Moment after moment, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram.

Composer John Cage sought the silence of a mind at peace with itself - and found it in Zen Buddhism, a spiritual path that changed both his music and his view of the universe. "Remarkably researched, exquisitely written", Where the Heart Beats weaves together "a great many threads of cultural history" (Maria Popova, Brain Pickings) to illuminate Cage’s struggle to accept himself and his relationship with choreographer Merce Cunningham. Freed to be his own man, Cage originated exciting experiments that set him at the epicenter of a new avant-garde forming in the 1950s.

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels–expansive works that are simultaneously lowbrow and highbrow–Tom Robbins has also published over the years a number of short pieces, predominantly nonfiction. His travel articles, essays, and tributes to actors, musicians, sex kittens, and thinkers have appeared in publications ranging from Esquire to Harper’s, from Playboy to the New York Times, High Times, and Life.

Alone in a museum in Paris, Gabriela Wiener confronts her complicated family heritage. She is visiting an exhibition of pre-Columbian artifacts, spoils of European colonialism, many stolen from her homeland of Peru. As she peers at countless sculptures of Indigenous faces, each resembling her own, she sees herself in them—but the man responsible for pillaging them was her own great-great-grandfather, Austrian colonial explorer Charles Wiener.

Buckle up for the ride of your life as Fifty Shades of True Crime sets into motion a bizarre trajectory of next-level carnal knowledge. You'll never look at your neighbor the same way, you'll wonder about your best friend, and you'll imagine what your coworker does behind closed doors. Deviant sexual behavior is part of our human psyche, and as offensive as it may seem to some people, it happens in your community. Usually, the private world of people's lives remains undisclosed, but those secrets will come alive as you explore these real-life events.

In Robyn’s 2010 track Dancing on My Own, the Swedish pop-singer chronicles a night on the dance floor in the shadow of a former lover. She is bitter, angry, and at times desperate, and yet by the time the chorus arrives her frustration has melted away. She decides to dance on her own, and in this way, she transforms her solitude into a more complex joy. Taking inspiration from Robyn’s seminal track, emerging art critic and curator Simon Wu dances through the institutions of art, capitalism, and identity in these expertly researched, beautifully rendered essays.

Seven Pillars of Wisdom is the autobiographical account of T. E. Lawrence's role in the Arab Revolt against the Turkish Empire. The book is mostly set in the deserts of Arabia with a great deal of time spent marching through them with camels and the telling of the events through Lawrence's eyes.

In her moving account of how she came to understand the world around her despite being blind and deaf since childhood, Helen Keller confirms that no physical obstacle can hinder the achievements of the human mind. Included with Keller's poignant autobiography are her letters, spanning 15 years, which reveal her remarkable intellectual growth and empathic soul. Commentary by her teacher, Anne Sullivan, and the book's original editor is also featured, providing illuminating insight from two of Keller's closest companions.

It's been a decade since Kate and Cecelia foiled Napoleon's plot to reclaim the French crown. The cousins now have estates, children, and a place at the height of wizarding society. It is 1828, and though magic remains at the heart of the British Empire, a new power has begun to make itself felt across England: the steam engine. As iron tracks crisscross the countryside, the shaking of the locomotives begins to disrupt the workings of English magic, threatening the very foundations of the Empire.

Andy Griffith (1926-2012) is one of North Carolina's most beloved exports, capturing America's heart as Sheriff Andy Taylor. Evan Dalton Smith was born in the North Carolina Piedmont over four decades after Andy, just an hour south of Griffith's hometown of Mount Airy. Both were small-town boys who grew up in similar places, where the counties were dry and the churches plentiful. But for both, there was darkness, crushed hopes, and tragedy, hidden just below the surface.

Written by a direct descendant of the union between Nell Gwyn and King Charles II, Nell Gwyn tells the story of one of England's great folk heroines. Born during a tumultuous period in England's past, Nell Gwyn was spotted selling oranges in the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane. Nell's wit and charm brought her to the attention of numerous suitors, including one of the theater's leading actors, Charles Hart. Under his patronage Nell took to the stage where she became one of London's first professional female actresses, and the finest comedienne in London.

Nowhere in Africa is the extraordinary tale of a Jewish family who flees the Nazi regime in 1938 for a remote farm in Kenya. Abandoning their once-comfortable existence in Germany, Walter Redlich, his wife Jettel, and their five-year-old daughter, Regina, each deal with the harsh realities of their new life in different ways. Attorney Walter is resigned to working the farm as a caretaker; pampered Jettel resists adjustment at every turn; while the shy yet curious Regina immediately embraces the country - learning the local language and customs.

Written by descendant Arthur T. Vanderbilt II, Fortune's Children traces the dramatic and amazingly colorful history of this great American family, from the rise of industrialist and philanthropist Cornelius Vanderbilt to the fall of his progeny - wild spendthrifts whose profligacy bankrupted a vast inheritance.

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.

Based on select writings from a collection of more than two thousand Dutch diaries written during World War II in order to record this unparalleled time, and maintained by devoted archivists, The Diary Keepers illuminates a part of history we haven’t seen in quite this way before, from the stories of a Nazi sympathizing police officer to a Jewish journalist who documented daily activities at a transport camp.