Research Literature

In his book-length essay Spirituality and the Writer, Larson surveys the literary insights of authors old and new who have shaped religious autobiography and spiritual memoir - from Augustine to Thomas Merton, from Peter Matthiessen to Cheryl Strayed. He holds them to an exacting standard: They must render transcendent experience in the writing itself.

Turning Pages: The Adventures and Misadventures of a Publisher is the well-told story of forty years in the publishing business. For twenty-four of those years, John Sargent ran one of America’s largest publishing companies. Rather than a straight chronological narrative, Sargent uses the best stories of those years to give us an intimate look inside book publishing. In weaving these stories together, he brings the listener with him through triumph and despair, and a very interesting daily life.

Carson Bradley is the CEO of Bradley Pharmaceutical Corporation, a powerful and influential multi-billion dollar drug empire. His wealth spans beyond anyone's imagination, but is useless to his lonely soul, which has been dormant since the death of his first love to cancer. Every day he strives for the sake of his research because he's determined to eradicate that vile disease forever. Lillian Ly is a young, humble medical student whose compassion for people is boundless.

Deep in the vastness of the great plains, fate brings together a reclusive chemist and a mysterious woman who emerges from the boundless forest surrounding his mountain cabin. Their lives intertwine as they discover a connection to the power of nature and a shared past far more improbable than they had ever imagined.

Previously published as A Private War, Marie Brenner’s Richard Jewell tells a gripping true story of heroism and injustice. In the early morning hours of July 27, 1996, three pipe bombs exploded at the Summer Olympics in Atlanta, Georgia, killing one person and injuring 111 others. Hundreds more potential casualties were prevented by the vigilance and quick actions of security guard Richard Jewell, who uncovered the bombs and began evacuating the area. But no good deed goes unpunished. Investigators and journalists pursued Jewell as a potential suspect.

In this fast-paced introduction, Ros King sets out to remind us of the sheer beauty and sophistication that can make Shakespeare’s works a joy for any audience. Exploring his invention and wit, along with his uncanny characterisation, King argues archaic language should be no barrier to the modern reader. This guide summarises the Bard’s life and background, detailing his plays and poetry in such a way that they are made accessible enough for everyone to admire.

“I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize, but rather for my journalism,” Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career - years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982.

If your love for someone is greater than your own life, what would you sacrifice to keep her safe? The world and everything you've worked most of your life to procure? That is CEO Carson Bradley's catch-22. Unfortunately for Carson, his rivals have discovered his only weakness - Lillian Ly, the owner of his heart. The power behind his new cancer drug is what they desire, and they will stop at nothing to seize it. If necessary, kidnapping and murder are just the means to an end.

In the winter of 1996, more than 100 women and men of diverse nationality, background, and belief gather at the site of a former concentration camp for an unprecedented purpose: a weeklong retreat during which they will offer prayer and witness at the crematoria and meditate in all weathers on the selection platform, while eating and sleeping in the quarters of the Nazi officers who, half a century before, sent more than a million Jews to their deaths.

Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts 26 ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play.

The second wave of the Siberian Flu catches the country completely unprepared. Instead of killing the old and frail, the young and healthy are dropping . . . in hours, not days. Kate, a new doctor, will sacrifice everything to break her and her sister free from a controlling stepfather and a dead-end small town existence. Moments from landing the critical job she needs, St. Louis falls apart around her.

Hundreds of deadly miles stand between Kate and her sister fighting for her life back home. Kate fights through the desperate people and a terrain that becomes more treacherous by the day. No longer waiting to be rescued, Alisa braves the powerful cabal that has taken over their small town and risks her own life to protect the innocent. The sisters can’t give up. They won’t. No matter the cost.

Both sisters are trapped. Kate fights to escape a city with closing borders as the leaders desperately try to contain the outbreak. Betrayed by family and embroiled in the chaos of an organized crime syndicate, Alisa struggles to get out before she breaks under the unbearable strain. Even if she escapes, Kate still faces miles of lawless country with dangers even worse than the virus. Back home, Alisa can’t turn her back on the other trapped victims and is determined to find a way to save them all.

Filled with empathy and wisdom, instruction and inspiration, this book encourages us to reevaluate the codes and conventions that have shaped our assumptions about how fiction should be written, and also challenges us to apply its lessons to both what we read and how we read. The start of a more inclusive conversation about storytelling, Letters to a Writer of Color will be a touchstone for aspiring and working writers and for curious readers everywhere.

¿Por qué y para qué se escribe? ¿De dónde provienen las ideas que estimulan y alimentan a un escritor? ¿Cuál es el motor que impulsa la creatividad? Para Federico Reyes Heroles estas preguntas constituyen una curiosidad esencial, el núcleo de una pasión de vida. Para responderlas, nos propone un recorrido que parte de su experiencia personal y sigue las pistas de otros escritores que sondearon sus propios procesos creadores. Al poco tiempo, el explorador descubre que no puede quedarse en el ámbito de la literatura.

In the decades between the Great Depression and the advent of cable television, when daily newspapers set the conversational agenda in the United States, the best reporter in the business was a rumpled, hard-drinking figure named Homer Bigart. Despite two Pulitzers and a host of other prizes, he quickly faded from public view after retirement. Few today know the extent to which he was esteemed by his peers. Get the Damn Story is the first comprehensive biography to encompass all of Bigart's journalism, including both his war reporting and coverage of domestic events.

For the last three decades Gary Younge has had a ringside seat during the biggest events and with the most significant personalities to impact the black diaspora: accompanying Nelson Mandela on his first election campaign, joining revellers on the southside of Chicago during Obama's victory, entering New Orleans days after hurricane Katrina or interviewing Archbishop Desmond Tutu, Maya Angelou and Stormzy. He has witnessed how much change is possible and the power of systems to thwart those aspirations.

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 middle of the night on March eleventh, 1980, the phone rang in Julia Reed’s Georgetown dorm. It was her boss at Newsweek, where she was an intern. He told her to get in her car and drive to her alma mater, the Madeira School. Her former headmistress, Jean Harris, had just shot Dr. Herman Tarnower, The Scarsdale Diet Doctor. Julia didn’t flinch. She dressed, drove to Madeira, got the story—and her first byline—and the new American Gilded Age was off and running.

When Gerald Eskenazi started reporting, sports journalism had a different look than it does today. Eskenazi gives a behind-the-scenes look into the journalistic techniques that go into crafting a story, as well as the pitfalls reporters fall into. There are cautionary tales of journalistic excess, as well as moments of triumph such as the time Eskenazi got Joe Namath to open up to him by admitting he was a sportswriter who knew nothing about football. Along the way, Eskenazi discusses interviewing other reluctant subjects and writing under the intense pressure of a deadline.