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In November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.” She described the sessions in a journal she created for her husband, John Gregory Dunne. For several months, Didion recorded conversations with the psychiatrist in meticulous detail. The initial sessions focused on alcoholism, adoption, depression, anxiety, guilt, and the heartbreaking complexities of her relationship with her daughter, Quintana. The subjects evolved to include her work, which she was finding difficult to maintain for sustained periods.

Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer Ron Chernow illuminates the full, fascinating, and complex life of the writer long celebrated as the father of American literature, Mark Twain.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more. But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work.

Mother Mary Comes to Me, Arundhati Roy’s first work of memoir, is a soaring account, both intimate and inspirational, of how the author became the person and the writer she is, shaped by circumstance, but above all by her complex relationship to the extraordinary, singular mother she describes as “my shelter and my storm.” “Heart-smashed” by her mother Mary’s death in September 2022 yet puzzled and “more than a little ashamed” by the intensity of her response, Roy began to write.

Molly Jong-Fast is the only child of a famous woman, writer Erica Jong, whose sensational book Fear of Flying launched her into second-wave feminist stardom. She grew up yearning for a connection with her dreamy, glamorous, just out of reach mother, who always seemed to be heading somewhere that wasn’t with Molly. When, in 2023, Erica was diagnosed with dementia just as Molly’s husband discovered he had a rare cancer, Jong-Fast was catapulted into a transformative year.

Sound interesting? The author thinks so too! Listen to Alexandrian Sphinx!

Life and Art—these are the twin subjects considered in Richard Russo’s twelve masterful new essays—how they inform each other and how the stories we tell ourselves about both shape our understanding of the world around us. In “The Lives of Others,” he reflects on the implacable fact that writers use people, insisting that what matters, in the end, is how and for what purpose. How do you bridge the gap between what you know and what you don’t, and sometimes can’t, know?

Vorab zur Persönlichkeit Jean Pauls: Als Busenfreund und Blutsbruder von E.T.A. Hofmann gilt er neben demselben als Enfant Terrible der Romantik und als einziger Mensch seiner Zeit, der sogar Goethes Intellekt ins Wanken brachte, wobei Letzterer nach einem Kennenlernen Jean Pauls anmerkte, dass dieser auf ihn wie ein Mensch vom Mond wirke, aber schließlich die Auseinandersetzung mit dessen Texten nur wohlwollende und respektable Worte der Anerkennung zur Folge hatten.

Nachdem Gottfried Keller durch Konfrontation mit der Realität zur Einsicht gelangte, dass der Beruf des Landschaftsmalers seiner Erwartungshaltung bezüglich eines regelmäßigen und sicheren Einkommens nicht genügte, ebnete eine Laune des Schicksals ihm einen anderen Lebensweg. Aus Langeweile schreibt Keller ein paar Verse, die überraschenderweise sogar veröffentlicht werden und zwar nicht im Eigenverlag. Ermutigt und beflügelt von seiner anscheinend vorhandenen literarischen Begabung erwacht der geisteswissenschaftliche Ehrgeiz in ihm, der schließlich in seinen prosaischen Fähigkeiten mündet.

Die tief reichende Freundschaft, in welcher die zwei bekanntesten Dichterfürsten aus deutschsprachigen Landen miteinander verbunden waren, begann laut einigen Quellen alles andere als günstig, da beim ersten Treffen der beiden Goethe Schiller weder erkannte noch diesem irgendwelche Beachtung schenkte. Das änderte sich mit der Zeit, nachdem sich Goethe näher über Schillers Werk informierte und beide in regen Gedankenaustausch traten, besonders in vorliegender Briefwechsel-Reihe.

Casting new light on one of the first modern self-identifying witches in the US, Jason Mankey invites you deep into Buckland's life. Known for bringing Wicca to America and sharing it through his writing, Buckland penned more than forty titles, placing him among the most prolific occult authors of all time.

On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and Toni Morrison, she finally sees herself and her loved ones reflected in their stories of “messy, beautiful, joyful Black people.”

From the moment Paul Lisicky heard Joni Mitchell while growing up in New Jersey, he recognized she was that rarity among musicians—a talent whose combination of introspection, liberation, and deep musicality set her apart from any other artist of the time. As a young man, Paul was a budding songwriter who took his cues from Mitchell’s mysteries and idiosyncrasies. But as he matured, he set his guitar aside and turned to prose, a practice that would eventually take him to the Iowa Writers’ Workshop and into the professional world of letters.

America, 2003: A country at war, its shiny veneer beginning to crack. Von Dutch and The Simple Life dominate. And on the cover of every magazine, a twenty-one-year-old pop star named Britney Spears. Tracking her every move for a third-tier gossip rag in Los Angeles is a young writer who for all practical purposes let's call Jeff Weiss, who took whatever job he could to pursue his dream of being a “serious” writer. He'd instead become a firsthand witness to the slow tragedy of a changing nation, represented in spirit by “the coy it-girl at the end of history.”

Charles Handy is one of the giants of contemporary thought. His books on management – including Understanding Organizations and Gods of Management – have changed the way we view business. His work on broader issues and trends – such as Beyond Certainty and The Second Curve – has changed the way we view society. In his new book, Handy, looking back over a rich and varied life, shares the lessons he has learned along the way. What things really matter? What daily worries should we learn to treat as unimportant? How do we become more accepting of ourselves and of those around us?

As the first Black woman to consistently write and publish in the field of science fiction, Octavia Butler was a trailblazer. With her deft pen, she created stories speculating the devolution of the American empire, using it as an apt metaphor for the best and worst of humanity—our innovation and ingenuity, our naked greed and ambition, our propensity for violence and hierarchy. In this outstanding work, Susana M. Morris places Butler’s story firmly within the cultural, social, and historical context that shaped her life.

As James Schiff writes in the introduction to this volume, of the writer who would eventually express himself in written form as fully as any American writer since Henry James, "Updike needed to write the way the rest of us need to breathe or eat." With his stunning rhetorical gifts—allowing him to thrive in both fiction and nonfiction, in criticism as well as poetry—he was also a consummate letter writer.

In the years leading up to the Second World War, authors J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis—who both fought in the trenches of WWI—saw the world descending once again into a human catastrophe. This book tells the story of how the crucible of war brought them together in friendship and inspired them to engage their Christian imagination to confront the darkest forces of their age.

From the acclaimed biographer of explorers Magellan, Columbus, and Francis Drake comes a unique exploration of life and influence of Jules Verne, the novelist whose mind spun the greatest adventures ever told and whose daring and prescient imagination sparked a lasting transformation of modern society and technology, inspiring everyone from J.R.R. Tolkien to Kurt Vonnegut to Jeff Bezos.

Peter Matthiessen (1927-2014), a towering figure of twentieth-century American letters, achieved so much during his lifetime, in so many different areas, that people have struggled to pin him down. While ambivalent about his WASP privilege—as a teenager he demanded that his name be removed from the New York Social Register—he attended Yale and cut his teeth in postwar Paris, co-founding The Paris Review as he worked undercover for the CIA. But then, after a rebellious stint as a Long Island fisherman, he escaped into a series of wild expeditions.