Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. This is the audio recording of David Foster Wallace delivering that very address. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace's electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others.

Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.

When Elon Musk was a kid in South Africa, he was regularly beaten by bullies. One day a group pushed him down some concrete steps and kicked him until his face was a swollen ball of flesh. He was in the hospital for a week. But the physical scars were minor compared to the emotional ones inflicted by his father, an engineer, rogue, and charismatic fantasist.

In "elegant, finely honed prose" (The Washington Post Book World), Lebowitz limns the vicissitudes of contemporary urban life—its fads, trends, crazes, morals, and fashions. By turns ironic, facetious, deadpan, sarcastic, wry, wisecracking, and waggish, Fran Lebowitz is always wickedly entertaining.

Louis is a Trumpeter Swan, but he has no voice. Leaving his wild and beautiful home, he finds a young human friend, Sam Beaver, who helps him learn to read and write. When he returns to the lake, Louis discovers his education isn't enough: the beautiful swan he loves, Serena, can't read his declarations of love, and he can't trumpet them. Louis' resolution to win the swan of his desire launches him on an adventure that will take him far from home and lead where fate and love have a few surprises in store.

In recent years the young, educated, and affluent have surged back into cities, reversing decades of suburban flight and urban decline. And yet all is not well, Richard Florida argues in The New Urban Crisis. Florida demonstrates how the same forces that power the growth of the world's superstar cities also generate their vexing challenges: gentrification, unaffordability, segregation, and inequality.

In a landmark work of history, Russell Shorto presents astonishing information on the founding of our nation and reveals in riveting detail the crucial role of the Dutch in making America what it is today.

Following Mozart from his youth in Salzburg to his early death; from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments; from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard, Patrick Mackie leads the listener through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer's life and brings alive the teeming, swiveling modernity of eighteenth-century Europe.

Rory Stewart was an unlikely politician. He was best known for his two-year walk across Asia—in which he crossed Afghanistan, essentially solo, in the months after 9/11—and for his service, as a diplomat in Iraq, and Afghanistan. But in 2009, he abandoned his chair at Harvard University to stand for a seat in Parliament, representing the communities and farms of the Lake District and the Scottish border—one of the most isolated and beautiful districts in England.

Millions of people climb the grand marble staircase to visit the Metropolitan Museum of Art every year. But only a select few have unrestricted access to every nook and cranny. They’re the guards who roam unobtrusively in dark blue suits, keeping a watchful eye on the two million square foot treasure house. Caught up in his glamourous fledgling career at The New Yorker, Patrick Bringley never thought that he’d be one of them.

Long known for his range and supple prose (he is the only writer elected to membership in both the Baseball Hall of Fame and the American Academy of Arts and Letters), Angell won the 2015 American Society of Magazine Editors’ Best Essay award for “This Old Man,” which forms a centerpiece for this book. This deeply personal account is a survey of the limitations and discoveries of great age, with abundant life, poignant loss, jokes, retrieved moments, and fresh love, set down in an informal and moving fashion.

Draft No. 4 is an elucidation of the writer's craft by a master practitioner. In a series of playful but expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he's gathered over his career and refined during his long-running course at Princeton University, where he has launched some of the most esteemed writers of several generations. McPhee offers a definitive guide to the crucial decisions regarding structure, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces and presents extracts from some of his best-loved work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny.

Two men, each handsome and unusually adept at his chosen work, embodied an element of the great dynamic that characterized America’s rush toward the twentieth century. The architect was Daniel Hudson Burnham, the fair’s brilliant director of works and the builder of many of the country’s most important structures, including the Flatiron Building in New York and Union Station in Washington, D.C. The murderer was Henry H. Holmes, a young doctor who, in a malign parody of the White City, built his “World’s Fair Hotel” just west of the fairgrounds.

Every time Bill Bryson walks out the door, memorable travel literature threatens to break out. His previous excursion on the Appalachian Trail resulted in the best seller A Walk in the Woods. Now, we follow him "Down Under" to Australia with this delectably funny, fact-filled, and adventurous performance that combines humor, wonder, and unflagging curiosity. More from Bill Bryson.

You'll stop at Europe's most diverting and historic locales and view the Old World through Bryson's tourist eye view in this affectionate, blisteringly insightful, and riotously funny pilgrimage from the frozen wastes of Scandinavia to the chaotic tumult of Istanbul.

Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.

New York Times best-selling author and New York native Colson Whitehead composes a breathtaking tribute to his hometown. Whitehead captures the very essence of New York, infusing his reflections with the energy that permeates the city.

Too personal for an almanac, too sophisticated for a domestic history, and too funny and self-doubting for a literary journal, One Man's Meat can best be described as a primer of a countryman's lessons and a timeless recounting of experience that will never go out of style.

In E. B. White on Dogs, his granddaughter and manager of his literary estate, Martha White, has compiled the best and funniest of her grandfather's essays, poems, and letters depicting over a dozen of his various canine companions. Included here are favorite essays such as "Two Letters, Both Open", "Bedfellows", and many others, as well as some of White's little-known notes and comment pieces covering dog shows, sled dog races, and the trials and tribulations of city canines.

Paul Auster's signature work, The New York Trilogy, consists of three interlocking novels: City of Glass, Ghosts, and The Locked Room - haunting and mysterious tales that move at the breathless pace of a thriller.

One night, Peter Lake - orphan, master-mechanic, and master second-story man - attempts to rob a fortress-like mansion on the Upper West Side. Though he thinks the house is empty, the daughter of the house is home. Thus begins the affair between the middle-aged Irish burglar and Beverly Penn, a young girl who is dying. Because of a love that at first he cannot fully understand, Peter, a simple and uneducated man, will be driven "to stop time and bring back the dead".

The Elements of Style has long been a valued and beloved resource for all writers. Hailed for its directness and clever insight, this unorthodox textbook was born from a professor's love for the written word and perfected years later by one of his students: famed author E. B. White. Ever since its first publication in 1959, writers have turned to this book for its wise and accessible advice.

Take a walk through almost any neighborhood in Manhattan and you’ll likely pass some of the most significant clubs in American music history. But you won’t know it—almost all of these venues have been demolished or repurposed, leaving no record of what they were, how they shaped music scenes, or their impact on the neighborhoods around them. This Must Be the Place examines how these scenes came together and fell apart—and shows how these communal artistic experiences are not just for rarefied geniuses but available to us all.

Although Greenwich Village takes up less than a square mile in downtown New York, rarely has such a concise area supported and nurtured so many groundbreaking artists and genres. Musician used the Village’s smokey coffeehouses and clubs to chronicle the tumultuous Sixties, rewrite jazz history, and take rock & roll into eclectic places it hadn’t been before. Based on new interviews with surviving participants, previously unseen and unheard archives, and author David Browne's years immersed in the scene, Talkin’ Greenwich Village lends the saga the epic, panoramic scope it has long deserved.

Between You & Me features Norris' laugh-out-loud descriptions of some of the most common and vexing problems in spelling, punctuation, and usage - comma faults, danglers, "who" vs. "whom", "that" vs. "which", compound words, gender-neutral language - and her clear explanations of how to handle them.

There is simply no A-Z like the alphabet of fiction writers who have appeared in the pages of The New Yorker in the last hundred years. The book boasts inarguable classics like Salinger’s “A Perfect Day for Bananafish,” Annie Proulx’s “Brokeback Mountain,” and Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” alongside stunners to be rediscovered. Some stories defined a moment or a now-lost world (Isaac Bashevis Singer’s “The Cafeteria”); others showed us a whole new way fiction could sound and feel (“The Red Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid).

Herman Wouk's sweeping epic of World War II stands as the crowning achievement of one of America's most celebrated storytellers. Like no other books about the war, Wouk's spellbinding narrative captures the tide of global events - and all the drama, romance, heroism, and tragedy of World War II - as it immerses us in the lives of a single American family drawn into the very center of the war's maelstrom.

In September 1969, a fumbling, cranky old church deacon known as Sportcoat shuffles into the courtyard of the Cause Houses housing project in south Brooklyn, pulls a .38 from his pocket, and, in front of everybody, shoots the project's drug dealer at point-blank range. The reasons for this desperate burst of violence and the consequences that spring from it lie at the heart of Deacon King Kong, James McBride's funny, moving novel and his first since his National Book Award-winning The Good Lord Bird.

From her creation of the “Approval Matrix” in New York magazine in 2004 to her Pulitzer Prize–winning columns for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum has argued for a new way of looking at TV. In this collection, including two never-before-published essays, Nussbaum writes about her passion for television, beginning with Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the show that set her on a fresh intellectual path. She explores the rise of the female screw-up, how fans warp the shows they love, the messy power of sexual violence on TV, and the year that jokes helped elect a reality-television president.

"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.