Essays

The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness

The incomparable Rebecca Solnit, author of more than a dozen acclaimed, prizewinning books of nonfiction including Men Explain Things To Me, brings the same dazzling writing to the essays in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness; hailed by the Los Angeles Times as “globally wide-ranging and topically urgent and the Boston Globe as “luminous and precise.”. As …

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The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2015

For the past year, a group of high school students met at a publishing house in San Francisco every Monday night to read literary magazines, chapbooks, graphic novels, and countless articles. This committee was assisted by a group of students that met in the basement of a robot shop in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Together, and under the guidance …

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Wonderbook: The Illustrated Guide to Creating Imaginative Fiction

This all-new definitive guide to writing imaginative fiction takes a completely novel approach and fully exploits the visual nature of fantasy through original drawings, maps, renderings, and exercises to create a spectacularly beautiful and inspiring object. Employing an accessible, example-rich approach, Wonderbook energizes and motivates while also providing practical, nuts-and-bolts information needed to improve as a writer. Aimed …

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The Periodic Table

(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)The Periodic Table is largely a memoir of the years before and after Primo Levi’s transportation from his native Italy to Auschwitz as an anti-Facist partisan and a Jew. It recounts, in clear, precise, unfailingly beautiful prose, the story of the Piedmontese Jewish community from which Levi came, of his years as a student …

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I Wasn’t Strong Like This When I Started Out: True Stories of Becoming a Nurse

This collection of true narratives reflects the dynamism and diversity of nurses, who provide the first vital line of patient care. Here, nurses remember their first “sticks,” first births, and first deaths, and reflect on what gets them though long, demanding shifts, and keeps them in the profession. The stories reveal many voices from nurses at different stages …

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What the Dog Saw: And Other Adventures

What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard-but only one variety of ketchup? What do football players teach us about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the 20th century? In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books …

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The Greatest Minds and Ideas of All Time

A wise and witty compendium of the greatest thoughts, greatest minds, and greatest books of all time — listed in accessible and succinct form — by one of the world’s greatest scholars. From the “Hundred Best Books” to the “Ten Greatest Thinkers” to the “Ten Greatest Poets,” here is a concise collection of the world’s most significant …

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The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays

One of the most influential works of this century, this is a crucial exposition of existentialist thought. Influenced by works such as Don Juan and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide: the question of living or not living in an absurd universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Camus posits …

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Yes, My Accent Is Real: And Some Other Things I Haven’t Told You

In the spirit of Mindy Kaling’s bestseller Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?, a collection of humorous, autobiographical essays from Kunal Nayyar, best known as Raj on CBS’s #1 hit comedy The Big Bang Theory.Of all the charming misfits on television, there’s no doubt Raj from The Big Bang Theory—the sincere yet incurably geeky Indian-American astrophysicist—ranks among the …

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A House of My Own: Stories from My Life

From the author of The House on Mango Street, a richly illustrated compilation of true stories and nonfiction pieces that, taken together, form a jigsaw autobiography—an intimate album of a beloved literary legend. From the Chicago neighborhoods where she grew up and set her groundbreaking The House on Mango Street to her abode in Mexico in a region …

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