Just As I Thought

Author

John Updike

Rabbit, Run is the book that established John Updike as one of the major American novelists of his—or any other—generation. Its hero is Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom, a onetime high-school basketball star who on an impulse deserts his wife and son. He is twenty-six years old, a man-child caught...

Author	Elisabeth Tova Bailey
ISBN	1565126068

In a work that beautifully demonstrates the rewards of closely observing nature, Elisabeth Bailey shares an inspiring and intimate story of her uncommon encounter with a Neohelix albolabris —a common woodland snail.

While an illness keeps her bedridden, Bailey watches a wild snail that...

Author	Henry David Thoreau
ISBN	1596058811

The philosophies of Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)—hero to environmentalists and ecologists, profound thinker on humanity's happiness—have greatly influenced the American character, and his writings on human nature, materialism, and the natural world continue to be of profound import...

Author	Patrick deWitt
ISBN	0062041266

Hermann Kermit Warm is going to die. The enigmatic and powerful man known only as the Commodore has ordered it, and his henchmen, Eli and Charlie Sisters, will make sure of it. Though Eli doesn't share his brother's appetite for whiskey and killing, he's never known anything else. But their prey isn't...

Author	Marshall McLuhan
ISBN	1584230703

The Medium is the Massage is Marshall McLuhan's most condensed, and perhaps most effective, presentation of his ideas. Using a layout style that was later copied by Wired, McLuhan and coauthor/designer Quentin Fiore combine word and image to illustrate and enact the ideas that were first put forward...

Author	Patti Smith
ISBN	0525657681

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.

Following a run of New Year’s concerts at San Francisco’s legendary Fillmore, Patti...

Author	Maggie Nelson
ISBN	1555977073

An intrepid voyage out to the frontiers of the latest thinking about love, language, and family.

Maggie Nelson's The Argonauts is a genre-bending memoir, a work of "autotheory" offering fresh, fierce, and timely thinking about desire, identity, and the limitations and possibilities of...

Author	Lisa Scottoline
ISBN	1250099560

A handsome stranger moves to the small Pennsylvania town of Central Valley, and his name is Chris Brennan. He’s applying for a job as a teacher and varsity baseball coach at the local high school, and he looks perfect, on paper. But his name is an alias, his resume is false, and everything about him is...

Author	Elizabeth Gilbert
ISBN	0670024856

A glorious, sweeping novel of desire, ambition, and the thirst for knowledge, from the # 1 New York Times bestselling author of Eat, Pray, Love and Committed.

In The Signature of All Things, Elizabeth Gilbert returns to fiction, inserting her inimitable voice into an enthralling story of...

Author	Iliana Regan
ISBN	1572842679

A singular, powerfully expressive debut memoir that traces one chef's struggle to find her place and what happens once she does.

Burn the Place is a galvanizing memoir that chronicles Iliana Regan's journey from foraging on the family farm to running her Michelin-starred restaurant, Elizabeth....

Author

Michelle Tea

It's 5am. I am jittery from all the coffee I've fed into my system in an attempt to stave off sleep and instead spend my moonlit hours on the more worthwhile pursuit of reading this book. I am forever changed.

This collection of personal anecdotes, journalistic pieces, wisdoms shared, and talks...

Author	Patricia Hampl
ISBN	0525429646

A spirited inquiry into the lost value of leisure and daydream

The Art of the Wasted Day is a picaresque travelogue of leisure written from a lifelong enchantment with solitude. Patricia Hampl visits the homes of historic exemplars of ease who made repose a goal, even an art form. She begins...

Author	Joy Harjo
ISBN	1324003863

In the early 1800s, the Mvskoke people were forcibly removed from their original lands east of the Mississippi to Indian Territory, which is now part of Oklahoma. Two hundred years later, Joy Harjo returns to her family’s lands and opens a dialogue with history. In An American Sunrise, Harjo finds...

Author	Maggie Nelson
ISBN	1933517409

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant...

Author	Patti Smith
ISBN	1101875100

M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes every morning for black coffee, ruminates on the world as it is and the world as it was, and writes in her notebook. Through prose that shifts fluidly between dreams and reality, past and present, we travel to Frida Kahlo's Casa Azul in...

Author	Rob Bell
ISBN	0062356291

The popular pastor and New York Times bestselling author of Love Wins and What We Talk About When We Talk About God shows us how to pursue and realize our dreams, live in the moment, and joyfully do the things that make us come alive.

Each of us was created for something great—we just need to figure...

Author	Vivian Gornick
ISBN	0374528586

A guide to the art of personal writing, by the author of Fierce Attachments and The End of the Novel of Love

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can...

Author	Judith Barrington
ISBN	0933377509

Since Writing the Memoir came out in early 1997 it has sold roughly 80,000 copies and is consistently praised as "the best book on memoir out there." It is thought-provoking, explanatory, and practical: each chapter ends with writing exercises. It covers everything from questions of truth and ethics...

Author

Philippe Lançon

Lambeau, subst. masc.
1. Morceau d’étoffe, de papier, de matière souple, déchiré ou arraché, détaché du tout ou y attenant en partie.
2. Par analogie : morceau de chair ou de peau arrachée volontairement ou accidentellement. Lambeau sanglant ; lambeaux de chair et de sang. Juan,...

Author	Naomi Shihab Nye
ISBN	1942683731

Internationally beloved poet Naomi Shihab Nye places her Palestinian American identity center stage in her latest full-length poetry collection for adults. The collection is inspired by the story of Janna Tamimi, the "Youngest Journalist in Palestine," who at age 7 began capturing videos of anti-occupation...

Author	George Hodgman
ISBN	0525427201

When George Hodgman leaves Manhattan for his hometown of Paris, Missouri, he finds himself—an unlikely caretaker and near-lethal cook—in a head-on collision with his aging mother, Betty, a woman of wit and will. Will George lure her into assisted living? When hell freezes over. He can’t bring...

Author

Nick Flynn

The newest collection from Nick Flynn, whose “songs of experience hum with immediacy” (The New York Times)

Beginning with a poem called “Confessional” and ending with a poem titled “Saint Augustine,” Nick Flynn's I Will Destroy You interrogates the potential of art to be redemptive,...

Author	Ali Liebegott
ISBN	1936932504

My essay for the Poetry Foundation:

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/arti...

The writer Jean Rhys, a great miner of autobiographical ore, once said, “The things you remember have no form. When you write about them, you have to give them a beginning, a middle, and an end. To give...

Author	Nick Flynn
ISBN	1555977103

A daring and intimate new book by the poet and memoirist Nick Flynn, "a champion of contemporary American poetry" (Newpages)


. . . the take from his bank jobs, all of it

will come to me, if I can just get him to draw me
a map, if I can find the tree, if I can find

the shovel....

Author	Jonathan Coe
ISBN	0670917389

Maxwell Sim seems to have hit rock bottom. Estranged from his father, newly divorced, unable to communicate with his only daughter, he realizes that while he may have seventy-four friends on Facebook, there is nobody in the world with whom he can actually share his problems. Then a business proposition...

Author

Karen Finley

.