"The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays"-- ""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious...

When Tony Hillerman looks back at seventy-six years spent getting from hard times farm boy to bestselling author, he sees lots of evidence that Providence was poking him along. For example, when an absentminded Army clerk left him off the hospital ship taking the wounded home from France, the mishap put him on a collision course with a curing ceremony held for two Navajo Marines, thereby providing the grist for a writing career that now sees his books...

Presents a literary memoir of poems, essays, and intimate family photos that reflect on the author's complicated relationship with his mother and his disadvantaged childhood on a Native American reservation.

A highly personal memoir of exile and homeland by bestselling author Isabel Allende In My Invented Country Isabel Allende evokes the magnificent landscapes of her country, a charming, idiosyncratic Chilean people with a violent history and indomitable spirit, and the politics, religion, myth and magic of her homeland that she carries with her even today. The book circles around two life-changing moments. The assassination of her uncle, Salvador Allende...

A delightful collection of essays exploring reading and writing. "In the Margins" contains Elena Ferrante's latest reflections on literature, and the works and authors that have influenced her throughout her career.

Bill Bryson's bestselling biography of William Shakespeare takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship-updated with a new introduction by the author to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death. William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild...

"This is my favorite kind of history," writes Dick Haeberlin in "Southwestern American Literature," "the story of a person I did not know about before, one not famous but important anyway." And important she was, as this new Sunstone Press edition of "Nina Otero-Warren of Santa Fe" reconfirms. In many ways her life paralleled that of Santa Fe and New Mexico in the early years of the twentieth century. Born in 1881, Nina saw New Mexico change from...

One of the joys of going on a trip is coming home to share with others your adventures and experiences. Mary Austin felt that way, so when she took an extended trip through an area of the American Southwest, she recorded her impressions in The Land of Journeys' Ending. This is no ordinary travel book and she was no ordinary tourist. Her book goes beyond the descriptions of flora and fauna of the land between the Colorado River and the Rio Grande....

In this frank and witty memoir, world-renowned chef Jacques Pepin tells how he rose from a frightened thirteen year old apprentice in an Old World kitchen to an Emmy Award winning TV superstar who continues to teach millions of Americans how to cook. We see young Jacques struggling to earn respect while working his way up the kitchen ladder: cooking for Jean Paul Sartre in a Paris brasserie, fending off the advances of Jean Genet, and clowning as...

Biographer Richardson has written a moving portrait of James--pivotal member of the Metaphysical Club and author of The Varieties of Religious Experience. The biography, ten years in the making, draws on unpublished letters, journals, and family records. Richardson paints extraordinary scenes from what James himself called the "buzzing blooming confusion" of his life, beginning with childhood, as he struggled to achieve amid the domestic chaos and...