At the age of 36, on the verge of a completing a decade's worth of training as a neurosurgeon, Paul Kalanithi's health began to falter. He started losing weight and was wracked by waves of excruciating back pain. A CT scan confirmed what Paul, deep down, had suspected: he had stage four lung cancer, widely disseminated. One day, he was a doctor making a living treating the dying, and the next, he was a patient struggling to live. Just like that, the...

David Sedaris has kept a diary for forty years, recording everything that has captured his attention -- overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These observations are the source code for his work, and through them he has honed his cunning, surprising sentences. Now Sedaris shares his private writings with the world. Theft by Finding, the first of two volumes, is an account of how a drug-abusing...

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...

A memoir of the steamboat era on the Mississippi River before the American Civil War. The first half details a brief history of the river from its discovery by Hernando de Soto in 1541 and describes Twain's career as a Mississippi steamboat pilot, the fulfillment of a childhood dream. The second half of Life on the Mississippi tells of Twain's return, many years after, to travel the river from St. Louis to New Orleans. By then the competition from...

Knut Hamsun believed that modern literature should express the complexity of the human mind and nowhere is that philosophy more evident than in this stunning modern masterpiece, "Hunger." First published in 1890 in Norwegian and based on Hamsun's own experiences with poverty prior to his success as an author, "Hunger" tells the story of an unnamed vagrant who stumbles around the streets of Norway's capital city of Kristiania (now Oslo) looking for...

Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins delivers the long awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe. "In Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins turns that unparalleled literary sensibility inward, stitching together stories of his unconventional life, from his Appalachian childhood to his globetrotting adventures -- told in his unique voice that combines the sweet and sly, the spiritual and earthy....

The book that made Mark Twain famous and introduced the world to that obnoxious and ubiquitous character: the American tourist Based on a series of letters first published in American newspapers, The Innocents Abroad is Mark Twain's hilarious and insightful account of an organized tour of Europe and the Holy Land undertaken in 1867.   With his trademark blend of skepticism and sincerity, Twain casts New World eyes on the people and places of the...

West with the Night is the story of Beryl Markham--aviator, racehorse trainer, beauty--and her life in the Kenya of the 1920s and '30s.

"The author describes how she endured as the only child of an unstable poet for a mother and a beloved but largely absent father and explores the consequences of a psychologically harrowing childhood as she seeks refuge from the past and recovers what was lost."--NoveList.

Oboist Blair Tindall recounts her decades-long professional career as a classical musician-from the recitals and Broadway orchestra performances to the secret life of musicians who survive hand to mouth in the backbiting New York classical music scene, where musicians trade sexual favors for plum jobs and assignments in orchestras across the city. Tindall and her fellow journeymen musicians often play drunk, high, or hopelessly hungover, live in decrepit...