A liberal Vanity Fair reporter recounts her attempt to reconnect with her conservative apple-farmer brother when the latter fell ill, an attempt that brought to the surface their disparate beliefs about politics, lifestyle choices, and priorities.

"The world is a more difficult place to live in than it was when Anne Lamott's runaway bestseller "Traveling mercies" was published six years ago. There's the big picture, in which terrorism and war have become the new normal, George W. Bush is president, and environmental devastation looms ever closer. And there are greater personal demands on Lamott's faith as well: turning fifty, her mother's Alzheimer's, her son Sam's adolescence, and the passing...

Didion's journalistic skills are displayed as never before in this story of a year in her life that began with her daughter in a medically induced coma and her husband unexpectedly dead due to a heart attack. This powerful and moving work is Didion's "attempt to make sense of the weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death about illness . . . about marriage and children and memory . . . about the shallowness of sanity...

"Hemingway described his artistic method as inventing from experience. In his letters we live in the country, meet the people, track the relationships, and witness events unfold that later he would forge into fiction. In a postscript to the 11 September 1925 letter to his mother telling of his novel in progress, Hemingway added a note about his wife: Hadley is better looking and huskier than ever. She's had her hair cut like a boys as all the chic...

Saul Bellow, the famous but fiercely private Nobel Prize winner, was known to be quick to anger and prone to argument, but he shared a tender bond with Greg, his firstborn. In this warm, affectionate, yet strikingly honest memoir, Greg Bellow offers a unique look inside the life of his father, one of America's greatest twentieth-century writers.