The second groundbreaking anthology from the New York Times best-selling team of Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly is here! The everyday world is turned upside down and the ordinary becomes extraordinary in this collection of the strangest tales. From Art Spiegelman's The Several Lives of Selby Sheldrake to Maurice Sendak's Cereal Baby Keller to Jules Feiffer's Trapped in a Comic Book, these stories are sure to entice any young reader. Also included are comics and features by Ian Falconer and David Sedaris, Paul Auster and Jacques de Loustal, Crockett Johnson, Richard McGuire, and Barbara McClintock, a puzzle by Lewis Trondheim, and make-your-own comic-book endpapers from Kaz. Little Lit Strange Stories for Strange Kids continues the tradition of bringing the pleasure of books and reading into the hands and minds of kids.
As Americans are the fattest people on earth, the fat, the formerly fat, those who feel fat, and those who fear fat encompass just about all of us. In this surprising collection of pieces, almost half of which are original to this anthology, some of our most lively, provocative writers explore the many folds of fat that make up reality. From David Sedaris's hilarious assessment of his father's fat prejudices in "A Shiner Like A Diamond" to Anne Lamott's self-prescribed cathartic weight loss remedies in "Hunger", Pam Houston's rich literary panorama in "Out of Habit I Start Apologizing," and psychiatrist Irving Yalom's deeply moving confrontation of his own biases in "Fat Lady," each piece in its unique way deals with fat as a matter of fact. Sometimes funny, sometimes angry, often illuminating and always engaging, these writers make a new and compelling case for why we should make room for a bigger behind.
In response to requests from instructors and students for shorter and less expensive composition readers, 40 Model Essays — featuring material adapted from the successful The Compact Reader — offers about half the usual number of readings for about half the price of similar books.
'When apple-picking season ended, I got a Job in a packing plant and gravitated towards short stories, which I could read during my break and reflect upon for the remainder of my shift. A good one would take me out of myself and then stuff me back in, outsized, now, and uneasy with the fit ...Once, before leaving on vacation, I copied an entire page from an Alice Munro story and left it in my typewriter, hoping a burglar might come upon it and mistake her words for my own. That an intruder would spend his valuable time reading, that he might be impressed by the description of a crooked face, was something I did not question, as I believed, and still do, that stories can save you'.
The Best American series has been the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction since 1915. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of periodicals. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the very best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected--and most popular--of its kind. The Best American Essays 2005 includes Roger Angell • Andrea Barrett • Jonathan Franzen • Ian Frazier • Edward Hoagland • Ted Kooser • Jonathan Lethem • Danielle Ofri • Oliver Sacks • Cathleen Schine • David Sedaris • Robert Stone • David Foster Wallace • and others Susan Orlean, guest editor, is the author of My Kind of Place, The Orchid Thief, The Bullfighter Checks Her Makeup, and Saturday Night. A staff writer for The New Yorker since 1982, she has also written for Outside, Esquire, Rolling Stone, and Vogue.
STORIES BY DAVID SEDARIS, JOHN UPDIKE, TOM PERROTTA, LYNN FREED,L. ELISE BLAND, JAMES WILLIAMSON, HELEN WALSH, SIDNEY DURHAM, KWELI WALKER, PEGGY MUNSON, AND MR. SLEEP
New in paperback for the very first time comes the New York Times bestselling Little Lit series! Choice comic stories culled from the three bestselling comic collections edited by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly: Little Lit: Once Upon a Time, Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids, and Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night. The gorgeous paperback features flaps and beautifully reproduced full-color interiors. Hilarious and charming, the collection contains comics from such award-winning and bestselling authors and artists as Harry Bliss, Daniel Clowes, Ian Falconer, Jules Feiffer, Neil Gaiman, Crockett Johnson, Barbara McClintock, David Sedaris, J. Otto Seibold, Maurice Sendak, Lemony Snicket, and Art Spiegelman.
From memoir to journalism, personal essays to cultural criticism, this indispensable anthology brings together works from all genres of creative nonfiction, with pieces by fifty contemporary writers including Cheryl Strayed, David Sedaris, Barbara Kingsolver, and more. Selected by five hundred writers, English professors, and creative writing teachers from across the country, this collection includes only the most highly regarded nonfiction work published since 1970. Contributers include: Jo Ann Beard, Wendell Berry, Eula Biss, Mary Clearman Blew, Charles Bowden, Janet Burroway, Kelly Grey Carlisle, Anne Carson, Bernard Cooper, Michael W. Cox, Annie Dillard, Mark Doty, Brian Doyle, Tony Earley, Anthony Farrington, Harrison Candelaria Fletcher, Diane Glancy, Lucy Grealy, William Harrison, Robin Hemley, Adam Hochschild, Jamaica Kincaid, Barbara Kingsolver , Ted Kooser, Sara Levine, E.J. Levy, Phillip Lopate, Barry Lopez, Thomas Lynch, Lee Martin, Rebecca McCLanahan, Erin McGraw, John McPhee, Brenda Miller, Dinty W. Moore, Kathleen Norris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lia Purpura, Richard Rhodes, Bill Roorbach, David Sedaris, Richard Selzer, Sue William Silverman, Floyd Skloot, Lauren Slater, Cheryl Strayed, Amy Tan, Ryan Van Meter, David Foster Wallace, and Joy Williams.
Like an overstuffed stocking on Christmas morning, NPR Holiday Favorites is full of unexpected pleasures and evergreen delights: David Sedaris contributes his now classic Santaland Diaries, his account of his experiences playing Santas little helper at Macys in New York. Susan Stamberg sneaks her mother-in-laws recipe for cranberry relish onto the airagain. Storyteller Kevin Kling finds an invitation to participate in a production of The Nutcracker too tempting to resist. Ghanian-born commentator Meri Danquah shares her thoughts on Kwanzaa. Cowboy poet Baxter Black describes a Christmas cookie with the denseness of an anvil and the half-life of a radial tire. Robert Siegel goes in search of the correct spelling for Decembers Jewish holiday. The Thanksgiving tables are turned on unsuspecting Bostonians in When Turkeys Attack.
Over the last century air travel has evolved from a high-risk experiment involving a few visionary pioneers to an efficientand often irritatingmeans for distributing masses of people to the far reaches of the globe. During the hundred-year history of human air travel, it has yielded writing that is, by turns, heroic, dreamy, subversive, and utterly dire. This anthology traces this trajectory from the early letters and memoirs of Wilbur and Orville Wright, and Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh, to the diaries of Amelia Earhart. Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s heroism gives way to the darkly magical storytelling of Roald Dahl, and the spare, elegiac prose of master stylist James Salter. More recent stories by Erica Jong, Mary Gaitskill, Thomas Beller, Mike Albo, Maxine Swann, and David Sedaris examine an array of contemporary subjects, from the addictiveness of mile-high sex, to etiquette for cramped seating and accounts of racial profiling post9/11. Flight Patterns promises an entertaining refuge for frequent fliers, and a gateway to dreams for nighttime readers. These writings exude the primal fear and cool perspective that can only come from seeing the worldand one’s own lifefrom a great distance. Flight Patterns renders airplane travel a time capsule of modern life.
The books that we choose to keep -- let alone read -- can say a lot about who we are and how we see ourselves. In My Ideal Bookshelf , dozens of leading cultural figures share the books that matter to them most; books that define their dreams and ambitions and in many cases helped them find their way in the world. Contributors include Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Keller, Michael Chabon, Alice Waters, James Patterson, Maira Kalman, Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, Miranda July, Alex Ross, Nancy Pearl, David Chang, Patti Smith, Jennifer Egan, and Dave Eggers, among many others. With colorful and endearingly hand-rendered images of book spines by Jane Mount, and first-person commentary from all the contributors, this is a perfect gift for avid readers, writers, and all who have known the influence of a great book.
Sixty-five of the world's leading writers open up about the books and authors that have meant the most to them Every Sunday, readers of The New York Times Book Review turn with anticipation to see which novelist, historian, short story writer, or artist will be the subject of the popular By the Book feature. These wide-ranging interviews are conducted by Pamela Paul, the editor of the Book Review, and here she brings together sixty-five of the most intriguing and fascinating exchanges, featuring personalities as varied as David Sedaris, Hilary Mantel, Michael Chabon, Khaled Hosseini, Anne Lamott, and James Patterson. The questions and answers admit us into the private worlds of these authors, as they reflect on their work habits, reading preferences, inspirations, pet peeves, and recommendations. By the Book contains the full uncut interviews, offering a range of experiences and observations that deepens readers' understanding of the literary sensibility and the writing process. It also features dozens of sidebars that reveal the commonalities and conflicts among the participants, underscoring those influences that are truly universal and those that remain matters of individual taste. For the devoted reader, By the Book is a way to invite sixty-five of the most interesting guests into your world. It's a book party not to be missed.