With her trademark spare, crystalline prose-a voice infused with intimate, fragile, desperate humanness (The Washington Post)-Elizabeth Strout once again turns her exquisitely-tuned eye to the inner workings of the human heart, this time following theindomitable heroine of My Name Is Lucy Barton and Oh William! through the early days of the pandemic. As a panicked world goes into lockdown, Lucy Barton is uprooted from her life in Manhattan and bundled...

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 Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores what it means to be seen, to find someone...

"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...

Mark Twain's semi-autobiographical travel memoir, "Roughing It" was written between 1870-1871 and subsequently published in 1872. Billed as a prequel to "Innocents Abroad", in which Twain details his travels aboard a pleasure cruise through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, "Roughing It" conversely documents Twain's early days in the old wild west between the years 1861-1867. Employing his characteristically humoristic wit and flare for regional dialect,...

How did a boy from small-town New York become the world’s most successful writer? How does he do it? He has always wanted to write the kind of novel that would be read and reread so many times that the binding breaks and the book literally falls apart. As he says, “I’m still working on that one.”

One of the most famous non-fiction American books, Walden by Henry David Thoreau is the history of Thoreau's visit to Ralph Waldo Emerson's woodland retreat near Walden Pond. Thoreau, stirred by the philosophy of the transcendentalists, used the sojourn as an experiment in self reliance and minimalism… "so as to "live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not,

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"SOME PIG," Charlotte the spider's praise for Wilbur, is just one fondly remembered snippet from E. B. White's Charlotte's Web. In Some Writer!, the two-time Caldecott Honor winner Melissa Sweet mixes White's personal letters, photos, and family ephemera with her own exquisite artwork to tell his story, from his birth in 1899 to his death in 1985. Budding young writers will be fascinated and inspired by the journalist, New Yorker contributor, and...

Story tells how Margret and H.A. Rey escaped from Nazi-occupied France in 1940, carrying in their bicycle baskets the manuscripts that would become their beloved picture books about Curious George, the little monkey.

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In this moving memoir, Danielle Steel tells the story of how she met a dog the size of a mouse with a personality that could light up an entire room. From Minnie’s arrival at home in San Francisco to clothes-shopping jaunts in Paris, her adventures provide the perfect backdrop for a heartfelt look at the magic that dogs bring to our lives, and how they become part of the family, making indelible...

Published posthumously in 1964, A Moveable Feast is Ernest Hemingway's memoir of Paris in the 1920s. It is filled with portraits of other expatriate luminaries such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Gertrude Stein; tender memories of his first wife, Hadley; and insightful recollections of his own early experiments with his craft.