This national bestseller tells the story of James McBride and his mother--a rabbi's daughter, born in Poland and raised in the South, who fled to Harlem, married a black man, founded a church, and put twelve children through college.

In his early 20s, a lifetime of excess left Rick Moody suddenly stranded in a depression so profound that he feared for his life. A stay in a psychiatric hospital was just the first step out of mental illness. In this astonishingly inventive book, Moody tells the story of his collapse and recovery in an inspired journey through what it means to be young and confused, older and confused, guilty, lost, and healed.

With great wit, Sisman here tells the story of Boswell's presumptuous task--the making of the greatest biography of all time. Sisman traces the friendship between Boswell and Samuel Johnson, his mentor, and provides a fascinating account of Boswell's seven-year struggle to write The Life of Samuel Johnson.

In this collection, Gould consciously and unconventionally formulates a humanistic natural history, a consideration of how humans have learned to study and understand nature, rather than a history of nature itself. With his customary brilliance, Gould examines the puzzles and paradoxes great and small that build nature's and humanity's diversity and order. In affecting short biographies, he depicts how scholars grapple with problems of science and philosophy as he illuminates the interaction of the outer world with the unique human ability to struggle to understand the whys and wherefores of existence.

King takes the reader through crucial aspects of the writer's art and life, offering practical and inspiring advice on everything from plot and character development to work habits and rejection.Serialized in the New Yorker to vivid acclaim, On Writing culminates with a profoundly moving account of how King's overwhelming need to write spurred him toward recovery, and brought him back to his life.

Paul Krugman, who "writes better than any economist since John Maynard Keynes" (Fortune), lays bare the hidden facts behind Bush's $2 trillion tax cut.

The continuation of the magnificent, bestselling tale of adventure begun in The Fellowship of the Ring. "Among the greatest works of imaginative fiction of the twentieth century."-The Sunday Telegraph

The iconic coming-of-age story of one prep school boy's wild weekend in New York City.