Seattle, with its spectacular natural beauty and rough frontier history, has inspired writers from its earliest days. This anthology spans seven decades and includes fiction, memoirs, histories, and journalism that define the city or use it as a setting, imparting the flavor of the city through a literary prism.Reading Seattle features classics by Horace R. Cayton, Richard Hugo, Betty MacDonald, Mary McCarthy, Murray Morgan, and John Okada as well as more recent works by S...

Reading Portland is a literary exploration of the city's past and present. In over eighty selections, Portland is revealed through histories, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, novels, and news reports. This single volume gives voice to women and men; the colonizers and the colonized; white, Hispanic, African American, Asian American, and Indian storytellers; and lower, middle, and upper classes.In his introduction, John Trombold considers the history of writing abou...

"I fell in love with Maupin’s effervescent Tales of the City decades ago, and his genius turn at memoir is no less compelling. Logical Family is a must read."—Mary KarrIn this long-awaited memoir, the beloved author of the bestselling Tales of the City series chronicles his odyssey from the old South to freewheeling San Francisco, and his evolution from curious youth to ground-breaking writer and gay rights pioneer.Born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart o...

“This quietly profound book belongs on the shelf next to Jon Krakauer’s Into the Wild.” —The New York TimesThe riveting true story of Dick Conant, an American folk hero who, over the course of more than twenty years, canoed solo thousands of miles of American rivers—and then disappeared near the Outer Banks of North Carolina. This book “contains everything: adventure, mystery, travelogue, and unforgettable characters” (David Grann, best-se...

“Beautiful. The human condition is on full display in these glimpses of our essential connectedness. Perfect for our times.”—Dani Shapiro, author of InheritanceSixty-five extraordinary writers grapple with this mystery: How can an ephemeral encounter with a stranger leave such an eternal mark?When Colleen Kinder put out a call for authors to write a letter to a stranger about an unforgettable encounter, she opened the floodgates. Th...

Discover some of Canada's best new writers with this highly acclaimed annual anthology, made possible by the generosity of Pulitzer Prize-winning author James A. Michener.For more than two decades, The Journey Prize Stories has been presenting the best short stories published each year by some of Canada's most exciting new writers. Previous contributors -- including such now well-known, bestselling writers as Yann Martel, Elizabeth Hay, Annabel Lyon, Lisa Moore, He...

Everyone knows Frank Herbert's Dune.This amazing and complex epic, combining politics, religion, human evolution, and ecology, has captured the imagination of generations of readers. One of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, winning awards, selling millions of copies around the world. In the prophetic year of 1984, Dune was made into a motion picture directed by David Lynch, and it has recently been ...

Curated by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Wild, this volume shares intimate perspectives from some of today's most acclaimed writers.As Cheryl Strayed explains in her introduction, "the invisible, unwritten last line of every essay should be and nothing was ever the same again." The reader, in other words, should feel the ground shift, if even only a bit. In this edition of the acclaimed anthology series, Strayed has gathered ...

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...

In this enthusiastic, heartfelt, and sometimes humorous ode to bookshops and booksellers, 84 known authors pay tribute to the brick-and-mortar stores they love and often call their second homes.In My Bookstore our greatest authors write about the pleasure, guidance, and support that their favorite bookstores and booksellers have given them over the years. The relationship between a writer and his or her local store and staff can last for years or even decad...

"Some books celebrate the human condition; others commiserate with us. This memoir does both." —Helen Oyeyemi, NPRThis spellbinding memoir by the National Book Award–nominated author of The Bird Artist begins with a portrait, both harrowing and hilarious, of a midwestern boy's summer working in a bookmobile, under the shadow of his grifter father and the erotic tutelage of his brother's girlfriend. Howard Norman's life story continues in places as far-flung...

The Discomfort Zone is Jonathan Franzen’s tale of growing up afraid of spiders, school dances, urinals, music teachers, boomerangs, popular girls, and his parents. It’s also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal history of the decades in which America turned away from its mid-century idealism and became a more polarized society. Whether he’s writing about the explosive dynamics of a Christian youth fellowship in the 1970s,...