We all know someone who has suffered a heart attack. But how often do we learn the intimate, potentially life-saving details that accompany coronary disease? In The Sanctuary of Illness, Thomas Larson gives a powerful and personal inside tour of what happens when our arteries fail. He chronicles the three heart attacks in five years that he survived, and the emergency surgeries that saved his life each time. Slowly waking up to the genetic legacy and dangerous diet that pushed him to the b...

The memoir is the most popular and expressive literary form of our time. Writers embrace the memoir and readers devour it, propelling many memoirs by relative unknowns to the top of the best-seller list. Writing programs challenge authors to disclose themselves in personal narrative. Memoir and personal narrative urge writers to face the intimacies of the self and ask what is true.In The Memoir and the Memoirist, critic and memoirist Thomas Larson explores the craft and pu...

An exploration of the cultural impact of Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, the Pieta of music, and its enigmatic composer."Whenever the American dream suffers a catastrophic setback, Barber’s Adagio plays on the radio.” —Alex Ross, author of The Rest is NoiseIn the first book ever to explore Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings, music and literary critic Thomas Larson tells the story of the prodigal composer and his seminal master...

Today, the surprisingly elastic form of the memoir embraces subjects that include dying, illness, loss, relationships, and self-awareness. Writing to reveal the inner self—the pilgrimage into one’s spiritual and/or religious nature—is a primary calling. Contemporary memoirists are exploring this field with innovative storytelling, rigorous craft, and new styles of confessional authorship. Now, Thomas Larson brings his expertise as a critic, reader, and teacher to the boldly evolving and im...

A reflection on how to listen and pay attention amid the constant noise that saturates our public and private lives.From podcasts sounding through earbuds to talk shows blaring from televisions, from the continuous stream of social media on our phones to doctors’ waiting rooms with pumped-in music, we face different sounds, soothing and alarming. Some are welcome, some are not, but all demand our attention, often to distraction. Whether we’re at home or out and abo...

NATIONAL BESTSELLERFINALIST for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-FictionFINALIST for the RBC Taylor PrizeShortlisted for the Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Non-Fiction as well as a finalist for the RBC Taylor Prize, Sixty is a wickedly honest and brutally funny account of the year in which Ian Brown truly realized that the man in the mirror was...sixty. By the author of the multiple award-winning The Boy in t...

Jodi Picoult meets Atul Gawande in this gripping medical drama that plunges readers into the hidden pressures of the operating room and the emotional fallout of failure, guilt, and ambition from the bestselling author of Gemini and Healer.Dr. Marie Heaton is an anesthesiologist at the height of her profession. She has worked, lived, and breathed her career since medical school, and she now practices at a top Seattle hospital. Mari...

From the front lines of modern medicine, Tell Me Where It Hurts is a fascinating insider portrait of a veterinarian, his furry patients, and the blend of old-fashioned instincts and cutting-edge technology that defines pet care in the twenty-first century.For anyone who’s ever wondered what goes on behind the scenes at your veterinarian’s office, Tell Me Where It Hurts offers a vicarious journey through twenty-four intimate, eye-opening, heartrend...

A New York Times Notable Book. This "harrowing, lyrical autobiographical memoir . . . is a striking meditation on the distorting effects of our culture's preoccupation with physical beauty" (Publishers Weekly).It took Lucy Grealy twenty years of living with a distorted self-image and more than thirty reconstructive procedures before she could come to terms with her appearance after childhood cancer and surgery that left her jaw disfigured. As a yo...

"For all animal lovers ... Few books ... approach the combination of fine writing, radical honesty, and endless optimism found [in these] veterinary tales." ( Booklist, starred review)With insight and humor, Dr. Philipp Schott shares tales from the unlikely path he took into his career as a veterinarian and anecdotes from his successful small-animal clinic. Dr. Schott brings to his writing the benefit of many years of expertise. Wisdom he imparts on reader...

Crammed with useful info, funny recollections, heartfelt anecdotes, and lots of cute furry creatures, a collection for all animal lovers!This collection of over 60 stories and essays, drawn from Dr. Schott’s 30 years in small animal practice, covers an astonishing breadth of experiences, emotions, and species. Schott has tales of creatures ranging from tiny honeybees to massive Burmese pythons, although the emphasis is on dogs and cats and the interesting, often qu...

From Dr. Schott’s 30 years in veterinary practice come over 60 heartwarming, funny, and adorable stories about angry pelicans, bug-eyed goldfish, and plenty of cats and dogsIn the third book in this bestselling series, we meet the oddest creatures, from an escaped newt to a baby snow leopard, but the focus is on the dogs and cats that make up most of a pet vet’s day and on the wacky and wonderful people who bring them in.Dr. Schott also pulls back the curta...