An Oregon musician pursues his dreams but eventually must choose between his celebrity lifestyle and the woman he loves.Set on the West Coast during George W. Bush's first term, Out of What Chaos showcases the escapades of Rex and The Brains as they settle into the Portland rock scene, record their first album, and tour from Vancouver to LA behind their chart-topping single, "F U. I Just Want To Get My Rocks Off."The boys party on, finding their way ...

This is a posthumously published collection of Nalin Ranasinghe's sharp analyses of Shakespeare's five heavy dramas: Hamlet, King John, Julius Caesar, King Lear, and Antony and Cleopatra. True to form, Ranasinghe serves up philosophical and literary genius for the reader's benefit and delight."I will try to claim that Shakespeare offers an esoteric vindication of the human soul itself, not merely poetry, against the looming backdrop of the Counter-Reformation in Europe and the Puri...

T. S. Eliot was raised in the Unitarian faith of his family in St. Louis but drifted away from their beliefs while studying philosophy, mysticism, and anthropology at Harvard. During a year in Paris, he became involved with a group of Catholic writers and subsequently went through a gradual conversion to Catholic Christianity.Many studies of Eliot's writings have mentioned his religious beliefs, but most have failed to give the topic due weight, and many have misunderstood or misrep...

The mesmerizing bestseller that combines the storytelling gifts of Donna Tartt and the suspense of Alfred Hitchcock—A New York Times Ten Best Book of the YearSpecial Topics in Calamity Physics is a darkly hilarious coming-of-age tale and a richly plotted suspense story, told with dazzling intelligence and wit. At the center of the novel is clever, deadpan Blue van Meer, who has a head full of literary, philosophical, scientific, and cinematic know...

No one burned hotter than Eve Babitz. Possessing skin that radiated “its own kind of moral laws,” spectacular teeth, and a figure that was the stuff of legend, she seduced seemingly everyone who was anyone in Los Angeles for a long stretch of the 1960s and ’70s. One man proved elusive, however, and so Babitz did what she did best, she wrote him a book. Slow Days, Fast Company is a full-fledged and full-bodied evocation of a bygone Southern California that far exceeds its mash-note...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author presents a sterling selection of short fiction by Ursula K. Le Guin, Jeffrey Eugenides, and others."As soon as you complete a description of what a good story must be, a new example flutters through an open window, lands on your sleeve, and proves your description wrong," writes Anthony Doerr about the task of selecting The Best American Short Stories 2019. The year's best stories are a diverse, addictive group exploring e...

In The Last Night of the Earth Poems, Charles Bukowski reckons with writing, death and immortality, literature, city life, illness, war, and the past.“The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles.”—Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author“He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels.”—Leonard Cohen, songwriter The poems in the first three sections of this book were published in three volumes: It Catches My Heart in its Hands, Crucifix in a Deat...

The National Book Award–winning coming-out memoir. "One of the most complex, moral, personal, and political books to have been written about gay life" ( LA Weekly).Paul Monette grew up all-American, Catholic, overachieving . . . and closeted. As a child of the 1950s, a time when a kid suspected of being a "homo" would routinely be beaten up, Monette kept his secret throughout his adolescence. He wrestled with his sexuality for the first thirty years of his ...

**NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • This dazzling memoir from the former U.S. Poet Laureate and Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Life on Mars is the story of a young artist struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America."Engrossing in its spare, simple understatement.... Evocative ... luminous." —The Washington Post**In Ordinary Light, Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Tracy K. Smith tells her...

Bestselling author and humorist Garrison Keillor returns to one of America's most beloved mythical towns, beset by a contagion of alarming candor.A mysterious virus has infiltrated the good people of Lake Wobegon, transmitted via unpasteurized cheese made by a Norwegian bachelor farmer, the effect of which is episodic loss of social inhibition. Mayor Alice, Father Wilmer, Pastor Liz, the Bunsens and Krebsbachs, formerly taciturn elders, burst into political rants, ...

In a collection of personal essays that are “both rip-roaringly funny and sentimental, drawing natural (and justified) comparisons to David Sedaris and David Rakoff” (Esquire), longtime recording artist and actor Sam Harris recounts stories of friendship, love, celebrity, and growing up and getting sober.In sixteen brilliantly observed true stories, Sam Harris emerges as a natural humorist in league with David Sedaris, Chelsea Handler, Carrie Fisher, and S...

Charles Bukowski was one of America's best-known writers and one of its most influential and imitated poets. Although he published over 45 books of poetry, hundreds of his poems were kept by him and his publisher for posthumous publication, This is the first collection of these unique poems.