I have spent my life both in the classroom (as a university professor) and out of it as a passionate, committed reader, for whom books are as necessary as food and drink. My interest in poetry dates back to junior high school, when I was learning foreign languages (first French and Latin, and then, later, Italian, German, and ancient Greek) and realized that language is humankind’s most astonishing invention. I’ve been at it ever since. It used to be thought that a writer’s life was of little consequence to an understanding of his or her work. We now think otherwise. Thank goodness.
Every English major in the 20th century (maybe even in the 21st!) came to grips with T.S. Eliot.
People remember J. Alfred Prufrock and his love song. And The Waste Land has just passed its 100th birthday and readers are still scratching their heads over it.
T. S. Eliot was the man—along with several others—who made modern poetry “hard” and complicated, and he was quite a complicated figure himself.
Lyndall Gordon gives us Eliot in all his complexities and shows how he became our age’s Dr. Johnson.
In this "nuanced, discerning account of a life famously flawed in its search for perfection" (The New Yorker), Gordon captures Eliot's "complex spiritual and artistic history . . . with tact, diligence, and subtlety" (Boston Globe). Drawing on recently discovered letters, she addresses in full the issue of Eliot's anti-Semitism as well as the less-noted issue of his misogyny. Her account "rescues both the poet and the man from the simplifying abstractions that have always been applied to him" (The New York Times), and is "definitive but not dogmatic, sympathetic without taking sides. . . . Its voice rings with…
This
book got my attention when I heard a radio interview with the author, R. Eric
Thomas.
I’ve gone through a really difficult period with my health that has
lasted through most of my forties, and Thomas describes his own challenges that
emerged at midlife.
He brings a light touch to the difficulties of this life
phase—including career issues, family struggles, loss, and illness—while also
acknowledging the darker times and periods of depression that I could relate
to.
In the end, his tone is as optimistic as it is realistic, and he shows how
beauty can be found even in the wreckage of our dreams about what life would be.
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The beloved author of Here for It returns with an all-new collection of heartening, deeply relatable, and laugh-out-loud essays about what happens after happily ever after.
“Funny, insightful, and hopeful . . . a profound meditation on what it means to come home, and on finding your way again after the chaos of life takes you off your path.”—John Paul Brammer, author of ¡Hola Papi!
After going viral “reading” the chaotic political news, having one-too-many awkward social encounters, and coming to terms with his intersecting identities, R. Eric Thomas finally knew who he was and where he…
You don’t have to be a lifelong fan of John Waters’ proudly transgressive
work in film to appreciate this book. You have to be open to sliding into
a wild and funny tale of how the author hitchhiked from Baltimore to San
Francisco when he was in his 60s.
You’ll never look at hitchhikers standing by
Interstates or resting in rest stops the same way.
Waters’ stories are
remarkably imaginative, but when you get to the last third of the book and read
his actual descriptions of the hitchhiking adventure, you’ll gain a new
appreciation for the way he cares deeply about people who are often shunned in
our society.
John Waters is putting his life on the line. Armed with wit, a pencil-thin moustache, and a cardboard sign that reads 'I'm Not Psycho', he hitchhikes across America from Baltimore to San Francisco, braving lonely roads and treacherous drivers. But who should we be more worried about, the delicate film director with genteel manners or the unsuspecting travelers transporting the Pope of Trash?
Along the way, Waters fantasizes about the best and worst possible scenarios: a friendly drug dealer hands over piles of cash to finance films with no questions asked, a demolition-derby driver makes a filthy sexual request in…
As a young working mom, I occasionally longed to follow the example of columnist Erma Bombeck and hide from my family in the car. Instead, I channeled the mayhem of family life into a humor column called “The Mother Load,” which detailed the day-to-day challenges of running a business while caring for two daughters, one husband, two guinea pigs, and a dancing rabbit. When I decided to pursue my life-long dream to write fiction, my debut novel was a humorous story about a mother-daughter-grandmother road trip/chase from Boston to Memphis. Although my writing doesn’t shy away from serious issues, I choose to see the world through a humorous and ultimately hopeful lens.
While on a beach vacation, the forty-year-old mother/protagonist of this book, Delia Grinstead, walks away from her distant husband and three surly children – seemingly on a whim – to try out a new life.
Anne Tyler’s characters are unfailingly quirky, and Delia can be both frustrating and charming, but the book engagingly details the mid-life crisis of a woman eager to learn who she is.
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the beloved Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Breathing Lessons
"BALTIMORE WOMAN DISAPPEARS DURING FAMILY VACATION."
The headlines are all the same: Beloved mother and wife Delia Grinstead was last seen strolling down the Delaware shore, wearing only a bathing suit and carrying a beach tote with five hundred dollars tucked inside. To the best of her family's knowledge, she has disappeared without a trace. But Delia didn't disappear. She ran.
Exhausted with her routine and everyone else's plans for her, Delia needed an out, a chance to make a new life for herself and to…
Growing up in a post-industrial city that bore the scars of urban renewal, I developed an early fascination with historic preservation. I began my studies as an architecture major; by my second year, I switched to American history because my passion lay in studying and understanding existing buildings and landscapes. Preserved is the product of inspiration that hit me when I spotted a beautifully preserved funeral home. Most of the neighborhood’s nineteenth-century refined residential fabric had been erased, but the grand Italianate mansion served as a reminder of what the area was like at the start of the twentieth century. At that moment, I realized that this was a story worth telling.
This book reminds us that in addition to shaping our laws, our institutions, and our culture, white supremacy has also shaped our nation’s landscape, from housing discrimination and redlining to blockbusting and urban renewal.
Although Brown focuses on racial segregation and Black neighborhoods in Baltimore, his insights speak to communities of color throughout the United States and how decades of hypersegregation in American cities have adversely impacted health, livelihoods, and lives.
What makes Brown’s analysis of the landscape of urban apartheid so compelling, however, is his recipe for dismantling it and replacing it with a new landscape of racial equity.
The best-selling look at how American cities can promote racial equity, end redlining, and reverse the damaging health- and wealth-related effects of segregation.
The world gasped in April 2015 as Baltimore erupted and Black Lives Matter activists, incensed by Freddie Gray's brutal death in police custody, shut down highways and marched on city streets. In The Black Butterfly-a reference to the fact that Baltimore's majority-Black population spreads out like a butterfly's wings on both sides of the coveted strip of real estate running down the center of the city-Lawrence T. Brown reveals that ongoing historical trauma caused by a combination…
Neighbors. We’ve all got ‘em, right? We believe we’re the good ones, and we pray we don’t live next door to the bad ones… but sometimes it’s inevitable that we share our property lines with those ill-suited for neighborly behavior. Horror books about bad neighbors are the perfect window into our own communities. We can peer into the lives of others without worry of getting caught. We can tiptoe through their rooms and rummage through their drawers… Who knows what we might find. Are they witches? Serial killers? Devil worshippers? Only their dirty laundry will tell.
Samson’s one and only novel, The Auctioneer is a wonderfully unnerving tale of how a community can find itself completely hollowed out in a matter of a single devil’s bargain. Predating Stephen King’s Needful Things, this book is a literary garotte that slowly closes around the reader’s throat. The paranoia is palpable in these pages, believe me.
One of the finest and best-selling horror novels of the 1970s returns at last to chill a new generation of readers
In the isolated farming community of Harlowe, New Hampshire, where life has changed little over the past several decades, John Moore and his wife Mim work the land that has been in his family for generations. But from the moment the charismatic Perly Dunsmore arrives in town and starts soliciting donations for his auctions, things begin slowly and insidiously to change in Harlowe. As the auctioneer carries out his terrible, inscrutable plan, the Moores and their neighbors will find…
As a cultural historian of 20th century America, I’m fascinated by how culture is used to rebel against the status quo and how the status quo fights back. In my first book, Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle, I looked at greasers, hippies, and white hip hop lovers to understand how they used style and fashion to push back against being white and middle class. In Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire, I went beyond looking at how individuals shape their identity to thinking about how artists and city leaders shape the identity of a place. Can artists counter the efforts of cities to create sanitized images of themselves?
The history that matters most to me is the history that can help explain the world we live in now. The editors of Baltimore Revisited, a collection of brilliant essays about the city, takes that to heart. Fascinating chapters trace the War on Drugs back to the 1910s, when the city outlawed cocaine, examine how Johns Hopkins University’s growth has displaced Black residents for decades, and surprise us with the fact that Maryland was home to the longest-running movie censorship board in the country (which only closed shop in 1981). More than curiosities, though, these authors reveal how race, gender, sexuality, and class have affected Baltimore.
Most importantly, the book focuses on how everyday people fought back against discrimination through acts as varied as pickets against segregation to dancing in gay bars. The book is good history, yes, but also a call to action.
Nicknamed both "Mobtown" and "Charm City" and located on the border of the North and South, Baltimore is a city of contradictions. From media depictions in The Wire to the real-life trial of police officers for the murder of Freddie Gray, Baltimore has become a quintessential example of a struggling American city. Yet the truth about Baltimore is far more complicated-and more fascinating.
To help untangle these apparent paradoxes, the editors of Baltimore Revisited have assembled a collection of over thirty experts from inside and outside academia. Together, they reveal that Baltimore has been ground zero for a slew of…
I'm a former novelist who now writes historical narrative nonfiction, mainly about American cities and the people who give them life. Each book focuses on an important turning point in the history of a specific metropolis (I've written about Chicago, New Orleans, Los Angeles, and San Francisco), often when the city goes from being a minor backwater to being someplace of significance. And I try to tell this story through the lives of real individuals who help to make that transformation happen. My goal is to use the skills I developed as a fiction writer to create historical narratives that maintain strict standards of scholarship while being as compelling and compulsively readable as novels.
I find few dramas in history more intriguing than that of Abraham Lincoln, and it's sobering to realize just how close we came to missing his entire second act.
The so-called Baltimore Plot – a conspiracy to assassinate the newly elected president while en route to his first inauguration – has been written about before, but never as vividly and novelistically as in Daniel Stashower's The Hour of Peril. In telling this riveting story, Stashower brings into the spotlight a little-known figure named Kate Warne, perhaps the country's first female private detective.
Tough-minded and self-possessed beyond her years, Warne assists the celebrated Allan Pinkerton in a tense, nerve-racking effort to spirit the President-elect safely to Washington DC – and into arguably the most important role in American history.
"It's history that reads like a race-against-the-clock thriller." ―Harlan Coben
Daniel Stashower, the two-time Edgar award–winning author of The Beautiful Cigar Girl, uncovers the riveting true story of the "Baltimore Plot," an audacious conspiracy to assassinate Abraham Lincoln on the eve of the Civil War in THE HOUR OF PERIL.
In February of 1861, just days before he assumed the presidency, Abraham Lincoln faced a "clear and fully-matured" threat of assassination as he traveled by train from Springfield to Washington for his inauguration. Over a period of thirteen days the legendary detective Allan Pinkerton worked feverishly to detect and thwart…
As a cultural historian of 20th century America, I’m fascinated by how culture is used to rebel against the status quo and how the status quo fights back. In my first book, Class Acts: Young Men and the Rise of Lifestyle, I looked at greasers, hippies, and white hip hop lovers to understand how they used style and fashion to push back against being white and middle class. In Come and Be Shocked: Baltimore Beyond John Waters and The Wire, I went beyond looking at how individuals shape their identity to thinking about how artists and city leaders shape the identity of a place. Can artists counter the efforts of cities to create sanitized images of themselves?
In the space of two years, D. Watkins published two stunning books about Baltimore. The second, The Cook Up: A Crack Rock Memoir, is sharp and smart, but if I had to only choose one, it would be The Beast Side. In this slim volume of essays, Watkins invites us to explore the two worlds he lives within and between. He grew up on the tough east side, known locally as the beast side, and sold drugs, but also went to college and now teaches creative writing.
While there are many books by Black authors that use stories of poverty and despair to titillate or move white audiences to pity, Watkins does none of that. He speaks first to Black audiences, especially those who maybe don’t love to read, because literacy, he says, is a step towards liberation. The Beast Sidemay be the best way to see…
A New York Times Best Seller! Baltimore, one of our country's quintessential urban war zones, is brought powerfully to life by literary talent, D. Watkins
To many, the past 8 years under President Obama were meant to usher in a new post-racial American political era, dissolving the divisions of the past. However, when seventeen-year-old Trayvon Martin was shot by a wannabe cop in Florida; and then Ferguson, Missouri, happened; and then South Carolina hit the headlines; and then Baltimore blew up, it was hard to find any evidence of a new post-racial order.
As a kid, our public library in the basement of the Methodist church became my second home. However, I considered any visit a bitter disappointment that didn’t result in one or two dog stories in the stack I signed out. Big Red, Old Yeller, Lassie, Lad a Dog, Call of the Wild, White Fang (the occasional wolf was also okay), I loved them all. That experience has continued to affect the adult I’ve become. As I’ve turned to reading, and writing, stories of family, relationships, and, lately, of aging, it’s become clear to me that I’ve never found a story that wasn’t improved by the appearance of a good dog.
I read Ann Tyler for her unrivaled ability to create heartfelt stories illuminated by humor about family in all its broken splendor.
The trepidatious Macon Leary is our accidental tourist, writer of an advice column full of tips for making travel feel like staying home. He’s lost his son; his wife has left him. He’s back living with his two brothers and sister when Edward, his choleric Welsh Corgi, starts biting people. This bit of bad luck pulls him into the orbit of the irritating, opinionated, big-hearted dog trainer, Muriel, and on a journey back to a life worth living for both Macon and his dog.
Read The Accidental Tourist if your family (or certain members thereof) make you crazy. You will feel seen. (It’s also a terrific movie.)
Discover a beautiful story of what it is to be human from Pulitzer prize-winning Sunday Times bestselling Anne Tyler
How does a man addicted to routine - a man who flosses his teeth before love-making - cope with the chaos of everyday life?
With the loss of his son, the departure of his wife and the arrival of Muriel, a dog trainer from the Meow-Bow dog clinic, Macon's attempts at ordinary life are tragically and comically undone.
**ANNE TYLER HAS SOLD OVER 1 MILLION BOOKS WORLDWIDE**
