National Network for Equitable Library Service

The 40-plus essays will span art, literature, and politics, with topics from Virginia Woolf and James Baldwin to President Obama and Boko Haram. The collection will include pre-published essays that gone viral, like "The White Industrial Savior Complex," first published in The Atlantic.

Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Scott shows that while individual critics--himself included--can make mistakes and find flaws where they shouldn't, criticism as a discipline is one of the noblest, most creative, and urgent activities of modern existence.

Cusk, a best-selling novelist, is acclaimed for her humorous works. Her account of a year of modern motherhood becomes many stories: a farewell to freedom, sleep and time; a lesson in humility and hard work; a journey to the roots of love; and most of all a sentimental education in babies, books, toddler groups, bad advice, crying, breastfeeding, and never being alone.

Delve into the stories from Amy Tan's life that inspired bestselling novels like The Joy Luck Club and The Valley of Amazement Amy Tan has touched millions of readers with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists.

Professor Michael D.C. Drout takes listeners on a literary journey, exploring Tolkien's most celebrated writings, while explaining the techniques and themes, to show how Tolkien crafted literary worlds that the reader cares desperately about and wishes to save.

In 1941, Steinbeck and his close friend Ed Ricketts, a marine biologist, rented a ship and set about exploring the Gulf of California. The scientific data collected, along with Steinbeck's log of the journey, were detailed in the work Sea of Cortez. Ten years later, the log was published on its own, chock-full of elegantly described marine life and often-amusing anecdotes about the adventure.

Proulx vividly recounts the ups and downs of building her dream house on a nature preserve in Wyoming.

Professor William McKeen delves into the origins of storytelling, the nature of literary journalism, and the ways in which literary journalism has affected culture and modes of expression.

Hailed for its directness and clever insight, this unorthodox textbook was born from a professor's love for the written word and perfected years later by one of his students--famed author E.B. White. Ever since its first publication in 1959, writers have turned to this book for its wise and accessible advice.

The first and definitive biography of one of America's bestselling, notorious, and influential writers of the twentieth century: Iceberg Slim, ne Robert Beck, author of the multimillion-copy memoir Pimp and such equally popular novels as Trick Baby and Mama Black Widow. For a career as a, yes, ruthless pimp in the '40s and '50s, Iceberg Slim refashioned himself as the first and still the greatest of "street lit" masters, whose vivid books have made him an icon to such rappers as Ice-T, Jay-Z, and Snoop Dogg and a presiding spirit of blaxploitation" culture.