Abraham Lincoln read it with approval, but Emily Dickinson described its bold language and themes as "disgraceful." Ralph Waldo Emerson found it "the most extraordinary piece of wit and wisdom that America has yet produced." Published at the author's expense on July 4, 1855, Leaves of Grass inaugurated a new voice and style into American letters and gave expression to an optimistic, bombastic vision that took the nation as its subject. Unlike many...

Best-selling author Nick Flynn delivers a dazzling, searing, and inventive memoir about becoming a father in the age of terror. In 2007, as Flynn awaits his daughter's birth, the release of the Abu Ghraib photographs exacerbates his already growing outrage and obsession with torture, leading him on a journey to Istanbul to meet some of the Iraqi men depicted in the photos. A memoir of profound self-discovery, Flynn's book artfully interweaves passages

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Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met, a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972." His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves...

"A dual biography of poets, friends, and rivals Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton"--

In this memoir, singer-songwriter Patti Smith shares tales of New York City : the denizens of Max's Kansas City, the Hotel Chelsea, Scribner's, Brentano's and Strand bookstores and her new life in Brooklyn with a young man named Robert Mapplethorpe--the man who changed her life with his love, friendship, and genius.

"Asian Americans inhabit a purgatorial status: neither white enough nor black enough, unmentioned in most conversations about racial identity. In the popular imagination, Asian Americans are all high-achieving professionals. But in reality, this is the most economically divided group in the country, a tenuous alliance of people with roots from South Asia to East Asia to the Pacific Islands, from tech millionaires to service industry laborers. How...

"A memoir about the year 2016 in which dreams and reality are interwoven" -- Provided by publisher. Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Francisco's legendary Fillmore, Patti Smith finds herself tramping the coast of Santa Cruz, about to embark on a year of solitary wandering. Unfettered by logic or time, she draws us into her private wonderland with no design, yet heeding signs--including a talking sign that looms above her, prodding and...

Filled with broken hearts and black ravens, Edgar Allan Poe's ghastly tales have delighted readers for centuries. Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was orphaned at age two. He was soon adopted by a Virginia family who worked as tombstone merchants. In 1827 he enlisted in the Army and subsequently failed out of West Point. His first published story, The Raven, was a huge success, but his joy was overshadowed by the death of his wife. Poe devoted his life...

HERE AT EAGLE POND is Donald Hall's remarkable collection of essays about the permanent and transparent memory of place and of his coming home to Eagle Pond, New Hampshire, where he grew up and returned to live with his wife Jane Kenyon at the age of 45, where he began writing poems at the age of twelve, and where his ancestors made their livings by free-lancing as farmers. In these tender essays, Hall tells of the joys and quiddities of life in the...