Anthology

The sermons of Joni Tevis' youth filled her with dread, a sense "that an even worse story--one you hadn't read yet--could likewise come true." In this revelatory collection, she reckons with her childhood fears by exploring the uniquely American fascination with apocalypse. From a haunted widow's wildly expanding mansion, to atomic test sites in the Nevada desert, her settings are often places of destruction and loss.

And yet Tevis transforms these eerie destinations into sites of creation as well, uncovering powerful points of connection. Whether she's relating her experience of motherhood or describing the timbre of Freddy Mercury's voice in "Somebody to Love," she relies on the same reverence for detail, the same sense of awe. And by anchoring her attention to the raw materials of our world--nails and beams, dirt and stone, bones and blood--she discovers grandeur in the seemingly mundane.

Possessed throughout with eclectic intelligence and extraordinary lyricism, these essays illuminate curiosities and momentous events with the same singular light.

From Chekhov to Maugham to William Carlos Williams, doctors have long given voice to their unique perspectives through literature. Writer, M.D. celebrates this rich tradition with a collection of fiction and nonfiction by today's most beloved physician-writers, including,

- Abraham Verghese, on the lost art of the physical exam

- Pauline Chen, on the bond between a med student and her first cadaver

- Atul Gawande, on the ethical dilemmas of a young surgical intern

- Danielle Ofri, on the devastation of losing a patient

- Ethan Canin, on love, poetry, and growing old

These essays and stories illuminate the inner lives of men and women who deal with trauma, illness, mortality, and grief on a daily basis. Read together, they provide a candid, moving, one-of-a-kind glimpse behind the doctor's mask.

Truth is stranger than fiction.

If you've imagined famous writers to be desk-bound drudges, think again. Writers Gone Wild rips back the (book) covers and reveals the seamy underside of the writing life.

Insightful, intriguing, and irresistibly addictive, Writers Gone Wild reveals such fascinating stories as:

* The night Dashiell Hammett hired a Chinese prostitute to break up S. J. Perelman's marriage (and ran off with his wife).

* Why Sylvia Plath bit Ted Hughes on the cheek.

* Why Ernest Hemingway fought a book critic, a modernist poet, and his war correspondent/wife Martha Gellhorn (but not at the same time).

* The near-fatal trip Katherine Anne Porter took while high on marijuana in Mexico.

* Why women's breasts sent Percy Bysshe Shelley screaming from the room.

* The day Virginia Woolf snuck onto a Royal Navy ship disguised as an Abyssinian prince.

Pull up a chair, turn on good reading light, and discover what your favorite writers were up to while away from their desks. Sometimes, they make the wildest characters of all.

Now back in print, these witty, insightful ssays on fashion, cinema, wartime, and everyday life demonstrate why Eileen Chang was and is a major icon of twentieth-century Chinese literature.

Eileen Chang is one of the most celebrated and influential modern Chinese novelists and cultural critics of the twentieth century. First published in 1944, and just as beloved as her fiction in the Chinese-speaking world, Written on Water collects Chang's reflections on art, literature, war, urban culture, and her own life as a writer and woman, set amid the sights and sounds of wartime Shanghai and Hong Kong. In a style at once meditative and vibrant, Chang writes of friends, colleagues, and teachers turned soldiers or wartime volunteers, and her own experiences as a part-time nurse. She also reflects on Chinese cinema, the aims of the writer, and the popularity of the Peking Opera. Chang engages the reader with her sly and sophisticated humor, conversational voice, and intense fascination with the subtleties of everyday life. In her examination of Shanghainese food, culture, and fashions, she not only reveals but also upends prevalent attitudes toward women, presenting a portrait of a daring and cosmopolitan woman bent on questioning pieties and enjoying the pleasures of modernity, even as the world convulses in war and a revolution looms.

Fifty leading writers retell myths from around the world in this dazzling follow-up to the bestselling My Mother She Killed Me, My Father He Ate Me.

Icarus flies once more. Aztec jaguar gods again stalk the earth. An American soldier designs a new kind of Trojan horse--his cremains in a bullet. Here, in beguiling guise, are your favorite mythological figures alongside characters from Indian, Punjabi, Inuit, and other traditions.

Aimee Bender retells the myth of the Titans.

Elizabeth McCracken retells the myth of Lamia, the child-eating mistress of Zeus.

Madeline Miller retells the myth of Galatea.

Kevin Wilson retells the myth of Phaeton, from Ovid's Metamorphoses.

Emma Straub and Peter Straub retell the myth of Persephone.

Heidi Julavits retells the myth of Orpheus and Euridice.

Ron Currie, Jr. retells the myth of Dedalus.

Maile Meloy retells the myth of Demeter.

Zachary Mason retells the myth of Narcissus.

Joy Williams retells the myth of Argos, Odysseus' dog.

If "xo" signals a goodbye, then xo Orpheus is a goodbye to an old way of mythmaking. Featuring talkative goats, a cat lady, a bird woman, a beer-drinking ogre, a squid who falls in love with the sun, and a girl who gives birth to cubs, here are extravagantly imagined, bracingly contemporary stories, heralding a new beginning for one of the world's oldest literary traditions.

The stories in You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction dramatize the spirit of Buddhism, often with wit, always with verve, and each in some distinctly vivid way. Only a few of these stories touch on the Dharma explicitly and this book takes you on an inward tour across the whole world-to the jungles of Indonesia, a fog-shrouded park in San Francisco, the sun-blistered African veldt, a Burmese monastery surrounded by gun-fire, and the church-like sanctuary of a Nebraska barn, just to name a few. Collectively these stories paint a living portrait of the face of Buddhism, and readers may discover that that face is a strangely familiar one-and that every journey only ever leads home.

Edited by Keith Kachtick--the author of Hungry Ghost: A Novel (A New York Times Notable Book), You Are Not Here and Other Works of Buddhist Fiction--offers more surprising and transcendent work from some of fiction's famous names, alongside that of names you've never heard before--but surely will again:

Lama Surya Das, Keith Kachtick, Robert Olen Butler, Kate Wheeler, Anne Donovan, Samantha Schoech, Mary Yukari Waters, Andrew Foster Altschul, Jess Row, Anh Chi Pham, Sean Murphy, Pico Iyer, Dan Zigmond, Michele Martin, Sean Hoade, Jeff Davis, Jake Lorfing, Geshe Michael Roach, Anne Carolyn Klein, Dean Sluyter, Mark Salzman, and Hal Hallstein.

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK FROM: Oprah Daily, Business Insider, Marie Claire, The Seattle Times, Lit Hub, Bustle, and New York Magazine's Vulture

Introduction by New York Times bestselling author Henry Louis Gates Jr.

Spanning more than 35 years of work, the first comprehensive collection of essays, criticism, and articles by the legendary author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston, showcasing the evolution of her distinctive style as an archivist and author.

"One of the greatest writers of our time."--Toni Morrison

You Don't Know Us Negroes is the quintessential gathering of provocative essays from one of the world's most celebrated writers, Zora Neale Hurston. Spanning more than three decades and penned during the backdrop of the birth of the Harlem Renaissance, Montgomery bus boycott, desegregation of the military, and school integration, Hurston's writing articulates the beauty and authenticity of Black life as only she could. Collectively, these essays showcase the roles enslavement and Jim Crow have played in intensifying Black people's inner lives and culture rather than destroying it. She argues that in the process of surviving, Black people re-interpreted every aspect of American culture--"modif[ying] the language, mode of food preparation, practice of medicine, and most certainly religion." White supremacy prevents the world from seeing or completely recognizing Black people in their full humanity and Hurston made it her job to lift the veil and reveal the heart and soul of the race. These pages reflect Hurston as the controversial figure she was--someone who stated that feminism is a mirage and that the integration of schools did not necessarily improve the education of Black students. Also covered is the sensational trial of Ruby McCollum, a wealthy Black woman convicted in 1952 for killing her lover, a white doctor.

Demonstrating the breadth of this revered and influential writer's work, You Don't Know Us Negroes and Other Essays is an invaluable chronicle of a writer's development and a window into her world and mind.