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A Most Anticipated Book of 2023 from: LA Times * Boston Globe * The Millions * LitHub * ShondalandBy the New York Times bestselling author of the award-winning AFTERPARTIES comes a collection like none other: sharply funny, emotionally expansive essays and linked short fiction exploring family, queer desire, pop culture, and race The late Anthony Veasna So's debut story collection, Afterparties, was a landmark publication, hailed as a "bittersweet triumph for a fresh voice silenced too soon" (Fresh Air). And he was equally known for his comic, soulful essays, published in n+1, The New Yorker, and The Millions.Songs on Endless Repeat gathers those essays together, along with previously unpublished fiction. Written with razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, the essays examine his youth in California, the lives of his refugee parents, his intimate friendships, loss, pop culture, and more. And in linked fiction following three Cambodian American cousins who stand to inherit their late aunt's illegitimate loan-sharking business, So explores community, grief, and longing with inimitable humor and depth.Following "one of the most exciting contributions to Asian American literature in recent years" (Vulture), Songs on Endless Repeat is an astonishing final expression by a writer of "extraordinary achievement and immense promise" (The New Yorker).

The last book in the trilogy begun by Jennifer Worth's New York Times bestseller and the basis for the PBS series Call the MidwifeWhen twenty-two-year-old Jennifer Worth, from a comfortable middle-class upbringing, went to work as a midwife in the poorest section of postwar London, she not only delivered hundreds of babies and touched many lives, she also became the neighborhood's most vivid chronicler. Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End is the last book in Worth's memoir trilogy, which the Times Literary Supplement described as "powerful stories with sweet charm and controlled outrage" in the face of dire circumstances.Here, at last, is the full story of Chummy's delightful courtship and wedding. We also meet Megan'mave, identical twins who share a browbeaten husband, and return to Sister Monica Joan, who is in top eccentric form. As in Worth's first two books, Call the Midwife: A Memoir of Birth, Joy, and Hard Times and Call the Midwife: Shadows of the Workhouse, the vividly portrayed denizens of a postwar East End contend with the trials of extreme poverty?unsanitary conditions, hunger, and disease?and find surprising ways to thrive in their tightly knit community.A rich portrait of a bygone era of comradeship and midwifery populated by unforgettable characters, Call the Midwife: Farewell to the East End will appeal to readers of Frank McCourt, Katherine Boo, and James Herriot, as well as to the fans of the acclaimed PBS show based on the trilogy.

One of the most acclaimed writers in the world today, the inimitable Joyce Carol Oates follows up her searing, New York Times bestselling memoir, A Widow's Story, with an extraordinary new work of fiction. Mudwoman is a riveting psychological thriller, taut with dark suspense, that explores the high price of repression in the life of a respected university president teetering on the precipice of a nervous breakdown. Like Daphne DuMaurier's gothic masterwork, Rebecca, and the classic ghost story, The Turn of the Screw, by Henry James, Oates's Mudwoman is a chilling page-turner that hinges on the power of the imagination and the blurry lines between the real and the invented--and it stands tall among the author's most powerful and beloved works, including The Falls, The Gravedigger's Daughter, and We Were the Mulvaneys.

According to The Waiter, 80 percent of customers are nice people just looking for something to eat. The remaining 20 percent, however, are socially maladjusted psychopaths.Eye-opening, outrageous, and unabashed--replete with tales of customer stupidity, arrogant misbehavior, and unseen tidbits of human grace in the most unlikely places--Waiter Rant presents the server's unique point of view, revealing surefire secrets to getting good service, proper tipping etiquette, and ways to ensure that your waiter won't spit on your food.

What happened along the evolutionary trail that made humans so unique? In his accessible style, Michael Gazzaniga pinpoints the change that made us thinking, sentient humans different from our predecessors. He explores what makes human brains special, the importance of language and art in defining the human condition, the nature of human consciousness, and even artificial intelligence.

His historic career as an aviator made Charles Lindbergh one of the most famous men of the twentieth century, the subject of best-selling biographies and a hit movie, as well as the inspiration for a dance step--the Lindy Hop--that he himself was too shy to try. But for all the attention lavished on Lindbergh, one story has remained untold until now: his macabre scientific collaboration with Dr. Alexis Carrel. This oddest of couples--one a brilliant Nobel Prize-winning surgeon turned social engineer, the other a failed dirt farmer turned hero of the skies--joined forces in 1930 driven by a shared and secret dream: to conquer death and attain immortality.Part Frankenstein, part The Professor and the Madman, and all true, The Immortalists is the remarkable story of how two men of prodigious achievement and equally large character flaws challenged nature's oldest rule, with consequences--personal, professional, and political--that neither man anticipated.

Although Gerd Heinrich, a devoted naturalist, specialized in wasps, Bernd Heinrich tried to distance himself from his "old-fashioned" father, becoming a hybrid: a modern, experimental biologist with a naturalist's sensibilities. In this extraordinary memoir, the award-winning author shares the ways in which his relationship with his father, combined with his unique childhood, molded him into the scientist, and man, he is today. From Gerd's days as a soldier in Europe and the family's daring escape from the Red Army in 1945 to the rustic Maine farm they came to call home, Heinrich relates it all in his trademark style, making science accessible and awe-inspiring.

"The Walt Whitman of Los Angeles."--Joyce Carol Oates, bestselling author"He brought everybody down to earth, even the angels."--Leonard Cohen, songwriterOne of Charles Bukowski's best, this beer-soaked, deliciously degenerate novel follows the wanderings of aspiring writer Henry Chinaski across World War II-era America. Deferred from military service, Chinaski travels from city to city, moving listlessly from one odd job to another, always needing money but never badly enough to keep a job. His day-to-day existence spirals into an endless litany of pathetic whores, sordid rooms, dreary embraces, and drunken brawls, as he makes his bitter, brilliant way from one drink to the next.Charles Bukowski's posthumous legend continues to grow. Factotum is a masterfully vivid evocation of slow-paced, low-life urbanity and alcoholism, and an excellent introduction to the fictional world of Charles Bukowski.

"The most convincing portrait I know of contemporary America . . . a great American novel." -- James Atlas, The Atlantic MonthlyFrom acclaimed author Russell Banks, a masterful novel of hope lost and gained--a gripping, indelible story of fragile lives uprooted and transformed by injustice, disappointment, and the seductions and realities of the American dream.Banks's searing tale of uprootedness, migration, and exploitation in contemporary America brings together two of the dominant realms of his fiction--New England and the Caribbean--skillfully braided into one taut narrative. Continental Drift is the story of a young blue-collar worker and family man who abandons his broken dreams in New Hampshire and the story of a young Haitian woman who, with her nephew and baby, flees the brutal injustice and poverty of her homeland.Continental Drift is a powerful literary classic from one of contemporary fiction's most important writers.

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views is Joyce Carol Oates's most candid gathering of prose pieces since (Woman) Writer: Occasions & Opportunities. Her ninth book of nonfiction, it brings together thirty-eight diverse and provocative pieces from the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review.Oates states in her preface, "In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not absent," and indeed, the voice of these "conversations" echoes the voice of her fiction in its dramatic directness, ethical perspective, and willingness to engage the reader in making critical judgments. Under the heading "Not a Nice Person," such controversial figures as Sylvia Plath, Patricia Highsmith, and Muriel Spark are considered without sentimentality or hyperbole; under "Our Contemporaries, Ourselves," such diversely talented figures as William Trevor, E. L. Doctorow, Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Connelly, Alice Sebold, Mary Karr, Anne Tyler, and Ann Patchett are examined. In sections of "homages" and "revisits," Oates writes with enthusiasm and clarity of such cultural icons as Emily Brontë, Ernest Hemingway, Carson McCullers, Robert Lowell, Balthus, and Muhammad Ali ("The Greatest"); after a lapse of decades, she (re)considers the first film version of Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Americana, Don DeLillo's first novel, as well as the morality of selling private letters and the nostalgic significance of making a pilgrimage to Henry David Thoreau's Walden Pond.Through these balanced and illuminating essays we see Oates at the top of her form, engaged with forebears and contemporaries, providing clues to her own creative process: "For prose is a kind of music: music creates 'mood.' What is argued on the surface may be but ripples rising from a deeper, subtextual urgency."

Phil Rizzuto, famed shortstop and broadcaster extraordinaire for the New York Yankees, has waxed poetic on America's favorite pastime since the glorious days of Mantle and Maris. For more than a quarter century the Bard of the Booth has captured great moments in baseball - and effortlessly woven them together with essential and often hilarious insights into the human condition. Editors Tom Peyer and Hart Seely have forever captured Rizzuto's unmistakable voice in this collection, which gathers his funniest and most inspiring verses - from comments on Maris getting booed to explications of how the Red Sox control the weather. With an introduction by Roy Blount, Jr., and game stats following each poem, "O Holy Cow!" is a must for baseball fans, Scooter devotees, and everyone interested in major league fun.

Trapped in a small, poverty-ridden town in 1933, under pressure from his father to go into the family business, seventeen-year-old Dominic Molise yearns to fulfill his own dreams.

Czeslaw Milosz did not believe he would ever return to the river valley in which he grew up. But in the spring of 1989, exactly fifty years after he left, the new government of independent Lithuania welcomed him back to that magical region of his childhood. Many of the poems in Facing the River record his experiences there, where the river of the Issa Valley symbolizes the river of time as well as the river of mythology, over which one cannot step twice. This is the river Milosz faces while exploring ancient themes. He reflects upon the nature of imagination, human experience, good and evil--and celebrates the wonders of life on earth.In these later poems, the poems of older age, this Nobel laureate takes a long look back at the catastrophic upheavals of the twentieth century; yet despite the soberness of his themes, he writes with the lightness of touch found only in the great masters.

Tomas Tranströmer's poems are thick with the feel of life lived in a specific place: the dark, overpowering Swedish winters, the long thaws and brief paradisal summers in the Stockholm archipelago. He conveys a sense of what it is like to be a private citizen in the second half of the twentieth century.

In this collection of Mason's best short stories, Mason moves through the lives of ordinary Kentucky people, capturing their tangled aspirations and buried disappointments as they struggle with the ironies of modern life in a traditional rural society.

"This cookbook is a whole way of life. What care, love, and work have gone into it. I find it fascinating. I think people would just love it, as it is not like anything else around." -Julia ChildIn the high Alpine valley of Le Grande Chartreuse, Roy Andreis de Groot discovered by accident a charming and unpretentious little inn L'Auberge de l'Atre Fleuri. Impressed by the devotion of its owners to perpetuating the tradition of supreme country dining, Mr. de Groot returned to the inn to record their recipes for natural country soups, hearty winter stews, roasted meats, pates, terrines, and fruity and spirituous desserts--the best of French cooking.Superb food, fine wine and the perfect blending of both into a series of menus for memorable lunches and dinners, together with the unique French Alpine recipes that build each meal--these are the ingredients of this remarkable book, now considered a classic.

W.H. Auden is unquestionably one of the most fascinating and influential literary figures of the twentieth century. His formal innovations in poetry and drama have immeasurably affected modern literary consciousness, as have his reactive views about political and literary trends. At the time he wrote The Prolific and the Devourer, Auden was moving away from his vocal Marxism of the 1930s toward a committed Christianity in the 1940s and beyond. The Prolific and the Devourer sheds new light on the personal and public worlds he inhabited, philosophically drawing the line between the position of the artist and that of the politician. The book takes its title and, in part, its form from William Blake's The Marriage of Heaven and Hell. In Auden's interpretation, the Prolific are those who produce: the farmer; the skilled worker; the scientist; the cook; the innkeeper; the doctor; the teacher; the athlete; the artist. The Devourers are the political types who depend on what is already produced for their well-being: the "Judges, Policemen, Critics. These are the real Lower Orders, the low, sly lives, whom no decent person should receive in his house." As in Blake, the sections and subsections of Auden's book are unified and propelled by the oracular need to express the key components of human nature. The first section contains a series of aphoristic statements and personal reflections that usher us into the enormous territory to be explored. In the second section, Auden chooses examples from politics, religion, and literature to expound his views on human and historical evolution. The third section examines the characters of the Prolific and the Devourer in relation to Catholic, Protestant, andRomantic traditions and to Socialist and Fascist beliefs. The question and answer form employed in the final section allows Auden to reveal his inner struggle to reach some understanding of God, the supernatural, and pacifism. At a time when spiritual and political values are co

In this sexy, racy collection of short prose takes by a master of the form, Joyce Carol Oates makes her own appointment with character and event--a sort of extended sequential reverie that surprises and sometimes shocks, but always satisfies.

Excerpts from the novels, plays, and poems of the French convict, prostitute, and literary artist join notes from his film, The Penal Colony, letters, essays, and a rare interview, all edited by a contemporary biographer.

Borges On WritingIn 1971, Jorge Luis Borges was invited to preside over a series of seminars on his writing at Columbia University. This book is a record of those seminars, which took the form of informal discussions between Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni--his editor and translator, Frank MacShane--then head of the writing program at Columbia, and the students. Borges's prose, poetry, and translations are handled separately and the book is divided accordingly.The prose seminar is based on a line-by-line discussion of one of Borges's most distinctive stories, "The End of the Duel." Borges explains how he wrote the story, his use of local knowledge, and his characteristic method of relating violent events in a precise and ironic way. This close analysis of his methods produces some illuminating observations on the role of the writer and the function of literature.The poetry section begins with some general remarks by Borges on the need for form and structure and moves into a revealing analysis of four of his poems. The final section, on translation, is an exciting discussion of how the art and culture of one country can be "translated" into the language of another.This book is a tribute to the brilliant craftsmanship of one of South America's--indeed, the world's--most distinguished writers and provides valuable insight into his inspiration and his method.

A dazzling collection and already a standard reference for those interested in contemporary drama, Plays in One Act is a unique compilation of plays and monologues that showcases a stunning and diverse array of work from some of the most important voices in theater.Forty-three modern works are collected here: from plays by important contemporary artists such as David Mamet, Wendy Wasserstein, Sam Shepard, and John Guare, to gems by masters like Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams, and newer talents like Carol S. Lashof and Perry Souchuk. Leading British playwrights -- Tom Stoppard, David Hare, and John Osborne -- are also featured, along with the international voices of Václav Hacel and Kobo Abe, and works by such established wtiters as Eudora welty, Joyce Carol Oates, Richard Ford, and Garrison Keilor, who are writing outside their traditional genres.

From the introduction by Seamus Heaney: Wordsworth's power over us stems from the manifest strength of his efforts to integrate several strenuous and potentially contradictory efforts. Indeed, it is not until Yeats that we encounter another poet in whom emotional susceptibility, intellectual force, psychological acuteness, political awareness, artistic self-knowledge and bardic representativeness are so truly and responsibly combined. He is an indispensable figure in the evolution of modern, a finder and keeper of the self as subject, a theorist and apologist whose preface to Lyrical Ballads 1802 remains definitive.

In his fourteenth collection of poetry, Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award winner James Tate continues exploring his own peculiar brand of poetry, transforming our everyday world, a world where women give birth to wolves, wild babies are found in gardens, and Saint Nick visits on a hot July day. Tate's signature style draws on a marvelous variety of voices and characters, all of which sound vaguely familiar, but are each fantastically unique, brilliant, and eccentric.Yet, as Charles Simic observed in the New York Review of Books, "With all his reliance on chance, Tate has a serious purpose. He's searching for a new way to write a lyric poem." He continues, "To write a poem out of nothing at all is Tate's genius. For him, the poem is something one did not know was there until it was written down. . . . Just about anything can happen next in this kind of poetry and that is its attraction. . . . Tate is not worried about leaving us a little dazed. . . . He succeeds in ways for which there are a few precedents. He makes me think that anti-poetry is the best friend poetry ever had."

Emily Dickinson saw fewer than twenty of her 1,775 poems published during her lifetime: when she died in 1886, her obscurity as a poet was nearly total. Now widely recognized as one of the great American poets of the nineteenth century, she is one of a handful from any period whose enduring stature in the world of letters is matched by the loyal affection of generation after generation of readers. In this distinguished addition to The Essential Poets series, Joyce Carol Oates presents a "personal - yet not private" collection of Dickinson favorites, selecting from relatively obscure works as well as better-known poems to illuminate Dickinson's often unacknowledged range. Oates takes care to introduce us to the poet's subversive playfulness; to her rebellious nature and radical aesthetic; to her gender-bending personae and surprisingly wicked humor. At the heart of this collection, of course, stands the work that made Dickinson's reputation as one of America's great visionary poets: an artist who has written with stoic control and astonishing lucidity about the soul's darkest, most terrifying hours.