A globe-spanning, ambitious book of essays from one of the most enthralling storytellers in narrative nonfiction.
In his highly anticipated debut essay collection, Impossible Owls, Brian Phillips demonstrates why he’s one of the most iconoclastic journalists of the digital age, beloved for his ambitious, off-kilter, meticulously reported essays that read like novels.
The eight essays assembled here—five from Phillips’s Grantland and MTV days, and three new pieces—go beyond simply chronicling some of the modern world’s most uncanny, unbelievable, and spectacular oddities (though they do that, too). Researched for months and even years on end,
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The river that runs through the wilderness opens his heart: the mountains burn, friends die, and green shoots sprout from the ashes.
The Gila River and Wilderness are the heart and soul of A Song for the River. Every summer since 2002, Connors has been perched in a tower 50 feet above the Gila Wilderness, watching for fire. His first book, Fire Season (30,000 sold), recounted the deep lessons learned about mountains, wilderness, fire, and solitude. A Song for the River, its sequel, updates and deepens the story: the mountain he loves goes up in flames;
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Elie Wiesel was a towering presence on the world stage—a Nobel laureate, activist, adviser to world leaders, and the author of more than forty books, including the Oprah’s Book Club selection Night. But when asked, Wiesel always said, “I am a teacher first.”
In fact, he taught at Boston University for nearly four decades, and with this book, Ariel Burger—devoted protégé, apprentice, and friend—takes us into the sacred space of Wiesel’s classroom. There, Wiesel challenged his students to explore moral complexity and to resist the dangerous lure of absolutes. In bringing together never-before-recounted moments between Wiesel and his students,
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The day of her mother’s funeral, Harriet Brown was five thousand miles away. For years they’d gone through cycles of estrangement and connection, dramatic blow-ups and equally dramatic reconciliations. By the time her mother died at seventy-six, they hadn’t spoken at all in several years. Her mother’s death sent Brown on a journey of exploration, one that considered guilt and trauma, rage and betrayal, and forgiveness.
Shadow Daughter tackles a subject we rarely discuss as a culture. Family estrangements—between parents and children, siblings, multiple generations—are surprisingly common, and even families that aren’t officially estranged often have some experience of deep conflicts.
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In this warm collection of personal essays and recipes, best-selling author Ann Hood nourishes both our bodies and our souls.
From her Italian American childhood through singlehood, raising and feeding a growing family, divorce, and a new marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Growing up, she tasted love in her grandmother’s tomato sauce and dreamed of her mother’s special-occasion Fancy Lady Sandwiches. Later, the kitchen became the heart of Hood’s own home. She cooked pork roast to warm her first apartment, used two cups of dried basil for her first attempt at making pesto,
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This lively book, from one of America’s best known theatre critics, tells the story of Broadway’s renaissance from the darkest days of the AIDS crisis, through the disaster that was Spiderman: Turn off the Dark to the unparalleled success of Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. Through a loving look at some of our most well-known plays, Chris Jones shows that the theatre thrived by embracing bold statements and taking part in the national conversation.
Jones was in the theatres when and where it mattered. He takes readers from the moment Tony Kushner’s angel crashed through the ceiling of prejudice and intolerance to the triumph of Hamilton,
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