For years the legendary John Seigenthaler hosted A Word on Words on Nashville's public television station, WNPT. During the show’s four-decade run (1972 to 2013), he interviewed some of the most interesting and most important writers of our time. These in-depth exchanges revealed much about the writers who appeared on his show and gave a glimpse into their creative processes. Seigenthaler was a deeply engaged reader and a generous interviewer, a true craftsman. Frye Gaillard and P...

Circling Faith is a collection of essays by southern women that encompasses spirituality and the experience of winding through the religiously charged environment of the American South.Mary Karr, in “Facing Altars,” describes how the consolation she found in poetry directed her to a similar solace in prayer. In “Chiaroscuro: Shimmer and Shadow,” Susan Cushman recounts how her dissatisfaction with a Presbyterian upbringing led her to hold her own worship services at home an...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • Maya Angelou shares her path to living well and with meaning in this absorbing book of personal essays.Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight.Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lesso...

**The New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night, Dawn, Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Almost Everything“Lamott’s …most insightful book yet, Stitches offers plenty of her characteristic witty wisdom…this slim, readable volume [is] a lens on life, widening and narrowing, encouraging each reader to reflect on what it is, after all, that really matters.”—People**What do we do when life lurches out of bal...

The New Yorker is, of course, a bastion of superb essays, influential investigative journalism, and insightful arts criticism. But for eighty years, it’s also been a hoot. In fact, when Harold Ross founded the legendary magazine in 1925, he called it “a comic weekly,” and while it has grown into much more**,** it has also remained true to its original mission. Now an uproarious sampling of its funny writings can be found in a hilarious new collection, one as satirical and witty, m...

Where do our journeys take us? What do we leave behind?What do we carry with us? How do we find our way?You are invited to consider a more graceful way of traveling through life. With arresting clarity, Journeys of Simplicity offers vignettes of forty travelers and the few, ordinary things they carried with themfrom place to place, from day to day, from birth to death.Edward Abbey Nellie Bly Raymond CarverDorothy Day Marcel Duchamp Dolores Gar...

**AMY GERSTLER’S COMMITMENT TO INNOVATIVE POETRY that conveys meaning, feeling, wit, and humor informs the cross section of poems in the 2010 edition of *The Best American Poetry.***The works collected here represent the wealth, the breadth, and the tremendous energy of poetry in the United States today. Featuring poems from some of our country’s top bards, including John Ashbery, Anne Carson, Louise Glück, Sharon Olds, and Charles Simic, The Best American Poetry 2010 also present...

"A deeply beautiful book, with the fierce galloping pace of a great novel."—Liz Rosenberg Boston GlobeInformed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such ...

**“A breezy, inviting collection of love poems that celebrates the divine as much as it does the natural world or human relationships . . . An eloquent celebration of simple joy from one of America’s most beloved poets.” —The Washington Post“Oliver’s poems are thoroughly convincing—as genuine, moving, and implausible as the first caressing breeze of spring.” —New York Times Book ReviewMary Oliver, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, celebrates love in this colle...

Laughterthe GPS System for the SoulLaughter was honored by the ancients as a spiritual healing tool and celebrated by the worlds great religions. So why arent we laughing along the spiritual path today? What would happen if we did?In this personal and funny look at humor as a spiritual practice, Rev. Susan Sparksan ex-lawyer turned comedian and Baptist ministerpresents a convincing case that the power of humor radiates far beyond punch lines. Laughter can help you:

In her highly anticipated memoir, Margaret A. Salinger writes about life with her famously reclusive father, J.D. Salinger—offering a rare look into the man and the myth, what it is like to be his daughter, and the effect of such a charismatic figure on the girls and women closest to him.With generosity and insight, Ms. Salinger has written a book that is eloquent, spellbinding, and wise, yet at the same time retains the intimacy of a novel. Her story chronicles an almost cultlike ...

Winner of the 2010 National Book Award for PoetryWatch for the new collection of poetry from Terrance Hayes, American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin, coming in June of 2018In his fourth collection, Terrance Hayes investigates how we construct experience. With one foot firmly grounded in the everyday and the other hovering in the air, his poems braid dream and reality into a poetry that is both dark and buoyant. Cultural ic...