A World Fantasy Award–winning anthology of erotic horror stories, including dark tales of desire by Joyce Carol Oates, Stephen Dedman, Harry Crews, and others.The title of this acclaimed anthology comes from the French term "la petite mort," a seventeenth-century euphemism for orgasm. It was thought that part of a man's life-force was drained from him each time he climaxed. In Little Deaths, renowned horror editor Ellen Datlow collects twenty-two stories th...

A collection of the very best in contemporary first-person journalism compiled by the award-winning former Washington Post reporter and author.Great journalists, at one time or another, have all been characters in their own stories: people with personalities that shaped what they saw and reported, and were touched and changed by the experiences about which they wrote; and innovators who borrowed the storytelling techniques of fiction. The Beholder's Eye...

Harry Crews’s savagely funny and gritty portrait of discipline, obsession, control, and powerShereel Dupont, formerly the secretary Dorothy Turnipseed, trains rigorously at the behest of her boss turned personal trainer Russell (“Muscle”) Morgan, sculpting her body into taut muscles and bone in preparation for the Ms. Cosmos bodybuilding championship. But the arrival of one family — her family, the Turnipseeds — endangers her chance for victory. The ragtag...

**Crews’s novel about a boxer with the gift of knocking himself unconscious, with a new foreword by New York Times-bestselling author S. A. CosbyA Penguin Classic**A favorite of longtime Harry Crews fans, The Knockout Artist (1988) portrays Eugene Talmadge Biggs, a young boxer from rural Georgia whose champion rise is diverted by a vulnerability, or gift, for knocking himself unconscious. As he begins to exploit his talents, the notorious...

**“Harry Crews is magnificently twisted and brutally funny.” - Carl HiaasenA Penguin Classic**Golden-haired, with the voice of an angel and a reputation as a healer, the Gospel Singer appeared on the cover of LIFE and brought thousands to their knees in Carnegie Hall. But for all his fame, he is a man in mortal torment that drives him back to his obscure and wretched hometown of Enigma, Georgia. But by the time his Cadillac pulls into Enigma, he discovers an old friend is b...

**“One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written” –The New Yorker“A Childhood has been widely recognized as a masterpiece, a Dickensian document of survival and blight in Depression-era Georgia.” –Harper’s**The highly acclaimed memoir of one of the most original American storytellers of the rural SouthA Penguin ClassicHarry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was j...

Harry Crews’s savagely funny and gritty portrait of discipline, obsession, control, and powerShereel Dupont, formerly the secretary Dorothy Turnipseed, trains rigorously at the behest of her boss turned personal trainer Russell (“Muscle”) Morgan, sculpting her body into taut muscles and bone in preparation for the Ms. Cosmos bodybuilding championship. But the arrival of one family — her family, the Turnipseeds — endangers her chance for victory. The ragtag...

**“Harry Crews is magnificently twisted and brutally funny.” - Carl HiaasenA Penguin Classic**Golden-haired, with the voice of an angel and a reputation as a healer, the Gospel Singer appeared on the cover of LIFE and brought thousands to their knees in Carnegie Hall. But for all his fame, he is a man in mortal torment that drives him back to his obscure and wretched hometown of Enigma, Georgia. But by the time his Cadillac pulls into Enigma, he discovers an old friend is b...

**“One of the Finest Memoirs Ever Written” –The New Yorker“A Childhood has been widely recognized as a masterpiece, a Dickensian document of survival and blight in Depression-era Georgia.” –Harper’s**The highly acclaimed memoir of one of the most original American storytellers of the rural SouthA Penguin ClassicHarry Crews grew up as the son of a sharecropper in Georgia at a time when “the rest of the country was j...

**Crews’s novel about a boxer with the gift of knocking himself unconscious, with a new foreword by New York Times-bestselling author S. A. CosbyA Penguin Classic**A favorite of longtime Harry Crews fans, The Knockout Artist (1988) portrays Eugene Talmadge Biggs, a young boxer from rural Georgia whose champion rise is diverted by a vulnerability, or gift, for knocking himself unconscious. As he begins to exploit his talents, the notorious...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • An extraordinary investigation of a critical moment in the evolution of religious thought—from the New York Times bestselling author of A History of God and The Spiral Staircase“A splendid book.... Lucid, highly readable.... Relevant to a world still embroiled in military conflict and sectarian hatreds.” —The New York Times**In the ninth century BCE, events in four regions of the civilized world led to the rise of ...

**NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The New York Times bestselling author of A History of God delivers the gripping, inspirational story about her own search for God.“A story about becoming human, being recognized, finally recognizing oneself…. It fills the reader with hope.” —**The Washington Post Book WorldIn 1962, at age seventeen, Karen Armstrong entered a convent, eager to meet God. After seven brutally unhappy years as a nun, she left h...