There is a literal Russian landscape, and there is its emotional, literary counterpart. In Mud and Stars, award-winning writer Sara Wheeler sets out to explore both. With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides - Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol and Turgenev, among others - Wheeler travels across eight time zones, from rinsed north-western beetroot fields and far-eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of ethnic soup that is the Caucasus. She follows nineteenth-century...

In The End of the Novel of Love, an acclaimed and provocative collection of criticism, Gornick applies the same intelligence, honesty, and insight that define her memoirs to an analysis of love and marriage as literary themes in the twentieth century. She examines the work and lives of several authors she admires-including Grace Paley, Willa Cather, Jean Rhys, George Meredith, Jane Smiley, Richard Ford, and Andre Dubus-to ultimately posit that love,...

"Ann Burack-Weiss, a gerontologist with more than forty years of experience, analyzes and engages with the writings of a dozen well-known authors for insights into old age. Featured are Maya Angelou, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Joan Didion, M.F.K Fisher, Doris Grumbach, Carolyn Heilburn, Doris Lessing, Florida Scott-Maxwell, May Sarton, Anne Roiphe, and Alexis Kate Shulman, among others, all of whom wrote about essential issues in old age including...

How do objects summon memories? What do real images feel like? For decades, these types of questions have permeated the pages of Lynda Barry's compositions, with words attracting pictures and conjuring places through a pen that first and foremost keeps on moving. What It Is demonstrates a tried-and-true creative method that is playful, powerful, and accessible to anyone with an inquisitive wish to write or to remember. Composed of completely new material,...

"From one of the most engaging and brilliant writers of our time comes a collection of essays about growing up in Ireland during radical change; about cancer, priests, popes, homosexuality, and literature"--

"The debut graphic novel from Thai-Italian illustrator Elisa Macellari, Papaya Salad tells the story of her great-uncle Sompong who found himself in Europe on military scholarship on the eve of World War II. A gentle and resolute man in love with books and languages, in search of his place in the world, Sompong chronicles his life during the war and falling for his wife, finding humor and joy even as the world changes irrevocably around him."--

"Drawing on original manuscripts and letters, Woodside shows how Rose reshaped her mother's story into a series of heroic tales that rebutted the policies of the New Deal. Their secret collaboration would lead in time to their estrangement. This fascinating look at the relationship between two strong-willed women is also the deconstruction of an American myth"--

"In the next installment of her graphic memoir series, Displacement, Knisley volunteers to watch over her ailing grandparents on a cruise. (The book's watercolors evoke the ocean that surrounds them.) In a book that is part graphic memoir, part travelogue, and part family history, Knisley not only tries to connect with her grandparents, but to reconcile their younger and older selves. She is aided in her quest by her grandfather's WWII memoir, which...

"I was living in a fairy story--the kind with sinister overtones and not always a happy ending--in which a young man loves a beautiful maiden who returns his love but is always disappearing into some unknown and mysterious world, about which she will reveal nothing." So John Bayley describes his life with his wife, Iris Murdoch, one of the greatest contemporary writers in the English-speaking world, revered for her works of philosophy and beloved...