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Barbara Kingsolver's generous collection is divided into thematic sections that loop and interweave to form a carefully patterned whole: a series of 'How to' poems that smartly balance tongue-in-cheek pragmatism with revelatory wisdom, a complicated yet affirmative family pilgrimage to Italy, cherished childhood memories, the perils and pleasures of being a [female] writer, elegies to lost loved ones and elegies to the planet.

Katy Carr is always dreaming of the time when something will happen to make her famous. But when it does, it's not at all what she wants. In this moving story, Katy Carr overcomes a tragic accident and learns to be as loving and as patient as the beautiful invalid, Helen.

A vow. A contract. A marriage of fire and ice. But just when Eric de Vries and I found our forever, the entire world conspired to keep us apart. A kidnapping. A trial. A madman bent on revenge. Now caught in a web of our own passion and a father's obsession, the harder we struggle, the tighter we're caught. They say love conquers all, but it feels like we're the conquest. As the walls close in, I have to wonder...are we really meant to be? Or is this love just a trap?

P.J. O'Rourke traces his development from hippie protester to conservative grouch to jaded humorist. Along the way, we are privy to his strange, twisted days as editor in chief of National Lampoon, as well as the in-depth looks at appropriate sports for middle-aged Republicans, namely those which can be engaged in with a smuggled Havana between the teeth - fly-fishing, bird hunting, deep-sea fishing, and of course, golf. Plus, you'll hear O'Rourke's take on the Virtues of Automobiles - because what good was oil doing sitting in the ground for millions of years? - and many other hilarious rants in this off-the-wall collection by America's premier political humorist.

Rei Shimura, a California girl living in Tokyo, has an antiques business that's only slightly more successful than her love life. When her aunt enrolls her in the Kayama School of Ikebana to learn how to arrange flowers, disaster strikes. A mean teacher is found with scissors in her neck, and Takeo Kayama, the sexy billionaire heir to the school, considers Rei's aunt the main suspect.

Witty playwright Oscar Wilde is most famous for his 1895 play "The Importance of Being Earnest." The two protagonists use a false identity, Earnest, as a way to escape from unwanted social obligations. However, they encounter difficulties keeping up their personas as their social circles draw closer together. Wilde drew upon what he thought were outrageous social conventions of the Victorian Era and used satire to show the absurdity of its beliefs, like how marriage was more of a boring burden than a joyous commitment.

After her last remaining family member dies, Sara Jenkins goes home to The Hideaway, her grandmother Mags’s ramshackle B&B in Sweet Bay. She intends to quickly tie up loose ends then return to her busy life and thriving antique shop in New Orleans. Instead, she learns Mags has willed The Hideaway to her and charged her with renovating it — no small task considering her grandmother’s best friends, a motley crew of senior citizens, still live there.

Out in the desert in a place called the Palace, a young man tends to a dying soul, someone he once knew briefly, but who has haunted the edges of his life. Juan Gay―playful raconteur, child lost and found and lost, guardian of the institutionalized―has a project to pass along to this new narrator. It is inspired by a true artifact of a book, Sex Variants: A Study in Homosexual Patterns, which contains stories collected in the early twentieth century from queer subjects by a queer researcher, Jan Gay, whose groundbreaking work was then co-opted by a committee, her name buried.

Tiller is an average American college student with a good heart but minimal aspirations. Pong Lou is a larger-than-life, wildly creative Chinese American entrepreneur who sees something intriguing in Tiller beyond his bored exterior and takes him under his wing. When Pong brings him along on a boisterous trip across Asia, Tiller is catapulted from ordinary young man to talented protégé, and pulled into a series of ever more extreme and eye-opening experiences that transform his view of the world, of Pong, and of himself.

Samuel Clemens, the man known to history as Mark Twain, was more than one of America's greatest writers. He was our first true celebrity, one of the most photographed faces of the 19th and 20th centuries. This series of 24 lectures by an acclaimed teacher and scholar explores Twain's dual identities-as one of our classical authors and as an almost mythical presence in our nation's cultural life.

Legendary author and essayist E. B. White writes, "The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest." Covering a large number of subjects, this classic collection features 31 of White's most memorable essays.

In Water, Water Billy Collins writes with joy and wonder about the beauties and ironies of everyday life. The best poems, he believes, begin in clarity and end with a hint of the sublime: A cat learns to drink from a swimming pool. An astronaut recites Emily Dickinson in space. Here is a writer devotedly in love with the world around him, fascinated by its pleasures but generously sensitive of its pains.

Willa Chen has never quite fit in. Growing up as a biracial Chinese American girl in New Jersey, Willa felt both hypervisible and unseen, too Asian to fit in at her mostly White school, and too White to speak to the few Asian kids around. After her parents’ early divorce, they both remarried and started new families, and Willa grew up feeling outside of their new lives, too.

Piper Parrish's life on Frick Island - a tiny, remote town smack in the middle of the Chesapeake Bay - is nearly perfect. Well, aside from one pesky detail: Her darling husband, Tom, is dead. When Tom's crab boat capsized and his body wasn't recovered, Piper, rocked to the core, did a most peculiar thing.

The daughter of proud Napa Valley hoteliers, Asha “Poppy” Patel chose a different line as a Paris perfumer, gifted with a nose for fragrances and business. Until her heightened sense of smell disappears. Her career in jeopardy, her world now muted, Poppy returns home. Maybe tending to her grandmother’s massive aromatic garden, where Poppy’s gift first flowered, will bring restorative hope. But when she arrives, Poppy discovers that the land upon which the beautiful garden once thrived has been uprooted and destroyed.

Private detective Bill Smith is hurtled headlong into the most provocative - and personal - case of his career when he receives a chilling late-night phone call from the NYPD, who is holding his 15-year-old nephew Gary. But Gary escapes Bill's custody and disappears into the dark, unfamiliar streets. Bill and his partner, Lydia Chin, try to find the missing teen; their search takes them to a small town in New Jersey, where they discover that one of Gary's classmates was murdered.

Holden Henry is every girl’s dream—kind, funny, outgoing. A catch in every sense. Despite my wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing, he’s been my friend forever. He has no idea I’ve had more-than-friends feelings for him for years, and I intend to keep it that way. When I’m forced to return to the small town where we grew up, I’m faced with a big, fat problem. Being a good pal, Holden offers me a too-tempting solution: a marriage of convenience. It’s a crazy plan...but I’m desperate enough to try it. Besides, he’s not just saving me; we’ll be helping each other.

Jim Harrison's popular novels represent only part of his literary output—he has also been widely acclaimed for the "renegade genius" of his powerful expressive verse, collected in several books such as The Theory and Practice of Rivers and Other Poems (Clark City Press, 1989). After Ikkyu is the first collection of Harrison's poems that are directly inspired by his many years of Zen practice.

Poet and podcaster Jarod K. Anderson (creator of The CryptoNaturalist podcast and author of Field Guide to the Haunted Forest) celebrates the natural world with warmth and humor. The poetry and prose in this collection are love letters to impermanence, to our kinship with nature, to our strange ability to conjure meaning. Vivid and approachable, the work gathered here invites listeners to rediscover commonplace wonders and find new beauty in topics ranging from moss to mortality.

A Woman of Endurance, set in nineteenth-century Puerto Rican plantation society, follows Pola, a deeply spiritual African woman who is captured and later sold for the purpose of breeding future slaves. The resulting babies are taken from her as soon as they are born. Pola loses the faith that has guided her and becomes embittered and defensive. The dehumanizing violence of her life almost destroys her. But this is not a novel of defeat but rather one of survival, regeneration, and reclamation of common humanity.