Sent by their mother to live with their devout, self-sufficient grandmother in a small southern town, Maya and her brother, Bailey, endure the ache of abandonment and the prejudice of the local "powhitetrash." At eight years old and back at her mother's side in St. Louis, Maya is attacked by a man many times her age, and has to live with the consequences for a lifetime. Years later, in San Francisco, Maya learns about love for herself, and the kindness...

"The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays"-- ""Any story that starts will also end." As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth in these wise essays that afford a fresh and intimate look into her mind and heart. At the center of These Precious...

The celebrated author shares the intimate story of her relationship with her mother, relating the events that prompted her mother to send young Angela to Arkansas to live with her grandmother and the complicated fallout that shaped their family life.

Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a "lifelong endeavor," or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice -- Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of...

Bestselling author Anna Quindlen writes about her life and the lives of women today, looking back and ahead--and celebrating it all--as she considers marriage, girlfriends, mothers, faith, loss, all that stuff in closets, and more.

"This long-awaited biography establishes Shirley Jackson as a towering figure in American literature and revives the life and work of a neglected master. Still known to millions only as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) remainscuriously absent from the American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the...

Chronicles the life of "To Kill a Mockingbird" author Harper Lee, exploring her personality and discussing such topics as her youth in Alabama; her satirizing of bigotry in campus publications during her college days; her experiences as a struggling writer in New York; the creation of her famous novel; and her contributions to her friend Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood," for which she served as a research assistant in Kansas.

Silko combines memoir with family history and observations on the creatures and desert landscapes that command her attention and inform her vision of the world. Ambitious in scope and full of wonderfully plainspoken and evocative lyricism, The Turquoise Ledge is both an exploration of Silko's experience and a moving and deeply personal contemplation of the enormous spiritual power of the natural world.

After their parents divorce in the 1970's, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with drugs and crime. To protect himself and those he loved from street violence, Andre learned to use his fists so well that he was even scared of himself. He was on a fast track to getting killed, or killing someone else, or to beatings-for-pay as a boxer. Nearby, his father,...

"A book of great ambition, Sarah M. Broom's The Yellow House tells a hundred years of her family and their relationship to home in a neglected area of one of America's most mythologized cities. This is the story of a mother's struggle against a house's entropy, and that of a prodigal daughter who left home only to reckon with the pull that home exerts, even after the Yellow House was wiped off the map after Hurricane Katrina. The Yellow House expands...