""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 Days is the title essay, a surprising and moving meditation on an unexpected friendship that explores "what it means to be seen, to find someone...

What is the difference between choking and panicking? Why are there dozens of varieties of mustard but only one variety of ketchup? What can we learn from football players about how to hire teachers? What does hair dye tell us about the history of the twentieth century? In the past decade, Malcolm Gladwell has written three books that have radically changed how we understand our world and ourselves. Now he brings together, for the first time, the...

"Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there." — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

A New York Times Bestseller

Best Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe • Newsweek • Time Out New

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"To see the world through Jenny Slate's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility. As she will remind you, we live on an ancient ball that rotates around a bigger ball made up of lights and gasses that are science gasses, not farts (don't be immature). Heartbreak, confusion, and misogyny stalk this blue-green sphere, yes, but it is also a place of wild delight and unconstrained vitality, a place where...

"There's no right way to keep a diary, but if there's an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mastered it. If it's navel-gazing you're after, you've come to the wrong place; ditto treacly self-examination. Rather, his observation turn outward: a fight between two men on a bus, a fight between two men on the street, pedestrians being whacked over the head or gathering to watch as a man considers leaping to his death. There's a dirty joke shared...

"A collection of long-form essays on joy, in which the author turns his curious and poetic mind to everything from skateboarding and cover songs, basketball and race, dancing and academia, death and laughter, and, always, the garden and the natural world"--

In an illustrated memoir, the creator of the Bloggess blog shares humorous stories from her life, including her awkward upbringing in Texas and her relationship with her husband

"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature....

"CJ Hauser expands on her viral essay sensation, "The Crane Wife," in a brilliant collection of essays that echo the work of Cheryl Strayed in their revelatory observations of romantic love. CJ Hauser uses her now-beloved title essay as an anchor around which to explore the narratives of romantic love we are taught and which we tell ourselves, and the need to often rewrite those narratives to find an accurate version of ourselves in them. Told with...

The characteristic heart and punch-packing observations are back, but with a newfound coat of maturity. A thin coat. More of a blazer, really. Fans of I Was Told There'd Be Cake and How Did You Get This Number know Sloane Crosley's life as a series of relatable but madcap misadventures. In Look Alive Out There, whether it's scaling active volcanoes, crashing shivas, playing herself on Gossip Girl, befriending swingers, or squinting down the barrel...