Full AspenCat Catalog

"If you don't have the time to read, you don't have the time or the tools to write." In 1999, Stephen King began to write about his craft -- and his life. By midyear, a widely reported accident jeopardized the survival of both. And in his months of recovery, the link between writing and living became more crucial than ever. Rarely has a book on writing been so clear, so useful, and so revealing. On Writing begins with a mesmerizing account of King's...

The protagonist, Mary Emma Moody, widowed mother of six, has taken her family east in 1912 to begin a new life. Her son, Ralph, then thirteen, recalls how the Moodys survive that first bleak winter in a Massachusetts town. Money and prospects are lacking, but not so faith and resourcefulness. "Mother" in Little Britches and Man of the Family, Mary Emma emerges fully as a character in this book, and Ralph, no longer called "Little Britches," comes...

"Louisa May Alcott" portrays a writer as worthy of interest in her own right as her legendary character Jo March, and addresses all aspects of Alcott's life: the effect of her father's self-indulgent utopian schemes, her family's chronic economic difficulties and frequent uprootings, her experience as a nurse in the Civil War, the loss of her health and, sadly, her reliance on opiates in middle age. Stories and details culled from Alcott's journals,...

Raised in a secular family but interested in the relevance of faith in our modern world, A.J. Jacobs decides to attempt to obey the Bible as literally as possible for one full year. He vows to follow the Ten Commandments. To be fruitful and multiply. To love his neighbor. But also to obey the hundreds of less publicized rules: to avoid wearing clothes made of mixed fibers; to stone adulterers. The resulting spiritual journey is at once funny and profound,...

Writer Thad Beaumont announces to the public that his own pseudonym, George Stark, is dead. George Stark is a recurring hero/alter ego and is an evil character named Alexis Machine. Thad Beaumont's pseudonym is not so docile and George Stark bursts forth into reality. At that point, two stories kick into gear: a mystery-detective story about the crime spree of George Stark (or is it Alexis Machine?) and a horror story about Beaumont's struggle to...

One of the most mesmerizing memoirs of the literary season: a wrenching, hilarious, and stylistically groundbreaking story of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. "Well, this was when Bill was sighing a lot. He had decided that after our parents died he just didn't want any more fighting between what was left of us. He was twenty-four, Beth was twenty-three,...

"A personal evocation of the glory of nature, our vexed position in the animal kingdom, and the difficulty of adoring what we destroy. Acclaimed novelist Lydia Millet's first work of nonfiction, We Loved It All, is a genre-defying tour de force that makes an impassioned argument for people to see their emotional and spiritual lives as infinitely dependent on the lives of nonhuman beings. Drawing on a quarter-century of experience as an advocate for...

Beth is a spirited woman with mental retardation who spends nearly every day riding the buses in her pennsylvania city. The drivers, a lively group, are her mentors; her fellow passengers are her community. Beth, who lives independently and has a boyfriend, is a joyful, endearing, and feisty individual. Her single sister Rache;, a writer and professor, masks her emotional isolation and loneliness behind her hyperbusy schedule. When Beth asks Rachel...

Jarvis Jay Masters has taken an extraordinary journey of faith. Strangely enough, his moment of enlightenment came behind the bars of San Quentin's death row. Here, inmate author Masters takes us from the arms of his heroin-addicted mother to an abusive foster home, on his escape to the illusory freedom of the streets and through lonely nights spent in bus stations and juvenile homes, and finally to life inside the walls of San Quentin State Prison....

"New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote's never-published final novel, Answered Prayers--the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote's ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his "swans.""--