Full AspenCat Catalog

Once again, David Sedaris brings together a collection of essays so uproariously funny and profoundly moving that his legions of fans will fall for him once more. He tests the limits of love when Hugh lances a boil from his backside, and pushes the boundaries of laziness when, finding the water shut off in his house in Normandy, he looks to the water in a vase of fresh cut flowers to fill the coffee machine. From armoring the windows with LP covers...

Samantha Bee, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart's Most Senior Correspondent, turns the spotlight on her own highly entertaining life, sharing her unique and irreverent viewpoint on far ranging topics.

From the Publisher: Gore Vidal-novelist, playwright, critic, screenwriter, memoirist, indefatigable political commentator, and controversialists-is America's premier man of letters. No other living writer brings more sparkling wit, vast learning, indelible personality, and provocative mirth to the job of writing an essay. This long-needed volume comprises some twenty-four of his best-loved pieces of criticism, political commentary, memoir, portraiture,...

"An "album quilt," an artful assortment of nonfiction writings by John McPhee that have not previously appeared in any book" --

Combines commentary on American society and the world at large with reflections on being a woman, a writer, and a mother. These essays were first written for Newsweek and The New York Times.

"With consummate craftsmanship, [the author] has fashioned fifteen luminous prose pieces: on nature, writing, and herself and those around her. She praises Whitman, denounces cuteness, notes where to find the extraordinary, and extols solitude." -- Back cover

"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"--

Carefully culled from her past work, The Abundance is quintessential Annie Dillard, delivered in her fierce and undeniably singular voice, filled with detail and metaphysical fact. The pieces within will exhilarate both admiring fans and a new generation of readers, having been "re-framed and re-hung," with fresh editing and reordering by the author, to situate these now seminal works within her larger canon.

A writer who can imagine the "community belonging to its place" is one who has applied his knowledge and citizenship to achieve the goal to which Wendell Berry has always aspired -- to be a native to his own local culture. And for Berry, what is "local, fully imagined, becomes universal," and the "local" is to know one's place and allow the imagination to inspire and instill "a practical respect for what is there besides ourselves." In Imagination...