Edward de Vere’s life and letters indicate that he was the true author of the works of Shakespeare. Weaving together ten years of research, this biography of the adventurous Elizabethan earl is a triumph of literary detective work.

Actor William Shaksper of Stratford had little education, never left England, and apparently owned no books. How could he have written the great plays and poetry attributed to him? Journalist Mark Anderson’s biography offers tantalizing proof that...

The first time I heard it, I laughed.
Oh, come on, I thought. He didn’t just say that.
We were at a restaurant in southern Ohio, where a hundred or so Democrats and a handful of young campaign workers had gathered to hear my husband, Sherrod Brown, announce for the seventh time in two days why he was running for the United States Senate.
The party chairman of the county stood up at the lectern and in a loud, booming voice, introduced “Congressman Sherrod Brown–and...

"In each little life we can see great truth and beauty, and in each little life we glimpse the way of all things in the universe."

DEAN KOONTZ thought he had everything he needed. A successful novelist with more than twenty #1 New York Times bestsellers to his credit, Dean had forged a career out of industry and imagination. He had been married to his high school sweetheart, Gerda, since the age of twenty, and together they had made a happy life for themselves in t...

A literary exploration of the Beats' encounter with India in the 1960s, a journey that inspired and influenced generations of Americans and Indians alike

In 1961, Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, India. He brought with him his troubled lover, Peter Orlovsky, and a plan to meet up with poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. He left behind not only fellow Beats Jack Kerouac, Gregory Corso, and William Burroughs, but also the relentless notoriety that followed his ...

In this engrossing new piece of Beat history, Pulitzer Prize finalist Deborah Baker takes us back to the moment when America?s edgiest writers looked to India for answers as India looked to the West. It was 1961 when Allen Ginsberg left New York by boat for Bombay, where he hoped to meet poets Gary Snyder and Joanne Kyger. Baker follows Ginsberg and his companions as they travel from ashram to opium den. Exposing an overlooked chapter of the literary past, A Blue Hand will delight all ...

The year was 1957, the month September, and I had just turned eight years old. Dwight Eisenhower was President, but in my life it was the diminutive, intense Sister Mary Lurana who ruled, at least in the third-grade class where I was held captive. For reasons you will soon understand, my parents had remanded me to the penal institution of St. Brigid’s School in Westbury, New York, a cruel and unusual punishment if there ever was one.

Already, I had barely survived my first tw...

AGE ISN’T JUST A NUMBER—IT’S A WAY OF KEEPING SCORE.
THIS IS YOUR SCORECARD.

The day we turn any age, we become contemporaries of everyone who has ever been that age, and it becomes our business to know that Bob Dylan wrote “Blowin’ in the Wind” when he was twenty, Orson Welles cowrote, directed, and starred in Citizen Kane when he was twenty-five, Winston Churchill was fired from the Admiralty when he was forty and took up painting, and Jane Au...

Novelist and nonfiction writer Pearson (When She Was Bad) was diagnosed with generalized anxiety disorder at 23 in 1987; she had suffered a nervous breakdown after discovering that her lover was sleeping with another woman. In a rambling fashion, she traces the roots of her anxiety to a youth spent in tumultuous New Delhi, where her diplomat father was posted when an Indian-Pakistani war broke out over Bangladesh. Genetically, she traces her anxiety to a grandmother whose famous biting...

For the twice-published novelist, reading an article about herself in the National Enquirer—under the headline "Here's One for the Books: Cleaning Lady Is an Acclaimed Author"—was more than a shock. It was an inspiration.

In A Broom of One's Own, Nancy Peacock, whose first novel was selected by the New York Times as a Notable Book of the Year, explores with warmth, wit, and candor what it means to be a writer. An encouragement to al...

"I share the country's admiration for the bravery of Captain Phillips
and his selfless concern for his crew.
His courage is a model for all Americans."
--President Barack Obama

It was just another day on the job for fifty-three-year-old Richard Phillips, captain of the Maersk Alabama, the United States-flagged cargo ship which was carrying, among other things, food and agricultural materials for the World Food Program. That all changed when armed Somali pi...

In the days before his fortieth birthday, London-based journalist Jasper Rees trades his pen for a French horn that has been gathering dust in the attic for more than twenty-two years, and, on a lark, plays it at the annual festival of the British Horn Society.

Despite an embarrassingly poor performance, the experience inspires Rees to embark on a daunting, bizarre, and ultimately winning journey: to return to the festival in one year's time and play a Mozart concerto—solo&#...

Drawing on rare access to an NFL team?s players, coaches and facilities, the author of The New York Times bestseller Word Freak trains to become a professional-caliber placekicker. As he sharpens his skills, he gains surprising insight into the daunting challenges?physical, psychological, and intellectual?that pro athletes must master

In Word Freak, Stefan Fatsis infiltrated the insular world of competitive Scrabble® players, ultimately achieving ?expert? st...

From Neil Sheehan, author of the Pulitzer Prize—winning classic A Bright Shining Lie, comes this long-awaited, magnificent epic. Here is the never-before-told story of the nuclear arms race that changed history–and of the visionary American Air Force officer Bernard Schriever, who led the high-stakes effort. A Fiery Peace in a Cold War is a masterly work about Schriever’s quests to prevent the Soviet Union from acquiring nuclear superiority, to penetrate and exploit space for America, and to ...

A Freewheelin’ Time is Suze Rotolo’s firsthand, eyewitness, participant-observer account of the immensely creative and fertile years of the 1960s, just before the circus was in full swing and Bob Dylan became the anointed ringmaster. It chronicles the back-story of Greenwich Village in the early days of the folk music explosion, when Dylan was honing his skills and she was in the ring with him.

A shy girl from Queens, Suze Rotolo was the daughter of Italian workin...

In this enchanting European version of A Year by the Sea, an artist recalls her liberating sojourn in France during the sixties?and the friendship that transformed her life.

Marjorie was a young woman from Chicago in the 1960s who shocked her family and fiancé by moving to Paris to pursue her dream of becoming an artist. There she fell in love and married Yves, a handsome and volatile French painter. On a trip to Breton, a rugged area on the northern coast of France, ...

From the best-selling author of The Bookseller of Kabul, an intimate look at the daily lives of women, children, and other noncombatants under siege in Baghdad

For one hundred and one days Asne Seierstad worked as a reporter in Baghdad. Always in search of a story far less obvious than the American military invasion, Seierstad brings to life the world behind the headlines in this compelling--and heartbreaking--account of her time among the people of Iraq. From the moment she first ...

In 2005, First Sergeant Charles Monroe King began to write what would become a two-hundred-page journal for his son in case he did not make it home from the war in Iraq. Charles King, forty-eight, was killed on October 14, 2006, when an improvised explosive device detonated under his Humvee on an isolated road near Baghdad. His son, Jordan, was seven months old.

A Journal for Jordan is a mother’s letter to her son–fierce in its honesty–about the father he lost before he could ev...