Collects the author's recent essays exploring motherhood as an older mom, her life as a reader, her relationships with her parents, her newspaper career, and her experiences as a novelist.

"Moving, joyful, and insightful collection of conversations with today's living literary legends about the books that changed their lives, made them think, and brought them joy, from 'American's Librarian' Nancy Pearl and noted playwright Jeff Schwager"--

"More than twenty years ago Braveheart captured the hearts of moviegoers around the world. The film was nominated for ten Academy Awards, winning five. Now, for the first time, author and screenwriter Randall Wallace shares the journey that led him to the famous Scottish warrior and how telling the story of William Wallace changed the direction of his life and career?from that surprising first moment in Edinburgh, Scotland, to selling the script to...

Mark Twain's semi-autobiographical travel memoir, "Roughing It" was written between 1870-1871 and subsequently published in 1872. Billed as a prequel to "Innocents Abroad", in which Twain details his travels aboard a pleasure cruise through Europe and the Holy Land in 1867, "Roughing It" conversely documents Twain's early days in the old wild west between the years 1861-1867. Employing his characteristically humoristic wit and flare for regional dialect,...

"Delia Ephron had struggled through several years of heartbreak. She'd lost her sister, Nora, and then her husband, Jerry, both to cancer. Several months after Jerry's death, she decided to make one small change in her life--she shut down his landline, which crashed her internet. She ended up in Verizon hell. She channeled her grief the best way she knew: by writing a New York Times op-ed. The piece caught the attention of Peter, a Bay Area psychiatrist,...

Father Greg Lockwood is unlike any Catholic priest you have ever met, a man who lounges in boxer shorts, loves action movies, and whose constant jamming on the guitar reverberates "like a whole band dying in a plane crash in 1972." His daughter is an irreverent poet who long ago left the Church's country. When an unexpected crisis leads her and her husband to move back into her parents' rectory, their two worlds collide. In Priestdaddy, Lockwood interweaves...

A lonely British woman strikes up a pen pal friendship with a successful American author and they offer each other help and support with their relationship dramas before agreeing to finally meet up in Paris.

"The internationally bestselling author of the Guido Brunetti mysteries tells her own adventurous life story as she enters her eighties. In a series of vignettes full of affection, irony, and good humor, Donna Leon narrates a remarkable life she feels has rather more happened to her than been planned. From a childhood in the company of her New Jersey family, with frequent visits to her grandfather's farm and its beloved animals, and summers spent...

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring book, E. B. White was obeying the maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats--White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. Painfully shy his entire life, "this boy," White once wrote of himself, "felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people." It is all the more impressive, therefore, how many...