...This new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness, and growing old. Blue Nights opens on July 26, 2010, as Didion thinks back to Quintanas wedding in New York seven years before. Today would be her wedding anniversary. This fact triggers vivid snapshots of Quintanas childhoodin Malibu, in Brentwood, at school in Holmby Hills. Reflecting on her daughter but also on her role as a parent, Didion...

The acclaimed and beloved author of Hourglass now gives us a new memoir about identity, paternity, and family secrets--a real-time exploration of the staggering discovery she made last year about her father, and her struggle to piece together the hidden the story of her own life.

Henry Roth (1906-1995), author of the great immigrant novel Call It Sleep, is one of the giants of American literature. After completing his first book in 1934, Roth lapsed into a legendary six-decade silence, only to reemerge with Mercy of a Rude Stream, hailed as "a landmark of the American literary century." In following Roth's tortured life from his childhood on the Jewish Lower East Side to his twilight years in New Mexico, literary critic Kellman...

A prize-winning, successful novelist in her 30s, McCracken was happy to be an itinerant writer and self-proclaimed spinster. But suddenly she fell in love, got married, and two years ago was living in a remote part of France, working on her novel, and waiting for the birth of her first child. This book is about what happened next. In her ninth month of pregnancy, she learned that her baby boy had died. How do you deal with and recover from this kind...

John Armstrong Chanler (known as Archie) was an heir to the Astor fortune, an eccentric, dashing, and handsome millionaire. Amelie Rives, from a Southern family and the goddaughter of Robert E. Lee, was a daring author, a stunning temptress, and a woman ahead of her time. Filled with glamour, mystery, and madness, their love affair and marriage made them the talk of society in the Gilded Age. Archie and Amelie seemed made for each other, but the very...

Draws on diary entries, personal letters, journal extracts, and newspaper columns to trace the life of the two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize, offering a unique perspective of Mailer's personality and writings and discussing his relationships with contemporaries.

The first biography of the renowned American author David Foster Wallace. Wallace was on of the most innovative and influential authors of the last twenty-five years. A writer whose distinctive style and example had a huge impact on the culture and helped give meaning to his generation in a disorienting, distressing time. In this first in-depth biography, journalist D.T. Max captures Wallace's compelling, turbulent life and times--his genius, his...