Boy meets dot-com, boy falls for dot-com, boy flees dot-com in horror. So goes one of the most perversely hilarious love stories you will ever read, one that blends tech culture, hero worship, cat litter, Albanian economics, venture capitalism, and free bagels into a surreal cocktail of delusion. In ... more »

Benjamin Franklin is the Founding Father who winks at us. An ambitious urban entrepreneur who rose up the social ladder, from leather-aproned shopkeeper to dining with kings, he seems made of flesh rather than of marble. In bestselling author Walter Isaacson's vivid and witty full-scale biography, we ... more »

It's all about you. Your apartment. Your job. Your dates. Your sex life. Your time off. Your exercise. Your food. Your music. Your future. What are you waiting for? Who will you love? What is it, really, that you want? The life of a single woman in the twenty-first century is full of new connections ... more »

Es war kurz vor Weihnachten, als Andrea Sixt glaubte, am Anfang eines Alptraums zu stehen. Diagnose Brustkrebs. Ihr Partner konnte damit nicht umgehen, die Beziehung zerbrach. Mit eindrucksvoller Offenheit beschreibt die Autorin die verschiedenen Stufen ihres Lebens nach der Brustamputation: Ihre grenzenlose ... more »

In an irresistible tale of a life lived fully, if not always wisely, Liam Clancy, of the legendary Irish group the Clancy Brothers, describes his eventful journey from a small town in Ireland in the 1930s into the heart of the New York music scene in the 1950s and '60s. Following in the grand tradition ... more »

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 ... more »

33,000 pages 44 million words 10 billion years of history 1 obsessed man Part memoir and part education (or lack thereof), The Know-It-All chronicles NPR contributor A.J. Jacobs's hilarious, enlightening, and seemingly impossible quest to read the Encyclopaedia Britannica from A to Z. To fill the ever ... more »

Why would a talented young girl go through the looking glass and step into a netherworld where up is down and food is greed, where death is honor and flesh is weak? Why enter into a love affair with hunger, drugs, sex, and death? Marya Hornbacher sustains both anorexia and bulimia through five lengthy ... more »

Paul Williams has been writing about pop music for decades, never flagging in his enthusiasm or his emotional and intellectual openness to the newest music. His insight into how it feels when we listen to certain performers or certain performances makes a connection between music and reading that is ... more »

A single parent, Martha Tod Dudman wants the perfect life for her children. But when Augusta turns fifteen, she is drawn into a whirling vortex of troubled adolescence, hurting herself and her mother, who would do anything to save her. This daring book will be admired for its lyricism, applauded for ... more »

There is a superstition that if an emptied theater is ever left completely dark, a ghost will take up residence. To prevent this, a single ghost light is left burning at center stage after the audience and all of the actors and musicians have gone home. Frank Rich's eloquent and moving boyhood memoir ... more »

Thad Carhart never realized there was a gap in his life until he happened upon Desforges Pianos, a demure little shopfront in his Pairs neighborhood that seemed to want to hide rather than advertise its wares. Like Alice in Wonderland, he found his attempts to gain entry rebuffed at every turn. An accidental ... more »