The Lost Art of Walking: The History, Science, and Literature of Pedestrianism

Why New Orleans Matters

Tom Piazza · 192 pages

An impassioned plea for the meaning of New Orleans in American life–past, present, and future–at its moment of greatest peril.Award–winning novelist and cultural critic writer Tom Piazza is a longtime resident of New Orleans, and a celebrator of the music and culture of that city. In the wake of Hurricane Katrina, from a temporary outpost in Missouri, he began work immediately after the storm on t

And the Pursuit of Happiness

Maira Kalman · 471 pages

Filled with original art and photographs by the author who is also an illustrator and designer, each chapter represents a month of Kalman's yearlong travel across the U.S. and her reflections on democracy. She starts with a celebration of Barack Obama's Presidential inauguration in Washington, D.C., continues with the month of February and Abraham Lincoln, and explores democracy and the pursuit o

Downtown: My Manhattan

Pete Hamill · 312 pages

In Downtown, Pete Hamill leads us on an unforgettable journey through the city he loves, from the island's southern tip to Times Square, combining a moving memoir of his days and nights in New York with a passionate history of its most enduring places and people.

Wanderlust: A History of Walking

Rebecca Solnit · 326 pages

"In Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit draws together many histories -- of anatomical evolution and city design, of treadmills and labyrinths, of walking clubs and sexual mores -- to create a portrait of the range of possibilities for this most basic act. Arguing that walking as history signifies walking for pleasure and for political, aesthetic, and social meaning, Solnit hones in o

Paris, Paris: Journey into the City of Light

David Downie · 304 pages

Presents a guide to the districts of Paris, describing the history, buildings, landscape, social customs, and people of the city in each section.

Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places

Colin Dickey · 320 pages

Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Geoff Dyer · 256 pages

Geoff Dyer wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his 'Lawrence book'. The problem was Dyer didn't really know what his 'Lawrence book' would be, what form it would take, or even when he'd start writing it. He set out simply to explore and record his reactions - both as a reader, and as a writer himself. But, just as Lawrence's study of Thomas Hardy ended up bei

The Dead Ladies Project: Exiles, Expats, and Ex-Countries

Jessa Crispin · 240 pages

"When Jessa Crispin was thirty, she burned her settled Chicago life to the ground and took off for Berlin with a pair of suitcases and no plan beyond leaving. Half a decade later, she's still on the road, in search not so much of a home as of understanding, a way of being in the world that demands neither constant struggle nor complete surrender, "--Amazon.com.

The Braindead Megaphone

George Saunders · 257 pages

George Saunders's first foray into nonfiction is comprised of essays on literature, travel, and politics. At the core of this unique collection are Saunders's travel essays based on his trips to seek out the mysteries of the "Buddha Boy" of Nepal; to attempt to indulge in the extravagant pleasures of Dubai; and to join the exploits of the minutemen at the Mexican border. Saunders expertly navigate

A History of Reading

Alberto Manguel · 372 pages

At one magical instant in your early childhood, the page of a book—that string of confused, alien ciphers—shivered into meaning. Words spoke to you, gave up their secrets; at that moment, whole universes opened. You became, irrevocably, a reader. Noted essayist Alberto Manguel moves from this essential moment to explore the 6000-year-old conversation between words and that magician without whom th

On the Natural History of Destruction

W.G. Sebald · 202 pages

This book is acclaimed German novelist Sebald's investigation of one of the least examined "silences" of our time. He examines the devastation of German cities by Allied bombardment, and the reasons for the astonishing absence of this unprecedented trauma from German history and culture. This void is in part a repression of things--such as the death by fire of the city of Hamburg at the hands of t

A Supposedly Fun Thing I'll Never Do Again: Essays and Arguments

David Foster Wallace · 353 pages

A collection of stories from David Foster Wallace is occasion to celebrate. These stories -- which have been prominently serialized in Harper's, Esquire, the Paris Review, and elsewhere -- explore intensely immediate states of mind, with the attention to voice and the extraordinary creative daring that have won Wallace his reputation as one of the most talented fiction writer of his generation.Amo

"Exterminate All the Brutes": One Man's Odyssey into the Heart of Darkness and the Origins of European Genocide

Sven Lindqvist · 190 pages

Dancing in Cambodia, at Large in Burma

Amitav Ghosh · 114 pages

Imagined London: A Tour of the World's Greatest Fictional City

Anna Quindlen · 169 pages

Anna Quindlen first visited London from a chair in her suburban Philadelphia home--in one of her beloved childhood mystery novels. She has been back to London countless times since, through the pages of books and in person, and now, in Imagined London, she takes her own readers on a tour of this greatest of literary cities.While New York, Paris, and Dublin are also vividly portrayed in fiction, it

Danube: A Sentimental Journey from the Source to the Black Sea

Claudio Magris · 416 pages

London Orbital

Iain Sinclair · 577 pages

A brilliant voyage of discovery into the deeply unfashionable fringes of London.'It isn't often that one reads a book and is convinced that it's an instant classic, but I'm sure that LONDON ORBITAL will be read 50 years from now. This account of his walk around the M25 is on one level a journey into the heart of darkness, that terrain of golf courses, retail parks and industrial estates which is B

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them

Elif Batuman · 297 pages

Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence--including her own.

In the American Grain

William Carlos Williams

The Omnivore's Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals

Michael Pollan · 450 pages

What should we have for dinner?" To one degree or another this simple question assails any creature faced with a wide choice of things to eat. Anthropologists call it the omnivore's dilemma. Choosing from among the countless potential foods nature offers, humans have had to learn what is safe, and what isn't—which mushrooms should be avoided, for example, and which berries we can enjoy. Today, as

Cultural Amnesia: Necessary Memories from History and the Arts

Clive James · 896 pages

Echoing Edward Said's belief that "Western humanism is not enough, we need a universal humanism," renowned critic Clive James presents here his life's work. Containing over one hundred original essays, organized by quotations from A to Z, this book illuminates, rescues, or occasionally destroys the careers of many of the greatest thinkers, humanists, musicians, artists, and philosophers of the twe

Confronting the Classics: Traditions, Adventures and Innovations

Mary Beard · 320 pages

Russian Thinkers

Isaiah Berlin, Jason Ferrell · 312 pages

Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkers is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in his most famous essay, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox,' Berlin considers the social and p

Travels with Herodotus

Ryszard Kapuscinski · 288 pages

From the renowned journalist comes this intimate account of his years in the field, traveling for the first time beyond the Iron Curtain to India, China, Ethiopia, and other exotic locales.In the 1950s, Ryszard Kapuscinski finished university in Poland and became a foreign correspondent, hoping to go abroad -- perhaps to Czechoslovakia. Instead, he was sent to India -- the first stop on a decades-