At twenty-six, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. In the wake of her mother's rapid death from cancer, her family disbanded and her marriage crumbled. With nothing to lose, she made the most impulsive decision of her life: to walk eleven-hundred miles of the west coast of America - from the Mojave Desert, through California and Oregon, and into Washington State - and to do it along. She had no experience of long-distance hiking and the...

In this collection of essays, Patchett turns her writer's eye on her own experiences and transforms the private into the universal, providing us all a way to look at our own worlds anew.

"Even as a kid, everyone thought Jeff Kinney was talented. People loved his drawings, and when he went to college, his comic strip Igdoof was so popular that it spread to other universities! Still, Jeff faced challenges. His cartoons were rejected by syndicates that claimed his art was unprofessional. Then, an idea struck: Jeff would write a journal from the perspective of a child, illustrated with doodles just like a kid might do. And so, the Diary...

"From Harrison Scott Key, winner of the Thurber Prize for American Humor, How to Stay Married tells the hilarious, shocking, and spiritually profound story of one man's journey through hell and back when infidelity threatens his marriage."--

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...

"CJ Hauser expands on her viral essay sensation, "The Crane Wife," in a brilliant collection of essays that echo the work of Cheryl Strayed in their revelatory observations of romantic love. CJ Hauser uses her now-beloved title essay as an anchor around which to explore the narratives of romantic love we are taught and which we tell ourselves, and the need to often rewrite those narratives to find an accurate version of ourselves in them. Told with...

"Beloved writer Samantha Irby has returned to the printed page for her much-anticipated, sidesplitting fourth book following her 2020 breakout, Wow, no thank you, a Vintage Books Original. The success of Irby's career has taken her to new heights. She fields calls with job offers from Hollywood and walks the red carpet with the iconic ladies of Sex and the City. Finally, she has made it. But, behind all that new-found glam, Irby is just trying to...

Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika S̀nchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment--a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she's now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she's still got an irrepressible laugh,...

Moving his family from California to Maine, mystery writer David Rosenfelt tried to prepare for everything. They brought three GPSs, refrigerators full of food, and volunteers for help. But traveling in three RVs with twenty-five dogs turned out to be a bigger ordeal than he anticipated. Rosenfelt recounts the adventure with humor and warmth and tells how he and his wife became passionate foster parents for rescue dogs, culminating in the creation...

"From the author of The Queen of the Night, an essay collection exploring how we form our identities in life, in politics, and in art"-- "...How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author's manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities...