Excuse Me While I Disappear

Author: Laurie Notaro

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $4.99

Deal price: $2.49

Deal starts: December 20, 2024

Deal ends: December 20, 2024

Description:

A laugh-out-loud spin on the realities, perks, opportunities, and inevitable courses of midlife.Laurie Notaro has proved everyone wrong: she didn’t end up in rehab, prison, or cremated at a tender age. She just went gray. At past fifty, every hair’s root is a symbol of knowledge (she knows how to use a landline), experience (she rode in a car with no seat belts), and superpowers (a gray-haired lady can get away with anything).Though navigating midlife is initially upsetting—the cracking noises coming from her new old body, receiving regular junk mail from mortuaries—Laurie accepts it. And then some. With unintentional abandon, she shoplifts a bag of russet potatoes. Heckles a rude driver from her beat-up Prius. And engages in epic trolling on Nextdoor.com. That, says Laurie, is the brilliance of growing older. With each passing day, you lose an equivalent amount of fear.And the #1 New York Times bestselling author has never been so fearlessly funny as she is in this empowering, candid, and enlightening memoir about living life on the other side of fifty.

Vindication

Author: Lyndall Gordon

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $12.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: December 20, 2024

Deal ends: December 20, 2024

Description:

“Gordon relates Wollstonecraft’s story with the same potent mixture of passion and reason her subject personified . . . Wonderful, and deeply sobering.” —New York Times Book ReviewThe founder of modern feminism, Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) was the most famous woman in Europe and America in her time. Yet her reputation over the years has suffered—until now. Acclaimed biographer Lyndall Gordon mounts a spirited defense of this brilliant, unconventional woman who held strikingly modern notions of education, single motherhood, family responsibilities, working life, domestic affections, friendships, and sexual relationships.Offering a new interpretation for the 21st century, Gordon paints a vibrant, full portrait of Wollstonecraft, revealing how this remarkable woman’s genius reverberated through the generations, influencing not only her daughter, Mary Shelley, and other heirs, but early political philosophy in England and America as well—including the ideas of John and Abigail Adams.“Fierce and wonderful. . . . [Wollstonecraft is] a dazzling character on the brilliant page.” —Harper’s Magazine“Rich with new interpretations, sources, and detail . . . Captures the drama of Wollstonecraft’s life.” —Library Journal (starred review)“Imaginative and intelligent, consistently absorbing . . . [Gordon] speculates and probes with a freewheeling intelligence that responds to Wollstonecraft’s own.” —New York Review of Books“Adventurous scholarship. . . . [Gordon’s] fresh approach places this early feminist in the context of the American and French Revolutions.” —Washington Post“Judicious, sympathetic, intelligent and utterly riveting.” —The Independent“Eminently readable and rewarding.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

Knife

Author: Salman Rushdie

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: December 20, 2024

Deal ends: December 20, 2024

Description:

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • #1 NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring—and surviving—an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him

 

A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR:

The New York Times Book Review, The New Yorker, Time,

NPR,

Town & Country, Kirkus Reviews

On the morning of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie was standing onstage at the Chautauqua Institution, preparing to give a lecture on the importance of keeping writers safe from harm, when a man in black—black clothes, black mask—rushed down the aisle toward him, wielding a knife. His first thought:

So it’s you. Here you are.

What followed was a horrific act of violence that shook the literary world and beyond. Now, for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, Rushdie relives the traumatic events of that day and its aftermath, as well as his journey toward physical recovery and the healing that was made possible by the love and support of his wife, Eliza, his family, his army of doctors and physical therapists, and his community of readers worldwide.

Knife

is Rushdie at the peak of his powers, writing with urgency, with gravity, with unflinching honesty. It is also a deeply moving reminder of literature’s capacity to make sense of the unthinkable, an intimate and life-affirming meditation on life, loss, love, art—and finding the strength to stand up again.

Practice Makes Perfect

Author: Edward Vernon

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $3.99

Deal price: Free

Deal starts: December 19, 2024

Deal ends: December 19, 2024

Description:

It's the 1970s and newly qualified GP Edward Vernon has taken a job as an assistant to an elderly general practitioner in a small town in the English midlands. It is his first job in general practice; his first brave excursion into the dangerous world where patients walk round in their clothes. Dr Vernon soon finds himself bemused, fascinated and exhausted as he copes with the procession of ailing humanity that streams into his surgery and awaits his visits. A confused old lady, timid vet, puzzled diabetic, lonely housewife, hypochondriac, tipster with an ulcer, nun with dandruff and a persistent young lady with abundant charms and nothing wrong with her.
Just published as an e book, exclusive to Amazon, this book was a huge hit in England and America when first published in the 1970s.
Edward Vernon is a pen name of a well known British doctor/author.
Here's what the critics said about the series:
Thoroughly delightful - Fresno Bee
Hilarious - Titbits
A delightfully funny book that keeps the reader laughing and appeals to one's sense of the ridiculous - Sunday Advocate, Baton Rouge
For entertainment, a chapter or two before bedtime is just what the doctor ordered - Sacramento Bee
Does for British GPs what Herriot has done for vets - Booklist
Hilarious, written with skill and zest - Grimsby Evening Telegraph
Very funny - Citizen, Gloucester
Thoroughly enjoyable, genuinely funny - South Wales Echo
Wise, funny, sad and heartwarming - Chattanooga Times
Good fun - Homes and Gardens
Most of his adventures are funny, some hilarious; but he has the good sense to leven the comedy lump with some that are sad, some touching. All are written lightly, easily, entertainingly - Oxford Times
The funniest of the funny doctor books - Richard Gordon
Jolly good reading - Publishers Weekly
Views the human species he treats with much the same affection, compassion and humour as Herriot brings to the animal world - Cleveland Plain Dealer
Sometimes serious, sometimes hilarious - Lancashire Evening Post
Truthful, well observed and consistently readable - Daily Telegraph
Perceptive and witty - Surrey Advertiser
Will amuse, amaze and entertain - Yorkshire Post
etc etc

Van Gogh: The Life

Author: Steven Naifeh

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $14.99

Deal price: $1.99

Deal starts: December 18, 2024

Deal ends: December 18, 2024

Description:

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The definitive biography for decades to come.”—Leo Jansen, curator, the Van Gogh Museum, and co-editor of Vincent van Gogh: The Complete LettersSteven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith, who galvanized readers with their Pulitzer Prize–winning biography of Jackson Pollock, have written another tour de force—an exquisitely detailed, compellingly readable portrait of Vincent van Gogh. Working with the full cooperation of the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, Naifeh and Smith have accessed a wealth of previously untapped materials to bring a crucial understanding to the larger-than-life mythology of this great artist: his early struggles to find his place in the world; his intense relationship with his brother Theo; and his move to Provence, where he painted some of the best-loved works in Western art. The authors also shed new light on many unexplored aspects of Van Gogh’s inner world: his erratic and tumultuous romantic life; his bouts of depression and mental illness; and the cloudy circumstances surrounding his death at the age of thirty-seven.   Though countless books have been written about Van Gogh, no serious, ambitious examination of his life has been attempted in more than seventy years. Naifeh and Smith have re-created Van Gogh’s life with an astounding vividness and psychological acuity that bring a completely new and sympathetic understanding to this unique artistic genius.NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • The Washington Post • The Wall Street Journal • San Francisco Chronicle • NPR • The Economist • Newsday • BookReporter “In their magisterial new biography, Van Gogh: The Life, Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith provide a guided tour through the personal world and work of that Dutch painter, shining a bright light on the evolution of his art. . . . What [the authors] capture so powerfully is Van Gogh’s extraordinary will to learn, to persevere against the odds.”—Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times“Brilliant . . . Steven Naifeh and Gregory White Smith are the big-game hunters of modern art history. . . . [Van Gogh] rushes along on a tide of research. . . . At once a model of scholarship and an emotive, pacy chunk of hagiography.”—Martin Herbert, The Daily Telegraph (London)

Making Toast

Author: Roger Rosenblatt

Category: Biography & Memoir

Regular price: $6.99

Deal price: $0.99

Deal starts: December 18, 2024

Deal ends: December 18, 2024

Description:

“A painfully beautiful memoir….Written with such restraint as to be both heartbreaking and instructive.”

—E. L. Doctorow

 

A revered, many times honored (George Polk, Peabody, and Emmy Award winner, to name but a few) journalist, novelist, and playwright, Roger Rosenblatt shares the unforgettable story of the tragedy that changed his life and his family. A book that grew out of his popular December 2008 essay in The New Yorker, Making Toast is a moving account of unexpected loss and recovery in the powerful tradition of About Alice and The Year of Magical Thinking. Writer Ann Beattie offers high praise to the acclaimed author of Lapham Rising and Beet for a memoir that is, “written so forthrightly, but so delicately, that you feel you’re a part of this family.”