"Have you ever thought of living in some remote place, far beyond the end of the tire tracks? A place where tall snow-capped peaks reach for blue sky? Mary and I thought about high country like that for over 30 years. Then we pulled up stakes, loaded our outfit on a string of packhorses and headed up the mountain. At 8,000 feet, we fitched a tent."

Nature was a form of religion for naturalist, essayist, and early environmentalist Henry David Thoreau (1817–62). In communing with the natural world, he wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and learn what it had to teach. Toward that end Thoreau built a cabin in the spring of 1845 on the shores of Walden Pond, on land owned by Ralph Waldo Emerson, outside Concord, Massachusetts. There he observed nature, farmed,...

Written by Ethel Waxham Love, a Wellesley College graduate who went to Wyoming in 1905 as a teacher in a one-room schoolhouse, and her son, J. David Love, who later became an eminent geologist, Life on Muskrat Creek tells the fascinating story of a family's day-to-day life on an isolated ranch in early twentieth-century Wyoming. Readers will be held in suspense as they learn about the family's battle with a variety of challenges, including a near-fatal...

There aren't many books more beloved than “The Tale of Peter Rabbit” and even fewer authors as iconic as Beatrix Potter. Her characters- Peter Rabbit, Jemima Puddle Duck, and all the rest, exist in a charmed world filled with flowers and gardens. In Beatrix Potter's Gardening Life, bestselling author Marta McDowell explores the origins of Beatrix Potter's love of gardening and plants and shows how this passion came to be reflected in her work. The...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Taking up where his beloved A Year in Provence leaves off, Peter Mayle offers us another funny, beautifully (and deliciously) evocative book about life in Provence. With tales only one who lives there could know-of finding gold coins while digging in the garden, of indulging in sumptuous feasts at truck stops-and with characters introduced with great affection and wit-the gendarme fallen from grace, the summer visitors ever trying...

The #1 New York Times bestselling memoir from Augusten Burroughs, Running with Scissors, now a Major Motion Picture!

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her psychiatrist, a dead-ringer for Santa and a lunatic in the bargain. Suddenly, at age twelve, Augusten Burroughs found himself living in a dilapidated Victorian

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Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Whether she is recalling such lost friends as Coretta Scott King and Ossie Davis, extolling honesty, decrying vulgarity, explaining why becoming a Christian is a "lifelong endeavor, " or simply singing the praises of a meal of red rice--Maya Angelou writes from the heart to millions of women...

Taking on the thorny ethics of owning and selling property as a white woman in a majority Black city and a majority Bangladeshi neighborhood with both intelligence and humor, this memoir brings a new perspective to a Detroit that finds itself perpetually on the brink of revitalization.
In 2016, a Detroit arts organization grants writer and artist Anne Elizabeth Moore a free house—a room of her own, à la Virginia Woolf—in...