NCW Libraries

With this collection of more than fifty pieces on politics, photography, travel, history, and literature, Teju Cole solidifies his place as one of today's most powerful and original voices. On page after page, deploying prose dense with beauty and ideas, he finds fresh and potent ways to interpret art, people, and historical moments, taking in subjects from Virginia Woolf, Shakespeare, and W. G. Sebald to Instagram, Barack Obama, and Boko Haram. Cole...

"In Vesper Flights, Helen Macdonald brings together a collection of her best loved essays with new pieces on topics ranging from nostalgia for a vanishing countryside to the tribulations of farming ostriches to her own private vespers while trying to fall asleep. Meditating on notions of captivity and freedom, immigration and flight, Helen invites us into her most intimate experiences: observing songbirds from the Empire State Building as they migrate...

A collection of essays celebrating the cultural heritage of history and home argues that arrogance must be abandoned in favor of respect and care for oneself, one's neighbors, and the land. In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his fifty-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities. The writings gathered...

""Love is our only hope," Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. "It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks." In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. "Love just won't...

"A collection of long-form essays on joy, in which the author turns his curious and poetic mind to everything from skateboarding and cover songs, basketball and race, dancing and academia, death and laughter, and, always, the garden and the natural world"--

"A charmingly idiosyncratic look at writing, creativity, and the author's own novels. Haruki Murakami's myriad fans will be delighted by this unique look into the mind of a master storyteller. In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author and famously reclusive writer shares with readers what he thinks about being a novelist; his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the...

"From the bestselling author of Stitches and Help, Thanks, Wow comes her long-awaited collection of new and selected essays on hope, joy, and grace. Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It's an approach that has become her trademark. Now in Small Victories, Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship...

"Steve Doocy calls Kathy, his wife of more than thirty years, "the best cook I've ever met." Together, they take joy in cooking and entertaining with their family and friends. In The Happy Cookbook, the Doocys share favorite recipes, stories, and photos from their family life. In addition to beloved family dishes, this full-color cookbook includes recipes from friends like musician Kid Rock, professional golfer Greg Norman, and many more! The Happy...

Jim Harrison's legendary gourmandise is on full display in A Really Big Lunch. From the titular New Yorker piece about a French lunch that went to thirty-seven courses to pieces from Brick, Playboy, Kermit Lynch's newsletter, and others, from the relationship between hunter and prey to the obscure language of wine reviews, A Really Big Lunch is shot through with Harrison's pointed aperçus and keen delight in the pleasures of the senses. And between...

Married to an evangelical paster's son with a comfortable life, the author describes her reckoning with religious trauma and Midwestern values as she shed years of indoctrination, piety, and repression and came out as queer, and discusses how evangelicalism has undermined American political power structures.