In FARTHER AWAY, which gathers together essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigor to the themes, both human and literary, that have long preoccupied him. These pieces deliver on Franzen’s implicit promise to conceal nothing.

Faced with a diagnosis of prostate cancer at age 64, novelist Howard Frank Mosher embarked on a 20,000-mile book promotion tour that took him to some 150 independent bookstores. In this memoir, he recounts that journey, as well as one back to the roots of his writing career.

Julia Severn is a student at an elite institute for psychics. Her mentor, Madame Ackermann, afflicted by jealousy, refuses to pass the torch to her young disciple. Instead, she subjects Julia to the humiliation of reliving her mother's suicide when Julia was an infant. As the two lock horns, Madame Ackermann launches a desperate psychic attack that leaves Julia the victim of a crippling ailment.

When Edward Schuyler, a modest 62-year-old science teacher, is widowed, he finds himself ambushed by female attention. Edward is still in mourning, but when his stepchildren place a personal ad in the newspaper for him, he is torn between his loyalty to Bee’s memory and his growing longing for connection.

Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with English writer Graham Greene. He investigates all he has in common with Greene, and the deeper he delves, the more he begins to wonder if the man within his head is not Greene but his own father --- or even himself.

This is a definitive, hand-picked selection of Hunter S. Thompson's finest pieces ever published in Rolling Stone --- the magazine that helped to put him on the map in the 1970s. 

Though best known for his fiction, William Gibson is as much in demand for his cutting-edge observations on the world we live in now. Originally printed in publications as varied as Wired, the New York Times and the Observer, these articles and essays cover 30 years of thoughtful, observant life, and are reported in the wry, humane voice that lovers of Gibson have come to crave.

AND SO IT GOES is the culmination of five years of research and writing --- the first-ever biography of the life of Kurt Vonnegut Jr., a writer who changed the conversation of American literature.

Based on more than 40 interviews with Apple cofounder Steve Jobs conducted over two years --- as well as interviews with more than a hundred family members, friends, adversaries, competitors and colleagues --- Walter Isaacson has written a riveting story of the rollercoaster life and searingly intense personality of a creative entrepreneur whose passion for perfection and ferocious drive revolutionized six industries: personal computers, animated movies, music, phones, tablet computing and digital publishing. Driven by demons, Jobs could drive those around him to fury and despair. But his personality and products were interrelated, just as Apple’s hardware and software tended to be, as if part of an integrated system.

In her first book since THE YEAR OF MAGICAL THINKING, Joan Didion has now written with stunning frankness about her daughter, Quintana Roo, as well as thoughts and fears about having children and about growing old.