Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us.

Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Christopher Hitchens refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us.

On June 8, 2010, while on a book tour for his bestselling memoir, HITCH-22, Christopher Hitchens was stricken in his New York hotel room with excruciating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of award-winning columns for Vanity Fair, he suddenly found himself being deported "from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady." Over the next 18 months, until his death in Houston on December 15, 2011, he wrote constantly and brilliantly on politics and culture, astonishing readers with his capacity for superior work even in extremis.

Throughout the course of his ordeal battling esophageal cancer, Hitchens adamantly and bravely refused the solace of religion, preferring to confront death with both eyes open. In this riveting account of his affliction, Hitchens poignantly describes the torments of illness, discusses its taboos, and explores how disease transforms experience and changes our relationship to the world around us. By turns personal and philosophical, Hitchens embraces the full panoply of human emotions as cancer invades his body and compels him to grapple with the enigma of death.

MORTALITY is the exemplary story of one man's refusal to cower in the face of the unknown, as well as a searching look at the human predicament. Crisp and vivid, veined throughout with penetrating intelligence, Hitchens's testament is a courageous and lucid work of literature, an affirmation of the dignity and worth of man.

Life is good for Maura Corrigan. Married to her college sweetheart, Pete, raising three young kids with her parents nearby in her peaceful Chicago suburb, her world is secure. Then one day, in a single turn of fate, that entire world comes crashing down and everything that she thought she knew changes.

Life is good for Maura Corrigan. Married to her college sweetheart, Pete, raising three young kids with her parents nearby in her peaceful Chicago suburb, her world is secure. Then one day, in a single turn of fate, that entire world comes crashing down and everything that she thought she knew changes.

A bright June day. A split-second distraction. A family forever changed.

Life is good for Maura Corrigan. Married to her college sweetheart, Pete, raising three young kids with her parents nearby in her peaceful Chicago suburb, her world is secure. Then one day, in a single turn of fate, that entire world comes crashing down and everything that she thought she knew changes.

Maura must learn to move forward with the weight of grief and the crushing guilt of an unforgivable secret. Pete senses a gap growing between him and his wife but finds it easier to escape to the bar with his friends than face the flaws in his marriage.

Meanwhile, Maura's parents are dealing with the fault lines in their own marriage. Charismatic Roger, who at 65, is still chasing the next business deal and Margaret, a pragmatic and proud homemaker, have been married for four decades, seemingly happily. But the truth is more complicated. Like Maura, Roger has secrets of his own and when his deceptions and weaknesses are exposed, Margaret's love and loyalty face the ultimate test.

THOSE WE LOVE MOST chronicles how these unforgettable characters confront their choices, examine their mistakes, fight for their most valuable relationships, and ultimately find their way back to each other. It takes us deep into the heart of what makes families and marriages tick and explores a fundamental question: when the ties that bind us to those we love are strained or broken, how do we pick up the pieces?

Deeply penetrating and brimming with emotional insight, this engrossing family drama heralds the arrival of a major new voice in contemporary fiction.

Joyce Carol Oates takes readers deep into dangerous territory, from a maximum-security prison to the inner landscapes of two beautiful and mysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los Angeles: Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia, victim of a long-unsolved and particularly brutal murder, and her roommate Norma Jeane Baker, soon to become Marilyn Monroe.

Joyce Carol Oates takes readers deep into dangerous territory, from a maximum-security prison to the inner landscapes of two beautiful and mysteriously doomed young women in 1940s Los Angeles: Elizabeth Short, otherwise known as the Black Dahlia, victim of a long-unsolved and particularly brutal murder, and her roommate Norma Jeane Baker, soon to become Marilyn Monroe.

Bob Spitz, the author of a well-regarded biography of the Beatles, has now given us a hagiography of another 20th-century icon: Julia Child. His affection for television’s French Chef comes through on every page. This comprehensive book covers Child’s life from her privileged upbringing in Pasadena to her work in the OSS during World War II to her four decades as one of America’s preeminent cooking teachers.

Bob Spitz, the author of a well-regarded biography of the Beatles, has now given us a hagiography of another 20th-century icon: Julia Child. His affection for television’s French Chef comes through on every page. This comprehensive book covers Child’s life from her privileged upbringing in Pasadena to her work in the OSS during World War II to her four decades as one of America’s preeminent cooking teachers.

It’s rare for someone to emerge in America who can change our attitudes, our beliefs, and our very culture. It’s even rarer when that someone is a middle-aged, six-foot three-inch woman whose first exposure to an unsuspecting public is cooking an omelet on a hot plate on a local TV station.  And yet, that’s exactly what Julia Child did. The warble-voiced doyenne of television cookery became an iconic cult figure and joyous rule-breaker as she touched off the food revolution that has gripped America for more than 50 years.

Now, in Bob Spitz’s definitive, wonderfully affectionate biography, the Julia we know and love comes vividly --- and surprisingly --- to life. In DEARIE, Spitz employs the same skill he brought to his best-selling, critically acclaimed book THE BEATLES, providing a clear-eyed portrait of one of the most fascinating and influential Americans of our time --- a woman known to all, yet known by only a few.

At its heart, DEARIE is a story about a woman’s search for her own unique expression.  Julia Child was a directionless, gawky young woman who ran off halfway around the world to join a spy agency during World War II. She eventually settled in Paris, where she learned to cook and collaborated on the writing of what would become MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING, a book that changed the food culture of America. She was already fifty when "The French Chef" went on the air --- at a time in our history when women weren’t making those leaps. Julia became the first educational TV star, virtually launching PBS as we know it today; her marriage to Paul Child formed a decades-long love story that was romantic, touching, and quite extraordinary.

A fearless, ambitious, supremely confident woman, Julia took on all the pretensions that embellished tony French cuisine and fricasseed them to a fare-thee-well, paving the way for everything that has happened since in American cooking, from TV dinners and Big Macs to sea urchin foam and the Food Channel. Julia Child’s story, however, is more than the tale of a talented woman and her sumptuous craft.  It is also a saga of America’s coming of age and growing sophistication, from the Depression Era to the turbulent sixties and the excesses of the eighties to the greening of the American kitchen. Julia had an effect on and was equally affected by the baby boom, the sexual revolution, and the start of the women’s liberation movement.

On the centenary of her birth, Julia finally gets the biography she richly deserves. An in-depth, intimate narrative, full of fresh information and insights, DEARIE is an entertaining, all-out adventure story of one of our most fascinating and beloved figures.

Just as the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle Lionel --- once again in a London prison --- wins £140 million in the lottery. Upon his release, Lionel hires a public relations firm and begins dating a topless model and “poet.” Strangely, however, Lionel's true nature remains uncompromised, while his problems --- and therefore also Desmond's --- seem only to multiply.

Just as the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle Lionel --- once again in a London prison --- wins £140 million in the lottery. Upon his release, Lionel hires a public relations firm and begins dating a topless model and “poet.” Strangely, however, Lionel's true nature remains uncompromised, while his problems --- and therefore also Desmond's --- seem only to multiply.

A savage, funny, and mysteriously poignant saga by a renowned author at the height of his powers. 

Lionel Asbo, a terrifying yet weirdly loyal thug (self-named after England's notorious Anti-Social Behaviour Order), has always looked out for his ward and nephew, the orphaned Desmond Pepperdine.  He provides him with fatherly career advice (always carry a knife, for example) and is determined they should share the joys of pit bulls (fed with lots of Tabasco sauce), Internet porn, and all manner of more serious criminality.  Des, on the other hand, desires nothing more than books to read and a girl to love (and to protect a family secret that could be the death of him).  But just as he begins to lead a gentler, healthier life, his uncle --- once again in a London prison --- wins £140 million in the lottery and upon his release hires a public relations firm and begins dating a cannily ambitious topless model and “poet.”  Strangely, however, Lionel's true nature remains uncompromised while his problems, and therefore also Desmond's, seem only to multiply.

A love story serves as the backdrop for THE MAP OF THE SKY when New York socialite Emma Harlow agrees to marry millionaire Montgomery Gilmore, but only if he accepts her audacious challenge: to reproduce the extraterrestrial invasion featured in Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds. What follows are three interconnected plots that create a breathtaking tale of time travel and mystery.

A love story serves as the backdrop for THE MAP OF THE SKY when New York socialite Emma Harlow agrees to marry millionaire Montgomery Gilmore, but only if he accepts her audacious challenge: to reproduce the extraterrestrial invasion featured in Orson Wells’ War of the Worlds. What follows are three interconnected plots that create a breathtaking tale of time travel and mystery.

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital gave Victoria Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea --- of the body as a garden to be tended. GOD'S HOTEL tells their story and the story of the hospital itself.

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital gave Victoria Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea --- of the body as a garden to be tended. GOD'S HOTEL tells their story and the story of the hospital itself.

San Francisco's Laguna Honda Hospital is the last almshouse in the country, a descendant of the Hôtel-Dieu (God's hotel) that cared for the sick in the Middle Ages. Ballet dancers and rock musicians, professors and thieves --- "anyone who had fallen, or, often, leapt, onto hard times" and needed extended medical care --- ended up here. So did Victoria Sweet, who came for two months and stayed for twenty years.

Laguna Honda, lower tech but human paced, gave Sweet the opportunity to practice a kind of attentive medicine that has almost vanished. Gradually, the place transformed the way she understood her work. Alongside the modern view of the body as a machine to be fixed, her extraordinary patients evoked an older idea, of the body as a garden to be tended. GOD'S HOTEL tells their story and the story of the hospital itself, which, as efficiency experts, politicians, and architects descended, determined to turn it into a modern "health care facility," revealed its own surprising truths about the essence, cost, and value of caring for body and soul.

Midwife Patience Murphy has a talent for escorting mothers through the challenges of bringing children into the world. Working in the hardscrabble conditions of Appalachia during the Depression, Patience helps those most in need --- and least likely to pay. She knows a successful midwifery practice must be built on a foundation of openness and trust, but the secrets Patience is keeping are far too intimate and fragile for her to ever let anyone in.

Midwife Patience Murphy has a talent for escorting mothers through the challenges of bringing children into the world. Working in the hardscrabble conditions of Appalachia during the Depression, Patience helps those most in need --- and least likely to pay. She knows a successful midwifery practice must be built on a foundation of openness and trust, but the secrets Patience is keeping are far too intimate and fragile for her to ever let anyone in.

Retired Special Branch agent David Hughes disappears after looking into the previously closed case of Oliver Jordan, who went missing at the hands of the IRA decades ago. Soon after, a former spy is found bludgeoned to death, the day after placing his own obituary in the newspaper. To solve this string of murders, Catholic detective Celcius Daly must reach decades into the past, confronting a painful history that Ireland would prefer to forget.

Retired Special Branch agent David Hughes disappears after looking into the previously closed case of Oliver Jordan, who went missing at the hands of the IRA decades ago. Soon after, a former spy is found bludgeoned to death, the day after placing his own obituary in the newspaper. To solve this string of murders, Catholic detective Celcius Daly must reach decades into the past, confronting a painful history that Ireland would prefer to forget.