“ Sorrow prepares you for joy. It violently sweeps everything out of your house, so that new joy can find space to enter. It shakes the yellow leaves from the bough of your heart, so that fresh, green leaves can grow in their place. It pulls up the rotten roots, so that new roots hidden beneath have room to grow. Whatever sorrow shakes from your heart, far better things will take their place. ” ― Rumi
This fascinating reassessment of America's most popular and famous poet reveals a more complex and enigmatic man than many readers might expect. Jay Parini spent over twenty years interviewing friends of Robert Frost and working in the poet's archives at
William Faulkner was a literary genius, and one of America's most important and influential writers. Drawing on previously unavailable sources -- including letters, memoirs, and interviews with Faulkner's daughter and lovers -- Jay Parini has crafted a bi
The eerie tales of Edgar Allan Poe remain among the most brilliant, enduring, and influencial works in American literature. But Poe is also the author of some of the most haunting poetry ever written--poems of love, death and loneliness that have lost non
Jay Parini brings a life’s worth of contemplation on Jesus to the first volume in ICONS, a series of brief, thought-provoking biographies edited by James Atlas. In Jesus, Parini turns the powerful narrative skill he’s wielded over the course of a four
An intimate, authorized yet totally frank biography of Gore Vidal (1925–2012), one of the most accomplished, visible, and controversial American novelists and cultural figures of the past century The product of thirty years of friendship and conversati
In The Good Book, thirty-two of today's most prominent writers share never-before-published pieces about passages in the Bible that are most meaningful to them.The Good Book, with an introduction by Adam Gopnik, collects new pieces by writers from many di
From the author of the international bestseller "The Last Station," a stirring novel about the adventurous life and tragic literary career of Herman Melville. As "The Passages of H. M. "opens, we see, through the eyes of his long-suffering wife Lizzie, a
Born in a small town in northern California in 1902, Steinbeck refused from the outset to fit himself to any mold, digging ditches and washing dishes while intermittently attending Stanford University. Failing to take a degree, he struggled for more than
