John Cheever spent much of his career impersonating a perfect suburban gentleman, the better to become one of the foremost chroniclers of postwar America. Written with unprecedented access to essential sources—including Cheever’s massive journal, only a fraction of which has ever been published—Bailey’s Cheever is a stunning example of the biographer’s art and a brilliant tribute to an essential author.

"A searing and brave memoir that offers a new understanding of suicide as a distinct mental illness. As the sun lowered in the sky one Friday afternoon in April 2006, acclaimed author Donald Antrim found himself on the roof of his Brooklyn apartment building, afraid for his life. In this moving memoir, Antrim vividly recounts what led him to the roof and what happened after he came back down: two hospitalizations, weeks of fruitless clinical trials,...

"... a memoir of an immigrant family coming to America, as told by a lifelong misfit who forged from his imagination an essential literary voice and, against all odds, a place in the world."--

Come gentle spring -- Two worlds -- Weakling -- Christmas present for Uncle Bob -- Old law wasn't strong enough -- Love in the spring -- Water penalty -- Our Wiff and Daniel Boone -- Pa's a man's man all right -- Mad Davids and a mechanical Goliath -- Last round up -- Land beyond the river -- Powderday's red hen -- Fast-train Ike -- Uncle Fonse laughed -- Does the army always get its man? -- Seventy-six days -- Rainy day at Big Lost Creek -- War and...

"Updike is Adam Begley's masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike--a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work.In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America,...

" The #1 internationally bestselling thriller, and ingenious book within a book, about the disappearance of a 15-year-old New Hampshire girl and, 30 years later, a young American writer's determination to clear his mentor's name--and find the inspiration for his next bestseller. August 30, 1975: the day fifteen-year-old Nola Kellergan is glimpsed fleeing through the woods before she disappears; the day Somerset, New Hampshire, lost its innocence....

Born in the mid-twentieth century and raised in the heart of conservative North Carolina, Maupin realized that the South was too small for him and took a road journey that led him from a homoerotic navy initiation ceremony in the jungles of Vietnam to San Francisco in the early 1970s. His life and travels became an epic urban saga, Tales of the City, which provided him with a very public coming-out platform, chronicled the evolution of America's queer...

Humorous essays, partly fictional, about the life of a faculty spouse, the mother of four children, in a Vermont town.