Product Description: In 1966, Rebecca Wilson’s father, a Union Leader and civil rights activist, was assassinated on the street in San Francisco. Rebecca—known throughout as “Becky”—was three years old. A House with No Roof is Wilson’s gripping memoir of how the murder of her father propelled her family into a life-long search for solace and understanding...read more

Product Description: Rosie Ferguson is seventeen and ready to enjoy the summer before her senior year of high school. Smart‚ athletic‚ and beautiful‚ she's everything her mother‚ Elizabeth‚ and her stepfather‚ James‚ hoped she could be. But as the school year draws to a close‚ there are disturbing signs that the well-adjusted life Rosie claims to be leading is a sham...read more

Product Description: Jane Vandenburgh, the author of two highly acclaimed novels and a recent memoir, offers aspiring writers the tools to create powerful and unique novels filled not only with good writing but also dynamic storytelling.Architecture of the Novel is an ambitious blueprint for writers, one that reveals the underlying machinery that propels a plot that is dynamic, coherent, and interesting...read more

Amazon.com Review: Through Anne Lamott's many books (including six novels, her bestselling parenting memoir, Operating Instructions, and her popular guide to writing, Bird by Bird) the subject she keeps returning to is her faith, her deeply personal--"erratic," she says--journey in Christianity. Her latest book, Grace (Eventually), is her third collection of her "thoughts on faith," and she took the time to answer a few of our questions. Questions for Anne Lamott This is your third book on faith. How has your perspective changed since you wrote your first one? Lamott: I wrote my first book on faith when Bill Clinton was president, and I was in a much better mood. I wrote Plan B during the run-up to war in Iraq, and the ensuing catastrophe, so I was very angry, but trying to reconcile that pain and hostility to Jesus's insistence that we are made of love, to love, and be loved, to forgive and be forgiven. Some days went better than others. Also, my son Sam was in his early teens, and that was a LOT easier than when he turned 16 and 17, his ages when I was writing the pieces in Grace (Eventually). In general, I think Grace (Eventually) is a less angry book. I like how I'm aging, except that my back hurts more often, my knees crack like twigs when I squat, and my memory fails more frequently, in more public and therefore humiliating ways. But I think I complain less. As my best friend said when she was dying, and I was obsessing about my butt, "You just don't have that kind of time." What does grace mean for you? How can we better communicate it to each other? Lamott: Grace is that extra bit of help when you think you are really doomed; also, not coincidentally, when you have finally run out of good ideas on how to proceed, and on how better to control the people or circumstances that are frustrating or defeating you. I experience Grace as a cool ribbon of fresh air when I feel spiritually claustrophobic. Sometimes I experience it as water-wings, something holding me up when I am afraid that I'm going down, or the tide is carrying me away. I know that Grace meets us whereever we are, but does not leave us where it found us. Sometimes it is so small--a couple of seconds relief here, several extra inches there. I wish it were big and obvious, like sky-writing. Oh, well. Grace is not something I DO, or can chase down; but it is something I can receive, when I stop trying to be in charge. We communicate grace to one another by holding space for people when they are hurt or terrified, instead of trying to fix them, or manage their emotions for them. We offer ourselves as silent companionship, or gentle listening when someone feels very alone. We get people glasses of water when they are thirsty. Many of the essays in Grace (Eventually) first appeared in Salon, the online magazine, and that's the way that many readers first found you. How do you see the Internet changing the way people read and write? Lamott: The Internet makes everything so immediate and spontaneous, which I totally love--UNLESS it has to do with the immediacy of people's negative response to me. Several of the Salon pieces in Grace--for instance, the story about the horrible fight with my son, and the piece about turning the other cheek while being ripped off by The Carpet Guy--generated a couple hundred letters, many of them extremely hostile. Perhaps "spewy" would be a better description. I also sometimes get knee-jerk responses to my mentions of Jesus in my Salon pieces that seem to lump me in the same tradition as Jerry Falwell. But for the most part, I love the populism and egalitarian nature of the Internet: everyone counts the same. What stories do people tell you, when they've read your books or know you are a writer? Lamott: People tell me how relieved they are that I try to tell the truth about how hard it can be to be a mother, or a daughter, or an American in these times. They tell me stories about how awful their own teenagers can be, or how awful they themselves behaved towards their kids or parents; how hard it was to finally be able to adore their mothers, or to forgive their fathers. They tell me their sobriety dates. They whisper to me that they are Christians, too. Also, they ask if I am able to read their manuscripts, and the name of my agent, and my e-mail address. They ask if we are going to survive the current political difficulties--and I promise them we are. They ask how old my son is now--17 and a half--and how he is doing, which is fantastically, after some of the hard months I wrote about in Grace. Amazon.com:What lessons do you think you can pass on to others: to your readers, to your son? What lessons does it seem like people have to learn for themselves? Lamott: All I have to offer is my own truth, my own experience, strength and hope. I can pass on the tool of a God Box, and how for 20 years I have been putting tiny notes in mine and promising God I will keep my sticky fingers off the controls until I hear God's wisdom: sometimes I get an answer because the phone rings, or the mail comes, but at any rate, during every single terrible problem and tragedy, I have been given enough guidance and stamina and even humor to bear up, and be transformed, for the good. I always tell Sam that if you want to make God laugh, tell Her your plans. I tell Sam that if he listens to his best thinking, he will suffer: and to listen to his heart instead, to listen in the silence, and to seek wise counsel. You've written nearly a dozen books (including an incredibly popular guide to writing): does writing get any easier? Does it get harder? Lamott: In a very important way, writing gets easier, because I've been doing it full time now for thirty-plus years, and just as you would get better and better if you practiced your scales on a piano, I've gotten better, and can try harder and harder pieces. But writing is always hard. It does not come naturally to me at all. I sit down at the same time every day, which lets my subconscious realize it's time to get to work. I give myself very short assignments, and let myself write really terrible first drafts. But I grapple with the exact same problems every writer does, which is having equal proportions of self-loathing and grandiosity. I sort of live by the Nike ads: Just Do It. So I sit down. I show up. I do it by pre-arrangement with myself, because I know I'll feel sad and terrible if I shirk on that days writing. I do it as a debt of honor, to myself, and to whatever it is that has given me this gift of being able to tell stories, and to make people laugh. Laughter is carbonated holiness. Other people's good writing is medicine for me, and I hope mine is too, for my readers.

Product Description: JOE JONES is Anne Lamott’s raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie’s Café, "the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck." Jessie, "thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine," inherited the café years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie’s gay grandson; Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday...read more

Product Description: JOE JONES is Anne Lamott’s raucous novel of lives gathered around Jessie’s Café, "the sort of broken-down waterfront dive one might expect to find in Steinbeck." Jessie, "thin, stooped and gorgeous at seventy-nine," inherited the café years before and it has become home to a remarkable family of characters: Louise, the cook and vortex, Joe, devoted and unfaithful; Willie, Jessie’s gay grandson; Georgia, an empress dowager who never speaks; and a dozen others all living together in the sweet everyday...read more

Product Description: "Thirty years ago my older brother, who was  ten years old at the time, was trying to get a  report on birds written that he'd had three months to  write. It was due the next day. We were out at our  family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen  table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper  and pencils and unopened books on birds,  immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead...read more

In a thought-provoking compilation of essays from Salon.com, twenty-eight celebrated writers--including Rick Moody, Kathryn Harrison, Lauren Slater, and Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez--share their thoughts on parenthood in twenty-first-century America as they look at their individual decisions on whether or not to become a parent. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

A spiritual guide by the author of the best-selling Traveling Mercies shares humorous and inspirational advice on how to manage with grace in today's world of terrorism, while caring for aging parents and children simultaneously, and in the face of environmental threats. Reprint.

A single mother and writer grappling alone with the problems of a newborn baby presents a vivid account of the confusion, joys, sorrows, and struggles of the first year in her son's life. Reprint. 20,000 first printing.

Product Description: Have you ever daydreamed about taking a risk but still felt paralyzed by fear? Can you imagine finding your dream home, embracing a career you love, or taking time off to travel the world? When Diane Conway started asking people what they would do if they had no fear, the results were both surprising and enlightening...read more

Amazon.com Review: Few people can write about faith, parenting, and relationships as can the talented, irreverent Anne Lamott. With characteristic black humor, ("Everyone has been having a hard time with life this year; not with all of it, just the waking hours") she updates us on the ongoing mayhem of her life since Traveling Mercies, and continues to unfold her spiritual journey...read more

Amazon.com Review: One of the few progressive Christian writers with a national voice, Anne Lamott's work (Bird by Bird, Operating Instructions) ranges from the meditative to the hilarious. Blue Shoe falls somewhere in the middle of that range. A slow, thoughtful novel, rooted in the domestic routines of child-raising, Blue Shoe follows the newly separated Mattie Ryder as she moves back into her childhood home, recently vacated by her elderly mother, and undertakes the renovation of her entire life...read more

Product Description: 1997 Audie Award winner for country's Best Educational/How-to/Instructional Audiobook. Provocative and witty, Anne Lamott takes you beyond her book Bird by Bird. Good writing, she says, slows you down, opens your heart and arrives through your fingers, knowing what it's about...read more

Product Description: Truth Is Beauty That Hurts The Collected Poems of Elizabeth M. Come There is much to love and enjoy in the poetry of Elizabeth M. Come, as you are about to discover. She was a woman who paid attention to the world, both outside her windows, and within...read more

Louise, a cook at Jessie's Cafe, relies on humor and the friendship of her co-workers and regulars at the cafe to get over her breakup with Joe Jones. Reprint.

Combining elements of spiritual study and memoir, the author describes her odyssey of faith, drawing on her own sometimes troubled past to explore the many ways in which faith sustains and guides one's daily life

A recovering alcoholic documents his first year of sobriety after returning home from rehabilitation.

Newly divorced, Nan Goodman returns to her childhood home and to vivid thoughts of her eccentric yet warm familyher unconventional parents, supportive babysitter, and loving younger brotherand of the feelings of security and warmth of a bygone era. Reprint.

Combining elements of spiritual study and memoir, the author of Bird by Bird and Crooked Little Heart describes her odyssey of faith, drawing on her own sometimes troubled past to explore the many ways in which faith sustains and guides one's daily life. Read by Anne Lamott. Simultaneous.

An emotional but humorous novel of family and heartbreak by the author of Bird by Bird chronicles the eventful thirteenth year of Rosie Ferguson, the daughter of a former alcoholic and the prey of a mysterious stalker. Reprint.

Precocious, eight-year-old Rosie Ferguson discovers the unpleasantness of real life through the actions of the father of her best friend, Sharon Thackery