Extracts from works of many English authors who have influenced the literary journey of Ruskin Bond; with short snippets of his own experiences.

Originally published: London: Doubleday, 2002.

“One of my favorite authors.”—Colleen Hoover An insightful, delightful, instant #1 New York Times bestseller from the author of Beach Read and People We Meet on Vacation. Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Oprah Daily ∙ Today ∙ Parade ∙ Marie Claire ∙ Bustle ∙ PopSugar ∙ Katie Couric Media ∙ Book Bub ∙ SheReads ∙ Medium ∙ The Washington Post ∙ and more! One summer. Two rivals. A plot twist they didn't see coming... Nora Stephens' life is books—she’s read them all—and she is not that type of heroine. Not the plucky one, not the laidback dream girl, and especially not the sweetheart. In fact, the only people Nora is a heroine for are her clients, for whom she lands enormous deals as a cutthroat literary agent, and her beloved little sister Libby. Which is why she agrees to go to Sunshine Falls, North Carolina for the month of August when Libby begs her for a sisters’ trip away—with visions of a small town transformation for Nora, who she’s convinced needs to become the heroine in her own story. But instead of picnics in meadows, or run-ins with a handsome country doctor or bulging-forearmed bartender, Nora keeps bumping into Charlie Lastra, a bookish brooding editor from back in the city. It would be a meet-cute if not for the fact that they’ve met many times and it’s never been cute. If Nora knows she’s not an ideal heroine, Charlie knows he’s nobody’s hero, but as they are thrown together again and again—in a series of coincidences no editor worth their salt would allow—what they discover might just unravel the carefully crafted stories they’ve written about themselves.

A SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER 'Irreverently funny ... kept me giggling all week.' Scotland on Sunday "Do you have a list of your books, or do I just have to stare at them?" Shaun Bythell is the owner of The Bookshop in Wigtown, Scotland. With more than a mile of shelving, real log fires in the shop and the sea lapping nearby, the shop should be an idyll for bookworms. Unfortunately, Shaun also has to contend with bizarre requests from people who don't understand what a shop is, home invasions during the Wigtown Book Festival and Granny, his neurotic Italian assistant who likes digging for river mud to make poultices.

A sharp and entertaining essay collection about the importance of multiple forms of love and friendship in a world designed for couples, from a laser-precise new voice. Sometimes it seems like there are two American creeds, self-reliance and marriage, and neither of them is mine. I experience myself as someone formed and sustained by others' love and patience, by student loans and stipends, by the kindness of strangers. Briallen Hopper's Hard to Love honors the categories of loves and relationships beyond marriage, the ones that are often treated as invisible or seen as secondary--friendships, kinship with adult siblings, care teams that form in times of illness, or various alternative family formations. She also values difficult and amorphous loves like loving a challenging job or inanimate objects that can't love you back. She draws from personal experience, sharing stories about her loving but combative family, the fiercely independent Emerson scholar who pushed her away, and the friends who have become her invented or found family; pop culture touchstones like the Women's March, John Green's The Fault in Our Stars, and the timeless series Cheers; and the work of writers like Joan Didion, Gwendolyn Brooks, Flannery O'Connor, and Herman Melville (Moby-Dick like you've never seen it!). Hard to Love pays homage and attention to unlikely friends and lovers both real and fictional. It is a series of love letters to the meaningful, if underappreciated, forms of intimacy and community that are tricky, tangled, and tough, but ultimately sustaining.

A collection of essays discusses the central and joyful importance of books and reading in the author's life.

"Women and Leadership explores the causes and consequences of the underrepresentation of women in America's leadership roles. Drawing on comprehensive research and a survey of prominent women leaders, the book describes the reasons for gender inequity in leadership and identifies compelling solutions. It is essential reading for anyone interested in leveling the playing field for women"--

Literary Nonfiction. How does the devout son of evangelical Christians, growing up dedicated to mission work in Africa, become one of America's leading sex columnists and a self-avowed slut committed to kink as his new religion? Across his debut book, MY LOVE IS A BEAST: CONFESSIONS, Alexander Cheves details his path from piousness to faithlessness, and his awakening to the saving power of hedonism. He tells intimate stories of what he sees as the sacred grace of pleasure as he embraces his life as a sex writer, worker, and activist. In stories richly lyrical, boldly erotic, and fearlessly honest, Cheves takes readers on a tour through Savannah, Atlanta, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York City. Along the way, he explores the darker corners of Queer culture and his own life, highlighting experiences most will have never considered. His rise to national popularity among LGBTQ+ writers gets balanced by his own struggles with and recovery from substance use--and his public embrace of kink and fetish as a belief system, way of life, and identity. In the end, Cheves writes with complete, even shocking, transparency and authenticity in the service of shattering sexual shame. Graphic and at times controversial, this book is sure to become a watershed moment among erotic memoirs.

Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Anne Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists. Anne Fadiman is--by her own admission--the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it was the only written material in the apartment that she had not read at least twice. This witty collection of essays recounts a lifelong love affair with books and language. For Fadiman, as for many passionate readers, the books she loves have become chapters in her own life story. Writing with remarkable grace, she revives the tradition of the well-crafted personal essay, moving easily from anecdotes about Coleridge and Orwell to tales of her own pathologically literary family. As someone who played at blocks with her father's 22-volume set of Trollope ("My Ancestral Castles") and who only really considered herself married when she and her husband had merged collections ("Marrying Libraries"), she is exquisitely well equipped to expand upon the art of inscriptions, the perverse pleasures of compulsive proof-reading, the allure of long words, and the satisfactions of reading out loud. There is even a foray into pure literary gluttony--Charles Lamb liked buttered muffin crumbs between the leaves, and Fadiman knows of more than one reader who literally consumes page corners.