For the creative fulfillment of writers who identify as runners, walkers, or movers, Running, Thinking, Writing: Embodied Cognition in Composition unveils the varied understandings of the relationship between writing activity and physical activity. Jackie Hoermann-Elliott provides an interdisciplinary overview of relevant research from the fields of composition studies, cognitive science, neuroscience, and sports psychology before proposing a new theoretical framework for explaining what happens to writers when they are moved to develop their writing while their bodies are in motion. She shares illuminating accounts from runner-writers working in the industries of journalism, academia, and youth literature. She also provides pedagogical insights from working with student writers on embodied writing assignments as well as introductory activities for instructors to try in their own classrooms. With a running metaphor guiding the chapters in this book, readers will be challenged to view writing as embodied cognition and to realize the benefits of embodiment for all writers.

From the best-selling author of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle and After Dark, a rich and revelatory memoir about writing and running, and the integral impact both have made on his life. In 1982, having sold his jazz bar to devote himself to writing, Haruki Murakami began running to keep fit. A year later, he’d completed a solo course from Athens to Marathon, and now, after dozens of such races, not to mention triathlons and a slew of critically acclaimed books, he reflects upon the influence the sport has had on his life and—even more important—on his writing. Equal parts training log, travelogue, and reminiscence, this revealing memoir covers his four-month preparation for the 2005 New York City Marathon and includes settings ranging from Tokyo’s Jingu Gaien gardens, where he once shared the course with an Olympian, to the Charles River in Boston among young women who outpace him. Through this marvellous lens of sport emerges a cornucopia of memories and insights: the eureka moment when he decided to become a writer, his greatest triumphs and disappointments, his passion for vintage LPs and the experience, after the age of fifty, of seeing his race times improve and then fall back. By turns funny and sobering, playful and philosophical, What I Talk About When I Talk About Running is both for fans of this masterful yet guardedly private writer and for the exploding population of athletes who find similar satisfaction in distance running.

In recent years, endurance athletes, bodybuilders, and long-distance runners such as Ruth Heidrich, Scott Jurek, Rich Roll, Brendan Brazier, Robert Cheeke, and many others have destroyed the notion that you cannot be a top-flight competitor on a plant-based diet and upended the stereotype that veganism means weakness, placidity, and passivity. But are there deeper connections between veganism and running, for example, that reach beyond attaining peak performance to other aspects of being vegan: such as living lightly on the land, caring for other-than-human life, and connecting to our animal bodies? The fifteen writers in Running, Eating, Thinking wager that there are, and they explore in manifold ways how those connections might be made. From coping with cancer to reflecting on the need of the confined animal to run free, from Buddhist ideas of nonviolence to harnessing the breath for singing and running, and from extolling the glories of lentils to committing oneself to the long run in animal activism, Running, Eating, Thinking is a pioneering anthology that may redefine your thinking about veganism and running.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NOW WITH A NEW WORKBOOK Deena Kastor was a star youth runner with tremendous promise, yet her career almost ended after college, when her competitive method—run as hard as possible, for fear of losing—fostered a frustration and negativity and brought her to the brink of burnout. On the verge of quitting, she took a chance and moved to the high altitudes of Alamosa, Colorado, where legendary coach Joe Vigil had started the first professional distance-running team. There she encountered the idea that would transform her running career: the notion that changing her thinking—shaping her mind to be more encouraging, kind, and resilient—could make her faster than she’d ever imagined possible. Building a mind so strong would take years of effort and discipline, but it would propel Kastor to the pinnacle of running—to American records in every distance from the 5K to the marathon—and to the accomplishment of earning America’s first Olympic medal in the marathon in twenty years. Let Your Mind Run is a fascinating intimate look inside the mind of an elite athlete, a remarkable story of achievement, and an insightful primer on how the small steps of cultivating positivity can give anyone a competitive edge.

*Major New York Times Bestseller *More than 2.6 million copies sold *One of The New York Times Book Review's ten best books of the year *Selected by The Wall Street Journal as one of the best nonfiction books of the year *Presidential Medal of Freedom Recipient *Daniel Kahneman's work with Amos Tversky is the subject of Michael Lewis's best-selling The Undoing Project: A Friendship That Changed Our Minds In his mega bestseller, Thinking, Fast and Slow, Daniel Kahneman, world-famous psychologist and winner of the Nobel Prize in Economics, takes us on a groundbreaking tour of the mind and explains the two systems that drive the way we think. System 1 is fast, intuitive, and emotional; System 2 is slower, more deliberative, and more logical. The impact of overconfidence on corporate strategies, the difficulties of predicting what will make us happy in the future, the profound effect of cognitive biases on everything from playing the stock market to planning our next vacation—each of these can be understood only by knowing how the two systems shape our judgments and decisions. Engaging the reader in a lively conversation about how we think, Kahneman reveals where we can and cannot trust our intuitions and how we can tap into the benefits of slow thinking. He offers practical and enlightening insights into how choices are made in both our business and our personal lives—and how we can use different techniques to guard against the mental glitches that often get us into trouble. Topping bestseller lists for almost ten years, Thinking, Fast and Slow is a contemporary classic, an essential book that has changed the lives of millions of readers.

George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

From the critically acclaimed author of Be Safe I Love You comes a haunting novel of love, friendship, and survival set in the red light district of Athens in the 1980s that New York magazine calls “a gauzy portrait of youthful longing, sticky romance, and regret.” Running follows the lives of three friends and lovers: queer English poet Milo Rollack, prep school dropout Jasper Lethe, and seventeen-year-old Bridey Sullivan, an American with a fascination for fire. Barely out of childhood, squatting in a crumbling hotel on the outskirts of Athens in the late 1980s, the three slip in and out of homelessness, heavy drinking, and underground jobs. While working as runners for the hotel—convincing tourists to stay there for a commission and free board—they are befriended by an IRA fugitive and become inextricably linked to an act of terrorism that will mark each of them for life. Bridey, the consummate survivor, abandons Jasper and Milo, planning to return when the dust has settled. But no one has fared well in her absence. And then a mysterious death drives her to seek an impossible absolution that will take her from the streets of the red-light district to the remote island cliff houses of the southern Mediterranean. Twenty-five years later, Milo, now a successful writer and professor in Manhattan, struggles to live ethically in a world he knows is corrupt, coping with a secret that makes him a stranger to those closest to him. “Beautiful and atmospheric…original and deeply sad” (Kirkus Reviews), Running is a sweeping and fearless story of friendship and survival from Cara Hoffman, an author who “writes like a dream—a disturbing, emotionally charged dream” (The Wall Street Journal).

Sometime between claiming my first Social Security check at 62 and signing on with Medicare at 65, I heard an offhand comment by a fellow writer on running from the same age-group. Rich Benyo, editor of Marathon & Beyond, had finished writing his life story and urged me to get going on mine. “Our age is the best time to write memoirs,” he said. “We're old enough to have had the experiences, but still young enough to remember what they were.”My second big push was a cancer diagnosis. Doctors found this disease early and treated it well, but the episode still left me thinking: Better get going on this book now, when the successful treatment has renewed my appreciation for the life I've led.Writing on this memoir began in 2008, shortly after hearing the three chilling words: “You have cancer.” I wrote and wrote and wrote that year, and only took the story as far as 1967. This became Starting Lines, covering my growing-up years in the Midwest. Two more books (Going Far and Home Runs) would follow in the next two years.The processing and polishing of this memoir series took three years. But in a sense I've been writing this story almost as long as I've lived it. The rough draft runs to more than 50 volumes. Since 1959, I have been a journalist in the truest sense: one whose writing all starts on a daily journal page.My first and most enduring literary hero was John Steinbeck. He taught me to read and inspired me to write. The first non-sports book I've ever read for pleasure, without a teacher's grade hanging over me, was Steinbeck's Grapes of Wrath. The best writing instructions I've ever seen were in his Journal of a Novel, which solidified my habit of journal-keeping.Fittingly John Steinbeck influenced the format of the three books. In one of his minor novels, Cannery Row's sequel called Sweet Thursday, he wrote lines that stayed with me: “Looking back, you can usually find the moment of the birth of a new era, whereas when it happened it was one day hooked on the tail of another. There were prodigies and portents, but you never notice such things until afterward.”I've known days like this, and I revisit dozens of them here. Each chapter of Starting Lines (and its two sequels) opens with a journal-like entry from one of my big days, then I append an instant epilogue (called “Update”) that tells where the events led. New-era-openers abound in every life. I've been lucky enough to keep a written record of mine.

Nearly 10 years after its first publication, Aurum are re-issuing this classic running book which has defined a genre. It includes an introduction from bestselling author Robert Macfarlane and an epilogue from Richard Askwith. The concept of fell-running is simple: it’s a sport that involves running over mountains – sometimes one, sometimes many. It’s also immensely demanding. While running uphill is a stamina-sapping slog, running pell-mell down the other side requires the agility – and even recklessness – of a mountain goat. And there’s the weather to contend with. It may make the sports pages only rarely, but in areas like the Lake District and Snowdonia fell-running is the basis of a whole culture – indeed, race organisers sometimes have to turn competitors away so that fragile mountain uplands are not irrevocably damaged by too many thundering feet. Fixtures like the annual Ben Nevis and Snowdon races attract runners from all over Britain, and beyond. Others, such as the Wasdale and Ennerdale fell runs in the Lakeland valleys – gruelling marathons of more than 20 miles – remain truly local events for which the whole community turns out, with many of the runners back on the same fells the next day tending sheep. Now, Richard Askwith explores the world of fell-running in the only legitimate way: by donning his Ron Hill vest and studded shoes to spend a season running as many of the great fell races as he can, from Borrowdale to Ben Nevis: an arduous schedule that tests the very limits of one’s stamina and courage. Over the months he also meets the greats of fell-running – like the remarkable Joss Naylor, who to celebrate his fiftieth birthday ran all 214 major Lakeland fells in a single week; Billy Bland, the combative Borrowdale man whose astounding records still stand for many of the top races; and Bill Teasdale, a hero of the sport’s earlier, professional days, whom he tracks down to his tiny cottage in the northern Lakes. And ultimately Askwith’s obsession drives him to attempt the ultimate challenge: the Bob Graham Round – a non-stop circuit of 42 of the Lake District’s highest peaks to be completed within 24 hours. This is a portrait of one of the few sports to have remained utterly true to its roots – in which the point is not fame or fortune but to run the ancient, wild landscape, and to be a hero, if at all, within one’s own valley. Feet in the Clouds is a chronicle of a masochistic but admirable sporting obsession, an insight into one of the oldest extreme sports, and a lyrical tribute to Britain’s mountains and the men and women who live among them.

A lifelong runner’s groundbreaking guide to fighting depression and anxiety, one run at a time Everyone knows that running builds stronger muscles and a healthier heart. In Running Is My Therapy, longtime runner Scott Douglas shows how endurance running is also the best form of exercise to develop a healthier brain. A natural antidepressant, running reinforces the benefits of therapy and triggers lasting, positive physiological changes. In fact, some doctors now “prescribe” a running regimen as part of their first-line treatment plan for depression. Marshaling expert advice and a growing body of research, Douglas explains how we can all use running to improve mental health—and live happier.