#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER More than ONE MILLION copies sold A TODAY Show Read with Jenna Book Club Pick A New York Times Notable Book, and Chosen by Oprah Daily, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bill Gates and Barack Obama as a Best Book of the Year “Wise and wildly entertaining . . . permeated with light, wit, youth.” —The New York Times Book Review “A classic that we will read for years to come.” —Jenna Bush Hager, Read with Jenna book club “Fantastic. Set in 1954, Towles uses the story of two brothers to show that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as we might hope.” —Bill Gates “A real joyride . . . elegantly constructed and compulsively readable.” —NPR The bestselling author of A Gentleman in Moscow and Rules of Civility and master of absorbing, sophisticated fiction returns with a stylish and propulsive novel set in 1950s America In June, 1954, eighteen-year-old Emmett Watson is driven home to Nebraska by the warden of the juvenile work farm where he has just served fifteen months for involuntary manslaughter. His mother long gone, his father recently deceased, and the family farm foreclosed upon by the bank, Emmett's intention is to pick up his eight-year-old brother, Billy, and head to California where they can start their lives anew. But when the warden drives away, Emmett discovers that two friends from the work farm have hidden themselves in the trunk of the warden's car. Together, they have hatched an altogether different plan for Emmett's future, one that will take them all on a fateful journey in the opposite direction—to the City of New York. Spanning just ten days and told from multiple points of view, Towles's third novel will satisfy fans of his multi-layered literary styling while providing them an array of new and richly imagined settings, characters, and themes. “Once again, I was wowed by Towles’s writing—especially because The Lincoln Highway is so different from A Gentleman in Moscow in terms of setting, plot, and themes. Towles is not a one-trick pony. Like all the best storytellers, he has range. He takes inspiration from famous hero’s journeys, including The Iliad, The Odyssey, Hamlet, Huckleberry Finn, and Of Mice and Men. He seems to be saying that our personal journeys are never as linear or predictable as an interstate highway. But, he suggests, when something (or someone) tries to steer us off course, it is possible to take the wheel.” – Bill Gates

From the myths of the Yokuts Indians, to stories and poems by famous contemporary writers, this anthology showcases the best literature of Californias Great Central Valley, and provides a rich view of the regions physical and emotional landscape

Do you spend your days working with students who struggle to comprehend reading in literacy and content classes? Are you looking for a way to establish comprehensive literacy instruction in your school or classroom so all students receive support in becoming competent and confident readers? In Yellow Brick Roads: Shared and Guided Paths to Independent Reading, 4-12, Janet Allen offers research-based methods for helping teachers move toward these goals. This book provides research, practical methods, detailed strategies, and resources for read-aloud, shared, guided, and independent reading. In addition, Janet outlines solutions for many of the literacy dilemmas that teachers face every day: Understanding what gets in the way of reading Rethinking and reorganizing time and resources Providing support for content literacy Developing assessment practices that inform instruction Supporting reading as a path to writing instruction Establishing professional communities to support individual and school-wide needs-based research The appendixes include graphic organizers to support strategy lessons, suggestions of titles for building classroom libraries, as well as web sites and professional resources that support the teaching of reading. Yellow Brick Roads will give you rich ideas, detailed strategies, and literature support for implementing those strategies. At a time when many are looking for that elusive wizard to solve students' reading problems, this book helps you create your own paths to effective literacy environments.

Winner, Distinguished Literary Achievement, Missouri Humanities Council, 2015 The story behind the writing of the best-selling Blue Highways is as fascinating as the epic trip itself. More than thirty years after his 14,000-mile, 38-state journey, William Least Heat-Moon reflects on the four years he spent capturing the lessons of the road trip on paper—the stops and starts in his composition process, the numerous drafts and painstaking revisions, the depressing string of rejections by publishers, the strains on his personal relationships, and many other aspects of the toil that went into writing his first book. Along the way, he traces the hard lessons learned and offers guidance to aspiring and experienced writers alike. Far from being a technical manual, Writing Blue Highways: The Story of How a Book Happenedis an adventure story of its own, a journey of “exploration into the myriad routes of heart and mind that led to the making of a book from the first sorry and now vanished paragraph to the last words that came not from a graphite pencil but from a letterpress in Tennessee.” Readers will not find a collection of abstract formulations and rules for writing; rather, this book gracefully incorporates examples from Heat-Moon’s own experience. As he explains, “This story might be termed an inadvertent autobiography written not by the traveler who took Ghost Dancing in 1978 over the byroads of America but by a man only listening to him. That blue-roadman hasn’t been seen in more than a third of a century, and over the last many weeks as I sketched in these pages, I’ve regretted his inevitable departure.” Filtered as the struggles of the “blue-roadman” are through the awareness of someone more than thirty years older with a half dozen subsequent books to his credit, the story of how his first book “happened” is all the more resonant for readers who may not themselves be writers but who are interested in the tricky balance of intuitive creation and self-discipline required for any artistic endeavor.

Cora June is B-O-S-S-Y! Will anyone put the breaks on her outlandish demands? And will Cora June ever realize that she can be a leader, but still be flexible?

As he crisscrosses America—driving in search of the present, the past, and himself—Larry McMurtry shares his fascination with this nation's great trails and the culture that has developed around them. Ever since he was a boy growing up in Texas only a mile from Highway 281, Larry McMurtry has felt the pull of the road. His town was thoroughly landlocked, making the highway his "river, its hidden reaches a mystery and an enticement. I began my life beside it and I want to drift down the entire length of it before I end this book." In Roads, McMurtry embarks on a cross-country trip where his route is also his destination. As he drives, McMurtry reminisces about the places he's seen, the people he's met, and the books he's read, including more than 3,000 books about travel. He explains why watching episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show might be the best way to find joie de vivre in Minnesota; the scenic differences between Route 35 and I-801; which vigilantes lived in Montana and which hailed from Idaho; and the histories of Lewis and Clark, Sitting Bull, and Custer that still haunt Route 2 today. As it makes its way from South Florida to North Dakota, from eastern Long Island to Oregon, Roads is travel writing at its best.

Minnesota-based writer and photographer Kazynski traces the transformation of the US from a network of places connected by rutted wagon trails to a maze of highways connected to other highways. He describes and illustrates road and bridge construction and the new roadside culture that threw up motels, restaurants, gas stations, and scenic perspectives.

"Americans have treated the highway as sacred space," says Primeau (English, Central Michigan U.) introducing the rich tradition of prose and non-fiction road narratives that include On the Road, Grapes of Wrath, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and the Journals of Lewis and Clark. Primeau critically examines these and other works from the position of travel as pilgrimage resulting in identifiable themes of protest, self discovery, picaresque parody, and myth making. Paper edition (unseen), $17.95. Annotation copyright by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE Funny and heartbreaking, this New York Times bestselling debut perfectly captures the maddening confusion of adolescence and the prickly nature of family with irony and unerring honesty. Harley Altmyer should be in college having the time of his life. He should be free from the backwards Pennsylvania coal town he calls home, with its lack of jobs and no sense of humor. Instead, he’s constantly reminded of just how messed up everything is... Harley’s mother is in prison for killing his father, so he’s in charge of bringing up his younger sisters and working two jobs to pay the bills—and that doesn’t leave a lot of time for distractions. But lately, he’s getting more and more sidetracked by lusting after Callie Mercer, his middle-aged neighbor. As he struggles to keep it together, things begin to spin out of control. Soon Harley finds that as shattered as his family is, there are still more crushing surprises in store. “In Harley, O’Dell has created a hero who’s heartbreakingly believable; like Holden Caulfield, he uses caustic humor to hide his pain. Readers will care very much about him and his future, if indeed he has one.”—St. Petersburg Times

In Divided Highways, Tom Lewis tells the monumental story of the largest engineered structure ever built: the Interstate Highway System. Here is one of the great untold tales of American enterprise, recounted entirely through the stories of the human beings who thought up, mapped out, poured, paved - and tried to stop - the Interstates. Conceived and spearheaded by Thomas "the Chief" MacDonald, the iron-willed bureaucrat from the muddy farmlands of Iowa who rose to unrivaled power, the highway system was propelled forward through the pathbreaking efforts of brilliant engineers, argued over by politicians of every ideological and moral stripe, reviled by the citizens whose lives it devastated, and lauded as the greatest public works project in U.S. history.