 | Tracy Kidder
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Essayist
"A lot of the job of a person trying to write stories that are true is to make what’s true believable. It isn’t enough to say, well, it actually happened. You have to make it believable on the page; you have to bring people to life and scenes to life."
—Tracy Kidder
Over his long career, Kidder’s writing has been prolific and outstanding. The Soul of a New Machine—a book celebrated for its insight into the world of high-tech corporate America—earned him a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award in 1982. Other bestselling works include House (1985), Among Schoolchildren (1989), Old Friends (1993) and Home Town (1999).
Selected Books: Mountains Beyond Mountains, The Strength in What Remains, The Soul of a New Machine
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Mountains Beyond Mountains, Strength in What Remains | Dr. Peter Kramer, MD
Bestselling Author │ Psychiatrist │ Novelist
"What if Van Gogh had taken antidepressants? Would we still have Starry Night?"
—Dr. Peter Kramer
More than a decade ago, Dr. Peter Kramer revolutionized the way we think about antidepressants with his enormously popular and influential bestseller Listening to Prozac (Viking, 1993). Thoughtful and provocative, Kramer’s work explored what it means to have medicines that alter the essence of personality and how this impacts our understanding of self.
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Freud: Inventor of the Modern Mind | Rebecca Skloot
Bestselling Author │ Journalist │ Educator
Bestselling author Rebecca Skloot spent over ten years doggedly
uncovering the truth about the life, death and ultimate "immortality" of
a poor black tobacco farmer named Henrietta Lacks. On a tumultuous
educational path until a community college biology instructor utter the
words "Henrietta Lacks," Skloot—with remarkable focus and tenacity—set
off on a trajectory that would shine the national spotlight on both and
become the phenomenal book, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks.
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The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks | William T. Vollmann
Novelist │ Short Story Writer │ Journalist
William T. Vollmann is a monster, a monster of talent, ambition and accomplishment."
—Los Angeles Times
Distinctive for his boundless ambition and extraordinary output—23 books to date, counting the seven-volume, 3,352-page, Rising Up and Rising Down series—Vollmann fully inhabits two often polarized literary worlds. “One of the most unnerving aspects [of Vollmann's work]….is his combination of journalistic immediacy with profound moral inquiry” (Chicago Tribune). That duality has earned him comparisons to Thomas Pynchon.
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Uncentering the Earth: Copernicus and The Revolutions of the Heavenly Spheres | Edmund White
Novelist │ Memoirist │ Biographer │Social Critic
Edmund White is America’s preeminent gay writer. In biography, social history, travel writing, journalism, the short story, and the novel, this prolific and versatile author has chronicled the gay experience in the United States from the closeted 1950’s through the AIDS crisis. But as William Goldstein wrote in Publishers Weekly, “To call Edmund White merely a gay writer is to oversimplify his work and his intentions.” The acuity, insight, and compassion with which White explores the human condition transcends such a label.
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Marcel Proust (“Penguin Lives” series) and
Genet: A Biography