The Solace of Open Spaces is a collection of transcendent, lyrical essays on life in the American West, capturing both its otherworldly beauty and its cruelty. Poet and filmmaker Gretel Ehrlich went to Wyoming in 1975 to make documentaries when her partner died. She stayed on, finding she couldn’t leave.

This book is a chronicle of her first years on “the planet of Wyoming,” a personal journey into a place, a feeling, and a way of life. Ehrlich brings depth, tenderness, and humor to her portraits of the peculiar souls who also call it home: hermits and ranchers, rodeo cowboys and schoolteachers, dreamers and realists.

Originally written as journal entries addressed to a friend, The Solace of Open Spaces is raw, meditative, electrifying, and uncommonly wise. In prose “as expansive as a Wyoming vista, as charged as a bolt of prairie lightning”, Ehrlich explores the magical interplay between our interior lives and the world around us.

Travel writer Macon Leary hates travel, adventure, surprises, and anything outside of his routine. Immobilized by grief, Macon is becoming increasingly prickly and alone, anchored by his solitude and an unwillingness to compromise his creature comforts. Then he meets Muriel, an eccentric dog trainer too optimistic to let Macon disappear into himself. Despite Macon’s best efforts to remain insulated, Muriel up-ends his solitary, systemized life, catapulting him into the center of a messy, beautiful love story he never imagined.

A fresh and timeless tale of unexpected bliss, The Accidental Tourist showcases Tyler’s talents for making characters—and their relationships—feel both real and magical.

Life on the Mississippi is Mark Twain’s most brilliant and personal non-fiction work. Fashioned from the same experiences that would inspire the masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, it is an affectionate evocation of the vibrant river life during the steamboat era and a melancholic reminiscence of its passing after the Civil War.

This book is a priceless collection of humorous anecdotes and folktales, offering a unique glimpse into Twain’s life before he began to write. Written in a prose style hailed as among the greatest in English literature, Life on the Mississippi established Twain not only as the most popular humorist of his time but also as America’s most profound chronicler of the human comedy.

Join Twain on his journey as he navigates the ever-changing Mississippi River, reflecting on the transition from the boom years preceding the Civil War to the sober times that followed. This work is infused with the irreverent humor that is Twain's trademark.

In a garden sit the aged Kublai Khan and the young Marco Polo—Mongol emperor and Venetian traveler. Kublai Khan has sensed the end of his empire coming soon. Marco Polo diverts his host with stories of the cities he has seen in his travels around the empire: cities and memory, cities and desire, cities and designs, cities and the dead, cities and the sky, trading cities, hidden cities. As Marco Polo unspools his tales, the emperor detects these fantastic places are more than they appear.

Nancy Mitford meets Nora Ephron in the pages of The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street, Helene Hanff's delightful travelogue about her "bucket list" trip to London.

When devoted Anglophile Helene Hanff is invited to London for the English publication of 84, Charing Cross Road—in which she shares two decades of correspondence with Frank Doel, a British bookseller who became a dear friend—she can hardly believe her luck. Frank is no longer alive, but his widow and daughter, along with enthusiastic British fans from all walks of life, embrace Helene as an honored guest.

Eager hosts, including a famous actress and a retired colonel, sweep her up in a whirlwind of plays and dinners, trips to Harrod's, and wild jaunts to their favorite corners of the countryside. A New Yorker who isn't afraid to speak her mind, Helene Hanff delivers an outsider's funny yet fabulous portrait of idiosyncratic Britain at its best.

And whether she is walking across the Oxford University courtyard where John Donne used to tread, visiting Windsor Castle, or telling a British barman how to make a real American martini, Helene always wears her heart on her sleeve. The Duchess of Bloomsbury Street is not only a witty account of two different worlds colliding but also a love letter to England and its literary heritage—and a celebration of the written word's power to sustain us, transport us, and unite us.

Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance: An Inquiry Into Values is both a personal and philosophical odyssey that delves into life's essential questions. This transformative narrative follows a father and his young son during an unforgettable summer motorcycle trip across America's Northwest.

The journey becomes a profound exploration of relationships, values, and ultimately, enlightenment. As they travel, the story delves into a meditation on how to live a better life, resonant with the myriad confusions and wonders of existence. It is a compelling examination of how we live and a breathtaking meditation on how to live better.

Robert M. Pirsig's work has become a modern classic, touching the hearts of millions and inspiring readers to ponder the nature of quality in a world that often seems indifferent to it. This modern epic was an instant bestseller upon its original publication and continues to inspire new generations.

This unusual fictional memoir - in good part autobiographical - narrates without self-pity and often with humor the adventures of a penniless British writer among the down-and-outs of two great cities. The Parisian episode is fascinating for its expose of the kitchens of posh French restaurants, where the narrator works at the bottom of the culinary echelon as dishwasher, or plongeur. In London, while waiting for a job, he experiences the world of tramps, street people, and free lodging houses. In the tales of both cities we learn some sobering Orwellian truths about poverty and of society.

Greeneland has been described often as a land bleak and severe. A whisky priest dies in one village, a self-hunted man lives with lepers in another. But Greeneland has its summer regions, and in the sunlight everything looks a bit different.

Here Aunt Augusta travels with her black lover, Wordsworth, Curran, the founder of a doggie's church, the CIA, a man obsessed by statistics and his hippie daughter; and old Mr. Visconti, who has been wanted by Interpol for twenty years.

Henry Pulling, a retired bank manager, unexpectedly caught up with them, describes their activities at first with shock and bewilderment and finally with the tenderness of a fellow traveler going their way.

The tranquillity of a cruise along the Nile is shattered by the discovery that Linnet Ridgeway has been shot through the head. She was young, stylish and beautiful, a girl who had everything - until she lost her life. Hercule Poirot recalls an earlier outburst by a fellow passenger: 'I'd like to put my dear little pistol against her head and just press the trigger.' Yet in this exotic setting, nothing is ever quite what it seems...