An essential, universally resonant new memoir from the number one bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and Big Magic

What if your most beautiful love story turned into your biggest nightmare?

Twenty years ago, Elizabeth Gilbert's Eat Pray Love inspired millions of readers to embark upon their own journeys of self-discovery. A decade later, Big Magic empowered countless others to live their most creative lives. Now comes another landmark book – about love and loss, addiction and recovery, grief and liberation.

In 2000, a friend sent Liz to see a new hairdresser named Rayya Elias. An intense and unlikely curiosity sparked between these two apparent opposites: Rayya, an East Village badass who lived boldly on her own terms but feared she was a failed artist; Liz, a married people-pleaser with a surprisingly unfettered sense of creativity. Over the years, they became friends, then best friends, then inseparable. When tragedy entered their lives, the truth was finally laid bare: the two were in love. Unacknowledged: they were also a pair of addicts, on a collision course toward catastrophe.

What if the love of your life – and the person you most trusted in the world – became a danger to your sanity and wellbeing? What if the dear friend who taught you so much about your self-destructive tendencies became the unstable partner with whom you disastrously reenacted every one of them? And what if your most devastating heartbreak opened a pathway to your greatest awakening?

All the Way to the River is for everyone who has ever been captive to love – or to any other passion, substance, or craving – and who yearns, at long last, for peace and freedom.

In Rural Hours, Harriet Baker tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the countryside and was forever changed by it. We encounter them at quiet moments – pausing to look at an insect on the windowsill; jotting down a recipe; or digging for potatoes, dirt beneath their nails. Slowly, we start to see transformations unfold: Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, and Rosamond Lehmann emerge before us as the passionate, visionary writers we know them to be.

Following long periods of creative uncertainty and private disappointment, each of Baker's subjects is invigorated by new landscapes, and the daily trials and small pleasures of making a home; slowly, they embark on new experiments in form, in feeling and in living that would resonate throughout the rest of their lives. In the country, each woman finds her path: to convalescence and recovery; to sexual and political awakening; and, above all, to personal freedom and creative flourishing.

In graceful, fluid prose, Baker vividly recreates these overlooked episodes, revealing how ‘rural hours’ defined the lives of three pioneering writers. In the end, she shows, their example is an invitation to us all: to recognize the radical and creative potential of rural places, and find new enchantment in the rituals of each day.

'Tense and intimate... an education.' Geoff Dyer 'Written with sensitivity and humanity... a remarkable insight into prison life.' Amanda Brown 'Authentic, fascinating and deeply moving.' Terry Waite 'Enriching, sobering and at times heartrending... a wonder' Lenny Henry __________ Can someone in prison be more free than someone outside? Would we ever be good if we never felt shame? What makes a person worthy of forgiveness? Andy West teaches philosophy in prisons. Every day he has conversations with people inside about their lives, discusses their ideas and feelings, and listens as they explore new ways to think about their situation. When Andy goes behind bars, he also confronts his inherited trauma: his father, uncle and brother all spent time in prison. While Andy has built a different life for himself, he still fears that their fate will also be his. As he discusses pressing questions of truth, identity and hope with his students, he searches for his own form of freedom too. Moving, sympathetic, wise and frequently funny, The Life Inside is an elegantly written and unforgettable book. Through a blend of memoir, storytelling and gentle philosophical questioning, it offers a new insight into our stretched justice system, our failing prisons and the complex lives being lived inside. __________ 'Strives with humour and compassion to understand the phenomenon of prison' Sydney Review of Books 'A fascinating and enlightening journey... A legitimate page-turner' 3AM

This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author's early years influence his life's work and how his writing, in turn, informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life, major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka's legacy with global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the public sphere, as well as one of Africa's most successful and popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka's work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social engineering.

In The Identities of Catherine de' Medici, Susan Broomhall provides an innovative analysis of the representational strategies that constructed Catherine de' Medici and sought to explain her behaviour and motivations. Through her detailed exploration of the identities that the queen, her allies, supporters, and clients sought to project, and how contemporaries responded to them, Broomhall establishes a new vision of this important sixteenth-century protagonist, a clearer understanding of the dialogic and dynamic nature of identity construction and reception, and its consequences for Catherine de' Medici's legacy, memory, and historiography.

For generations of children, including a young Oprah Winfrey, opening a Lois Lenski book has meant opening a world. This was just what the author wanted: to help children ""see beyond the rim of their own world."" In Lois Lenski: Storycatcher, historian and educator Bobbie Malone takes us into Lenski's own world to tell the story of how a girl from a small Ohio town became a beloved literary icon. Author and illustrator of the Newbery Award-winning Strawberry Girl and numerous other tales of children from America's diverse regions and cultures, Lenski spent five decades creating stories for young readers. Lois Lenski: Storycatcher follows her development as a writer and as an artist, and it traces the evolution of her passionate belief in the power of empathy conveyed in children's books. Understanding that youngsters responded instinctively to narratives rich in reality, Lenski turned her extensive study of hardworking families into books that accurately and movingly depicted the lives of the children of sharecroppers, coal miners, and migrant field workers. From Bayou Suzette to Blue Ridge Billy, Corn-Farm Boy to Houseboat Girl, and Boom Town Boy to Texas Tomboy, Lenski's books mirrored the cultural energy and concerns of the time. This first full-length biography tells how Lenski traveled throughout the country, gathering the stories that brought to life in words and pictures whole worlds that had for so long been invisible in children's literature. In the process, her work became a source of delight, inspiration, and insight for generations of readers.

"Here's the thing with kissing: it matters intensely or not at all." Mid-kiss, do you ever wonder who you are, who you're kissing, where it's leading? It can feel luscious, libidinal, friendly, but are we trying to make out something through our kissing? For Kathryn Bond Stockton, making out is a prism through which to look at the cultural and political forces of our world: race, economics, childhood, books, and movies. Making Out is Stockton's memoir about a non-binary childhood before that idea existed in her world. We think about kissing as we accompany Stockton to the bedroom, to the closet, to the playground, to the movies, and to solitary moments with a book, the ultimate source of pleasure. Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly-an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books-specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author's emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.