Bird by Bird is the bible of writing guides - a wry, honest, down-to-earth book that has never stopped selling since it was first published in the United States in the 1990s. Bestselling novelist and memoirist Anne Lamott distils what she's learned over years of trial and error. Beautifully written, wise and immensely helpful, this is the book for all serious writers and writers-to-be.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR How do we get through dark times when we feel like giving in to fear and despair, and when existential dread has convinced us of our smallness? In this real, resonant book, Anne Lamott uses her own recent marriage as a framework to explore how our lives can be enlarged through renewed commitment to ourselves and those around us. With warmth and wit, she looks at what it means to care for the soul when struggling with fear and dread and to emerge with exuberance, purpose and possibility, with new love for and joy in those around us. Our lives shouldn't be about what gets us ahead in the game or the demands other make on us. Wise, compassionate and spiritually uplifting, Dusk, Night, Dawn is for anyone looking for Christian hope and encouragement in times of fear and dread. It will leave you restored, and show you how you can care for your soul and live peacefully and exuberantly going forward. 'Chock-full of her trademark wit . . . this is [Lamott's] first book since getting married, so those honest insights about choosing love amid anxiety are sure to shine even brighter.' Bookpage 'By turns wise, funny, tragic, mystical, visionary, and imaginative . . . Readers new to Lamott are opening themselves to a real treat, as her abilities as a storyteller are in full form.' Library Journal

In this life-changing book, writer and spiritual coach Neal Allen, teaches us a stunning new method for quieting the inner critic. “Better Days will help you get to know your inner critic, and quiet its yammering, and in so doing, get to know the person you were born to be.� - Anne Lamott, Author of Dusk Night Dawn, Bird by Bird and others What if your superego has it wrong? That snarky little bully in your head…you know the one. You’ve lived under its weight for decades. I’m a fraud, I’m lazy I need to work harder I need to be tougher, funnier, calmer… I need to stay quiet, look pretty, stop showing off I need to put others before me, I need to put myself first I need to be perfect I need to hide who I really am Sound familiar? You know that its scolding voice is harmful to you, but you can't will it away. You accept a life with short periods of peace and long stretches of stress and anxiety. But you don't have to. In this revolutionary new book, Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic, writer and spiritual coach, Neal Allen, examines a critical aspect of the human psyche that often gets ignored - the superego. Building on Freud’s idea that the superego necessarily forms a person’s moral conscience, Neal explains how this voice in your head develops in childhood as a survival mechanism, but when no longer needed for protection, camps out in your mind like a personal parasite. A parasite that doesn’t belong. Through simple and engaging exercises and explorations, Neal leads you into meeting, confronting, and ultimately quieting your own inner critic. By shedding off the burden of the superego, you can overcome tired patterns of reward and punishment, reduce the self-talk that harms you, and ultimately clear an open space for the life you deserve, one that is gentler and more peaceful. Just imagine…if all that nasty, negative chatter in your head just evaporated ... what would you do next? Better days are just ahead.

From the bestselling author of Dusk, Night, Dawn and Help, Thanks, Wow, a joyful celebration of love.

“Love is our only hope,” Anne Lamott writes in this perceptive new book. “It is not always the easiest choice, but it is always the right one, the noble path, the way home to safety, no matter how bleak the future looks.”

In Somehow: Thoughts on Love, Lamott explores the transformative power that love has in our lives: how it surprises us, forces us to confront uncomfortable truths, reminds us of our humanity, and guides us forward. “Love just won't be pinned down,” she says. “It is in our very atmosphere” and lies at the heart of who we are. We are, Lamott says, creatures of love.

In each chapter of Somehow, Lamott refracts all the colors of the spectrum. She explores the unexpected love for a partner later in life. The bruised (and bruising) love for a child who disappoints, even frightens. The sustaining love among a group of sinners, for a community in transition, in the wider world. The lessons she underscores are that love enlightens as it educates, comforts as it energizes, sustains as it surprises.

Somehow is Anne Lamott’s twentieth book, and in it she draws from her own life and experience to delineate the intimate and elemental ways that love buttresses us in the face of despair as it galvanizes us to believe that tomorrow will be better than today. Full of the compassion and humanity that have made Lamott beloved by millions of readers, Somehow is classic Anne Lamott: funny, warm, and wise.

Geneen Roth, author of the #1 New York Times bestseller Women Food and God, explains how to take the journey to find one's own best self in this "beautiful, funny, deeply relevant" (Glennon Doyle) collection of personal reflections. With an introduction by Anne Lamott, This Messy Magnificent Life is a personal and exhilarating read on freeing ourselves from daily anxiety, lack, and discontent. It's a deep dive into what lies behind our self-criticism, whether it is about the size of our thighs, the expression of our thoughts, or the shape of our ambitions. And it's about stopping the search to fix ourselves by realizing that on the other side of the "Me Project" is spaciousness, peace, and the capacity to reclaim one's power and joy. This Messy Magnificent Life explores the personal beliefs, hidden traumas, and social pressures that shape not just women's feelings about their bodies but also their confidence, choices, and relationships. After years of teaching retreats and workshops on weight, money, and other obsessions, Roth realized that there was a connection that held her students captive in their unhappiness. With laugh-out-loud humor, compassion, and dead-on insight she reveals the paradoxes in our beliefs and shows how to move beyond our past to build lives that reflect our singularity and inherent power. This Messy Magnificent Life is a brilliant, bravura meditation on who we take ourselves to be, what enough means in our gotta-get-more culture, and being at home in our minds and bodies.

Despair and uncertainty surround us: in the news, in our families, and in ourselves. But even when life is at its bleakest, Anne Lamott shows how we can rediscover the hope and wisdom that are buried within us and that can make life sweeter than we ever imagined. Divided into short chapters that explore life's essential truths, Almost Everything pinpoints these moments of insight and, with warmth and humour, offers a path forward.

"Thirty years ago my older brother, who was ten years old at the time, was trying to get a report on birds written that he'd had three months to write. It was due the next day. We were out at our family cabin in Bolinas, and he was at the kitchen table close to tears, surrounded by binder paper and pencils and unopened books on birds, immobilized by the hugeness of the task ahead. Then my father sat down beside him, put his arm around my brother's shoulder, and said, 'Bird by bird, buddy. Just take it bird by bird.'"

"Superb writing advice... hilarious, helpful and provocative." -- "New York Times Book Review."

"A warm, generous and hilarious guide through the writer's world and its treacherous swamps." -- "Los Angeles Times."

"A gift to all of us mortals who write or ever wanted to write... sidesplittingly funny, patiently wise and alternately cranky and kind -- a reveille to get off our duffs and start writing "now," while we still can." -- "Seattle Times."

'I do not know much about God and prayer, but I have come to believe, over the last twenty-five years, that there's something to be said about keeping prayer simple. Help. Thanks. Wow.' Readers of all ages have followed and cherished Anne Lamott's funny and perceptive writing about faith and prayer. And in Help, Thanks, Wow, she has coalesced everything she's learned about prayer into these simple, transformative truths. It is these three prayers - asking for assistance, appreciating the good we witness, and feeling awe at the world - that get us through the day and show us the way forward. In Help, Thanks, Wow, Lamott recounts how she came to these insights, explains what they have meant to her over the years and how they've helped, and explores how others have embraced these ideas. Insightful and honest as only Anne Lamott can be, Help, Thanks, Wow is a book that new Lamott readers will love and longtime Lamott fans will treasure.

From the bestselling author of "Stitches "and "Help, Thanks, Wow "comes her long-awaited collection of new and selected essays on hope, joy, and grace.
Anne Lamott writes about faith, family, and community in essays that are both wise and irreverent. It's an approach that has become her trademark. Now in "Small Victories," Lamott offers a new message of hope that celebrates the triumph of light over the darkness in our lives. Our victories over hardship and pain may seem small, she writes, but they change us--our perceptions, our perspectives, and our lives. Lamott writes of forgiveness, restoration, and transformation, how we can turn toward love even in the most hopeless situations, how we find the joy in getting lost and our amazement in finally being found.
Profound and hilarious, honest and unexpected, the stories in "Small Victories "are proof that the human spirit is irrepressible.

In this life-changing book, writer and spiritual coach, Neal Allen, teaches us a stunning new method for quieting the inner critic. “Better Days will help you get to know your inner critic, and quiet its yammering, and in so doing, get to know the person you were born to be.� - Anne Lamott, Author of Dusk Night Dawn, Bird by Bird and others What if your superego has it wrong? That snarky little bully in your head…you know the one. You’ve lived under its weight for decades. I’m a fraud, I’m lazy I need to work harder I need to be tougher, funnier, calmer… I need to stay quiet, look pretty, stop showing off I need to put others before me, I need to put myself first I need to be perfect I need to hide who I really am Sound familiar? You know that its scolding voice is harmful to you, but you can't will it away. You accept a life with short periods of peace and long stretches of stress and anxiety. But you don't have to. In this revolutionary new book, Better Days: Tame Your Inner Critic, writer and spiritual coach, Neal Allen, examines a critical aspect of the human psyche that often gets ignored - the superego. Building on Freud’s idea that the superego necessarily forms a person’s moral conscience, Neal explains how this voice in your head develops in childhood as a survival mechanism, but when no longer needed for protection, camps out in your mind like a personal parasite. A parasite that doesn’t belong. Through simple and engaging exercises and explorations, Neal leads you into meeting, confronting, and ultimately quieting your own inner critic. By shedding off the burden of the superego, you can overcome tired patterns of reward and punishment, reduce the self-talk that harms you, and ultimately clear an open space for the life you deserve, one that is gentler and more peaceful. Just imagine…if all that nasty, negative chatter in your head just evaporated ... what would you do next? Better days are just ahead.

What do we do when life lurches out of balance? How can we reconnect to one another and to what's sustaining, when evil and catastrophe seem inescapable? These questions lie at the heart of Stitches, Anne Lamott's follow-up to her New York Times-bestselling work, Help, Thanks, Wow. In this book, she explores how we find meaning and peace in these loud and frantic times; where we start again after personal and public devastation; how we recapture wholeness after loss; and how we locate our true identities in this frazzled age. We begin, Lamott says, by collecting the ripped sheets of our emotional and spiritual fabric and sewing them back together - one stitch at a time. It's in these stitches that the quilt of life begins, and embedded in them are strength, warmth, humour and humanity.

"Lamott has chronicled her wacky and (sometimes) wild adventures in faith in...the wonderful "Grace (Eventually)."" ("Chicago Sun- Times") In "Grace (Eventually): Thoughts on Faith," the author of the bestsellers "Traveling Mercies" and "Plan B" delivers a poignant, funny, and bittersweet primer of faith, as we come to discover what it means to be fully alive.

With the trademark wisdom, humor, and honesty that made Anne Lamott's book on faith, Traveling Mercies, a runaway bestseller, Plan B: Further Thoughts on Faith is a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in increasingly fraught times.
The world is a more dangerous place than it was when Lamott's Traveling Mercies was published five years ago. Terrorism and war have become the new normal; environmental devastation looms even closer. And there are personal demands on Lamott's faith as well: turning fifty; her mother's Alzheimer's; her son's adolescence; and the passing of friends and time.
Fortunately for those of us who are anxious and scared about the state of the world, whose parents are also aging and dying, whose children are growing harder to recognize as they become teenagers, Plan B offers hope in the midst of despair. It shares with us Lamott's ability to comfort, and to make us laugh despite the grim realities.
Anne Lamott is one of our most beloved writers, and "Plan B" is a book more necessary now than ever. It will prove to be further evidence that, as The Christian Science Monitor has written, "Everybody loves Anne Lamott."

It's not like she's the only woman to ever have a baby. At thirty-five. On her own. But Anne Lamott makes it all fresh in her now-classic account of how she and her son and numerous friends and neighbors and some strangers survived and thrived in that all important first year. From finding out that her baby is a boy (and getting used to the idea) to finding out that her best friend and greatest supporter Pam will die of cancer (and not getting used to that idea), with a generous amount of wit and faith (but very little piousness), Lamott narrates the great and small events that make up a woman's life.

"Anne Lamott is my Oprah." -Chicago Tribune The New York Times bestseller from the author of Dusk, Night, Dawn, Almost Everything and Bird by Bird, a powerful exploration of mercy and how we can embrace it. "Mercy is radical kindness," Anne Lamott writes in her enthralling and heartening book, Hallelujah Anyway. It's the permission you give others-and yourself-to forgive a debt, to absolve the unabsolvable, to let go of the judgment and pain that make life so difficult. In Hallelujah Anyway: Rediscovering Mercy Lamott ventures to explore where to find meaning in life. We should begin, she suggests, by "facing a great big mess, especially the great big mess of ourselves." It's up to each of us to recognize the presence and importance of mercy everywhere-"within us and outside us, all around us"-and to use it to forge a deeper understanding of ourselves and more honest connections with each other. While that can be difficult to do, Lamott argues that it's crucial, as "kindness towards others, beginning with myself, buys us a shot at a warm and generous heart, the greatest prize of all." Full of Lamott's trademark honesty, humor and forthrightness, Hallelujah Anyway is profound and caring, funny and wise-a hopeful book of hands-on spirituality.

The Church of 80% Sincerity shares the inspiring, poignant, wickedly funny, and sometimes heartbreaking story of motivational speaker David Roche's journey from shame to self-acceptance. Born with a severe facial deformity, David has had a life that's been anything but easy. Still, over time he's learned to accept his gifts as well as his flaws, and to see that, sometimes, they are one and the same. In this compelling book, he shares his hard-earned lessons, providing an irresistible and unforgettable glimpse of his (and everyone's) inner beauty and worth, and offers profound encouragement in dealing with whatever life brings.

In 1966, Rebecca Wilson's father, a Union Leader and civil rights activist, was assassinated on the street in San Francisco. Rebecca known throughout as  Becky" was three years old. A House with No Roof is Wilson's gripping memoir of how the murder of her father propelled her family into a life-long search for solace and understanding.Following her father's death, Becky's mother, Barbara, desperate for closure and peace, uproots the family and moves to Bolinas, California. In this small, coastal town of hippies, artists, and  burnouts," the family continues to unravel. To cope, Barbara turns to art and hangs a banner that loudly declares,  Wilsons are Bold." But she still succumbs to her grief, neglecting her children in her wake. Becky's brother turns to drugs while her beautiful sister chooses a life on the road and becomes pregnant. As Becky fumbles and hurtles toward adulthood herself, she comes to learn the full truth of her father's death a truth that threatens to steal her sanity and break her spirit.Told with humor and candor and with love and family devotion at its heart A House with No Roof is a brave account of one daughter's struggle to survive.

Jane Vandenburgh, the author of two highly acclaimed novels and a recent memoir, offers aspiring writers the tools to create powerful and unique novels filled not only with good writing but also dynamic storytelling. Architecture of the Novel is an ambitious blueprint for writers, one that reveals the underlying machinery that propels a plot that is dynamic, coherent, and interesting. Architecture of the Novel derives from the many years Vandenburgh has spent teaching the craft of fiction writing. Her method points to the elemental nature of narrative: A story consists of its events, which are told in scenes. These scenes naturally place themselves along the arc of the story in an order that provides suspense and mystery, drawing characters toward the inevitability of their fictive destinies. Profoundly practical yet encouraging to writers at all levels, Architecture of the Novel offers the maps and mechanics to successfully guide writers toward the story that must be told.