'Good writers offer advice. Great writers offer condolences' If you want to be a writer, then you'd better be ready to hurl yourself at the door. That's the message from Stephen Marche in this irresistibly droll broadside. Perseverance, in the teeth of rejection, forms the essence of a writer's life. It's what it takes, so no whining. Even the greatest of writers grapple with failure. Marche's provocative, often very funny vignettes range through literary history from Samuel Johnson ('broke as f*ck') to Jane Austen's lacklustre publishing deals, to Dostoevsky facing mock-execution. The trick is to endure. As James Baldwin famously exhorts us: 'Write. Find a way to keep alive and write.' For new and seasoned writers, Marche's words are salutary and, in a paradoxical way, consoling. All writers are up against it. Success is just an attire.

A "spellbinding" literary novel with fangs: a sweeping, genre-busting tale of money, morality, and the American Dream-and the men and monsters who profit in its pursuit-set in New York, London, and the Canadian wilderness. Hunters found his body naked in the snow. The body is that of Ben Wylie, the second-richest man in America, and it is found in a remote patch of northern Canada. Far away, in New York, the son of the Wylie family's housekeepers tries to figure out how and why Ben died. The answer lies in the tortured history of the Wylie family, who built up their massive fortune over three generations. All of the Wylie men struggle with a secret: they are werewolves. The threads of their destinies, both financial and supernatural, lead twistingly but inevitably to the naked body in the snow and a final, terrible revelation. The Hunger of the Wolf is a novel about what it means to be a man in a world of money. It's a novel about the innate nature of violence: The Wylie men struggle to control their inner rage, through physical restraint, psychotherapy, drugs, hedonistic abandon, and good old-fashioned denial. It's a story of fathers and sons, about secrets that are kept in families, and about the cost of the tension between the public face and the private soul-the cruelty and loneliness and occasional joy of being a magical being in a quotidian world.

"Should be required reading for anyone interested in preserving our 246-year experiment in self-government." -The New York Times Book Review * "Well researched and eloquently presented." -The Atlantic * "Delivers Cormac McCarthy-worthy drama; while the nonfictional asides imbue that drama with the authority of documentary." -The New York Times Book Review A celebrated journalist takes a fiercely divided America and imagines five chilling scenarios that lead to its collapse, based on in-depth interviews with experts of all kinds. The United States is coming to an end. The only question is how. On a small two-lane bridge in a rural county that loathes the federal government, the US Army uses lethal force to end a standoff with hard-right anti-government patriots. Inside an ordinary diner, a disaffected young man with a handgun takes aim at the American president stepping in for an impromptu photo-op, and a bullet splits the hyper-partisan country into violently opposed mourners and revelers. In New York City, a Category 2 hurricane plunges entire neighborhoods underwater and creates millions of refugees overnight-a blow that comes on the heels of a financial crash and years of catastrophic droughts-and tips America over the edge into ruin. These nightmarish scenarios are just three of the five possibilities most likely to spark devastating chaos in the United States that are brought to life in The Next Civil War, a chilling and deeply researched work of speculative nonfiction. Drawing upon sophisticated predictive models and nearly two hundred interviews with experts-civil war scholars, military leaders, law enforcement officials, secret service agents, agricultural specialists, environmentalists, war historians, and political scientists-journalist Stephen Marche predicts the terrifying future collapse that so many of us do not want to see unfolding in front of our eyes. Marche has spoken with soldiers and counterinsurgency experts about what it would take to control the population of the United States, and the battle plans for the next civil war have already been drawn up. Not by novelists, but by colonels. No matter your political leaning, most of us can sense that America is barreling toward catastrophe-of one kind or another. Relevant and revelatory, The Next Civil War plainly breaks down the looming threats to America and is a must-read for anyone concerned about the future of its people, its land, and its government.

Writing is, and always will be, an act defined by failure. The best plan is to just get used to it. Failure is a topic discussed in every creative writing department in the world, but this is the book every beginning writer should have on their shelf to prepare them. Less a guide to writing and more a guide to what you need to continue existing as a writer, On Writing and Failure: Or, On the Peculiar Perseverance Required to Endure the Life of a Writer describes the defining role played by rejection in literary endeavors and contemplates failure as the essence of the writer's life. Along with his own history of rejection, Marche offers stories from the history of writerly failure, from Ovid's exile and Dostoevsky's mock execution to James Baldwin's advice just to endure, where living with the struggle and the pointlessness of writing is the point.

"Satisfying food for thought on the ever-changing dynamics of men and women as they interact and go about their individual lives" (Kirkus Reviews) as cultural commentator Stephen Marche examines contemporary male-female relations--with the help of his wife, writer and editor Sarah Fulford. One morning in New York City, Stephen Marche, then a new father and tenure-track professor, got the call: his wife had been offered her dream job...in Canada. Their decision to prioritize her career over his and move to Toronto sheds new light on the gender roles in their marriage (and in the world around them). As Marche provocatively argues, we are no longer engaged in a war of the sexes, but rather stuck together in a labyrinth of contradictions. And that these contradictions are keeping women from power and confounding male identity. The Unmade Bed is a deeply researched, deeply personal exploration into the moments in everyday life where women and men meet. After all, within offices and homes, on the street, online, and in bed, we constantly ask ourselves: What are we expected to sacrifice? Is it possible to be equal? As he attempts to answer these questions, Marche explores the issues that define our modern conversations on gender, from mansplaining and sexual morality to parenthood and divisions of the domestic sphere. In the process, he discovers that true power remains shockingly elusive for women while the idea of masculinity struggles in a state of uncertainty. The only way out of these mutual struggles is together. With footnote commentary throughout the book from Marche's wife, The Unmade Bed is a "compelling" (The Globe and Mail, Toronto), uniquely balanced, and honest approach to the revolution going on in our everyday lives--a thought-provoking work of social science that is sure to be a conversation starter.

Shakespeare is everywhere

Nearly four hundred years after his death, Shakespeare permeates our everyday lives: from the words we speak to the teenage heartthrobs we worship to the political rhetoric spewed by the twenty-four-hour news cycle. In the pages of this wickedly clever little book, Esquire columnist Stephen Marche uncovers the hidden influence of Shakespeare in our culture, including these fascinating tidbits: Shakespeare coined more than 1,700 words, including hobnob, glow, lackluster, and dawn. Paul Robeson's 1943 performance as Othello on Broadway was a seminal moment in black history. Tolstoy wrote an entire book about Shakespeare's failures as a writer. In 1936, the Nazi Party tried to claim Shakespeare as a Germanic writer. Without Shakespeare, the book titles Infinite Jest, The Sound and the Fury, and Brave New World wouldn't exist. The name Jessica was first used in The Merchant of Venice. Freud's idea of a healthy sex life came directly from the Bard.

Stephen Marche has cherry-picked the sweetest and most savory historical footnotes from Shakespeare's work and life to create this unique celebration of the greatest writer of all time.

"The Gold Piano" tells the story of Emerson Wainwright, a young man whose idyllic life in a small North Carolina town is turned upside down after his father is caught on videotape in a homosexual act at the county hospital.
To escape from his hometown and its painful memories, Emerson enrolls at an under-funded historically black college a hundred miles away, attending on a minority grant. As the only white student living on campus, he struggles with his loneliness and his role as an outsider.
His relationship with his roommate, a black activist from Brooklyn, is challenged when Emerson begins to fall in love with Zena, a gifted black artist. The novel's final scenes bring a quiet but hopeful sense of resolution to Emerson's quest to define himself and find his place in the world.

An endearing and brutally honest narrator hosts this ribald romp through the backwoods of the upper South and provides a challenging set of characters fresh from the backseat of an abandoned Ford Fairlane, with a jaw full of snuff and a gut full of cheap wine.