Tremendous Trifles
by G. K. Chesterton | 
The Way the World Works
by Nicholson Baker | 
Facing Unpleasant Facts
by George Orwell | 
Against Everything
by Mark Greif | 
On Looking
by Lia Purpura | 
When I Was a Child I Read Books
by Marilynne Robinson | 
Books v. Cigarettes
by George Orwell | 
Vintage Didion
by Joan Didion | 
Farther Away
by Jonathan Franzen | 
In Praise of Messy Lives
by Katie Roiphe | 
Broken Vessels
by Andre Dubus | 
The Patch
by John McPhee | 
Feel Free
by Zadie Smith | 
Meditations from a Movable Chair
by Andre Dubus | 
Wormholes
by John Fowles | 
Henry Miller on Writing
by Henry Miller | 
The Cross of Redemption
by James Baldwin | 
My Ears Are Bent
by Joseph Mitchell | 
The Other Glass Teat
by Harlan Ellison | 
Sleepless Nights in the Procrustean Bed: Essays
by Harlan Ellison |
The bestselling author of Vox and The Fermata devotes his hyperdriven curiosity and magnificently baroque prose to the fossils of punctuation and the lexicography of smut, delivering to readers a provocative and often hilarious celebration of the neglected aspects of our experience. 368 pp. 15,000 print.