Anton Chekhov is revered as a boldly innovative playwright and short story writer - but he wrote more than just plays and stories. In this book, the author introduces readers to some other sides of Chekhov.

“A gem of a book . . . of use to both beginning and seasoned ethnographers, as well as to anyone who wants to improve his or her writing about social life.” —Elizabeth Fine, Journal of Folklore Research Anton Chekhov is revered as a boldly innovative playwright and short story writer—but he wrote more than just plays and stories. In Alive in the Writing—an intriguing hybrid of writing guide, biography, and literary analysis—anthropologist and novelist Kirin Narayan introduces readers to some other sides of Chekhov: his pithy, witty observations on the writing process, his life as a writer through accounts by his friends, family, and lovers, and his venture into nonfiction through his book Sakhalin Island. By closely attending to the people who lived under the appalling conditions of the Russian penal colony on Sakhalin, Chekhov showed how empirical details combined with a literary flair can bring readers face to face with distant, different lives, enlarging a sense of human responsibility. Highlighting this balance of the empirical and the literary, Narayan calls on Chekhov to bring new energy to the writing of ethnography and creative nonfiction alike. Weaving together selections from writing by and about him with examples from other talented ethnographers and memoirists, she offers practical exercises and advice on topics such as story, theory, place, person, voice, and self. A new and lively exploration of ethnography, Alive in the Writing shows how the genre’s attentive, sustained connection with the lives of others can become a powerful tool for any writer. “A brief and brilliant book about what it means to be an ethnographer, and how to do it responsibly, and better.” —James Wood, The New Yorker

Discover the revolutionary writing practice that can transform your life! In 1976, Linda Trichter Metcalf, then a university English professor, sat down with pen and paper and intuitively started a self-guided writing practice that helped to bring herself into focus and clarify her life as never before. She and a colleague, Tobin Simon, introduced this original method into their classrooms. They experienced such solid response from their students that, for the last twenty-five years, they have devoted themselves to teaching what has now become the respected practice of Proprioceptive Writing®–in workshops, secondary and elementary schools, and college psychology and writing classes around the country, among them the New School University. “Proprioception” comes from the Latin proprius, meaning “one’s own,” and this writing method helps synthesize emotion and imagination, generating authentic insight and catharsis. Proprioceptive Writing® is not formal writing, nor is it automatic or stream-of-consciousness writing. Requiring a regular, disciplined practice in a quiet environment, the method uses several aids to deepen attention and free the writer within: Baroque music, a candle, a pad, and a pen. Presenting Proprioceptive Writing® in book form for the first time, Writing the Mind Alive shows how you, too, can use it to • Focus awareness, dissolve inhibitions, and build self-trust • Unburden your mind and resolve emotional conflicts • Connect more deeply with your spiritual self • Write and speak with strength and clarity • Enhance the benefits of psychotherapy • Awaken your senses and emotions • Liberate your creative energies Featuring actual “writes” by students of all ages, Writing the Mind Alive is a catalyst for mental and emotional aliveness that can truly enrich the rest of your life.

Dark, cutting, and coursed through with bright flashes of humour, crystalline imagery, and razor-sharp detail, I Become a Delight to My Enemies is a gut-wrenchingly powerful, breathtakingly beautiful meditation on the violence and shame inflicted on the female body and psyche. An experimental fiction, I Become a Delight to My Enemies uses many different voices and forms to tell the stories of the women who live in an uncanny Town, uncovering their experiences of shame, fear, cruelty, and transcendence. Sara Peters combines poetry and short prose vignettes to create a singular, unflinching portrait of a Town in which the lives of girls and women are shaped by the brutality meted upon them and by their acts of defiance and yearning towards places of safety and belonging. Through lucid detail, sparkling imagery and illumination, Peters' individual characters and the collective of The Town leap vividly, fully formed off the page. A hybrid in form, I Become a Delight to My Enemies is an awe-inspiring example of the exquisite force of words to shock and to move, from a writer of exceptional talent and potential.

GOOD MORNING AMERICA BUZZ PICK • A young, ambitious female astronaut’s life is upended by a love affair that threatens the rescue of a lost crew in this brilliantly imagined novel “with echoes of Station Eleven, The Martian, and, yes, Jane Eyre” (Observer). NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY VULTURE AND SHE READS • “The female astronaut novel we never knew we needed.”—Entertainment Weekly June is a brilliant but difficult girl with a gift for mechanical invention who leaves home to begin grueling astronaut training at the National Space Program. Younger by two years than her classmates at Peter Reed, the school on campus named for her uncle, she flourishes in her classes but struggles to make friends and find true intellectual peers. Six years later, she has gained a coveted post as an engineer on a space station—and a hard-won sense of belonging—but is haunted by the mystery of Inquiry, a revolutionary spacecraft powered by her beloved late uncle’s fuel cells. The spacecraft went missing when June was twelve years old, and while the rest of the world seems to have forgotten the crew, June alone has evidence that makes her believe they are still alive. She seeks out James, her uncle’s former protégé, also brilliant, also difficult, who has been trying to discover why Inquiry’s fuel cells failed. James and June forge an intense intellectual bond that becomes an electric attraction. But the relationship that develops between them as they work to solve the fuel cell’s fatal flaw threatens to destroy everything they’ve worked so hard to create—and any chance of bringing the Inquiry crew home alive. A propulsive narrative of one woman’s persistence and journey to self-discovery, In the Quick is an exploration of the strengths and limits of human ability in the face of hardship, and the costs of human ingenuity. This edition includes a bonus chapter.

*NOW A NETFLIX FILM STARRING MILA KUNIS* Fans of Gone Girl and The Girl on the Train will thrill at this “perfect page-turner” (People)—that Reese Witherspoon describes as “one of those reads you just can’t put down!” This instant New York Times and USA TODAY bestselling novel follows an unforgettable young woman striving to create the perfect life—until a violent incident from her past threatens to unravel everything and expose her most shocking secret. HER PERFECT LIFE IS A PERFECT LIE As a teenager at the prestigious Bradley School, Ani FaNelli endured a shocking, public humiliation that left her desperate to reinvent herself. Now, with a glamorous job, expensive wardrobe, and handsome blue blood fiancé, she’s this close to living the perfect life she’s worked so hard to achieve. But Ani has a secret. There’s something else buried in her past that still haunts her, something private and painful that threatens to bubble to the surface and destroy everything. With a singular voice and twists you won’t see coming, Luckiest Girl Alive explores the unbearable pressure that so many women feel to “have it all” and introduces a heroine whose sharp edges and cutthroat ambition have been protecting a scandalous truth, and a heart that's bigger than it first appears. The question remains: will breaking her silence destroy all that she has worked for—or, will it at long last, set Ani free?

An exciting new book about renewal by the winner of the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry In the searing poems of his new collection, Twice Alive, the Pulitzer Prize–winner Forrest Gander addresses the exigencies of our historical moment and the intimacies, personal and environmental, that bind us to others and to the world. Drawing from his training in geology and his immersion in Sangam literary traditions, Gander invests these poems with an emotional intensity that illuminates our deep-tangled interrelations. While conducting fieldwork with a celebrated mycologist, Gander links human intimacy with the transformative collaborations between species that compose lichens. Throughout Twice Alive, Gander addresses personal and ecological trauma—several poems focus on the devastation wrought by wildfires in California where he lives—but his tone is overwhelmingly celebratory. Twice Alive is a book charged with exultation and tenderness.