Alicia Baum is missing a deadly childhood memory. Located beyond life, The Library of Lost Childhood Memories holds the answer. But the Librarian is Mr. Wicker—a seductive yet sinister creature with an unthinkable past and an agenda just as lethal. When Alicia meets a child psychiatrist investigating the phenomenon of "Mr. Wicker" in his small sleeping patients, it stirs a storm of supernatural activity in both the hospital and Alicia's heart. Get swept up in the mystery, the history, and the dark romance of the world's most wicked library with MR. WICKER. WINNER, 2014 Bram Stoker Award for Superior Achievement in a First Novel From Publishers Weekly Convincing in its haunting whimsy, Alexander's emotionally complex faerie tale comments on grim reality with chilling metaphors. . . Alexander (By the Pricking) makes the impossible feel probable, anchoring fantasy in everyday struggles. Alicia's spitfire defiance and charming vulnerability, and the eventual romance between her and Dr. Farron, inject warmth into chilling encounters between a world that shouldn't exist and undependable reality. Illness, loss, and heartache color this splendid, bittersweet ode to the ghosts of childhood. From Library Journal Starred Review, Debut of the Month ..".the fantastic premise of memories so terrible they need to be excised and hidden away makes this a horror novel to anticipate." "Suicide, love, lust, lost dreams and twisted purgatories...Maria Alexander's Mr. Wicker is an original, crafted of startling images and darkly poetic language. Eerily effective." --Steven Barnes, author of Lion's Blood "Elegant chills, genuine awe, and true tragedy are all ingredients in the spell cast by Maria Alexander's Mr. Wicker. Anyone who has encountered Maria's short stories surely expects her first novel to be extraordinary, and she doesn't disappoint. Mr. Wicker is rich, lovely, and deeply unnerving." --Lisa Morton, author of Maledictionand Trick or Treat: A History of Halloween

This delightful children's storybook, written in 1952 by Carley Dawson is fully illustrated. It tells the story of twelve-year-old Chris, who entered Mr. Wicker's shop to inquire about a job for his friend. However, he was so intrigued by Mr. Wicker that he took the job himself. So began an adventure beyond his wildest dreams, full of magic and adventure.

From the famous, including Steve Jobs and Mona Simpson, to the not-so-famous, including Arch West, the inventor of the Dorito, this riveting collection of the 164 best obituaries from The New York Times, written by top journalists, is organized chronologically. Original.

This collection of reviews, selected from Rollyson's New York Sun column, is as much about the romance of biography as it is about the American lives. Certain concerns resonate throughout the book: the American left's failure to reckon with Communist subversion, McCarthyism, and Stalinism, the problematic nature of authorized biography, the history of American biography, definitive biographies, literary biography, the differences between autobiography and biography, the importance of interviews in biographies of contemporary figures, the differences between history and biography, comparative biographies, the virtues of short biographies and of biographies for children, the tendency of biographers to fictionalize and of novelists to biographize, psychology and biography, Rollyson's own experience as a biographer, and the way biographers treat one another's work. Too many biographers, he believes, evince no interest in the biographical tradition. Concerned only with possession of their subjects, their proprietorial attitude deforms not only their biographies but also the genre itself. If biography is reviewed badly (receiving hardly more than a summary of the subject's life with a perfunctory nod to the biographer), it is because the biographical tradition has been disregarded or discounted. This book, in other words, has been written on the behalf of biography, a genre that still awaits a full vindication.