The book examines the friendship between Walter Van Tilburg Clark and Robert Caples in relation to their lives and works and is also a memoir of Shafton's friendship with Caples.

This book is American in all its implications - big, full of beauty and of hope. It is the record of an American boy's torments and thrills, his slow maturing, his inhibitions, his aspirations. It is a story of adolescent love and of creative activity in America.

Taking an innovative approach to the life and legend of Marilyn Monroe (1926-1962), this biographical dictionary concentrates on her circle of friends, acquaintances and coworkers--1618 in all. Distilled from hundreds of celebrity biographies are references to, and quotes about, the iconic Hollywood sex symbol from such diverse personalities as architect Frank Lloyd Wright, Israeli diplomat Abba Eban, beat poet Jack Kerouac, novelist Somerset Maugham, jazz singer Ella Fitzgerald, counterculture guru Timothy Leary and evangelist Aimee Semple McPherson, to name but a few. All of these remarkable people have, in one way or another, crossed paths with the magnificent Monroe. The entries in this volume (with source listings for further reading and research) confirm the fact that Marilyn Monroe remains a figure of enduring fascination five decades after her death.

The #1 "New York Times"-bestselling author of "Crank" returns with a gripping, masterful novel, told in verse, that weaves a riveting story about a teenage girl who is raised in a fundamentally religious yet abusive family.

Children form teams, build a pitch, and play a joyous game of soccer in a book with English and Creole (as spoken in Saint Lucia) vocabulary words.

The extraordinary debut collection from the Guggenheim Award-winning author of the forthcoming Gold Fame Citrus Winner of the 2012 Story Prize Recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters 2013 Rosenthal Family Foundation Award Named one of the National Book Foundation's "5 Under 35" fiction writers of 2012 Winner of New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award NPR Best Short Story Collections of 2012 A Boston Globe, San Francisco Chronicle, and Time Out New York Best Book of the year, and more . . . Like the work of Cormac McCarthy, Denis Johnson, Richard Ford, and Annie Proulx, Battleborn represents a near-perfect confluence of sensibility and setting, and the introduction of an exceptionally powerful and original literary voice. In each of these ten unforgettable stories, Claire Vaye Watkins writes her way fearlessly into the mythology of the American West, utterly reimagining it. Her characters orbit around the region's vast spaces, winning redemption despite - and often because of - the hardship and violence they endure. The arrival of a foreigner transforms the exchange of eroticism and emotion at a prostitution ranch. A prospecting hermit discovers the limits of his rugged individualism when he tries to rescue an abused teenager. Decades after she led her best friend into a degrading encounter in a Vegas hotel room, a woman feels the aftershock. Most bravely of all, Watkins takes on - and reinvents - her own troubled legacy in a story that emerges from the mayhem and destruction of Helter Skelter. Arcing from the sweeping and sublime to the minute and personal, from Gold Rush to ghost town to desert to brothel, the collection echoes not only in its title but also in its fierce, undefeated spirit the motto of her home state.