From Big Sur to coastal Maine, The Library of America presents a lavish and fascinating tour of the homes of America's greatest writers.

The houses of writers are often places of both creation and inspiration, studio as much as home. This wonderful book takes readers into the intimacy of the homes of 20 great international figures--from Hemingway's simple, tropical world on Key West to the Connecticut Yankee home of Mark Twain to William Faulkner's Oxford plantation--to reveal their private worlds. 220 photos, 200 in color.

In Home, eighteen of our finest writers evoke different rooms--from their pasts, their present, or simply their imaginations--in order to investigate the ways in which homes contain our lives. The results are touching, provocative, and sometimes hilarious. And since a portion of the editors' proceeds will go to organizations that help the homeless, Home is really where the heart is. Contributors include: Lynda Barry, Richard Bausch, Tony Earley, James Finn Garner, Henry Louis Gates, Jr., Allan Gurganus, Colin Harrison, Kathryn Harrison, Gish Jen, Karen Karbo, Alex Kotlowitz, Clint McCown, Susan Power, Esmeralda Santiago, Mona Simpson, Jane Smiley, Sallie Tisdale, and Bailey White. "Unforgettable...These pages are filled with the kind of details that etch a childhood place into the deep recesses of memory, that distinguish the sensual life of one family from another."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

A guide to the homes, open to the public, of New Englandís most famous authors, such as Dickinson, Twain, Frost, and Alcott.

An anthology of diverse voices of North American Muslim writers.Through stories, essays and poems, they share their family lore, spiritual journeys, childhood dreams, and memories of homes they left and where they stay.

There are many ways to show our devotion to an author besides reading his or her works. Graves make for popular pilgrimage sites, but far more popular are writers' house museums. What is it we hope to accomplish by trekking to the home of a dead author? We may go in search of the point of inspiration, eager to stand on the very spot where our favorite literary characters first came to life—and find ourselves instead in the house where the author himself was conceived, or where she drew her last breath. Perhaps it is a place through which our writer passed only briefly, or maybe it really was a longtime home—now thoroughly remade as a decorator's show-house. In A Skeptic's Guide to Writers' Houses Anne Trubek takes a vexed, often funny, and always thoughtful tour of a goodly number of house museums across the nation. In Key West she visits the shamelessly ersatz shrine to a hard-living Ernest Hemingway, while meditating on his lost Cuban farm and the sterile Idaho house in which he committed suicide. In Hannibal, Missouri, she walks the fuzzy line between fact and fiction, as she visits the home of the young Samuel Clemens—and the purported haunts of Tom Sawyer, Becky Thatcher, and Injun' Joe. She hits literary pay-dirt in Concord, Massachusetts, the nineteenth-century mecca that gave home to Hawthorne, Emerson, and Thoreau—and yet could not accommodate a surprisingly complex Louisa May Alcott. She takes us along the trail of residences that Edgar Allan Poe left behind in the wake of his many failures and to the burned-out shell of a California house with which Jack London staked his claim on posterity. In Dayton, Ohio, a charismatic guide brings Paul Laurence Dunbar to compelling life for those few visitors willing to listen; in Cleveland, Trubek finds a moving remembrance of Charles Chesnutt in a house that no longer stands. Why is it that we visit writers' houses? Although admittedly skeptical about the stories these buildings tell us about their former inhabitants, Anne Trubek carries us along as she falls at least a little bit in love with each stop on her itinerary and finds in each some truth about literature, history, and contemporary America.

“Rowan Hisayo Buchanan’s debut is a beautifully textured novel, befitting the story of an artist.” —Washington Post Written in startlingly beautiful prose, Harmless Like You is set across New York, Connecticut, and Berlin. At its heart is Yuki Oyama, a Japanese girl fighting to make it as an artist, and her struggle with her decision to leave her two-year-old son, Jay. As an adult, Jay sets out to find his mother and confront her abandonment.