Winner of the 2018 New Academy Prize in Literature In this collection of autobiographical essays, Maryse Condé vividly evokes the relationships and events that gave her childhood meaning: discovering her parents’ feelings of alienation; her first crush; a falling out with her best friend; the death of her beloved grandmother; her first encounter with racism. These gemlike vignettes capture the spirit of Condé’s fiction: haunting, powerful, poignant, and leavened with a streak of humor.

As life expands outward, Mr. Petrakis's darker sketches tell of gambling obsessions and life in the streets and the risk of death. In reports of travels, he turns a sharp eye on England, the Middle East, and his Greek homeland. Whether he is recalling the world of his family or the world grown large, he writes with a novelist's eye and a poet's language.

In Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart", the narrator tries to prove his sanity after murdering an elderly man because of his "vulture eye". His growing guilt leads him to hear the old man's heart beating under the floorboards, which drives him to confess the crime to the police.

About the Book A COLLECTION OF MEMORABLE STORIES STRAIGHT FROM BELOVED CHILDREN'S AUTHOR RUSKIN BOND’S HEART. Miss Kellner has a tin of biscuits that fascinates little Ruskin. And granny’s cat is just so full of attitude. Oh, and have you heard about the famous playback singer from Mumbai who sang for the ghost of the maestro Tansen? Ruskin Bond’s charming life has been anything but ordinary. He scours through his memories to come up with tales that celebrate life and its myriad splendours and many lessons—spectacular wonders of nature, surprising friendships among animals and people, and even ghosts that sing. Tales from My Heart, written in Bond’s inimitable style, is peppered with his trademark warmth and wit. Vividly illustrated by Sumouli Dutta, this is a gift for all readers, big and small—a family treasure to return to with joy and affection over the years.

The secret history of our most vital organ: the human heart. The Man Who Touched His Own Heart tells the raucous, gory, mesmerizing story of the heart, from the first "explorers" who dug up cadavers and plumbed their hearts' chambers, through the first heart surgeries -- which had to be completed in three minutes before death arrived -- to heart transplants and the latest medical efforts to prolong our hearts' lives, almost defying nature in the process. Thought of as the seat of our soul, then as a mysteriously animated object, the heart is still more a mystery than it is understood. Why do most animals only get one billion beats? (And how did modern humans get to over two billion, effectively letting us live out two lives?) Why are sufferers of gingivitis more likely to have heart attacks? Why do we often undergo expensive procedures when cheaper ones are just as effective? What do Da Vinci, Mary Shelley, and contemporary Egyptian archaeologists have in common? And what does it really feel like to touch your own heart, or to have someone else's beating inside your chest? Rob Dunn's fascinating history of our hearts brings us deep inside the science, history, and stories of the four chambers we depend on most.

Marrakech is the heart and lifeblood of Morocco's ancient storytelling tradition. For nearly a thousand years, storytellers have gathered in the Jemaa el Fna, the legendary square of the city, to recount ancient folktales and fables to rapt audiences. But this unique chain of oral tradition that has passed seamlessly from generation to generation is teetering on the brink of extinction. The competing distractions of television, movies and the internet have drawn the crowds away from the storytellers and few have the desire to learn the stories and continue their legacy. Richard Hamilton has witnessed at first hand the death throes of this rich and captivating tradition and, in the labyrinth of the Marrakech medina, has tracked down the last few remaining storytellers, recording stories that are replete with the mysteries and beauty of the Maghreb.

These are twenty-four autobiographical story-essays, witty, vulnerable, and wise, about growing up part of a puzzled and unassimilated Orthodox Jewish family in a Michigan small-town in the 1930s and '40s and about the wider world of marriage, children, teaching and writing after that rich beginning.