The Corner Bookstore

Despite her innate ambition and Summa Cum Laude smarts, Kate Pearson has turned into a major slacker. After being unceremoniously dumped by her handsome, French “almost fiancé,” she abandons her grad school plans and instead spends her days lolling on the couch, watching reruns of Sex and the City, and leaving her apartment only when[read more...]

A film-centric portrait of the extraordinarily gifted movie director whose decades-long influence on American popular culture is unprecedented “Everything about me is in my films,” Steven Spielberg has said. Taking this as a key to understanding the hugely successful moviemaker, Molly Haskell explores the full range of Spielberg’s works for the light they shine upon[read more...]

“A beautiful and disturbing memoir of a beloved sister who died at the age of thirty-nine in circumstances that strongly suggest murder. . . . Highly recommended.” —Joyce Carol Oates When Sheila Kohler was thirty-seven, she received the heart-stopping news that her sister Maxine, only two years older, was killed when her husband drove them off[read more...]

Magdalena has an unsettling gift. She sees the truth about people written on their skin--names, dates, details both banal and profound--and her only relief from the onslaught of information is to take off her glasses and let the world recede. Mercifully, her own skin is blank. When she meets Neil, she is intrigued to see[read more...]

In 1984, Phillip Lopate sat down with his mother, Frances, to listen to her life story. A strong, resilient, indomitable woman who lived through the major events of the twentieth century, she was orphaned in childhood, ran away and married young, and then reinvented herself as a mother, war factory worker, candy store owner, community[read more...]

Acclaimed biographer Patricia Bosworth recalls her emotional coming of age in 1950s New York in this profound and powerful memoir, a story of family, marriage, tragedy, Broadway, and art, featuring a rich cast of well-known literary and theatrical figures from the period. Born into privilege in San Francisco as the children of famous attorney Bartley[read more...]

This is not a book that tells you to throw everything out and live austerely. You don't need a sock drawer that brings you joy or a kitchen from a design magazine; what you do need is to be organized enough to feel in control and serene. Organized Enough offers a ground-breaking, science-driven method for[read more...]

When a psychoanalyst became a painter after surviving a stroke, her longtime patient, distinguished and beloved poet Molly Peacock, took up a unique task. The Analyst is a new, visceral, twenty-first century “in memoriam” of ambiguous loss in which Peacock brilliantly tells the story of a decades-long patient-therapist relationship that now reverses and continues to[read more...]

Reza Shirvani is a talented, young associate on the cusp of promotion to partnership at a top corporate law firm in Washington, D.C. But the biggest challenge in his life is far more complicated—his mother and sister have fled Iran and are now stuck in western Afghanistan. Their last and best hope for safe passage[read more...]