REAL LIFE

For most people, weight loss is spurred by a pair of tight pants or a photo that shows one too many chins. But Edward Ugel isn’t most people. Ugel was forced to lose weight after his wife recorded him snoring—a sound so deafeningly horrible that his “turncoat” doctor made him wear a CPAP machine to sleep every night. Learn More

Life ain't easy when you're a bigfoot. Learn More

Pete Jordan, author of the wildly popular Dishwasher: One Man’s Quest to Wash Dishes in All Fifty States, is back with a memoir that tells the story of his love affair with Amsterdam, the city of bikes, all the while unfolding an unknown history of the city's cycling, from the craze of the 1890s, through the Nazi occupation, to the bike-centric culture adored by the world today. Learn More

Part travelogue, part autobiography, part medical mystery story. Learn More

On February 14, 1989, Valentine’s Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran." Learn More

Confident and robust, Jubilee Hitchhiker is an comprehensive biography of late novelist and poet Richard Brautigan, author of Troutfishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur, among many others. Learn More

"I would dive into a dumpster for this book any day." Essays and anecdotes about the life of an antique dealer. Learn More

In Just Kids, Patti Smith’s first book of prose, the legendary American artist offers a never-before-seen glimpse of her remarkable relationship with photographer Robert Mapplethorpe in the epochal days of New York City and the Chelsea Hotel in the late sixties and seventies. Learn More

This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction. Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide. Learn More