With the same spirit and humor that characterize her novels, Amy Tan now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists. Whether recalling arguments with her mother in suburban California or introducing us to the ghosts that inhabit her computer,...

Fueled by a powerful curiosity--and by a need to see and feel and hear, firsthand and close-up--Michael Crichton's travels have carried him into worlds diverse and compelling. This is a record of those travels--an exhilarating quest across the familiar and exotic frontiers of the outer world, a determined odyssey into the unfathomable, spiritual depths of the inner world. It is an adventure of risk and rejuvenation, terror and wonder, as exciting...

Doig's portrait of his mother, Berneta, who died on his sixth birthday in 1945, is drawn from Berneta's cryptic letters to her brother Wally, aboard a warship in the Pacific. Filling in missing bits from memory, he depicts what he recalls of his parents' marriage, and of the struggle and truce for his sake between his grandmother and father.

A romance writer sets off to Colombia to pay the ransom of her kidnapped sister, and soon finds herself in the middle of a dangerous adventure. Thrown into a jungle full of gunfire, mud slides and poisonous snakes, Joan's only hope lies with Jack Colton, a rugged wanderer straight out of her novels. Together, they'll have to outwit the bandits and survive the jungle if they're to save her sister.

"The best-selling novelist and memoirist delivers her most intimate and powerful work: a piercing, life-affirming memoir about marriage and memory, about the frailty and elasticity of our most essential bonds, and about the accretion, over time, of both sorrow and love. Hourglass is an inquiry into how marriage is transformed by time--abraded, strengthened, shaped in miraculous and sometimes terrifying ways by accident and experience. With courage...

Renowned horror novelist Mike Enslin only believes what he can see with his own two eyes. After a string of bestsellers discrediting paranormal events in the most infamous haunted houses and graveyards around the world, he scoffs at the concept of an afterlife. Enslin's phantom-free run of long and lonely nights is about to change forever when he checks into suite 1408 of the notorious Dolphin Hotel for his latest project. Defying the warnings of...

A tribute to the author's friendships with numerous animals includes descriptions of such companions as her grandmother's rascal parrot, a courageous Doberman, and her "co-author" tiger cat, Sneaky Pie.

"From the universally acclaimed, best-selling author of the National Book Award-winning The Year of Magical Thinking: ten pieces never before collected that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. Here are six pieces written in 1968 from the "Points West" Saturday Evening Post column Joan Didion shared from 1964 to 1969 with her husband, John Gregory Dunne about: American newspapers; a session with Gamblers Anonymous;...