Literary Collections

This handy guide places The Stranger, one of the seminal texts of existentialism and twentieth-century literature in general, in the context of French and French-Algerian history and culture. This second edition boasts a revised guide to further reading and a new chapter on Camus and the Algerian War. more...

Price: $13.00

In his fifties, Michael Gates Gill had it all: a big house in the suburbs, a loving family, and a top job at an ad agency with a six-figure salary. By the time he turned sixty, he had lost everything except his Ivy League education and his sense of entitlement. First, he was downsized at work. Next, an affair ended his twenty-year marriage. Then, he was diagnosed with a slow-growing brain tumor, prognosis undetermined. Around the same time, his girlfriend gave birth to a son. Gill had no money, no health insurance, and no prospects. One day as Gill sat in a Manhattan Starbucks with his last affordable luxury—a latté—brooding about his misfortune and quickly dwindling list of options, a 28-year-old Starbucks manager named Crystal Thompson approached him, half joking, to offer him a job. With nothing to lose, he took it, and went from drinking coffee in a Brooks Brothers suit to serving it in a green uniform. For the first time in his life, Gill was a minority--the only older white guy working with a team of young African-Americans. He was forced to acknowledge his ingrained prejudices and admit to himself that, far from being beneath him, his new job was hard. And his younger coworkers, despite having half the education and twice the personal difficulties he’d ever faced, were running circles around him. The other baristas treated Gill with respect and kindness despite his differences, and he began to feel a new emotion: gratitude. Crossing over the Starbucks bar was the beginning of a dramatic transformation that cracked his world wide open. When all of his defenses and the armor of entitlement had been stripped away, a humbler, happier and gentler man remained. One that everyone, especially Michael’s kids, liked a lot better. The backdrop to Gill's story is a nearly universal cultural phenomenon: the Starbucks experience. In How Starbucks Saved My Life, we step behind the counter of one of the world's best-known companies and discover how i more...

Price: $13.00

At sixteen, Lance Bass received a phone call from Justin Timberlake that would change his life forever. Soon after, he left his small-town home in Clinton, Mississippi, to join an emerging musical group called *NSYNC. Two years later *NSYNC was inspiring Beatles-esque mania around the world, becoming the face of the new MTV generation, and earning the all-time record for most album sales in a single day (more than one million) and in a single week for No Strings Attached. Full of fascinating behind-the-scenes lore and revealing insights from a pop star who, until now, has been notoriously private, Out of Sync is the book that millions of fans have been waiting for. more...

Price: $11.99

Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of a dramatic year in Virginia's Blue Ridge valley. Annie Dillard sets out to see what she can see. What she sees are astonishing incidents of "mystery, death, beauty, violence." more...

Price: $11.95

Still reeling but rebuilding after Katrina's fury, New Orleans braces for another major hurricane heading her way. But a far greater threat is looming on the horizon—a manmade terror storm that will dwarf the destructive force of anything Mother Nature could have devised. Following a tip, agent Jack Bauer has come to the Big Easy—and watches helplessly as two prime players representing America's most dangerous Latin American adversaries fall in a surprising hail of gunfire. With winds rapidly approaching gale force, the rogue CTU operative must now follow the blood trail to a completely unexpected source. Because in less than 24 hours, a ruthless enemy hiding among "friends" plans to take out the already damaged Crescent City—and deliver a staggering blow from which the U.S. "Satan" may never recover. more...

Price: $6.99