The author follows in the footsteps of America's most essential explorers, thinkers, and innovators to offer a new perspective on how the most powerful nation on Earth came together.

From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth. But who was this man, who lived with over twenty thousand books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard, and was known--in the late 1940s, no less--to traipse around...

"The funny and fascinating memoir of Bythell's experiences at the helm of The Bookshop, Scotland's largest second hand bookstore--and the delightfully unusual staff members, eccentric customers, odd townsfolk and surreal buying trips that make up his life there"-- When Bythell first thought of taking over the bookstore in the remote Scottish village of Wigtown, it seemed like a book-lover's paradise. Here he details his experiences at the helm of...

"An icon of American artistic invention, the Chelsea Hotel has been, since its founding by a French socialist utopian in 1884, a cultural dynamo lodged in the very heart of uber-capitalist New York City. Sherill Tippins, author of the acclaimed February House, delivers a lively, masterly history of the Chelsea and of the successive generations of artists who have cohabited and created there, among them John Sloan, Edgar Lee Masters, Isabella Stewart...

"Growing Up Bank Street is a uniquely Greenwich Village coming-of age-story, set on a legendary street whose irrepressible residents have helped shaped the story of America since Colonial times. A sparkling memoir of beatniks, rock stars, artists, AIDS activists, and free-thinkers, in an eccentric neighborhood that wrote its own rules on the power of community"--

The artistic journey of Chilly Gonzales from Canada to the Berlin scene of the late '90s and finally to philharmonies worldwide. The Grammy-winning eccentric inspired and collaborated with the likes of Daft Punk, Drake, Feist, Jarvis Cocker and Peaches. Criss-crossing between rap, electro and chamber music, Chilly Gonzales is the outrageous entertainer who invited himself to the ivory tower of classical music.

A humorous portrait of one of the 20th century’s most influential philosophers. This self-tortured eccentric, who preferred detective fiction and the musicals of Carmen Miranda to Aristotle, is a fitting subject for Derek Jarman’s irreverent imagination. A visually stunning and profoundly entertaining work about modern philosophy and the dark genius that revolutionized it. Winner of Best Feature Film at the **Berlin International Film Festival**....

Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend, but the world's most celebrated female authors are usually mythologized as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses. Friends Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney prove this wrong, thanks to their investigations into a wealth of surprising collaborations, such as the friendships between George Eliot and Harriet Beecher Stowe or Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield. Drawing on letters and diaries,...

"In this poignant memoir from the New York Times bestselling author of To Shake the Sleeping Self, a forty-year-old gay man and his eccentric conservative mother travel the country together and find surprising answers to our generational and cultural rifts. When his mother, Barbara, turned seventy, Jedidiah Jenkins was reminded of a palpable, sobering truth: Our parents won't live forever. For years, he and Barbara had talked about taking a trip together,...