A new collection of essays by the humorist author traces his offbeat world travel experiences, which involved surreal encounters with everything from French dentistry and Australian kookaburra eating habits to Beijing squat toilets and a wilderness Costco in North Carolina.

"'In the beginning I was so young and such a stranger to myself I hardly existed. I had to go out into the world and see it and hear it and react to it, before I knew at all who I was, what I was, what I wanted to be.' So begins Upstream, a collection of essays in which beloved poet Mary Oliver reflects on her willingness, as a young child and as an adult, to lose herself within the beauty and mysteries of both the natural world and the world of literature....

"From graffiti gangs and Grand Theft Auto to sugar daddies, Schopenhauer, and a deadly game of Russian roulette, in these essays, Chelsea Hodson probes her own desires to examine where the physical and the proprietary collide. She asks what our privacy, our intimacy, and our own bodies are worth in the increasingly digital world of liking, linking, and sharing. Starting with Hodson's own work experience, which ranges from the mundane to the bizarre--including...

Spanning twenty years of the author's work, this collection of fifteen previously unpublished essays includes a look at the effect that television has had on the new generation of writers and a dissection of the movie "Terminator 2.".

"A collection of essays from #1 New York Times bestselling author Neal Stephenson"--

Inspirations for Wes Anderson's The French Dispatch -- fascinating essays on the expatriate experience in Paris by some of the twentieth century's finest writers. In An Editor's Burial, celebrated director Wes Anderson gathers together the wonderful writing on the expatriate experience in Paris that inspired his latest film The French Dispatch, about an American who sets up a magazine in Paris. Featuring essays by luminaries of twentieth-century literature,...