Heart Essays

The handsome Texas sailor who offers dinner to a runaway in Central Park. The Midwestern college girl who stops a cop in Times Square for restaurant advice. The Brooklyn man on a midnight subway who helps a weary tourist find her way to Chinatown. The Columbia University graduate student who encounters an unexpected object of beauty at the Metropolitan Museum of Art....

Like Jack Kerouac’s intrepid little sister, Ariel Gore spins the spirited story of a vulnerable drifter who takes refuge in fate and the shadowy recesses of a string of glittering, broken relationships. With just a few pennies and her I Ching, a change of clothes and a one-way ticket to Hong Kong, a perceptive, searching 16-year-old Gore makes her way from the sterile suffocation of the Silicon Valley through the labyrinthine customs of Cold-War China, wanders through bustling, electric Kathmandu, and hunkers down in an icy London squat with a prostitute and a boyfriend on the dole.

A remarkable insight into the birth of a writer and the moving discovery of family secrets. When Hanif Kureishi discovers an abandoned manuscript of his father's, his understanding of the family history is transformed. So begins a journey which takes Kureishi through his father's privileged childhood by the sea in Bombay, to the trauma of partition and to his adult life hidden away in the suburbs of Bromley - his days spent as a minor functionary in the Pakistan embassy in London, his nights writing prose, hopeful of one day receiving literary recognition.

A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy is a new nonfiction collection of letters, interviews, and magazine articles spanning Conroy's long literary career, supplemented by touching pieces from the beloved author's many friends. The book collects some of Conroy's most charming pieces of short nonfiction, many of them addressed directly to his listeners, with his habitual greeting: "Hey, out there".

Learn how to find the unmarked places along the road, where deep healing, wisdom, and gifts are offered. This audiobook offers suggestions and practical advice for those new to the concept of sacred travel as well as ways for those with experience to expand their skills.   

Eager for a "doable adventure", Christopher Koch sets off on an impromptu 1,500-mile motorcycle trip down the Mississippi River from St. Paul to New Orleans in November 2014 - ill-equipped and underprepared as an unexpected Arctic air mass, the death rattle of a Pacific super-typhoon, washes over the American heartland. While meteorologists struggle for superlatives to describe the record-breaking cold, Koch pushes onward to overcome the weather, mechanical troubles, and his own hubris - and in doing so learns as much about himself as the hardscrabble landscape through which he rides.