The author melds personal history with frank biological data about every stage of life, creating an "autobiography about my body" that seeks meaning in death, but moreover, life. Shields filters his frank--and usually foreboding--data through his own experience as a 51-year-old father with burgeoning back pain, contrasting his own gloomy tendencies with the defiant perspective of his own 97-year-old father, a man who has waged a lifelong, urgent battle...

"A glimpse into a beloved novelist's inner world, shaped by family, art, and literature. In her fiction, Claire Messud "has specialized in creating unusual female characters with ferocious, imaginative inner lives" (Ruth Franklin, New York Times Magazine). Kant's Little Prussian Head and Other Reasons Why I Write opens a window on Messud's own life: a peripatetic upbringing; a warm, complicated family; and, throughout it all, her devotion to art and...

First Reba Hart had to get used to the fact that her husband of twenty years left her to marry his young dental assistant. Now she has to face the fact that her youngest daughter wants to go live with her ex-husband and his new wife. Hurt and angry, Reba struggles to accept her daughter's decision. But when her son also starts spending more time at his father's house, Reba fears she's losing her whole family. Although with her ex-husband's new wife...

Will and Carlton enter the University of Los Angeles, home of the Peacocks--and college life is fly. Gorgeous coeds, their own place, fraternity parties, and even some education.