Thirty-five years ago, when "searching for America" was not yet the cliche it has since become, Steinbeck hit the highways with his French poodle, Charley. In a custom-built camper he named Rosinante after Don Quixote's steed, the two traveled the country--10,000 miles and 34 states. Their varied experiences comprise several slices of small-town back-roads Americana. Steinbeck laments the rise of plastic-covered everything, the vacuousness of "sad...

WINNER OF THE PULITZER PRIZE • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A searing, post-apocalyptic novel about a father and son's fight to survive, this "tale of survival and the miracle of goodness only adds to McCarthy's stature as a living master. It's gripping, frightening and, ultimately, beautiful" (San Francisco Chronicle).
One of The New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century
A father...

A classic from the New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body.
After living in Britain for two decades, Bill Bryson recently moved back to the United States with his English wife and four children (he had read somewhere that nearly 3 million Americans believed they had been abducted by aliens—as he later put it, "it was clear my people needed me"). They were greeted by a new and...

When a native of Iowa returns from England to wander across America's heartland in search of the perfect small town, the result is a string of hilarious anecdotes and biting social commentary.

"This is not the republic of my imagination," Charles Dickens noted ruefully of his 1842 visit to the United States. His American Notes forms a stinging reproof of the country's embrace of slavery, its corrupt press and woeful sanitary conditions, and its citizens' offensive manners. Written with the author's customary observational powers and incisive wit, this volume offers a fascinating glimpse of 19th-century America. Dickens was not entirely...

A series of autobiographical essays draws on key moments and relationships in the author's life to explore such issues as trust, loss, and desire, in a volume that focuses on a central theme of losing oneself in the pleasures of experience.

"John Gunther's 'Inside' series were among the most popular books of reportage in the 1930s and 1940s. For 'Inside U.S.A., ' Gunther set out from California and traveled the entire country. His frank, lucid observations along the way -- on race relations, labor, the Tennessee Valley Authority, farm life, the politics of the big cities, and much else -- yield fascinating insight into life fifty years ago. Now on the brink of the millennium, this fiftieth...

"After a decade abroad, the National Book Award--and Pulitzer Prize--winning writer Evan Osnos returns to three places he has lived in the United States-Greenwich, CT; Clarksburg, WV; and Chicago, IL--to illuminate the origins of America's political fury"--

Traces the author's 2011 road trip from the southernmost to the northernmost points of the United States to experience firsthand the country's diversity and political tensions in the face of a historic economic recession.