When inspiration strikes, there's no handier way to jot down your thoughts than with this pocket-sized notebook. Sixty-four ruled pages are wrapped by a cover that features Norman Rockwell's beloved painting "Soda Jerk," from the August 22, 1953, issue of The Saturday Evening Post magazine.

Distinguished poet and novelist Jay Parini presents some of his best essays--both classic and unpublished works--on topics ranging from baseball to Frost and Emerson to the culture of creative writing. For aspiring writers, Some Necessary Angels is an illuminating glimpse into the workshop of a distinguished novelist and critic. For readers who share Parini's love of language, it is an invigorating expression of faith.

Stitched together over five years of journaling, Obiter Dicta is a commonplace book of freewheeling explorations representing the transcription of a dozen notebooks, since painstakingly reimagined for publication. Organized after Theodor Adorno's Minima Moralia, this unschooled exercise in aesthetic thought--gleefully dilettantish, oftentimes dangerously close to the epigrammatic--interrogates an array of subject matter (although inescapably circling back to the curiously resemblant histories of Western visual art and instrumental music) through the lens of drive-by speculation. Erick Verran's approach to philosophical inquiry follows the brute-force literary technique of Jacques Derrida to exhaustively favor the material grammar of a signifier over hand-me-down meaning, juxtaposing outer semblances with their buried systems and our etched-in-stone intuitions about color and illusion, shape and value, with lessons stolen from seemingly unrelatable disciplines. Interlarded with extracts of Ludwig Wittgenstein but also Wallace Stevens, Cormac McCarthy as well as Roland Barthes, this cache of incidental remarks eschews what's granular for the biggest picture available, leaving below the hyper-specialized fields of academia for a bird's-eye view of their crop circles. Obiter Dicta is an unapologetic experiment in intellectual dot-connecting that challenges much long-standing wisdom about everything from illuminated manuscripts to Minecraft and the evolution of European music with lyrical brevity; that is, before jumping to the next topic.

First appearing on the cover of the February 13, 1960 issue of The Saturday Evening Post, "Triple Self Portrait" is one of the legendary Norman Rockwell's most famous paintings -- and now it graces this affordable, pocket-sized notebook. Sixty-four blank pages are perfect for note taking, sketching, and much more.

The groundbreaking novel from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of American Pastoral that originally propelled its author to literary stardom: told in a continuous monologue from patient to psychoanalyst, this masterpiece draws us into the turbulent mind of one lust-ridden young Jewish bachelor named Alexander Portnoy. "Deliciously funny...absurd and exuberant, wild and uproarious...a brilliantly vivid reading experience." —The New York Times Book Review "Touching as well as hilariously lewd.... Roth is vibrantly talented." —New York Review of Books Portnoy's Complaint n. [after Alexander Portnoy (1933- )] A disorder in which strongly-felt ethical and altruistic impulses are perpetually warring with extreme sexual longings, often of a perverse nature. Spielvogel says: 'Acts of exhibitionism, voyeurism, fetishism, auto-eroticism and oral coitus are plentiful; as a consequence of the patient's "morality," however, neither fantasy nor act issues in genuine sexual gratification, but rather in overriding feelings of shame and the dread of retribution, particularly in the form of castration.' (Spielvogel, O. "The Puzzled Penis," Internationale Zeitschrift für Psychoanalyse, Vol. XXIV, p. 909.) It is believed by Spielvogel that many of the symptoms can be traced to the bonds obtaining in the mother-child relationship.

Claude has an intuitive faith in something splendid and feels at odds with his contemporaries. The war offers him the opportunity to forget his farm and his marriage of compromise; he enlists and discovers that he has lacked. But while war demands altruism, its essence is destructive

The most widely respected CEO in America looks back on his brilliant career at General Electric and reveals his personal business philosophy and unique managerial style. Nearly 20 years ago, former General Electric CEO Reg Jones walked into Jack Welch's office and wrapped him in a bear hug. "Congratulations, Mr. Chairman," said Reg. It was a defining moment for American business. So begins the story of a self-made man and a self-described rebel who thrived in one of the most volatile and economically robust eras in U.S. history, while managing to maintain a unique leadership style. In what is the most anticipated book on business management for our time, Jack Welch surveys the landscape of his career running one of the world's largest and most successful corporations.