"For its twentieth anniversary, a stunning Graphic Deluxe Edition of Mary Karr's pathbreaking, award-winning, mega-bestselling memoir, with a new foreword by Lena Dunham When it was first published twenty years ago, The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious...

"Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral, deeply felt, and hilarious as her memoirs. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous--that mystery some of us hope toward in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The "squalor" of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of...

A celebration of curiosity, compassion, and the surprising power of fear, based on the New York Times bestselling author and renowned professor's 2015 commencement address at Syracuse University. "Being smart and rich are lucky, but being curious & compassionate will save your ass." Every year there are one or two commencement speeches that strike a chord with audiences far greater than the student bodies for which they are intended. In 2015 Mary...

Mary Karr describes herself as a black-belt sinner, and this -- her fourth collection of poems --traces her improbable journey from the inferno of a tormented childhood into a resolutely irreverent Catholicism. Not since Saint Augustine wrote "Give me chastity, Lord -- but not yet!" has anyone brought such smart-assed hilarity to a conversion story. Karr's battle is grounded in common loss (a bitter romance, friends' deaths, a teenage son's leaving...