Search results for ""David R. Godine Publisher Inc""

A collection of P. K. Page’s poems, socially conscious work that focuses on our planet and on the beauty of existence. Shortlisted for the 2003 Griffin Award for Excellence in Poetry, Cosmologies is a careful distillation of Canadian poet P.K. Page’s critically acclaimed two-volume Hidden Room, and it is the first of her collections to be published in the United States. Anchored by a masterful use of metaphor, her poems quote knowingly from Eliot, Thomas, and Robert Graves. As editor Eric Ormsby says in his foreword, this “supreme escape artist of Canadian literature . . . is the shrewdest of observers . . . a citizen not only of the world but of the earth.” “Elegant, rigorous, fresh,” the Griffin Prize, Judge’s Citation said. “P.K. Page’s work sings with a voice of independent character and maenad conjecture. It is a creature that lives on its own terms and terrain. It is startling, authoritative, and anti-sentimental, able to bear cool as well as passionate gazing at our own species. Her poems are always thinking – each line is thinking, while its six senses remain impeccably alert. Her poems live by wit, wisdom, sass, suspense and a muscular lissome synapse and diction. They are daring in scope, meticulous in accomplishment, and boldly moral – with a lovely flavour of amoral verve! We fall under the charm of her reasoning, of her fecund, fastidious imagination, of her many musics, and of her necessariness to us, her essentialness.”

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Come to the wild and wacky DeZert Isle, where toys spring to life and the sun just may bump into the moon. Jules is a Zert. He lives on DeZert Isle with his best friend Ned the Nail, and he’s in love with a brick. Jules’s life is happy and busy; he has plenty of friends, lots of games to play, and sausages to tempt the brick of his dreams. But there are certain things he detests: being hammered by SledgeHead, being swallowed by BigMouths, and being captured by SmotherHen (why does she keep trying to hatch him?). Vibrantly colorful pictures offer a guided tour of Jules’s marvelous world, a visit to the high life and occasional low points of a sun-drenched place where new friends are just around the corner and gifts are offered with an open heart—and where there’s always enough hippopotamelon juice to go around. DeZert Isle sees the world from a child’s perspective; the improbable becomes the possible, and all things, even the most bizarre, have perfectly reasonable explanations—even being in love with a brick.

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Works by six of Israel 's most important contemporary authors. Included are Ahron Appelfeld's "In the Isles of St George", in which a fugitive black marketeer is forced to take refuge on a desolate Italian island where his past, his nationality, and his very sense of identity are resolved.

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Wit is on display on every page of this remarkable alphabet book, each spread of which is devoted to an emblematic creature—an appetitive Anteater, an annoying Fly, an addled Joey, a prickly Porcupine, and twenty-two more. On the left of each spread is an eight-line poem; opposite it is a delicate, complementary pencil drawing.

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Watson found himself forced to learn to speak the language when he was invited to present a paper in paris - in French. A private crash course and lessons at the Alliance Francaise only served to point out how difficult it can be to learn any foreign language, especially later in life.

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Rich food for thought—a philosopher’s guide to losing weight, and keeping it off, by embracing a whole new approach to life.In this slim volume, a middle-aged philosopher takes on the weighty double challenge of comprehending an expanding universe while fighting an expanding waistline. Witty, thoughtful, and practical, this is a thinking person’s guide to the how—and why—of watching what you eat.“I urge you to live at the peak of enjoyment of life,” Richard Watson writes. “Descartes said that the essence of the soul is self-consciousness. If you want to enjoy your life, pay attention to what you are doing. Control as much of your life as you can. Live in full consciousness. And don't stop thinking for yourself.”Here’s an erudite and fascinating combination of common sense, Cartesian philosophy, and the presumption that understanding the mysteries of weight loss and the universe are somehow compatible, even sympathetic, ambitions. If Descartes had written a treatise on losing weight as a way to maintain discipline amidst life’s vicissitudes, it would have read much like this. Richard Watson wants you to lose weight, as he did, while gaining new wisdom about yourself—and what you eat.

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A chapter book for young readers by a Newbery Honor winning author. “Original, wise, and thoughtful.”—School Library Journal It is a long time ago in a village near Germany’s Black Forest, and Erich, a foundling, has been left in the care of the good and charitable Frau Goddhart. Or, at least the publicly good and charitable Frau Goddhart; at home it’s quite another story. Erich’s young life of work and little love changes when old Ula, the town’s most skillful clockmaker, offers him a job as his helper. Ula is a patient and very slow worker, which is why his cuckoo clocks are the best anywhere. Ula teaches Erich about clockmaking, playing the fiddle, and many other useful and wonderful things. One day as Ula works at his clockmaking and Erich looks on, Baron Balloon storms in demanding a clock. Ula refuses, and decided right then and there to make a clock for himself, a wondrous, beautiful clock that will be his last and best. The clock he makes – with Erich’s help—is wonderful, beautiful, and magical, with a cheerful enchanted cuckoo bird that knows all the thirty-six songs of the birds of the Black Forest. Mary Stolz’s story is alive with the magic of art and is sure to enchant, as are the warm pencil illustrations by Pamela Johnson.

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An exciting, fact-based, old-fashioned tale of adventure at sea, winner of a Newbery Honor for young readers in 1936. When his father loses his fortune at sea, a boy, Enoch Thacher, signs up with a famous shipbuilder and takes a record-breaking trip around Cape Horn on the famous Flying Cloud. The Flying Cloud was a real ship and its maker was master shipbuilder, Donald McKay (1810-1880). The era depicted in this novel is a time when the windships were the queens of the ocean and sail was king. McKay’s company, located in East Boston, launched many of the fastest clipper ships in history, with Flying Cloud being his most famous ship of all. In All Sail Set, McKay puts Enoch to work during the lofting, building, and rigging of the Flying Cloud, and then to ship out on her for her maiden, record-breaking trip around the Horn. Accompanied by Sperry’s wonderfully vigorous drawings, this realistic nautical yarn from the glory days of sail will appeal to adults as well as young adult readers with a taste for historical adventure.

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“Must-Read”—Town & CountryA deeply evocative and imaginative portrayal of the life of Isabella Stewart Gardner, a daring visionary who created an inimitable legacy in American art and transformed the city of Boston itself. By the time Isabella Stewart Gardner opened her Italian palazzo-style home as a museum in 1903 to showcase her collection of old masters, antiques, and objects d’art, she was already well-known for scandalizing Boston’s polite society. But when Isabella first arrived in Boston in 1861, she was twenty years old, newly married to a wealthy trader, and unsure of herself. Puzzled by the frosty reception she received from stuffy bluebloods, she strived to fit in. After two devastating tragedies and rejection from upper-society, Isabella discovered her spirit and cast off expectations. Freed by travel, Isabella explores the world of art, ideas, and letters, meeting such kindred spirits as Henry James and Oscar Wilde. From London and Paris to Egypt and Asia, she develops a keen eye for paintings and objects, and meets feminists ready to transform nineteenth century thinking in the twentieth century. Isabella becomes an eccentric trailblazer, painted by John Singer Sargent in a portrait of daring décolletage, and fond of such stunts as walking a pair of lions in the Boston Public Garden.The Lioness of Boston is a portrait of what society expected a woman’s life to be, shattered by a courageous soul who rebelled and was determined to live on her own terms.

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After a sudden and terrible loss, how does a loving family find their way back to the goodness and peace they once shared? Reviewers and readers have called this literary historical novel “hauntingly beautiful,” “a masterpiece of compassion,” “a page-turner and an artistic triumph.”Written by a masterful storyteller, this is a book that illuminates the journey we make through grief to healing.In the midst of a nearly perfect life, Doris Senter is thankful but wary. “We can’t ever know what will come,” she says. When an unimaginable tragedy turns the family of five into a family of four, everything the Senters held faith in is shattered. The family is consumed by sorrow and guilt. Slowly, the surviving family members find their way to forgiveness—of themselves and of each other. Few writers know the human heart and the burden of grief as New York Times bestselling author Meredith Hall (Without a Map). This is a radiant novel of goodness and love—both its gifts and its obligations—that will stay with readers long after the last page. With a rare tenderness and compassion, Beneficence shows broken hearts becoming whole as this family reclaims their love and peace.“People stay together, fall apart, come back together, altered. It is a book about work, about grief, about thick ongoing love. Hall’s prose is hewn, sinewy, with moments of electrifying beauty and grace.”—Boston Globe“One of the best books I've ever read.”—Simon Van Booy“As organically as it traveled to heartbreak, Beneficence progresses to the place of wisdom that lies beyond it, where we learn that a home is part of the ‘vast world of innocence and harm,’ not an island beyond it.”—Wall Street Journal“A modern American masterpiece.”—Dani Shapiro“If the word ‘luminous’ didn’t already exist, you’d have to invent it to describe Meredith Hall’s radiant new novel Beneficence.”—Richard Russo“These voices from the past speak so clearly to our time, at a moment when many of us wonder whether we’ll lose the things that we consider blessings....Beneficence is a quiet but steady book, one that echoes ancient and important rhythms.”—Washington Post“A quiet gem...hard to put down.”—Library Journal“Hauntingly beautiful, emotionally devastating, and infused with great compassion.”—Kim Barnes“With wisdom and compassion, Meredith Hall writes about the capacity for atonement. Goodness. Generosity to see deeply, to live through fear and pain on your journey toward the awareness of splendor.”—Ursula Hegi

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“Seething Nation! Vast & Flowing! Day & Night & Dawn!” Poet Edward Sanders tells the story of America in incandescent verse. Bold, sweeping, investigative, rhapsodic, hilarious, heart-rendering, thought-provoking, Edward Sanders’ three-volume, America: A History in Verse uniquely and brilliantly tells “the story of America...a million stranded fabric / woven by billions of hands & minds.” It is by turns angry, wistful, defiant and extremely funny re-inventions of historical and biographical worlds, a highly original mix of chronicle, anecdote, document, reportage, paean and polemic. Volume 3, 1962-1970 begins with “the time of a randy young president with a bad back / who attracted the squint-eyed scorn / & even the hatred of the / National Security Grouch Apparatus,” of “a strange man named Johnson / & then the reappearance of an even stranger man named Nixon.” It was the time of Vietnam, civil rights, space shots, and evil—”the only word for some of it.” But it was also the time of the poet’s youth and Oh! what bliss to be young, alive, and high in those excruciatingly interesting times, those days “when we searched for meaning / in the sawdust floors of rebel cafés / or the stardust soars of psychedelic haze.” What a whirling hurry of years it was, what a flash of time! And what a necessary, twenty-first-century Whitman Sanders is, channeling Clio for our great nation, ”where so many sing without cease / work without halt / shoulder without shudder / to bring the Feather of Justice to every / bell tower, biome & blade of grass.” Long may Sanders sing us the 1960s, and long may his America “dwell in peace, freedom & equality / out on its spiraling arm / in the Milky Way.”

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“One of the most sinuous stylists and searching minds of the twentieth century.”—Washington Post Forty essays on history, art, and literature to lift your mind and spirit. Guy Davenport provides links between music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present—and pretty much everything in between. Not only had Davenport seemingly read (and often translated from the original languages) everything ever written, he also had the ability, expressed with unalloyed enthusiasm, to draw connections between how cultural synapses make, define, and reflect our civilization.Davenport serves as the reader’s guide through history and literature, pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking. In these forty essays we find fresh thinking on Greek culture, Whitman, Spinoza, Wittgenstein, Melville, Tolkien, Ezra Pound, Wallace Stevens, Charles Olson, Marianne Mo

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A moving and inspiring anthology of masterful essays on stories that touch the hearts and minds of readers. “A writer,” Nobel Prize winner Saul Bellow once said, “is a reader who is moved to emulation.” New York Times bestselling novelist and memoirist Andre Dubus III took that idea and invited acclaimed authors to write about short stories that altered their view of life and their place in it—short stories that, ultimately, made them want to write something substantial themselves. Here is Richard Russo on Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery,” Joyce Carol Oates on John Updike’s “A&P,” Tobias Wolff on Hawthorne’s “Wakefield,” Michael Cunningham on James Joyce’s “The Dead.” Readers will gain new insight into these masterfully written stories but also on the contributors’ own lives and work. The fifty contributors are T.C. Boyle, Russell Banks, Richard Bausch, Robert Boswell, Charles Baxter, Ann Beattie, Madison Smartt Bell, Ron Carlson, Lan Samantha Chang, Michael Cunningham, Junot Diaz, Anthony Doerr, Emma Donoghue, Stuart Dybek, Dagoberto Gilb, Julia Glass, Mary Gordon, Lauren Groff, Jennifer Haigh, Jane Hamilton, Ron Hansen, Paul Harding, Ann Hood, Pam Houston, Gish Jen, Charles Johnson, Phil Klay, Dennis Lehane, Lois Lowry, Colum McCann, Sue Miller, Rick Moody, Antonya Nelson, Bich Nguyen, Joyce Carol Oates, Stewart O’Nan, Peter Orner, ZZ Packer, Ann Patchett, Edith Pearlman, Jayne Ann Phillips, Kirstin Valdez Quade, Anna Quindlen, Ron Rash, Richard Russo, Dani Shapiro, Mona Simpson, Jess Walter, Tobias Wolff, and Meg Wolitzer. Reaching Inside will remind you why you fell in love with reading.

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A gardener’s pandemic journal that combines memoir with an exploration of the natural world both inside and outside the garden. In March 2020, Margot Anne Kelley was watching seeds germinate in her greenhouse. At high risk from illness, the planning, planting, and tending to seedlings took on extra significance. She set out to make her pandemic garden thrive but also to better understand the very nature of seeds and viruses. As seeds became seedlings, became plants, became food, Kelley looks back over the last few millennia as successions of pandemics altered human beings and global culture. Seeds and viruses serve as springboards for wide-ranging reflections, such as their shared need for someone to transport them, the centrality of movement to being alive, and the domestication of plants as an act of becoming co-dependent. Pandemic viruses only occurred through humankind’s settling down, taking up agriculture, and givin

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After a sudden and terrible loss, how does a loving family find their way back to the goodness and peace they once shared? Reviewers and readers have called this literary historical novel “hauntingly beautiful,” “a masterpiece of compassion,” “a page-turner and an artistic triumph.”Written by a masterful storyteller, this is a book that illuminates the journey we make through grief to healing.In the midst of a nearly perfect life, Doris Senter is thankful but wary. “We can’t ever know what will come,” she says. When an unimaginable tragedy turns the family of five into a family of four, everything the Senters held faith in is shattered. The family is consumed by sorrow and guilt. Slowly, the surviving family members find their way to forgiveness—of themselves and of each other. Few writers know the human heart and the burden of grief as New York Times bestselling author Meredith Hall (Without a Map). This is a radiant novel of goodness and love—both its gifts and its obligations—that will stay with readers long after the last page. With a rare tenderness and compassion, Beneficence shows broken hearts becoming whole as this family reclaims their love and peace.“People stay together, fall apart, come back together, altered. It is a book about work, about grief, about thick ongoing love. Hall’s prose is hewn, sinewy, with moments of electrifying beauty and grace.”—Boston Globe“One of the best books I've ever read.”—Simon Van Booy“As organically as it traveled to heartbreak, Beneficence progresses to the place of wisdom that lies beyond it, where we learn that a home is part of the ‘vast world of innocence and harm,’ not an island beyond it.”—Wall Street Journal“A modern American masterpiece.”—Dani Shapiro“If the word ‘luminous’ didn’t already exist, you’d have to invent it to describe Meredith Hall’s radiant new novel Beneficence.”—Richard Russo“These voices from the past speak so clearly to our time, at a moment when many of us wonder whether we’ll lose the things that we consider blessings....Beneficence is a quiet but steady book, one that echoes ancient and important rhythms.”—Washington Post“A quiet gem...hard to put down.”—Library Journal“Hauntingly beautiful, emotionally devastating, and infused with great compassion.”—Kim Barnes“With wisdom and compassion, Meredith Hall writes about the capacity for atonement. Goodness. Generosity to see deeply, to live through fear and pain on your journey toward the awareness of splendor.”—Ursula Hegi

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“It is a heartbreaking book, a gorgeous book...In Night Came with Many Stars, Van Booy finds the weakness, grace and beauty of common lives fully lived.”—NPR, “Books We Love” “Not to miss!”—USA Today In Kentucky, back in 1933, Carol’s daddy lost his 13-year-old daughter in a game of cards. Award-winning author Simon Van Booy’s spellbinding novel spans decades as he tells the story of Carol and the people in her life. Incidents intersect and lives unexpectedly change course in this masterfully interwoven story of chance and choice that leads home again to a night blessed with light. “What you give in this world,” an old man tells his grandson, “will be given back to you.” Those words illuminate the actions within this unforgettable novel and its connected characters. A young man survives two nearly fatal accidents. A Black family saves an orphaned white boy. A pregnant teenager is rescued by the side of the road. A teenager with developmental disabilities is given his first job. Each incident grows in meaning and power over many decades as we see connections sometimes felt but not always apparent to the people themselves. “Everything was moving,” observes Samuel (Carol’s grandson) in the Kentucky woods. “An invisible force that was everywhere, and made everything touch.” Told by a master storyteller, Night Came with Many Stars is a rare novel that reveals how wondrous, mysterious, and magically connected life can be—the light Simon Van Booy creates illuminates our own lives.

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How do simple words and images make a children’s picture book so magical that one reading can create a cherished memory for life? Here are 100 books that amply prove the picture book is an art form.Here are books you’ll remember and new gems to discover. From The Tale of Peter Rabbit (1901) to Last Stop on Market Street (2015), each of the 100 books is presented with a cover and inside spread as author Chris Loker explains the qualities that combine to make a successful picture book: the interplay between words and images, the dynamic pulse of picture and narrative that compels us to turn the page and follow the story, the sometimes quirky elements that appeal to both children and adults alike. It affirms what we all instinctively know, and have known since childhood — that a picture book is literature, art, and theater all rolled into one, miraculously blended and irresistibly presented.Additionally, A Shimmer of Joy provides an intriguing array of information, not only about the books but also about the authors, artists, publishers, and designers who created them. Along the way, the reader gains insight into the evolving eras of children’s literature and book publishing in the 20th and 21st century, with fascinating stories of its publication history and biographies of the creators.Anyone will gain a new, deeper, appreciation for the picture book while also remembering a time when, sitting in a classroom or on a lap, someone read you a book and opened up your world.For the collector, bibliophile, or children’s book enthusiast, this collection is guaranteed to provide nothing but joy. “All spot-on choices….a shop-window of the creative versatility embedded in children’s picture books over the decades.”—The Book Collector

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“The story of a book-making life.”—New York Times “The lovely colors, tasteful art and elegant typography are an abiding reminder to a hurried world that some gifts of grace endure. That promise is realized in Godine’s books, the gold standard of commercial bookmaking.”—Wall Street Journal David R. Godine, the retired founder of the press, conducts a personal tour of the most memorable books he published during his 50-year career. From his earliest days as a letterpress printer to the present digital era, Godine managed to survive, and sporadically thrive, against all odds and challenges. For more than fifty years, this publishing house tried to make good on the founder’s claim to “Publish books that matter for people who care.” Books that might, and often did, make a difference. In fiction and nonfiction, biography, photography, art and architecture, the graphic arts, children’s books, and more, the company maintained an open door policy, attempting to discover and nurture new talent, rediscovering and reprinting older and unjustly neglected classics. Its program includes first American editions of such acclaimed authors as John Banville, Richard Rodriguez, Noel Perrin, Andre Dubus, Janet Malcolm, and Georges Perec. Its photographers have included Sally Mann, Paul Caponigro, Yousuf Karsh, Nicholas Nixon, George Tice, Rosamond Purcell, Manuel Álvarez Bravo, and Julia Margaret Cameron, among others. Its list of children’s books, with authors and illustrators as diverse as Mary Azarian, Dylan Thomas, Barbara McClintock, Andrea Wisnewski, Edward Ardizzone, William Steig, Daniel C. Beard, Saki, and Frances Hodgson Burnett, have been embraced by reviewers, bookstores, and the public for two generations. Among many others, the Nonpareil list has reprinted the work of Edmund Wilson, George Orwell, Donald Hall, Iris Origo, Paul Horgan, William Gass, Will Cuppy, Ludwig Bemelmans, William Maxwell, Wright Morris, and Paula Fox. The Verba Mundi series introduced American readers to classics of foreign literature by Aharon Appelfeld, Dino Buzzati, Robert Musil, José Donoso, and two Nobel Laureates, J.M.G. Le Clézio and Patrick Modiano.As publishing history, Godine at Fifty presents a record of an era that began in 1970 as the reign of hot metal type that had endured for almost 500 years was coming to an end, when retailers were mostly brick-and-mortar stores, when small publishers thrived, when library purchases were primarily books, and when correspondence was carried on through letters and the telephone. It was an industry that had not substantially changed for a century. So this is, as well, the story of a sea change—in publishing practices, in technology, in retailing, and in corporate structures. Divided into twenty-four chapters and describing almost 300 titles, it remains primarily a personal story—the record, told through the books themselves, of a staunchly independent publisher who pursued his own interests, expanded on his own passions, and took the unconventional position that somewhere out there were probably enough readers that shared his peculiar obsessions to insure his survival. It is also the back story of books and authors, some famous, some little known, who had a story to tell, and what was required to bring that story, through the many and complex dimensions of the publishing process, to the attention of the world.

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In the summer of 1854, Longfellow wrote in his diary "I have at length hit upon a plan for a poem on the American Indians, which seems to me the right one and the only. It is to weave together their beautiful traditions as whole." What emerged the next year was "The Song of Hiawatha," a composite of legends, folklore, myth, and characters that presents, in short, lilting lines (who can forget "By the shore of Gitche-Gumme / By the shining Big-Sea Water"?) the life-story of a real Indian, who provides the focus for the narrative thread of this epic drama of high adventure, tragedy and conflict.The aim was not to tell a particular or specific story but to unite the strands of various Indian legends, to present a sympathetic portrait of many Native American tribes, and especially to disclose their profound relationship with the natural world. This when both government policies and an expanding, land-hungry population were just beginning their inexorable campaign of displacement and annihilation.The poem received a decidedly mixed reception. Our own "Boston Traveller" revealed its biases: "We cannot help but express our regret that our own pet national poet should not have selected as a theme of his muse something better and higher than the silly legends of the savage aborigines." Despite this, the poem entered into our canon of great narratives, and was revived again in 1891 when Remington, surely the most renowned artist of the West, provided with new pen and ink drawings.This handsome new, and freshly reset, edition (the only unabridged version in print) presents the full text, includes all 400 of the original Remington illustrations, and provides an index of the Indian names and their meanings.

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Like a long, funny letter from an old friend, an album of drawings by the legendary singer and activist for social justice, Joan Baez. Since retiring from active performing, Baez has focused her formidable talents on painting and drawing. This collection of drawings shows another side of Baez: lovingly loose and charming sketches on reoccurring themes such as politics, relationships, women, animals, and family. Each section, organized thematically, includes an introductory piece by the artist. Baez approaches her line drawings as exercises in freedom: she begins drawing upside down—often using her non-dominant hand—without any preconceived notion of where the lines might lead her. Beginning with her seminal debut album in 1960, Baez has been a musical force of nature of incalculable influence whose earliest recordings fed a host of traditional ballads into the rock vernacular. In 1963, she introduced Bob Dylan to the world, beginning a tradition of mutual mentoring that continued across her many recordings. As a lifetime advocate for non-violent social change, she marched on the front line of the civil rights movement with Martin Luther King Jr., shined a spotlight on the Free Speech Movement, took to the fields with Cesar Chavez, organized resistance to the Vietnam War, and inspired Vaclav Havel in his fight for a Czech Republic. Am I Pretty When I Fly? reveals yet another side of a beloved icon.

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An intimate, autobiographical poetry collection from legendary artist and activist, Joan Baez. Joan Baez shares poems for or about her contemporaries (such as Bob Dylan, Judy Collins, and Jimi Hendrix), reflections from her childhood, personal thoughts, and cherished memories of her family, including pieces about her younger sister, singer-songwriter Mimi Fariña. Speaking to the people, places, and moments that have had the greatest impact on her art, this collection is an inspiring personal diary in the form of poetry. While Baez has been writing poetry for decades, she’s never shared it publicly. Poems about her life, her family, about her passions for nature and art, have piled up in notebooks and on scraps of paper. Now, for the first time ever, her life is shared revealing pivotal life experiences that shaped an icon, offering a never-before-seen look into the reminiscences and musings of a great artist. Like a late-ni

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A New England Book Award Finalist. “Rich with shining interiors and tactile relationships, delicate human to delicate earth...Poems acting as guides, helping us navigate and remember...”—New York Times Magazine Susan Barba’s collection of poems resembles the spheroid stone of its name; when cracked open, a glittering and fascinating crystalline structure is revealed but the stony sphere she offers us, and the beauty within, is nothing less than the earth.The word “geode” also houses within it “ode,” a praise poem. With both anguish and exaltation, Barba considers our time within the larger scale of deep-time. The species decreasing in number and disappeared and the possibility of human extinction haunt this book, while new generations and the possibility of renunciation of our old ways animate it. There is wonder here as well. She writes...Oak, whose girth exceeds my reach forever I am at your feet, looking up. Here is the world, Barba reminds us, like a ball, in our hands. Poems include “Earthwards,” “Letter from Gaia,” “River,” and “Final Letter of Stone.” geode is for anyone who loves poetry’s uniquely precise and enduring power.

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A woman from New England falls for a charming Scottish landowner only to discover she’s also in a complex relationship with his family’s 400-year-old ancestral estate, The Guynd. Funny and heartwarming, this is the story of a house, a place, and a marriage. Guynd (rhymes with “wind“) is Gaelic for “a high, marshy place.” It’s there that Belinda Rathbone’s memoir takes place after her unlikely marriage and move to pastoral Scotland. There she learns to cope with a grand but crumbling mansion still recovering from the effects of two world wars, an overgrown landscape, a derelict garden, troublesome tenants, local aristocracy, Scottish rituals, and a husband who loathes change.Alternating between enchantment and near despair, Rathbone digs into family and local history in an effort to understand her new surroundings and the ties that bind us through generations. “The book lifts and excels,” wrote The New York Times, “Rathbone nails down a little bit of the Scottish soul in all its stark splendor.” The perfect book for anyone who loves a fish-out-of-water romance and a touching story of home.

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The illustrated classic of an inspired woman and her flower garden on Appledore Island. Celia Thaxter’s small garden with hollyhocks and poppies and scarlet flax was much admired by friends, neighbors, and visitors to the island off the coast of Portland, Maine. There, she wrote this collection of remembrances and gardening advice that was originally published in 1894, shortly before her death. It has never been out of print since.In vivid prose, Thaxter captures the stretching stems and blossoming flowers in moods ranging from bitter defeat—delivered by unrelenting slugs—to the exultant triumph of birdsong and bursting blooms. Any gardener will understand and take heart from Thaxter’s philosophical outlook. “I am fully and intensely aware,” she writes, “that plants are conscious of love and respond to it as they do to nothing else.”Many artists found inspiration in Celia Thaxter’s garden including the American impressionist, Childe Hassam, who provided this enduring book’s many full-page paintings and chapter head decorations. This book is perfect for anyone passionate about flowers and the many trials and triumphs of gardening.

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A literary humor classic—fractured biographical moments from the lives of great writers and composers.This is a collection of mostly imagined encounters between literary figures and their real or imagined family members, friends, and bitter enemies. In Howard Moss’s satirical voice and Edward Gorey’s twenty-five deadpan illustrations, we see Jane Austen wielding artful passive aggression and Sense and Sensibility galleys, the Alcott girls sculpting fudge, the rise of Emily Dickinson’s ruthless witch hazel business, among other delights.Perfect for those who love literature too much to hold it closely to actual facts.

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“French cooking for Americans was never the same after Clémentine came into our kitchens . . . This tale of a cook taught us that we, too, could turn out a splendid home-style French meal in our very own American kitchens.”—Julia ChildWhen Clémentine in the Kitchen first appeared in 1943, it immediately captivated American readers, and a new edition, revised by Narcisse Chamberlain, taught a generation of cooks that French family cooking could easily flourish in their own kitchens. Written by the artist Samuel Chamberlain under the pen name Phineas Beck, it recounts the gastronomic adventures of the Beck/Chamberlain family during the decade that their beguiling Burgundian cook Clémentine produced wonderful French meals for them, both in France and in their New England home in Marblehead.This edition includes a delicious collection of more than 170 traditional recipes—classic dishes, regional specialties, and much that is useful for special occasions: filets de sole au vin blanc, boeuf à la mode, endives braisées. But the most compelling are plain and old-fashioned. These are the dishes that identify the Clémentine family style, a style so French, so civilized, so knowing in its use of ingredients that it cannot become impractical or ever go out of date.

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A young boy finds his calling as the chef of a fancy restaurant in this read-aloud picture book. Comfort food indeed! Eating outrageously fine cuisine is the sole activity that stops this young lad from screaming incessantly. But one fateful night, when his parents accidentally burn dinner, the boy’s temper flares and he begins to yell. Tired of all the noise, Mom and Dad relinquish all cooking responsibilities, leaving it all up to him. E voilà! The boy so enjoys cooking that he sings instead of screams, and finds that he is so talented that his parents open a restaurant with the boy as head chef.But life in the kitchen of an acclaimed and busy restaurant is not easy, so when the boy begins to make mistakes, will his penchant for earsplitting noise ruin everything?Witty text and clever illustrations combine to create a silly yet serious picture book for readers of all ages which teaches kids that you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, especially when you’re singing. The New York Times wrote, “Ackerman and Dalton (The Lonely Phone Booth) have cooked up something witty and, as an example of the parental art of redirecting, perhaps inadvertently wise.”

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Roughly fifteen years after Gutenberg printed the first substantial book in Mainz in 1455, Nicolas Jenson of Venice produced what has been universally recognized among the most beautiful typefaces ever created. Based on the humanistic calligraphy of the Renaissance, an even and infinitely various set of lowercase letters that had evolved from the Carolingian minuscules of the ninth century, Jenson’s types were a miracle of proportion and evenness of color. In the late nineteenth century, it was imitated by Morris in his Golden Type of 1892 (far too heavy), and in the next by Cobden-Sanderson with his Doves Type, Goudy with his Deepdene, and Hunter Middleton with his Eusebius. But it was really not until Bruce Rogers, following his stint at the Riverside Press in Cambridge, Massachusetts, where he first attempted a version of the type in his Montaigne font, tackled the challenge of creating a roman equal to (and in some ways surpassing) the Jenson original. The proof of his success is that it has been used, and held in high esteem, ever since. The story behind the type, the many permutations through which it went, the myths that accrued and surrounded it are all exposed in this fully documented account of the type's genesis and development. Often and justly called "the noblest roman of them all," the book has been designed and set in a digital version especially created by Jerry Kelly who, along with co-author Misha Beletsky, have unearthed, mined, and refined a trove of typographic history to create the definitive history of what many consider the most beautiful typeface created by an American in the last century.

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Translated into English for the first time, this is Georges Perec's unique, puzzling, and often imitated memoir. At once an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring pointillist autobiography, Georges Perec's / Remember is the last of this essential writer's major works to be translated into English. Consisting of 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with "I remember," and all limited to pieces of public knowledge - brand names and folk wisdom, actors and illnesses, places and things ("I remember: "When parents drink, children tipple"; "I remember Hermes handbags, with their tiny padlocks"; "I remember myxomatosis") - the book represents a secret key to the world of Perec's fiction. As critic, translator, and Perec biographer David Bellos notes in his introduction to this edition, since its original publication, "It's hardly possible to utter the words je me souviens in French these days without committing a literary allusion." As playful and puzzling as the best of Perec's novels, I Remember began as a simple writing exercise, and grew into an expansive, exhilarating work of art: the image of one unmistakable and irreplaceable life, shaped from the material of our collective past.

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This is the riveling story of a museum director caught in a web of local and international intrigue while secretly pursuing a forgotten Renaissance pointing. On the eve of its centennial celebrations in December 1969, the Boston Museum of Fine Arts announced the acquisition of an unknown and uncatalogued painting attributed to Raphael. Boston's coup made headlines around the world. Soon afterward, an Italian art sleuth began investigating the details of the painting's export from Italy, challenging the museum's right to ownership. Simultaneously, experts on both sides of the Atlantic lined up to debate its very authenticity. While these contests played themselves out on the international stage, the crisis deepened within the museum as its charismatic director, Perry Rathbone, faced the most challenging crossroads of his 30-year career. In her quest for the true story behind this pivotal event in her father's life, Belinda Rathbone delves into the background of the affair as it was reported in the popular press, both questioning the inevitability of its outcome and revealing the power struggle within the museum that led to his resignation. She draws almost entirely from primary source material in various archival collections and over a hundred contemporary and personal interviews. It is lavishly illustrated with full-colour plates and many previously unpublished photographs.

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These are not your ordinary opposites, they are EXTREME! Extremely funny and extremely clever, combining superlatives and opposites. Knights and dragons, castaways and off-hour Santas, dinosaurs and pirates, mimes and scuba divers populate this imaginative universe. And with just two words per page, you and your little one will have more time to linger over the irresistible illustrations and relish this recital of reverse attractions.

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It is a richly detailed and fascinating history of one of North America's oldest and most colourful fishing ports. The port of Gloucester, nestled under Cape Ann in Massachusetts, has been a focus for seafaring stories from "Captains Courageous" to "The Perfect Storm". From its first settlement to its present struggles, the town has seen its share of boom and bust, expansion and retraction, loss and tragedy. The author's grandfather, Steve Ollson was lost at sea in 1935, in a dory, trawling for halibut. With more than seventy vintage photographs and maps, an extensive glossary of fishing terms, and a detailed chronology of the Gloucester fleet, including all the fishermen and vessels lost at sea since 1693, "Alone at Sea" is the most comprehensive record yet attempted to bring the history of Gloucester - the oldest, most dramatic, and colorful fishing port in the Western hemisphere - to life.

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Filled with wit and insight, this is a fascinating tour of Venice from an artist's perspective. The city of Venice has always provided an almost irresistible lure for both writers and artists. Henry James loved it, as did Ruskin, Browning, Pound, and Brodsky. For artists, it has been a compulsory magnet since the time of Bellini and Canaletto. By the 19th century there was hardly an artist of note - Whistler and Turner, Sargent and Prendergas - who was not seduced by the city's charms, history, and aesthetic heritage. For the depiction of Venice by artists, it's a high bar that's been set, but Adam Van Doren, grandson of the Pulitzer prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren, convincingly confronts the competition in this charming memoir, a verbal and visual account of his love affair with the city. His story is personal; like all other artists, he sees the city through his own eyes, but he is also well-informed historically, lacing his tour with information, opinion, and wit.

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This is a superb collection of stories by Stig Dagerman, one of the most talented writers of Sweden's post-war generation. Stig Dagerman (1923-1954) is regarded as the most talented young writer of the Swedish post-war generation. By the 1940s, his fiction, plays, and journalism had catapulted him to the forefront of Swedish letters, with critics comparing him to William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, and Albert Camus. His suicide at the age of thirty-one was a national tragedy. This selection, containing a number of new translations of Dagerman's stories never before published in English, is unified by the theme of the loss of innocence. Often narrated from a child's perspective, the stories give voice to childhood's tender state of receptiveness and joy tinged with longing and loneliness. The title story, "To Kill A Child", is the most famous of Dagerman's short stories and among the most anthologized and oft-read stories in Sweden.

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The selected early poems by Mark Doty including the complete texts of Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight for which Mr. Doty has contributed a new introduction.

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Take your children back to 1910 for an old-fashioned New England summer in the country, complete with a July Fourth parade.Poet laureate Donald Hall (author of The Ox-Cart Man and other classics of country life) grew up spending his summers on his grandfather’s farm in rural New Hampshire. It was there he milked cows, raised sheep, and heard stories about the past that are brought to life in this read-aloud picture book for young children.In that long-ago time, the biggest celebration of the year was the July Fourth celebration in Danbury, New Hampshire—complete with flags, marching bands, speeches, and ice cream. A trip to Boston, where toys could be bought for a penny apiece, was a major event. This is a piece of Americana that will bring readers—and listeners—back to a simpler time when pleasure came from making as much as buying, where politics were truly local, and when worth was determined by character, not price.Published in the same format and with the same delightful handcolored scratchboard illustrations by Michael McCurdy as Donald Hall’s Lucy’s Christmas, this is a wonderful way to share old-time summer traditions and history with your child.

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Arranged for daily inspiration, wisdom from one of America’s great visionary and philosophical minds.“A chief event of life is that day on which we have encountered a mind that startled us.” A Year with Emerson is a feast of 365 such days. Known throughout the world for his cogent, epigrammatic writing, admired as the “George Washington of American Literature,” his work is even more enriching in bigger doses. Daily almanac entries present the heart of Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideas and philosophy. Some were written on the very day in which they appear in the book, some are speculations and musings of the season and the natural world, but all are unfailingly wise, still relevant to our modern times.Emerson’s mind ranged across the universe even as he traveled the length and breadth of the United States and Europe. With Emerson as a companion and guide, we meet the ideas and personalities he championed and encountered, from Lincoln to John Muir, from Carlyle to Montaigne, and, of course, the close New England circle of Hawthorne, Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and the Alcotts. With company such as this, and the scope of Emerson’s vision, you're sure to encounter rich food for thought every day of the year.

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COSMOPOLITAN AND SENSITIVE, articulate and composed, Wohlauer is a master of the dramatic image, the framed landscape, the arrested instant. In this collection of fifty of his best images selected from his work over the past decade, the viewer is treated to dolmans from Ireland and standing stones from Scotland, the sweeping waves of the Big Sur and Oregon coast, and the majestic and dramatic vistas of the American desert. These landscapes, carefully crafted, beautifully printed, stand beside his quiet and unassuming still lives and his sculpted nudes with an assured authority. For this is a photographer who feels no need to strain for effect, to manipulate techniques, material, or subject matter, or batter the viewer with proof of his virtuosity. The material is left to speak for itself, reflecting a talent that knows precisely what it is doing and is content to let the drama of the subjects at hand speak more loudly than the man behind the camera. Beautifully printed in fine-line duotone, this is an extraordinary record of compelling vision, of an artist working proudly in the footsteps of Adams, Weston, and Strand.

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