Search results for ""grove press""

"Among America's greatest poets, a true minimalist who can weave awesome poems from remarkably few words." -Richard Kostelanetz, New York Times Book Review Every generation of poets seems to harbor its own hidden genius, one whose stature and brilliance come to light after his talent has already been achieved and exercised. The same drama of obscurity and nuance that attended the discovery of Emily Dickinson and Wallace Stevens is suggested by the career of Robert Lax. An expatriate American whose work to date — more than forty books — has been published mostly in Europe, this 85-year-old poet built a following in the U.S. among figures as widespread as Mark Van Doren, e. e. cummings, Jack Kerouac, and Sun Ra. The works in Love Had a Compass represent every stage of Lax's development as a poet, from his early years in the 1940s as a staff writer for The New Yorker to his present life on the Greek Island of Patmos. An inveterate wanderer, Lax's own sense of himself as both exile and pilgrim is carefully evoked in his prose journals and informs the pages of the Marseille Diaries, published here for the first time. Together with the poems, they provide the best portrait available to date of one of the most striking and original poets of our age.

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We called him a devil and quarantined him behind such labels as 'the most dangerous man alive.' But Charles Manson remains a shocking reminder of our own humanity gone awry. This astonishing book lays bare the life and the mind of a man whose acts left us horrified. His story provides an enormous amount of information about his life and how it led to the Tate-LaBianca murders, and reminds us of the complexity of the human condition. Born in the middle of the Depression to an unmarried fifteen-year-old, Manson lived through a bewildering succession of changing homes and substitute parents, until his mother finally asked the state authorities to assume his care when he was twelve.Regimented and often brutalized in juvenile homes, Manson became immersed in a life of petty theft, pimping, jail terms and court appearances that culminated in seven years of prison. Released in 1967, he suddenly found himself in the world of hippies and flower children, a world that not only accepted him, but even glorified his anti-establishment values. It was a combination that led, for reasons only Charles Manson can fully explain, to tragedy. Manson's story, distilled from seven years of interviews and examinations of his correspondence, provides sobering insight into the making of a criminal mind, and a fascinating picture of the last years of the sixties. No one who wants to understand that time, and the man who helped to bring it to a horrifying conclusion, can miss reading this book.

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*Winner of the NYPL Young Lions Award**Winner of the CLMP Firecracker Award*Finalist for the NBCC John Leonard PrizeA New York Times Writer to Watch This SummerNamed a Best Book of the Year by Literary Hub and Library JournalIn 1990, three boys are born, unrelated but intertwined by circumstance: Dayo, Iseul and Youssef. They are adopted as infants and live in a shared bedroom perched atop a mosque in Staten Island. The boys are a conspicuous trio: Dayo is of Nigerian origin, Iseul is Korean and Youssef indeterminately Middle Eastern, but they are so close as to be almost inseparable. Nevertheless, Youssef is keeping a secret from his brothers: he has an imaginary double, a familiar who seems absolutely real, a shapeshifting creature he calls Brother. The boys' adoptive father, Imam Salim, is known for his radical sermons extolling the virtues of opting out of Western ideologies. But he is uncharismatic at home, a distant father who spends evenings in his study with whiskey-laced coffee, writing letters to his former compatriots back in Saudi Arabia. Like Youssef, he too has secrets, including the cause of his failing health, the reason for his nighttime excursions from the house and the truth about what happened to the boys' parents. When Imam Salim's path takes him back to Saudi Arabia, the boys will be forced to follow. There they will be captivated by an opulent, almost futuristic world and find traces of their parents' stories. But they will have to change if they want to survive in this new world, and the arrival of a creature as powerful as Brother will not go unnoticed.With stylistic brilliance and intellectual acuity, in Brother Alive Zain Khalid brings characters to vivid life with a bold energy that matches the great themes of his novel - family, capital, power, sexuality and the possibility of reunion for those who are broken.

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Over a century ago, Rilke went to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris, where he watched a pair of flamingos. A flock of other birds screeched by, and, as he describes in a poem, the great red-pink birds sauntered on, unphased, then 'stretched amazed and singly march into the imaginary.' This encounter - so strange, so typical of flamingos with their fabulous posture - is also still typical of how we interact with animals. Even as our actions threaten their very survival, they are still symbolic, captivating and captive, caught in a drama of our framing.This issue of Freeman's tells the story of that interaction, its costs, its tendernesses, the mythological flex of it. From lovers in a Chiara Barzini story, falling apart as a group of wild boars roams in their Roman neighbourhood, to the soppen emergency birth of a cow on a Wales farm, stunningly described by Cynan Jones, no one has the moral high ground here. Nor is this a piece of mourning. There's wonder, humour, rage and relief, too.Featuring pigeons, calves, stray dogs, mascots, stolen cats, and bears, to the captive, tortured animals who make up our food supply, powerfully described in Nobel Prize winner Olga Tokarczuk's essay, this wide-ranging issue of Freeman's will stimulate discussion and dreams alike.

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Written with the same acerbic wit and infectious humor that has made P. J. O'Rourke one of the most popular political satirists of all time, The Enemies List will keep you howling and his enemies scowling. From Noam Chomsky to Yoko Ono, from Peter, Paul, and Mary (yes, they're still alive) to all the people who think quartz crystals cure herpes, from Ralph Nader to the entire country of Sweden, P. J. O'Rourke has created a roster of the most useless, politically disgraceful, and downright foolish people around. Although a rating system of S=Silly, VS=Very Silly, SML=Shirley MacLaine was ultimately cast aside, the distinguishing feature of the cluster of dunces presented here is silliness, not political subversion. The Enemies List began as an article in the American Spectator and, as readers contributed their own suggestions, quickly grew into a hilarious and slashing commentary on politicians and celebrities alike. Now they have been named, we just need to figure out what to do with them. "To say that P. J. O'Rourke is funny is like saying that the Rocky Mountains are scenic - accurate but insufficient." - Chicago Tribune

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"Talking in your sleep was never so funny...[Adam Lennard's] nighttime alter-ego is rude and crude and certainly sounds insane."-- ABC News (online) on the Sleep Talkin' Man blog Karen Slavick met Adam Lennard in 1991 on a Kibbutz in Israel, where he declared his love for her by passing out in her bed while he waited for her to return from a midnight swim. Understandably, she never forgot him. Over a decade later, they rekindled their romance and married--but then he fell asleep again, and all hell broke loose. Though he's a romantic and mild-mannered Englishman by day, Adam quickly morphs into the uproariously foul-mouthed, vegetarian-hating, wildlife-obsessed character beloved by millions as Sleep Talkin' Man. And Karen has the audio tapes to prove it. Sleep Talkin' Man collects the best of his questionable wisdom along with tales from blog readers, and stories of how love can bloom--even when your beloved is a nocturnal maniac. By turns crude and charming, Sleep Talkin' Man is a hilariously candid journey into one man's dreamland.

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Ray Robinson’s visceral, ambitious debut novel Electricity is a tour de force portrayal of a heroine you will not soon forget. Thirty-year-old Lily O’Connor lives with epilepsy, uncontrollable surges of electricity that leave her in a constant state of edginess. Prickly, up-front-honest and down-to-earth practical, Lily has learned to make do, to make the most of things, to look after — and out for — herself. Then her mother — whom Lily has not seen for years — dies, and Lily is drawn back into a world she thought she’d long since left behind. Reunited with her brother, a charismatic poker player, Lily pursues her own high-stakes gamble, leaving for London to track down her other, missing brother Mikey. In the pandemonium of the city, Lily’s seizures only intensify. As her journey takes her from her comfort zone, it leads her into the question of what her life is meant to be.

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From an acclaimed historian, the full and authoritative story of one of the most iconic disasters in American history, told through the vivid memories of those who experienced it Between October 8–10, 1871, much of the city of Chicago was destroyed by one of the most legendary urban fires in history. Incorporated as a city in 1837, Chicago had grown at a breathtaking pace in barely three decades, from just over 4,000 in 1840 to greater than 330,000 at the time of the fire. Built hastily, the city was largely made of wood. Once it began in the barn of Catherine and Patrick O'Leary, the Fire quickly grew out of control, twice jumping branches of the Chicago River on its relentless northeastward path through the city's three divisions. Close to one of every three Chicago residents was left homeless and more were instantly unemployed, though the death toll was miraculously low. Remarkably, no carefully researched popular history of the Great Chicago Fire has been written until now, despite it being one of the most cataclysmic disasters in US history. Building the story around memorable characters, both known to history and unknown, including the likes of General Philip Sheridan and Robert Todd Lincoln, eminent Chicago historian Carl Smith chronicles the city's rapid growth and place in America's post-Civil War expansion. The dramatic story of the fire—revealing human nature in all its guises—became one of equally remarkable renewal, as Chicago quickly rose back up from the ashes thanks to local determination and the world's generosity and faith in Chicago's future. As we approach the fire's 150th anniversary, Carl Smith's compelling narrative at last gives this epic event its full and proper place in our national chronicle.

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The New York Times bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, non-fiction, and poetry—including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. Sundog is a powerful novel about the life and loves of a foreman named Robert Corvus Strang, who worked on giant dam projects around the world until he was crippled in a fall down a three-hundred-foot dam. Now as he tries to regain use of his legs, he has a chance to reassess his life, and a blasé journalist who has heard of Strang’s reputation in the field arrives to draw him out about his various incarnations. Strang—who has the violently heightened sensibilities of a man who has gone to the limits and back—recounts his monumental life moving from Michigan to Africa and the Amazon, including his several marriages and children, and dozens of lovers. “A feisty, passionate novel” (Newsday) from a writer whose “storytelling instincts are nearly flawless” (The New York Times), Sundog is a story as true and gripping as real life, and ultimately as victorious.

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Best-selling author Bella Pollen’s imaginative new novel received stellar reviews in hardcover and was chosen as a Richard & Judy Book Club title.In 1980 Germany, Cold War tensions are once again escalating and a mole is suspected in the British Embassy. So when the clever diplomat Nicky Fleming dies suddenly and suspiciously, it’s convenient to brand him the traitor. But was his death an accident, murder, or suicide? As the government investigates Nicky's death, his wife relocates with their three children to a remote Scottish island hoping to save what remains of their family. But the isolated shores of her childhood retreat only intensify their distance between them, and it is the brilliant and peculiar youngest child, Jamie, who alone holds on to the one thing he’s sure of: his father has promised to return and he was a man who never broke a promise.When Jamie sets off to explore the island with his teenage sisters, they discover a tamed grizzly bear has been marooned on shore, hiding somewhere among the seaside caves. Jamie believes the bear may have a strange connection to his father, and as he seeks the truth, Nicky's story begins revealing itself in unexpected ways.

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