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

"Exquisite."—The New Yorker Isobel English, a novelist of the 1950s, wrote three brief books about adultery and damnation. Every Eye concerns Hattie, a woman not really at home anywhere, least of all among her manipulative family, which has assigned her the role of shabby-genteel London spinster. She has understood little about her existence, and about her strange, aborted love affair with a much older man—the central mystery of her life. Now, while in Ibiza with her new young husband, the meaning of her past is becoming clear, its hidden patterns emerging from gray English shadows into the blazing Mediterranean sun.“It is in Ibiza that the story breaks free from its resentments,” said Anita Brookner in praise of this remarkable neglected novel, “a lucidly written account of various kinds of confusion … and a valuable lesson in where to look for freedom.”

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always women in the
dark on porches talking as if in blackness their secrets would be safe —from “Champlain, Branbury, the lakes at night” Lyn Lifshin can make something memorable out of the most familiar words and scenes—something memorable, something fresh and entirely her own. Contents of this collection include Slippery Blisses, A Love of Blueness, Written on the Body of Night, Things Behind the SunDarkness in the Light.

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A selection of the very best from one of America’s most thought-provoking writers: poems on life, faith, doubt, and death that read like memoir, essay, and story. As The New York Times said, “likely to resonate with many who have come face to face with life’s most important questions.”Thomas Lynch—like Wallace Stevens and William Carlos Williams—is a poet who writes about real things with language rooted in the everyday yet masterfully infused with power: I have steady work, a circle of friends and lunch on Thursdays with the Rotary. I have a wife, unspeakably beautiful, a daughter and three sons, a cat, a car, good credit, taxes, and mortgage payments and certain duties here. Notably, when folks get horizontal, breathless, still: life in Milford ends. They call. I send a car.Thomas Lynch spent his career as an undertaker in Midwest America—and in his off-hours became a writer of exceptional insight. Publishers Weekly calls him, “A poet with something to say and something worth listening to.” This collection presents 140 of his greatest poems drawn from his previous books, Skating with Heather Grace, Still Life in Milford, Grimalkin, The Sin-Eater, and Walking Papers. This is a collection for readers who love all life’s questions and mysteries—big and small.“Thomas Lynch’s poems take us under the apparent world to where consciousness is alive and shimmering with joy and loss, blindness and epiphany.”—Billy Collins

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A New England Book Award Finalist. “There's so much life in this beautiful book that it feels like a living thing. Wesley McNair is a kind of Chekhov of American poetry.”—Ted Kooser, Pulitzer Prize winner and Poet Laureate. Wesley McNair is a poet, memorist, and storyteller. His stories are personal and yet speak to our most urgent, universal, concerns. As he writes...For we are all born into exile, saved only by the homes we dream, and the love that we may find there. Set in rural Virginia, the poet’s younger sister Aimee is adrift in a difficult marriage to Mike, a Trump-supporting, church-going, off-the-grid gun shop owner. McNair brilliantly explores his sister’s life, his own family’s past, to seek understanding. Throughout, this marvelous work, McNair attests to patience and perseverance, and an unwavering belief in compassion and reconciliation, in love’s ability to unite us, even amidst the ugly politics of our time. Dwellers in the House of the Lord is for anyone who loves poetry’s unique power, in the hands of a master, to tell stories of our lives.

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The story of Little Red Riding Hood reset in rural New England of the early nineteenth century. Into the forbidding but beautiful New England winter steps a resourceful farm girl in her scarlet cloak, bound with her basket of presents for her ailing grandmother. Told in a folksy cadence, the tale ends happily, as Little Red’s father comes to the rescue (sharp-eyed children will notice a calico cat helped, too!). Loving detail fills each illustration in this unique version. Andrea Wisnewski based her interiors, architecture, and costumes on models found at Old Sturbridge Village, the living-history museum in western Massachusetts. The images, full of period detail, are done in a medium Wisnewski has made her own: black-and-white prints made from intricate papercut designs (the results look much like woodcuts) that are then hand painted in gloriously vivid watercolor. This is a beautiful, totally original, reimagining of the German fairytale classic and, yes, Little Red does survive the ravenous wolf—moist but intact. A wonderful version of the classic tale, perfect as a read-aloud, a picture book to share.

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John Barleycorn must die—so everyone agrees from the ploughmen to the tinker in this exquisitely illustrated edition of the old English ballad. But who will prove to be the strongest man at last?Hand-colored woodcuts by artist Mary Azarian bring the tale of John Barleycorn to a new and glorious life, just like old Sir John himself. There are exquisite details on every page from the ploughing, sowing, harrowing, scything, tying, and grinding—until, finally, the drinking and celebrating.This ballad of how barley becomes beer dates back to the 16th century though the underlying theme of nature’s cycle dates back to pagan times. However old the story, the mystery and celebration of the earth’s cycles at the core of the tale still resonants strongly today. And as befits the tradition of the ballad, a bathtub beer recipe is included as well. Mary Azarian is a renowned New England illustrator and printmaker. Of her A Farmer’s Alphabet, School Library Journal said, “Azarian eschews the merely cute or quaint, creating a loving memorial to a way of life.” That be said equally of this, her book for adults, The Tale of John Barleycorn: Or From Barley to Beer.

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Stay in touch with country and city dwelling friends by writing them a note inside these rural-themed greeting cards by New England illustrator extraordinaire, Mary Azarian.A handwritten note, on good paper and contained in a classy envelope, says something about the sender and is more welcomed, absorbed, and remembered than an e-mail.Each box contains twelve cards and matching envelopes. The outside of each card features one of six farm scenes from Mary Azarian’s collection of prints, A Farmer’s Alphabet (each image is repeated twice). There are apples being picked from a tree, a dog asleep in a cozy armchair, kids jumping into a hay mound, neighbors chatting over a picket fence, long underwear worn in front of an old wood stove, and the scenic view of a farm amongst the hills.The inside of each card is blank and ready for your message.Mary Azarian created the prints for A Farmer’s Alphabet while a teacher in one of Vermont’s last one-room schoolhouses. In the late 1970s, the state board of education commissioned her to create a rural alphabet, a series of bold red-and-black woodcut prints featuring the letters, A to Z, and depicting scenes from Vermont life. Published as a book by Godine, Smithsonian Magazine said, “No matter where children live – on a farm, in the suburbs or the city – they will love this handsome book.” The Boston Globe said, “A beautiful gift; a treasure to own.”

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Tom is happy with his new Aunt Bundlejoy Cosysweet who is delighted to be asked to join him in his latest invention, a jam-powered frog. When the frog hops past Captain Najork's window, Tom does not expect to be chased by a pedal powered snake, complete with the Captain and his hired sportsmen, bent on revenge. As Tom, the Captain and Aunt Fidget Wonkham-Strong Najork all converge on a nearby girls' boarding school, the tables are suddenly turned with the Captain finding himself in a very precarious situation...

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A poetic read-aloud for young cat lovers with exquisite art and text.Just why are cats so special? This joyous celebration of our feline friends has some answers, “It is the curl-up-in-your-lap. At any time, it is the nap.” Clever verse and minutely observed paintings invite us to explore the many moods and passions of kitties. From a tiny gray kitten eyeing a goldfish to a fat marmalade lolling on the sofa, here is a panorama of pleasures for the youngest cat lover.

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The legendary tale of a saint and his encounter with a ferocious wolf. How the saint tamed the wolf with kindness resonants for families today in this beautifully illustrated picture book. Saint Francis was born in 1182, the son of a wealthy merchant. After a swashbuckling youth in Assisi, he had a change of faith and decided to live the life that he ascribed to Jesus, one of poverty and abstinence. He gave away everything he owned. His father disowned him. But over the years he drew to himself a substantial following of men and women and died revered and beloved in 1225. Three years later he was canonized as Saint Francis of Assisi by Pope Gregory IX. This lovely retelling of one of the less known of the Saint Francis lessons centers on the legend of the great wolf of Gubbio, a ferocious canine who terrorized the town and was slowly reducing it to penury and starvation. In nearby Assisi, Brother Francis heard of their plight and came to their rescue. Unbelievingly, the villagers watched from the ramparts as Brother Francis called to the wolf, tamed it with his tenderness, and made it pledge that if the people of Gubbio would care for it, he would do them no harm. He took the pledge and lived in harmony with the citizens of the city until his death. A wonderful collaboration between a Newbery-winning author, Jane Langton, and Caldecott-winning illustrator, Ilse Plume, with a timeless lesson.

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A chapter book for young readers about three brave sisters who happily live off the land while waiting for their parents to return.Kids often imagine what their lives would be like if they were left on their own for even a short time. The three very different sisters in this story have just that kind of adventure for a week on an island in Maine. This is a breezy read for boys and girls who love family stories and adventures with happy endings.

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Story-poems of friendship and wonder, loneliness and endurance, sexuality and unrequited longing, familial ties and the overriding relationship of the individual to nature, to landscape and animals, and the living earth. Kate Barnes wrote wise and moving verse as Robert Creeley said, “of a deep and heartfelt clarity.” She lived and wrote on a farm in Appleton, Maine and was the state’s first Poet Laureate. These are poems that celebrate the ingredients of our humanity in poetry narratives that will stay with you through every season.

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Two trailblazing novels by Georges Perec, Things: Jerome and Sylvie, the young upwardly mobile couple, lust for the good life. They wanted life's enjoyment, but this equated to ownership. A Man Asleep: A nameless student attempts to purify himself entirely of material desires and ambitions.

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This fine collection of stories straddles the thin border between the territory of ordinary anxiety and that of existential nightmare. These tales of dread and darkness do not feature the traditional demons that haunt country houses, but rather characters who inhabit the familiar scenes of everyday life. These are tales of ordinary people who all have one thing in common - at some point in their lives reality turned strange, and the unthinkable became conceivable.

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This is the sixth book by Los Angeles poet and short story writer Coleman.

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All roads begin somewhere and today’s U. S. highway system began with an exploratory, cross-country ride, led by 28-year-old Army lieutenant colonel, Dwight Eisenhower. This is the story of that coast-to-coast journey and how the dream of connecting America with roads began. Before he led the liberation of Europe, before he became our nation’s 34th President, Dwight D. Eisenhower’s made a road trip in 1919 from Washington D.C. to California. The expedition proved to be a crucial chapter in the history of America as it laid the groundwork to make automobile travel the fastest and easiest way to move around the country, also setting in motion the nation’s future love affair with cheap crude. The 1919 Transcontinental Motor Convoy of eighty-one trucks and other military vehicles traveled more than 3,000 precarious miles along the most famous road of the day, the Lincoln Highway, which ran between New York City and San Francisc

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“No one mulling this gentle record will fail to be moved.”—San Francisco Chronicle Poet, publisher, bookseller, activist—this is the story of Lawrence Ferlinghetti, the bookshop he made a landmark in San Francisco, and a life beautifully lived with writers and books.In the mid-1950s a group of San Francisco-based writers emerged as a central force in American letters. Self-styled bohemians, disillusioned with the old American dream of prosperity and conformity, they harangued these “virtues” in their writings. They became known as the Beat Generation. Their ranks included Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac, and Gregory Corso. But the unifying force among them was an unassuming, almost painfully shy young poet named Lawrence Ferlinghetti.As owner of the now legendary City Lights Booksellers and its publishing enterprises, City Lights Publishers and its Pocket Poet Series, Ferlinghetti promoted the writings of his rebellious contemporaries, and continually looked for new talent to publish, while conducting a parallel though more personal search for self-identity through his own work. Although that search began with a lonely, unstable childhood in which he never knew his real parents, it would not become manifest until years later with the 1958 publication of his first collection of poems, A Coney Island of the Mind—that debut would go on to sell more than one million copies and become one of the bestselling and most popular books of poetry ever published. In this, the first biography of Ferlinghetti ever published (originally released in 1979), Neeli Cherkovski recreates those early years of the poet-publisher and examines the content and import of his work. Long out-of-print, this is a crucial literary document by a man who knew the legendary poet-publisher-bookseller intimately.This expanded edition—published just one year after Ferlinghetti’s passing in 2021 at the age of 101—includes a fascinating, hilarious new foreword about how the book came to be written in the late 1970s, an epilogue covering the last forty years of Ferlinghetti’s life, and a personal, tender afterword about the long relationship between the author and his subject.For readers interested in American culture and how a business can make social change, this is an irresistible story of a long life very well lived.

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“Fantastically entertaining and deeply engaging...potent distillations of creative rage, social critique, and subversive wit.”—Washington Post “Terrifying and fearlessly inventive.”—New York TimesThe first complete collection of Wanda Coleman’s original and inventive sonnets. Long regarded as among her finest work, these one hundred poems give voice to loving passions, social outrage, and hard-earned wisdom. Wanda Coleman was a beat-up, broke Black woman who wrote with anger, humor, and ruthless intelligence: “to know, i must survive myself,” she wrote in “American Sonnet 7.” A poet of the people, she created the experimental “American Sonnet” form and published them between 1986 and 2001. The form inspired countless others, from Terrance Hayes to Billy Collins.Drawn from life’s particulars, Coleman’s art is timeless and universal. In “American Sonnet 61” she writes: reaching down into my griot bag of womanish wisdom and wily social commentary, i come up with bricks with which to either reconstruct the past or deconstruct a head.... from the infinite alphabet of afroblues intertwinings, i cull apocalyptic visions (the details and lovers entirely real) and articulate my voyage beyond that point where self disappears These one hundred sonnets—borne from influences as diverse as Huey P. Newton and Herman Melville, Amiri Baraka and Robert Duncan—tell Coleman’s own tale, as well as the story of Black and white America. From “American Sonnet 2”: towards the cruel attentions of violent opiates as towards the fatal fickleness of artistic rain towards the locusts of social impotence itself i see myself thrown heart first into this ruin not for any crime but beingThis is a collection of electrifying truth that only an artist such as Wanda Coleman can deliver.

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“Charming, delightful, and a great companion for gardeners and naturalists alike.”—Booklist Lavender, basil, hyssop, balm, sage, rue — the thinking gardener’s guide to herbs. Writer/naturalist Henry Beston, a founding father of the environmental movement, believed that a strong connection to nature is essential. “It is only when we are aware of the earth and of the earth as poetry that we truly live,” Beston says in his now-classic Herbs and the Earth. In this book, Beston shares one of those connections as seen through the oldest group of plants known to gardeners. “A garden of herbs,” he writes, “is a garden of things loved for themselves in their wholeness and integrity. It is not a garden of flowers, but a garden of plants which are sometimes very lovely flowers and are always more than flowers.” Whether you are already a committed herbalist or ju

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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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“Wesley McNair, an unassuming, avowedly regional pastoral poet from Western Maine, is writing the best poetry of his life—poetry uniquely capable of, and interested in, addressing our larger moment.”—Los Angeles Review of Books Wesley McNair’s story-like poems have long celebrated eccentrics and misfits, the hopeful and the lost, with a tenderness that transcends the everyday. This career-spanning collection brings together his very best poems from the past four decades alongside his newest poems. Since the publication of his first book in the early 1980s, Wesley McNair has earned a reputation as a poet of place, an intimate observer of the speech and character of New England. In fact, McNair’s “place” is unlimited, as he proves in the lucid, far-ranging poems of this volume. “Whole lives fill small lines,” wrote Donald Hall of McNair’s work. He is truly, as Philip Levine wrote, “One of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry.” Late Wonders: New & Selected Poems includes “The Long Dream of Home” the complete trilogy of McNair’s masterful, long narrative poems written over the last thirty years: “My Brother Running,” “Fire,” and “Dwellers in the House of the Lord.” This is a collection for anyone who believes mixing a little sorrow and little comedy makes for poetry that moves the heart.

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“We’re better off for having these men among us.”—Wall Street JournalBefore 9/11, the rugby team at West Point learned to bond on a sports field. This is what happened when those 15 young men became leaders in war. Filled with drama, tragedy, and personal transformations, this is the story of a unique brotherhood. It is a story of American rugby and a story of the U. S. Army created through intimate portraits of men shaped by West Point’s motto: “Duty, Honor, Country.” Some of the players deployed to Afganistan and Iraq, some to Europe. Some became infantry, others became fliers. Some saw action, some did not. One gave his life on a street in Baghdad when his convoy was hit with an IED. Two died away from the battlefield but no less tragically. Journalist Martin Pengelly, a former rugby player himself, was given extraordinary access to tell this story, a story of a brutal sport and even more brutal warfare.

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The fascinating, true, story of baseball’s amateur origins. “Explores the conditions and factors that begat the game in the 19th century and turned it into the national pastime....A delightful look at a young nation creating a pastime that was love from the first crack of the bat.”—Paul Dickson, The Wall Street JournalBaseball’s true founders don’t have plaques in Cooperstown. The founders were the hundreds of uncredited amateurs — ordinary people — who played without gloves, facemasks or performance incentives in the middle decades of the 19th century. Unlike today’s pro athletes, they lived full lives outside of sports. They worked, built businesses and fought against the South in the Civil War.But that’s not the way the story has been told. The wrongness of baseball history can be staggering. You may have heard that Abner Doubleday or Alexander Cartwright invented baseball. Neither did. You may have been told that a club called the Knickerbockers played the first baseball game in 1846. They didn’t. You have read that baseball’s color line was uncrossed and unchallenged until Jackie Robinson in 1947. Nope. You have been told that the clean, corporate 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were baseball’s first professional club. Not true. They weren’t the first professionals; they weren’t all that clean, either. You may have heard Cooperstown, Hoboken, or New York City called the birthplace of baseball, but not Brooklyn. Yet Brooklyn was the home of baseball’s first fans, the first ballpark, the first statistics—and modern pitching.Baseball was originally supposed to be played, not watched. This changed when crowds began to show up at games in Brooklyn in the late 1850s. We fans weren’t invited to the party; we crashed it. Professionalism wasn’t part of the plan either, but when an 1858 Brooklyn versus New York City series accidentally proved that people would pay to see a game, the writing was on the outfield wall.When the first professional league was formed in 1871, baseball was already a fully formed modern sport with championships, media coverage, and famous stars. Professional baseball invented an organization, but not the sport itself. Baseball’s amazing amateurs had already done that.Thomas W. Gilbert’s history is for baseball fans and anyone fascinating by history, American culture, and how great things began.

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“Insightful...empathetic...a thoughtful consideration of a topic that will have a substantial impact on our future.”—BooklistReadable Feast, Book Award Winner for Socially Conscious Writing * Civil Eats’ Food and Farming Book Pick Ever wonder if there’s a better way to live, work, and eat? You’re not alone. Here is the story of five back-to-the-land movements, from 1840 to present day, when large numbers of utopian-minded people in the United States took action to establish small-scale farming as an alternative to mainstream agriculture. Then and now, it’s the story of people striving to live freely and fight injustice, to make the food on their table a little healthier, and to leave the planet less scarred than they found it. Throughout America’s history as an industrial nation, sizable countercultural movements have chosen to forgo modern comforts in pursuit of a simpler life. In this illuminating alternative American history, Margot Anne Kelley details the evolution of food-centric utopian movements that were fueled by deep yearnings for unpolluted water and air, racial and gender equality, for peace, for a less consumerist lifestyle, for a sense of authenticity, for simplicity, for a healthy diet, and for a sustaining connection to the natural world.Millennials who jettisoned cities for rural life form the core of America’s current back-to-the-land movement. These young farmers helped meet surges in supplies for food when COVID-19 ravaged lives and economies, and laid bare limitations in America’s industrial food supply chain. Their forebears were the utopians of the 1840s, including Thoreau and his fellow Transcendental friends who created Brook Farm and Fruitlands; the single taxers and “little landers” who created self-sufficient communities at the turn of the last century; Scott and Helen Nearing and others who decamped to the countryside during the Great Depression; and, of course, the hippie back-to-the-landers of the 1970s. Today, food has become an important element of the social justice movement. Food is no longer just about what we eat, but about how our food is raised and who profits along the way. Kelley looks closely at the efforts of young farmers now growing heirloom pigs, culturally appropriate foods, and newly bred vegetables, along with others working in coalitions, advocacy groups, and educational programs to extend the reach of this era’s Good Food Movement. Foodtopia is for anyone interested in how we all might lead much better—and well-fed—lives.

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The 40th anniversary edition of an American classic: a “minority student” pays the cost of social assimilation and academic success with a painful alienation—from his past, his parents, his culture. Exquisitely written, poignant and powerful, unsettling and controversial, this both a profound study of the importance of language and a moving, intimate portrait of a boy struggling to become a man.Forty years ago, readers met the extraordinary writer Richard Rodriguez through the story of his own education. He would go on to win a loyal readership with Days of Obligation: An Argument with My Mexican Father (a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize), Brown: The Last Discovery of America, and Darling: A Spiritual Autobiography. But first came Hunger of Memory, originally published by Godine in 1982. Hunger of Memory is the story of a young Mexican-American, who began school in Sacramento, California knowing just fifty words of English, yet concluded his university studies in the reading room of the British Museum. In between, he fought a dramatic struggle between his public and private self. A longtime resident of San Francisco, and an ardent opponent of easy labels and limited self-conceptions, Rodriguez describes himself as a “queer Catholic Indian Spaniard at home in a temperate Chinese city in a fading blond state in a post-Protestant nation.” Resisting the easy way of following received dogmatic and conventional thought, Rodriguez has also encountered hostility for his provocative positions on issues such as affirmative action and bilingual education. But the extraordinary clarity of his iconoclastic writing—the surprising twists in his thinking, the view of public policy as it limits individual lives, and the story he tells of an American education—have made this book endure for forty years and counting. This edition includes a new afterword by the author as well as an introduction by Phillip Lopate. Whether you’re hearing about Richard Rodriguez for the first time, or have read him for years, whether his life is like your own or far from it, if you care about the power of language and original thinking, you owe yourself to read Hunger of Memory.

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“Ghost of the Hardy Boys is an elegant book, full of charm and pathos and whimsy. The writing is restrained, the characterizations deep and rich, the humor nuanced.”—Washington Post As millions of boys and girls devoured the early adventures of the Hardy Boys, little did the young readers and aspiring sleuths know: the series’ author was not Franklin W. Dixon, as the cover trumpeted. It was Leslie McFarlane, a nearly penniless scribbler, who hammered out the first adventures while living in a remote cabin without electricity or running water in Northern Ontario. McFarlane was among the first bestselling ghostwriters and this, at last, is his story—as much fun as the stories he wrote.In 1926, 23-year-old cub newspaper reporter Leslie McFarlane responded to an ad: “Experienced Fiction Writer Wanted to Work from Publisher’s Outlines.” The ad was signed by Edward Stratemeyer, whose syndicate effectively invented mass-market children’s book publishing in America. McFarlane, who had a few published adventure stories to his name, was hired and his first job was to write Dave Fearless Under the Ocean as Roy Rockwood—for a flat fee of $100, no royalties. His pay increased to $125 when Stratemeyer proposed a new series of detective stories for kids involving two high school aged brothers who would solve mysteries. The title of the series was The Hardy Boys. McFarlane’s pseudonym would be Franklin W. Dixon. McFarlane went on to write twenty-one Hardy Boys adventures. From The Tower Treasure in 1927 to The Phantom Freighter in 1947, into full-fledged classics filled with perilous scrapes, loyal chums, and breakneck races to solve the mystery. McFarlane kept his ghostwriting gig secret until late in life when his son urged him to share the story of being the real Franklin W. Dixon. By the time McFarlane died in 1977, unofficial sales estimates of The Hardy Boys series already topped 50 million copies. Ghost of the Hardy Boys is a fascinating, funny, and always charming look back at a vanished era of journalism, writing, and book publishing. It is for anyone who loves a great story and who’s curious about solving the mystery of the fascinating man behind one of the most widely read and enduring children’s book series in history.

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A milestone of modern poetry, American history comes to life in the actual words of victims and criminals in its courts.Taking as its raw material the voices of witnesses, victims, and perpetrators discovered by the author in criminal court transcripts, Charles Reznikoff’s book-length poem sets forth a stark panorama of late 19th and early 20th century America—the underside of the Gilded Age, beset by racism and casual violence, poverty and disease.In radically stripped-down language of tremendous intensity, Reznikoff’s poem is an unforgettable reading experience. This edition also includes Reznikoff’s prose studies for the poem, unavailable to readers since the 1930s, and a new introduction by critic and essayist Eliot Weinberger.

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The Holocaust memoir of a Dutch family who evaded arrest and deportation by the Nazis. Told through letters, diaries, and interviews, and illustrated with photographs throughout, this detailed account brings a new perspective to one of history’s most horrific chapters. During the Second World War, as the Nazis tightened their grip on the Netherlands, the Jewish population was slowly restricted from public life—everything from owning a bike to having a job was forbidden. Sensing the murderous consequences of deportation, Daphne Geismar’s family—her parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles—decided to separate and go into hiding. Parents and children were torn apart, living for years in isolation behind a church organ, below floorboards, or even in plain sight. While timelines and notes provide context, we hear the voices of young Mirjam, sent by her parents to live with a family of strangers; Judith whose braids were cut to make her look less Jewish; Nathan, taken in and given false papers by a Dutch soldier. Ordinary people whose collective story is one of resilience and resistance, survival and compassion. “This is an important book because many people don’t know what took place in the Netherlands during the Nazi occupation....[The] fascinating story also highlights the courage of the rescuers involved in that dangerous undertaking. It is a story that must be told to inspire others never to give up even when it seems all is lost.”—Mordecai Paldiel, Former Director, Righteous Among Nations, Yad Vashem For readers of history and memoirs, this family’s story, Invisible Years, challenges readers to follow this example of resistance to inhumanity.

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Make your writing and speech shine like the sun! Here’s the most entertaining and instructive book about both enlivening and clarifying communication with the art of comparison. “Ward Farnsworth is a witty commentator…It’s a book to dip in and savor.”—The Boston Globe.The author of Farnsworth’s Classical English Style and Farnsworth’s Classical English Rhetoric now provides a wide-ranging, practical, tour of metaphors, arranged by theme. Chapters include Sources & Uses of Comparisons, The Use of Nature to Describe Abstractions, Extreme People & States, Circumstances, Personification, and The Construction of Similes.Using hundreds of examples, Farnsworth demonstrates all the different stylistic ways that points can be unforgettably made. There are quotations from novelists, poets, playwrights, philosophers, and orators—along with commentary on how and why they work to bring power to words both in person and on paper. Farnsworth shows how the best writers have put figurative comparisons to distinctive use—for the sake of caricature, to make an abstract idea visible, to make a complicated idea simple. Writers and speakers, this book will make you a star.

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“Like Elizabeth Strout, her fellow chronicler of small-town Maine life, Monica Wood imbues her characters with the complexity and humanity of real people. Ernie’s Ark is as true as life.”—Christina Baker Kline, author of Orphan TrainIn ten interlinking stories, the town of Abbot Falls reacts as Ernie Whitten, pipefitter, builds a giant ark in his backyard. Ernie was weeks away from a pension-secured retirement when the union went on strike. Now his wife Marie is ill. Struck with sudden inspiration, Ernie builds the ark as a work of art for his wife to see from the window; a vessel to carry them both away; or a plea for God to spare Marie, come hell or high water.As the ark takes shape, the rest of the town carries on. There’s Dan Little, a building-code enforcer who comes to fine Ernie for the ark and makes a significant discovery about himself; Francine Love, a precocious thirteen-year-old who longs to be a part of the family-like world of the union workers; and Atlantic Pulp & Paper CEO Henry John McCoy, an impatient man wearily determined to be a good father to his twenty-six-year-old daughter. The people of Abbott Falls will try their best to hold a community together, against the fiercest of odds. . . .Few writers can capture the extraordinary within seemingly ordinary lives as does Monica Wood. An unforgettable tapestry of love, loneliness—and neighbors.

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“Farnsworth beautifully integrates his own observations with scores of quotations from Epictetus, Seneca, Marcus Aurelius, Montaigne and others. This isn’t just a book to read—it’s a book to return to, a book that will provide perspective and consolation at times of heartbreak or calamity.”—The Washington PostSee more clearly, live more wisely, and bear the burdens of this life with greater ease—here are the greatest insights of the Stoics, in their own words. Presented in twelve lessons, Ward Farnsworth systematically presents the heart of Stoic philosophy accompanied by commentary that is clear and concise.A foundational idea to Stoicism is that we appear to go through life reacting directly to events. That appearance is an illusion. We react to our judgments and opinions—to our thoughts about things, not to things themselves. Stoics seek to become conscious of those judgments, to find the irrationality in them, and to choose them more carefully.In chapters including Emotion, Adversity, Virtue, and What Others Think, here is the most valuable wisdom about living a good life from ages past—now made available for our time.

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The bilingual, illustrated, and National Book Award-winning edition of Charles Baudelaire’s masterpiece. The complete French text is accompanied with an English translation by Richard Howard.Charles Baudelaire’s 1857 masterwork was scandalous in its day for its portrayals of sex, same-sex love, death, the corrupting and oppressive power of the modern city and lost innocence, Les Fleurs Du Mal (The Flowers of Evil) remains powerful and relevant for our time.In “Spleen et idéal,” Baudelaire dramatizes the erotic cycle of ecstacy and anguish—of sexual and romantic love. “Tableaux Parisiens” condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city’s soul and praises the city’s anti-heroes including the deranged and derelict. “Le Vin” centers on the search for oblivion in drink and drugs. The many kinds of love that lie outside traditional morality is the focus of “Fleurs du Mal” while rebellion is at the heart of “Révolte.” The voice of Baudelaire lives in this award-winning edition that includes monotypes by artist, Michael Mazur. “Howard’s achievement is such that we can be confident that this Fleurs du Mal will long stand as definitive, a superb guide to France’s greatest poet.”—The Nation

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A truly seminal and original thesis, this is a book that should be read by anyone interested in science, myth, and the interactions between the two. In this classic work of scientific and philosophical inquiry, the authors track world myths to a common origin in early man's descriptions of cosmological activity, arguing that these remnants of ancient astronomy, suppressed by the Greeks and Romans and then forgotten, were really a form of pre-literate science. Myth became the synapse by which science was transmitted. Their truly original thesis challenges basic assumptions of Western science and theories about the transmission of knowledge.

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“The poems, plainspoken distillations of origins and loss, explore histories, teasing at what we know without knowing, and know without remembering we know. A book of quiet, watchful radiance.”—The Boston Globe “Must-read poetry.”—The MillionsNew from a poet whose astonishing images, emotional honesty, and storytelling power hold a singular clarity of vision. “American Wake navigates loss with such unparalleled sensitivity and inventiveness that language becomes its own jubilant force of survival.”—Major JacksonAn “American wake” is what the Irish call a farewell to those emigrating to the United States. A New England poet equally at home in Ireland, Kerrin McCadden explores family, death and grief, apologies, and all manner of departures. In the poem “In the Harbor,” McCadden writes: When we are out to sea, we look back to see faces ringing the shore like a fence, those we love in up to their hips in waves, waving goodbye like mad.Included in American Wake are the poems, “My Broken Family,” “Weeks After My Brother Overdoses,” “One Way to Apologize to a Daughter for Careless Words,” “Portrait of the Family as a Definition,” and “My Mother Talks to Her Son about Her Heart.”This collection by a writer of extraordinary gifts will appeal to readers who believe in the potential of carefully hewn words to unveil our world and our deepest feelings to ourselves. As the acclaimed memoirist Nick Flynn (Another Bullshit Night in Suck City) puts it: “Kerrin McCadden transforms tragedy into myth.”

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