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

Here is a selection of letters, envelopes, and illustrations by an artist who could never resist the temptation of filling his letters to family and friends with enchanting vignettes and sketches, done quickly, humorously and lovingly, with a sure touch for outline, wash and colour that always distinguished his work.

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Anyone who has spent any time messing around with boats — wooden boats in particular — knows that those cunning curves, endless seams, and rotting wood hold more than practical challenges. All boats have histories, some more poignant than others, and few narratives of the past few decades have captured the mystique of a boat’s provenance (in this case Chris Craft) or more touchingly depicted the ties that boats often create between father and son than this classic by Joe Soucheray.

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Presents a collection of short stories focusing on the relationship between and mother and daughter from such authors as Margaret Atwood, Gloria Naylor, and Alice Walker.

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Thrashin’ Time takes us back to autumn days in North Dakota in 1912, when farmers worked the land with sturdy draft horses and a new-fangled machine called the steam traction engine. The story opens with young Peter’s first look at the engine— blue boiler and red wheels, puffing smoke and hissing steam, gears spinning and rods stroking back and forth— and old Mr. Torgrimson’s wise prediction: “You know, Peter, you’re witnessing the beginning of real scientific farming.”

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A two-volume culinary memoir features some of the author's favorite recipes.

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A book length series of poems, looking at life in all its imperfections through the viewpoint of an inextinguishable character whose spirit triumphs through humor. Clayfeld, a comic everyman, is the center of these poems about the nature of beauty, sorrow, and art, as well as the potential for happiness. Thwarted continually by ordinary defeats, Clayfeld endures and laughs, loves and remembers.Critic Harold Bloom called poet Robert Pack an heir to Robert Frost and Edwin Arlington Robinson. That heritage is fully apparent in this joyous and exuberant odyssey.

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On fog-shrouded barrier island or deep in winter woods, eighteen essays describe the wild, outer half of Cape Cod. Robert Finch is a vivid witness to our participation, whether as individuals or as communities, in the mysteries of natural experience. As he explains: “One of the primary reasons this place yields so much to me so consistently is that I have invested so much of myself into it, physically, mentally, and emotionally . . . a thousand simple, repeated, physical acts have given this landscape a texture for me so that even its most casual aspect is filled, not with slick charm or abstract nostalgia, but with living, tactile memory.” In these essays, Finch demonstrates once again his profound willingness to ask essential questions. These essays recognize our need for both the human and the nonhuman in our lives; they probe the ambiguities in our response to the terror and beauty of the natural world and the love and aggression we struggle with in our associations with one another. Robert Finch’s remarkable prose offers high entertainment, but also gives us new sympathies for and understanding of both nature and ourselves.

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With Kamala Harris’s rise, American Blacks are entering a new phase in the struggle against white supremacy. Standing firmly in the African American tradition, Walton believes in the possibility of reconciliation with those whites who desire it, offering a hand of friendship and pragmatic ideas for paths forward. Born into the Civil Rights Movement, author Anthony Walton observed firsthand the opening of opportunity for racial reconciliation. He also saw systemic racism and the vicious backlash against Black progress embodied in the Southern Strategy, Tea Party, and MAGA. Over time, Walton came to believe that moving forward requires a “Third Reconstruction” to accomplish what remains: better health outcomes, secure voting rights, and sustained economic and educational opportunity. Only this approach, he believes, will accomplish what remains unfinished for true African American equality. Blending social history, bracing a

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The first biography of the writer/naturalist, and one of the leading founders of the modern environmental movement, Henry Beston. In September of 1926, Henry Beston spent a two-week vacation in a Cape Cod shack he’d built high on an isolated stretch of dunes overlooking the Atlantic Ocean. As he later wrote, “the fortnight ending, I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go.” The resulting book, The Outermost House, is universally considered a classic of American nature writing.In his later books, Beston explored the ways that the modern industrial era was endangering the vital connection between humankind and the natural world, and he is now recognized as a key figure in the twentieth century’s conservation movement.In Orion on the Dunes, the first biography of Beston, scholar Daniel Payne—granted unrestricted access to the writer’s archives and drawing on interviews with friends and family—has crafted a scrupulously researched narrative; one presenting a masterful portrait that traces the intellectual growth and tumultuous life of a vital American writer whose work and thought have exerted a tremendous pull on poets, naturalists, and novelists alike. This is the story of a life, at once hidden and transparent, that is here finally revealed.

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The life of Charles Bukowski—laureate of lowlife Los Angeles—a novelist and poet who wrote as he lived. This is the only biography of Bukowski written by a close friend and collaborator. Neeli Cherkovski began a deep friendship with Bukowski in the 1960s while guzzling beer at wrestling matches or during quieter evenings discussing life and literature in Bukowski’s East Hollywood apartment. Over the decades, those hundreds of conversations took shape as this biography—now with a new preface, “This Thing Upon Me Is Not Death: Reflections on the Centennial of Charles Bukowski.” Bukowski, author of Ham on Rye, Post Office, and other bestselling novels, short stories, and poetry collections only ever wanted to be a writer. Maybe that’s why Bukowski’s voice is so real and immediate that readers felt included in a conversation. “In his written work, he’s a hero, a fall guy, a comic character, a womanizing lush, a wise old dog,” biographer Neeli Cherkovski writes. “His readers do more than glimpse his many-sidedness. For some, it’s a deep experience. They feel as if his writing opens places inside of themselves they might never have seen otherwise. Often a reader comes away feeling heroic, because the poet has shown them that their ordinary lives are imbued with drama.” Full of anecdotes, wisdom, humor, and insight, this is an essential companion to the work of a great American writer. Long-time Bukowski fans will come away with fresh insights while readers new to his work will find this an exhilarating introduction. “In his death, I hear him clearly,” Cherkovski writes. “His voice comes to me resonant, full of unforced authority, a message of endurance, self-reliance, and honesty of expression. At the same time, he is also saying, ‘Poetry is a dirty dishrag. Keep laughing at yourself on the way out the door.’ ”

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A debut novel of great depth and power. “Art, grief, and technology churn in this excellent and raw novel…that profoundly explores the way we live with technology and how it informs our understanding of reality.”—Publishers WeeklyIn this debut novel, conceptual artist Sheila B. Ackerman heeds a mysterious urge to return to her estranged family home and arrives at the exact moment of her mother’s suicide.In an attempt to cope with and understand her own self destructive tendencies, Sheila plants a camera on the lawn outside the house to film 24/7 while workers deconstruct the physical object that encases so many of her memories. Meanwhile, as she begins to experience frequent blackouts, she finds herself hunting a robot drone through the San Francisco MOMA with a baseball bat, part of a provocative, technological show, The Last Art, and resuming a violent affair with her college professor. With a backdrop of post-9/11 San Francisco, Sheila navigates the social-media-obsessed, draught-ridden landscape of her life, exploring the frail line between the human impulse to control everything that takes place around us and the futility of excessive effort to do so. This thought-provoking work is for anyone who questions the status quo.

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Discover the unique mind and humane vision of an under-recognized American author. Encompassing themes of race, education, fame, law, and America’s past and future, these essays are James Alan McPherson at his most prescient and invaluable. Born in segregated 1940s Georgia, McPherson graduated from Harvard Law School only to give up law and become a writer. In 1978, he became the first Black author to win the Pulitzer Prize for fiction. But all the while, McPherson was also writing and publishing nonfiction that stand beside contemporaries such as James Baldwin and Joan Didion, as this collection amply proves. These essays range from McPherson’s profile of comedian Richard Pryor on the cusp of his stardom; a moving tribute to his mentor, Ralph Ellison; a near fatal battle with viral meningitis; and the story of how McPherson became a reluctant landlord to an elderly Black woman and her family. There are meditations on family as the author travels to Disneyland with his daughter, on the nuances of a neighborhood debate about naming a street after Malcolm X or Dr. Martin Luther King, and, throughout, those connections that make us most deeply human—including connections between writer and reader. McPherson writes of his early education, “The structure of white supremacy had been so successful that even some of our parents and teachers had been conscripted into policing the natural curiosity of young people. We were actively discouraged from reading. We were encouraged to accept our lot. We were not told that books just might contain extremely important keys which would enable us to break out of the mental jails that have been constructed to contain us.” The collection’s curator, Anthony Walton, writes, “In his nonfiction, McPherson was often looking for a way ‘beyond’ the morasses in which Americans find themselves mired. His work is a model of humanistic imagining, an attempt to perform a healing that would, if successful, be the greatest magic trick in American history: to ‘get past’ race, to help create a singular American identity that was no longer marred by the existential tragedies of the nation’s first 400 years. He attempted this profound reimagining of America while simultaneously remaining completely immersed in African American history and culture. His achievement demonstrates that an abiding love for black folks and black life can rest alongside a mastery of ‘The King’s English’ and a sincere desire to be received as an American citizen and participant in democracy. It is time for that imaginative work to be fully comprehended and for this simultaneously American and African American genius to assume a fully recognized place beside the other constitutive voices in our national literature.” This is a collection for any reader seeking a better understanding of our world and a connection to a wise and wickedly funny writer who speaks with forceful relevance and clarity across the decades.On Becoming an American Writer is part of Godine’s Nonpareil series: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics.

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“Earnest, amusing, and contemplative....though Beattie is known for her fiction, her nonfiction has just as much to offer.”—Publishers Weekly“Shimmering prose and critical acumen on display in an eclectic collection.”—Kirkus ReviewsAs deeply rewarding as her fiction, a selection of Ann Beattie’s essays, chosen and introduced by the author. From appreciations of writers, photographers, and other artists, to notes on the craft of writing itself, this is a wide-ranging, and always penetrating collection of writing never before published in book form. Ann Beattie, a master storyteller, has been delighting readers since the publication of her short stories in the 1970s and her first novel, Chilly Scenes of Winter. But as her literary acclaim grew and she was hailed “the voice of her generation,” Ms. Beattie was also moonlighting as a nonfiction writer. As she writes in her introduction to this collection, “Nonfiction always gave me a thrill, even if it provided only an illusion of freedom. Freedom and flexibility—for me, those are the conditions under which imagination sparks.” These penetrating essays are stories unto themselves, closely observed appreciations of life and art. The reader travels with Ms. Beattie to Cedar Rapids, Iowa to learn about the legacy of the painter, Grant Wood, and his iconic painting American Gothic; to the famed University of Virginia campus with her husband, the painter Lincoln Perry; to Key West, Florida for New Years with writer and translator, Harry Mathews; to a roadside near Boston in a broken-down car with the wheelchair-bound writer Andre Dubus. There are explorations of novels, short stories, paintings, and photographs by artists ranging from Alice Munro to Elmore Leonard, from Sally Mann to John Loengard. Whatever the subject, Ms. Beattie brings penetrating insight into literature and art that’s both familiar and unfamiliar—as she writes, “This, I think, is what artists want to do: find a way to lure the reader or viewer into an alternate realm, to overcome the audience’s resistance to being taken away from their own lives and interests and priorities.” Ann Beattie’s nonfiction (originally published in Life, The New Yorker, The New York Times, and The American Scholar, among others) is a new way to enjoy one of the great writers of her generation. Readers will find much to love in this journey with a curious and fascinating mind.More to Say is part of Godine’s Nonpareil series: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics.

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Twelve stories of immigrants who navigate the ancestral past of India as they remake their lives—and themselves—in North America. These are stories of fluid and broken identities, discarded languages and deities, and the attempt to create bonds with a new community against the ever-present fear of failure and betrayal. “The narrative of immigration,” Bharati Mukherjee once wrote, “is the epic narrative of this millennium.” Her stories and novels brilliantly add to that ongoing saga. In the story “The Lady from Lucknow,” a woman is pushed to the limit while wanting nothing more than to fit in. In “Hindus,” characters discover that breaking away from a culture has deep and unexpected costs. In “A Father,” the clash of cultures leads a man to an act of terrible violence. “How could he tell these bright, mocking women,” Mukherjee writes, “that in the darkness, he sensed invisible presences: gods and snakes frolicked in the master bedroom, little white sparks of cosmic static crackled up the legs of his pajamas. Something was out there in the dark, something that could invent accidents and coincidences to remind mortals that even in Detroit they were no more than mortal.” There is light in these stories as well. The collection’s closing story, “Courtly Vision,” brings to life the world within a Mughal miniature painting and describes a light charged with excitement to discover the immense intimacy of darkness. Readers will also discover that excitement, and the many gradations of darkness and light, throughout these pages from the mind of a master storyteller.Darkness is part of Godine’s Nonpareil series: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics.

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“Midnights is both a comedy of errors and an affectionate portrait of small-town police, those beleaguered souls charged with the task of keeping their neighbors in line....A reminder that those assigned to protect are often vulnerable and quietly heroic.”—Time Funny, touching, revealing, here is the view from a rookie cop’s patrol car, during midnight shifts, in a (mostly) peaceful town. With a rich cast of characters, this is a classic memoir of the fear, surprises, excitement, embarrassment that comes with a protecting and serving a small community. “When I was twenty-three years old, five months out of college, with a degree in music, and without any idea of what to do with myself, I took a job as a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts,” so writes Alec Wilkinson. “Music, huh?” the police chief said during the job interview. “That'll be a big help.” Wilkinson’s main qualification was familiarity with the town of 2,000 people from summers there growing up. Committing himself to a year wearing a uniform and carrying a gun, and with no training, Wilkinson was sent out to keep the peace, hoping nothing would happen. There are high-speed chases and stopping drunk drivers, one of whom tries to set Wilkinson's hair on fire. There are domestic squabbles. “The first six months were murder for me,” Wilkinson’s partner confides on his first night. “After that, when I found out the people I thought were my friends weren't really my friends, I felt better off.” There is an attempted bank robbery. The teller convinces the robber that his haul ($300) is too much to carry around in cash. The robber is still listening to investment options when the police arrive. Throughout there are conversations with his eight fellow officers who Wilkinson comes to respect and admire. “Nobody ever calls you when they're behaving themselves,” one admits. “As a rule, you always get called when people are at their worst. It's sad. It depresses me.” The job is often thankless. “Right now I work on the police force,” another officer says, “my wife stamps cans in the supermarket, and she makes more money than I do.” This is experiential journalism at its most poignant and entertaining—and it launched the career of Alec Wilkinson: writer, interviewer, essayist, and author. This is for any reader looking for insight into the real lives of police officers, outside of large cities, across America. It is also for anyone looking for a marvelously engaging read.Midnights is part of Godine’s Nonpareil series: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics.

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Be at home in nature, all through the year, with the old-timey, folksy wisdom in this classic camping companion.First published in 1920, and never out-of-print, Daniel C. Beard’s The Book of Camp-Lore & Woodcraft is a guide from yesteryear for enjoying the great outdoors as its guest.Through the pages of this book, the author, a pioneer of the scouting movement, takes kids on a camping trip and instructs them in the art of building a fireplace and lighting a fire, designing a campsite, pitching a tent, cooking flapjacks, packing a trail horse, handling an axe, and much more.Daniel Carter Beard was an expert outdoorsman and founder of the scouting movement in America. His goal was to help kids to enjoy the out-of-doors as much as he did. In his books, filled with time-tested tips and knowledgable advice, Beard helped preserve invaluable folkways that instill self-reliance and a deeper appreciation of nature—all while having a world of fun. This is truly a book for all ages—including adults.

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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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The celebrated, National Book Award winning, translation of Baudelaire’s masterpiece. “It is the English edition to acquire.”—Washington PostPulitzer Prize winning poet and translator, Richard Howard, gives readers the true voice of Baudelaire in this masterful translation. 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.”“Howard’s achievement is such that we can be confident that his Flowers of Evil will long stand as definitive, a superb guide to France’s greatest poet.”—The Nation

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