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Mattie, Ariel, and Nicki are fast friends facing the uncertainty of being thirteen. After finding a book of spells, the three girls perform a ritual that will grant each the object of her desire—but the girls’ longed-for wishes carry unintended,...
Taking its inspiration—and, for that matter, its form—from Ishmael’s abandoned “Cetological Dictionary” in Moby-Dick, this extraordinary, highly original work brings meditations on myth, representation, language, nature, consciousness,...
At midlife, the author writes, we are called to an “archaeology of memory”—turning over a potsherd here, a fragment there—to assemble something whole out of the messiness of experience. She encourages all of us to contemplate our own deep story,...
Exploring the paranoia and bravura of the modern American male, these powerful novellas depict a realm marked by faltering blunders, misguided intentions, and the fear of failure. “I Am Death, or Bartleby the Mobster” charts the slumped career of...
Eleven-year-old Nissa’s life has never been perfect. Living with her free-spirited mama in the small town of Harper, Louisiana, has led to lots of gossipy small talk and mean rumors. But now Mama is gone, leaving Nissa with her gentle father, and...
From the revulsion on a child’s face as the speaker’s recovering body struggles to walk after a stroke, to the gift of a night nurse revealing her tattoo, these poems defy consolation in their consideration of mortality. This collection engages...
Rapturous and electric, these poems take us through a glittering underworld of illness and recovery, on a confrontational, explosive trip that is at once euphoric and brutal. Without relying on familiar narratives of despair and pity, this...
In April 2003, the author and his wife set out with the Porcupine caribou herd as they journeyed from the Yukon Territory to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. On the caribou’s trail, two people learn what is possible when they immerse...
This timely collection—featuring essays from Wendell Berry, Alison Hawthorne Deming, Bill McKibben, and Rebecca Solnit, among others—challenges the division of human society from the natural world that has often characterized traditional...
Edward Abbey’s postcards and letters, legendary during his lifetime, convey the fullness of this singular writer and reveal a tender side seldom seen before. This collection is an awe-inspiring introduction for readers new to Abbey—and for...
This collection is set in the fictional African American community of Rio Seco, loosely based on Riverside, California. Full of defiance and tenderness, these linked stories chronicle the happiness and tragedies that the town’s residents—like...
Baja California is a place where nothing is as it seems. As mindful of the peninsula’s history of conquest and exploitation as it is receptive to the extraordinary characters who are drawn to it—from daredevil aviators to expatriate artists, and...
Written over the course of three decades, this extraordinary collection of new and selected poems is expressive variously of love and rage, vulnerability and authority, distraction and focus, and, perhaps above all, a sharply empathetic sense of...
It is 1993 and Bombay is threatened by terrorism and sectarian strife. Chamdi has rarely ventured outside his orphanage, and entertains an idyllic fantasy of what the city is like beyond its garden walls—a paradise he calls Kahunsha. But when he...
From the copper plate of an Intaglio print to the patched muslin form of a dressmaker’s mannequin to the maddered boy taking shape on a loom, these poems transform the ephemeral into the eternal. Along the way, the collection combines an...
From the Adirondack Mountains to Kerala, India, to Curitiba, Brazil, this book offers clear-eyed and profoundly compelling portraits of places where resourceful people have confronted modern problems with inventive solutions, and thrived in the...
This collection of poems tells the story of a woman named Bead and her search for safe harbor. The maritime International Code of Signals—a dictionary of ship’s pennants and the message they convey—becomes a symbolic guide to Bead’s...
Anna, Daniel, and Lucas seem to be living a dream. While their parents take care of a castle, they have the run of the grounds, along with the beautiful countryside that surrounds it. But as their summer begins, Daniel and Lucas’s mother is taken...
It’s the summer of 1955, and teenagers George, Esther, and Bennett spend their time roaming the countryside together, fishing and searching for outlaw treasure. But when a current of racism ruptures their idyllic summer, the three friends are...
Loading his pregnant wife, infant daughter, and widowed mother-in-law into a bullock cart, Faredoon Junglewalla—Freddy for short—leaves his ancestral village for the bustling city of Lahore. Despite the nagging of his unbearable mother-in-law,...
Offering perspectives both intimate and expansive in nature, these poems are informed by the immediate, rural landscape of Wyoming, as well as sociopolitical forces outside the speaker’s control. This collection speaks to an American...
Hoping to get away from the complexities of her life, the author arrived at Antarctica’s McMurdo Station with the intention of researching the landscape; what she found, instead, was a zany population of misfits and dreamers. This is an...
With firm roots in science and the natural world, the author’s poems have been compared to Emerson’s and Whitman’s. She has written about motherhood, art, science, spirituality, and the tension between humanity and wildness. This edition presents...
When Thoreau stood on the flank of Maine’s Mount Katahdin in 1846, he was one of only a handful who had ventured so far into wilderness for the simple purpose of seeing what was out there. This book observes today’s wilderness mob and wonders: If...
When twelve-year-old Donovan Sanger is sent to spend the summer with his Uncle Bix—an ex-con—and his Aunt Hattie, who is dying from lung cancer, he does not know what to expect. But before a week goes by, Donovan learns that his uncle’s criminal...
Lavina Cumming has spent her entire first ten years of life on the Bosque Ranch in Arizona Territory, but when her mother dies, she must go live with her aunt in Santa Cruz, California. Armed with the Cumming family motto, “Courage,” Lavina...
This colorful memoir traces the author’s path from “nature nut” to jock to writer, to his home at the end of Ridge Road near where he was raised by his grandparents. Just as essentially, it explores the links between his native Abenaki culture...