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Brothers C and Sam left home after their father’s violent death. But upon their return to the Easter house—looming over the residents of Ontarion, Iowa—they create a lucrative business: The Associate, a group of men who perform services for a fee...
Lusty and literate, these tales feature characters flirting with disaster. An alienated young man discovers the meaning of love in the pages of a biology textbook. A mother and son witness a father’s backyard fling with a disturbed neighbor. And...
This fascinating account of life on North America’s last frontier chronicles the transformation of the Arctic as the mainstream moves relentlessly north. Essays and photographs offer an ode to respect—that oft-forsaken, unromantic quality—for the...
As a small child, a storm at sea claimed Kyna’s family, and nearly took her own life. Now, when her adoptive parents announce that they’ve rented a summer house on “magical” Lake Champlain, Kyna begs to be left home for the summer. No such luck....
A tightrope walker who travels on telephone wires; angels, scarecrows, friends, and lovers—the speakers in these poems often desire to hold time still, even as they acknowledge that to do so would actually mean the death of love, of experience....
Drawing inspiration from Novalis, a poet who believed in the correspondence between inner and outer worlds, this collection divines the palpable and ineffable ways in which inherited traditions—indigenous culture, mythology, romanticism,...
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...