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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...
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...
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...
The impending death of his elderly father leads the narrator of this book-length poem back to the particular mystery of the sacramental self, the terror and the necessity of bearing witness. These powerful eulogies testify that the courage to die...
Originally published in 1993, this pioneering anthology is a powerful polemic for fundamental cultural change: the transformation of basic attitudes about power, gender, race, and sexuality. This edition updates statistics and essays, and adds...
Thirteen-year-old Anna Kallio often thinks about the way life was before her mother died. When Anna and her brother realize how lonely their father is, they plot to find him a new wife, even trying to arrange a match with one of the “mail order”...
In these short pieces—sometimes hilarious and sometimes heartbreaking—the author chronicles her return to a hometown in need of repair, physical and otherwise, after seventeen years away. Syrup boils, alligator trapping, and fighting to save the...
It’s 1935, and the hard times of the Great Depression, it seems, are here to stay. One day, MaryJake’s whole family packs up in the car and leaves—and after a couple hours’ drive, MaryJake finds herself alone on the edge of the road. So begins...
This collection reflects on the author’s time in Iceland (his ancestral home), his ongoing love affair with music, a friend’s death from AIDS, and his bold reactions to the world around him. Moving from Oregon forests to the deserts around Tuscon...
Meditating on the successful marriage of science and poetry, these essays cover true stories about color-blind scientists, the knowledge stored in ancient Native American songs, the link between an Amy Clampitt poem and diabetes research, and a...
Commuters, suburbanites, city dwellers: Are you curious about making your life more livable and interested in knowing what that might mean? This anthology introduces a range of perspectives about creating successful, livable cities, with examples...
This book gathers the evidence of a lifetime’s commitment to nonviolence. Born the year World War I began, the author spent World War II in a camp for conscientious objectors. His writings show that it is possible—and crucial—to think...
Organized by the seasons of the year, beginning with fall, these poems find wildness near at hand—and, through its recording, deepen consciousness of the physical processes of the earth and our own lives. Along the way, the collection provides...
Henry Bunks escapes neighborhood bullies and a grim, overcrowded apartment building by spending hours exploring the canal near his Miami home. Then a split-second decision to stow away aboard the boat of an outlaw alligator hunter begins Henry’s...
Written the year the author’s mother died and her first grandchild was born, these are poems that delve deeply into the ordinary passages and transformations of life, seeking out the possibility of a “Good Heart.”
These stories evoke a world in which spirits and the living commingle and Sioux culture and modern life collide with disarming power, humor, and joy. The characters grapple with potent forces of family, history, and belief—forces that at times...
Under Frederick the Great, every Jew who married was required to buy otherwise unsalable china from the royal porcelain factory. Moses Mendelssohn, a world-famous philosopher in the eighteenth century, was forced to buy twenty life-size porcelain...
The summer of 1964 begins calmly enough. But when civil rights workers come to a small Mississippi town and the Ku Klux Klan responds with intimidation and terrorism, the sultry days and nights are transformed into Freedom Summer. Soon three...
A disarmingly honest story of the author’s restless, rootless, disaffected youth, looking for meaning in drugs and an active outdoor life in the West. From time spent fishing, climbing, and making a living logging—as well as through friendships...
In these essays, the author describes how he found a way to balance his passions for literature and for the outdoors by building a sugarhouse with his sons in the Vermont woods. For him, the “frog run”—the tail end of the sugaring season in New...
Andy Fleck doesn’t have much of a family. A kid with Attention Deficit Disorder, he can’t keep himself from challenging every limit that is set by his adoptive parents Jeff and Laurie. It’s easy to see that Andy is a good kid dealing with his own...
In January 2001, the editors, responding to proposals to drill in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, sent a call to writers across the country. With testimonies by President Jimmy Carter, Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, Bill McKibben, and Terry...