This collection of flash fiction asks what motivations have led individuals throughout history—from Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr, to Cain and Abel, to John Henry and the steam drill—to risk it all. Taking a broad historical view, but allowing for more intimate scenes as well, these stories probe our notions of pride, honor, vengeance, and satisfaction.
During one month each year, for six years, the author wrote a short poem each day. The resulting six sequences of this masterly collection offer haunting reflections on time, and capture the aching, liminal beauty of one day becoming another.
A transatlantic journey with a subversive, vaguely threatening bunkmate; a student obsessed with a famous actress; a socially isolated couple who find themselves unable to resist their deviant sexual urges. In these stories, characters teeter on the brink of sanity—as those around them reach out in support, watch helplessly, or duck for cover.
After serving time for a dubious conviction, Blake Bookchester must adjust to existence outside prison—as life in Words, Wisconsin, swirls around him. Welcoming readers back to the characters introduced in the beloved Driftless, this novel offers an unforgettable portrait of community in the heart of rural America.
This collection takes the physical, elemental world as its point of inquiry, examining how language arises from landscape. Some of these poems begin with the form of physical objects—a rock, split slate, an egg, a feather—while others emerge from a more expansive space: a salt flat at the Great Salt Lake, a damaged woodlot.
These essays take jellyfish, fainting goats, and imperturbable caterpillars as just a few of their many inspirations. Surveying both the tiniest earth dwellers and the most far-flung celestial bodies, this is a book of wonder, one readers cannot help but leave with their perceptions expanded and confounded in delightful ways.
Inundated by monsoon floods in the winter, baked dry in the summer, and filled with the deadliest animals in the world, Australia’s Stilwater Station seems an unlikely home for a cattle operation. But over the course of one season, a ragged crew of ringers and stockmen use muscle and wit to bring the cattle in and win Stilwater Station back from the wild.
Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants
By
Robin Wall Kimmerer
As a botanist, the author has been trained to examine nature with the tools of science; as a member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation, she embraces the notion that plants and animals are our teachers. Here she brings these two lenses together, showing how other living beings offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices.
John James Audubon and the Making of the Birds of America
By
William Souder
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize
In the century and a half since John James Audubon’s death, his name has become synonymous with wildlife conservation and natural history. But few people know what a complicated figure he was—or the dramatic story behind The Birds of America—as revealed in this rich and gripping biography.
It’s September 1951, in Dalton, North Dakota: years since George and Margaret’s widowed daughter-in-law left with their only grandson and married another man. Margaret is resolved to bring little Jimmy home—but when she and George find him in Montana, they learn his new family is equally determined not to give up the boy without a fight.
