Has there ever been a more hated bird than the European starling? Let loose in New York City’s Central Park by a misguided aristocrat, the starlings were supposed to help curb insect outbreaks and add to the tuneful choir of other songbirds. Rather than staying put, the dark and speckled starlings marched across the continent like a conquering ......
Sylvia Beach was intimately acquainted with the expatriate and visiting writers of the Lost Generation, a label that she never accepted. Like moths of great promise, they were drawn to her well-lighted bookstore and warm hearth on the Left Bank. Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James Joyce, ......
In 1851 Olive Oatman was a thirteen-year old pioneer traveling west toward Zion, with her Mormon family. Within a decade, she was a white Indian with a chin tattoo, caught between cultures. The Blue Tattoo tells the harrowing story of this forgotten heroine of frontier America. Orphaned when her family was brutally killed by Yavapai Indians, ......
Finalist for the 2024 Pulitzer Prize in History Winner of Columbia University's 2024 Bancroft Prize in American History Winner of the 2024 Caughey Western History Prize Winner of the 2024 Spur Award Named a Best Civil War Book of 2023 by Civil War Monitor In Continental Reckoning renowned historian Elliott West presents a sweeping narrative ......
I Make Envy on Your Disco is the story of a thirty-seven-year-old art advisor who, fed up with his life in New York, flies to Berlin for a gallery opening and finds a once-divided city brimming with excitement and possibility, yet facing an identity crisis of its own.
"The guerrilla fights the war of the flea, and his military enemy suffers the dog's disadvantages: too much to defend; too small, ubiquitous, and agile an enemy to come to grips with.
Rate your pain on a scale of one to ten. What about on a scale of spicy to citrus? Is it more like a lava lamp or a mosaic? Pain, though a universal element of human experience, is dimly understood and sometimes barely managed. Pain Woman Takes Your Keys, and Other Essays from a Nervous System is a collection of literary and experimental essays ......
Ted Kooser has been writing and publishing poetry for more than forty years. In the pages of The Poetry Home Repair Manual, Kooser brings those decades of experience to bear. Here are tools and insights, the instructions (and warnings against instructions) that poets-aspiring or practicing-can use to hone their craft, perhaps into art. Using ......
"Showing off Evenson's myriad skills, the stories range from rural tales of death to a retelling of the biblical Job story, in which a skeletonized Job trades barbs and blows with a murderous lumberjack...There is a detached brutality to the collection, similar to Beckett's novels, which, due to Evenson's precise control over language is both ......