No other contemporary humorist knew the South so well, loved it so passionately, or wrote about it so vividly.

    Scott Fitzgerald once noted, “then the drink takes a drink, then the drink takes you.” Fitzgerald wrote alcohol into almost every one of his stories. On Booze gathers debutantes and dandies, rowdy jazz musicians, lost children and ragtime riff-raff into a newly compiled collection taken from The Crack-Up, and other works never before published by New Directions. On Booze portrays “The Jazz Age” as Fitzgerald experienced it: roaring, rambunctious, and lush — with quite a hangover.

    Told in eloquent, honest prose, Art’s Cello is a story about coming to terms with the past and letting go of the failures we allow to define us — and, in the process, honoring the lives of those we’ve lost. Jim McKean is an international award-winning violinmaker, author, and corresponding editor of Strings Magazine. He is a graduate of the first violinmaking school in America and the former president of the American Federation of Violin and Bow Makers. His novel, Quattrocento, was published in 2002. Cover design by Evan Twohy.

    For as long as Christmas has been celebrated, poets and writers have sought to explore every aspect of it, whether the story of the nativity, or the festive traditions that have grown up over the centuries. A Literary Christmas is a seasonal compendium that collects together poems, short stories, and prose extracts by some of the greatest poets and writers in the English language. Like Charles Dickens's ghosts of Christmas Past and Present, they are representative of times old and new—from John Donne's Elizabethan hymn over the baby Jesus to Benjamin Zephaniah's "Talking Turkeys," from Thomas Tusser counting the cost of a Tudor feast to P G Wodehouse's wry short story about Christmas on a diet. Enjoy a convivial Christmas Day as described by Samuel Pepys, Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, or Nancy Mitford. Venture out into the snow in the company of Jane Austen, Henry James, and Dickens's ever-popular Mr Pickwick. Entertain the children with the seasonal tales of Dylan Thomas, Kenneth Grahame, and Oscar Wilde. For any lover of great literature, A Literary Christmas is the perfect gift. As a companion to the book, A Literary Christmas is also being released as a 2CD set at the same time. The audio recordings on the two discs feature readings of many of the same poems and prose extracts from the book.

    

    It includes stories by Chekhov, Gorky, Bunin, Zamyatin, Babel, Nabokov, Solzhenitsyn, and Voinovich; excerpts from Andrei Bely's Petersburg, Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita, Boris Pasternak's Dr. Zhivago, and Sasha Solokov's A School for Fools; the complete text of Yuri Olesha's 1927 masterpiece Envy; and poetry by Alexander Blok, Anna Akhmatova, and Osip Mandelstam.

    In fresh and irreverent prose, Romm captures the mo-ments before and after loss, mining the depths of grief with wit and grace.The stories in "The Mother Garden" are at once vividly realistic and infused with the bizarre -- a man uses a chicken egg to test whether he is ready for fatherhood; a daughter plants a garden of mothers to replace her own; a family's ghosts literally fall through the ceiling, disrupting daily life; a woman finds her father sleeping in the desert after twenty-six years of living without him. People stumble in relationships, start families, struggle with illness, learn to mourn -- and as in life, these acts are consuming, magical, and disorienting.Sharply funny and deeply moving, this extraordinary collection introduces a young writer of fierce originality and prodigious talent.

    By turns sweet and comic, sentimental and serious, Joseph Bottum's "Dakota Christmas" is an instant Christmas classic. In this beautifully written account of the mad joys and wild emotions of Christmas for children, Bottum captures the universal spirit of the season even while he recounts his memories with a sharp particularity that brings them alive for readers."Her hair was the same thin shade of gray as the weather-beaten pickets of the fence around her frozen garden," he writes of one chance Christmas encounter. "She had a way with horses, and she was alone on Christmas Eve. There is little in my life I regret as much as that I would not stay for just one cookie, just one cup of tea.""Joseph Bottum is one of America’s most gifted writers, with a perfect ear and a matchless style," the essayist Andrew Ferguson notes of "Dakota Christmas." And "to watch him deck the halls with his customary humor and generosity of spirit is glad tidings indeed--guaranteed to make your Yuletide bright.""Families have always loved brief Christmas classics that could be read aloud by the fire," adds Michael Novak. "Joseph Bottum's 'Dakota Christmas' is such a classic."

    What we have here in this big fat volume is a cockeyed chrestomathy of 37 Algren pieces... with his hallmark stamped on every link." —The New York Times Book Review"The range of the book is satisfying—rich, will titillate even the most fastidious dilettante or culture vulture... also contains pieces that will make you laugh your head off. Once you begin reading it, you will not be able to put it aside." —The Chicago Tribune"Essential Algren." —The Washington Post"Very good, fast, funny and tough... Algren, where have you been hiding?" —The San Francisco ChronicleHere again is Algren's rich output from the 1960s and '70s, tough, streetwise stories and travelogues from around the world: accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of his beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects.

    Half of the essays are brand new, the others are all reworked and rewritten, based on pieces that were originally published in Golf Digest. Often biting, usually cranky, always hilarious and surprising—this is Dan Jenkins at his best, writing about the sport he loves the most.      "I've always wanted to do something for the golfer who has everything. I thought about a suede golf cart, or maybe a pair of cashmere Footjoys. Then I settled on writing this book." So begins Dan Jenkins's latest—and funniest—collection of golf essays. The book consists of thirty-eight essays, all of them, as Dan says in the first essay, are "literally throbbing with opinion."     In this book Dan delves into the greatest rounds of golf he's ever seen; the funniest things said on a golf course; the rivalries on tour and in the press box; the game's most magical moments—and its most absurd. Unplayable Lies is an ode to the game Jenkins loves. But it is Dan Jenkins, so nothing—even the game of golf—can escape his wrath, his critical eye, or his acerbic pen. The best way to describe it is to turn the book over to Mr. Jenkins:      In "Titanic and I"—probably the most hilarious and surprising essay in the book, telling true stories of Titanic Thompson: gambler, golf hustler, accused murderer, legendary storyteller—Dan explains how Titanic would win a wager by saying he could knock a bird off a telephone wire: "Titanic would drop a ball on the ground and take out his four-wood, waggle it, and pretend to aim at the bird on the wire. When some sucker would bet him he couldn't do it, Ti would pull out a gun he carried and shoot the bird off the wire."     In "The Greatest Rounds": "Show me a man who doesn't know what Arnold did in the last round of the '60 U.S. Open at Cherry Hills, and I'll show you a soccer fan in Paraguay."     This is a perfect follow up to His Ownself. It even has an Introduction by Sally Jenkins, one of the country's top sportswriters and Dan's own darling daughter.

    Petersburg in 1872, adopted the pen-name of Teffi, and it is as Teffi that she is remembered. In pre-revolutionary Russia she was a literary star, known for her humorous satirical pieces; in the 1920s and 1930s, she wrote some of her finest stories in exile in Paris, recalling her unforgettable encounters with Rasputin, and her hopeful visit at age thirteen to Tolstoy after reading War and Peace. In this selection of her best autobiographical stories, she covers a wide range of subjects, from family life to revolution and emigration, writers and writing. Like Nabokov, Platonov, and other great Russian prose writers, Teffi was a poet who turned to prose but continued to write with a poet’s sensitivity to tone and rhythm. Like Chekhov, she fuses wit, tragedy, and a remarkable capacity for observation; there are few human weaknesses she did not relate to with compassion and understanding.

    The original edition cost seventy-five cents, but there was something priceless about its eponymous piece. Although it gave a voice to the new generation that came of age in the conservative years following World War II, the poem also conferred a strange, subversive power that continues to exert its influence to this day. Ginsberg went on to become one of the most eminent and celebrated writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and "Howl" became the critical axis of the worldwide literary, cultural, and political movement that would be known as the Beat generation.The year 2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of "Howl," and The Poem That Changed America will celebrate and shed new light on this profound cultural work. With new essays by many of today's most distinguished writers, including Frank Bidart, Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody, Robert Pinsky, and Luc Sante, The Poem That Changed America reveals the pioneering influence of "Howl" down through the decades and its powerful resonance today.

    0-935906-00-2$5.00 / Javan Press

    Filled with the sharp humor, emotional acuity, and joyful language Moore has become famous for, these nine glittering tales marked the introduction of an extravagantly gifted writer.