Slumberland


Paul Beatty - 2008
    After creating the perfect beat, DJ Darky goes in search of Charles Stone, a little-known avant-garde jazzman, to play over his sonic masterpiece. His quest brings him to a recently unified Berlin, where he stumbles through the city’s dreamy streets ruminating about race, sex, love, Teutonic gods, the prevent defense, and Wynton Marsalis in search of his artistic—and spiritual—other. Ferocious, bombastic, and laugh-out-loud funny, Slumberland is vintage Paul Beatty and belongs on the shelf next to Jonathan Lethem, Colson Whitehead, and Junot Diaz.

Pillow Thoughts 1 - 3


Courtney Peppernell
    It is divided into sections to read when you feel you need them most. Pillow Thoughts II: Healing the Heart: Peppernell understands that healing is a process, and Pillow Thoughts II eloquently captures the time and experience that one goes through on their journey to peace through restoration. A collection of inspirational and comforting poems for anyone who is mending from a broken heart. Pillow Thoughts III: Mending the Mind: A beautifully raw and poignant collection of poetry and prose, Pillow Thoughts III continues the series from poet Courtney Peppernell. Fix yourself a warm drink and settle into Peppernell's words as she pens a tribute to her readers who are bravely continuing their journey from hurt to healing.

Shifting the Silence


Etel Adnan - 2020
    In short unrelenting paragraphs, Adnan enumerates her personal struggle to conceptualize the breadth of her own life at 95, the process of aging, and the knowledge of her own inevitable death. The personal is continuously projected outwards and mirrored back through ruminations on climate catastrophe, California wildfires, the on-going war in Syria, planned missions to Mars, and the view of the sea from Adnan’s window in Brittany in a poignant often painful interplay between the interior and the cosmic.

A Woman of Property


Robyn Schiff - 2016
    This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?

Eureka Mill


Ron Rash - 1998
    It is even more remarkable if the book is set where we live, a place we thought we'd been. These poems make up a dramatic and lyrical portrait of the migration of poor Buncombe County farmers to a mill village outside Chester, S.C. However, the book is much more than documentary. Rash, whose grandparents and parents worked in the Eureka Mill interweaves his family's personal history with the broader texture of mill life, giving us at once intimacy and perspective, heart and understanding.

Dante's Purgatorio; Adapted by Marcus Sanders


Marcus Sanders - 2005
    The second book of Dante Alighieri's classic poem "The Divine Comedy," this version of "Purgatorio" couples a clever literary adaptation incorporating modern urban speech and contemporary references with powerful illustrations inspired by Gustave Dore's famous engravings. Whereas "Inferno" was primarily situated in a city that bears a curious resemblance to modern Los Angeles, "Purgatorio" is set in a surreal San Francisco Bay Area, an outlandish and hopeful milieu for those who have a chance to wash their sins away. Together, the sardonic yet playful combination of text and images comprise a vivid retelling of this masterpiece.

An Anthology of Madness


Max Andrew Dubinsky - 2013
    Featuring brand new stories and some old favorites, many of these tell-all, gritty tales were originally published on the blog Make It MAD between 2010 and 2012, and have been rereleased in their originality for this special print and digital anthology.

Balloon Pop Outlaw Black


Patricia Lockwood - 2012
    Even all by themselves, the titles of Patricia Lockwood's poems reveal the sort of surreal, enigmatic, rhetorically-elongated world her sensibility inhabits effortlessly: "When We Move Away From Here, You'll See A Clean Square of Paper Where His Picture Hung," "The Cartoon's Mother Builds a House in Hammerspace," "The Front Half and the Back Half of a Horse in Conversation," "Children With Lamps Pouring Out of Their Foreheads," and the inimitable "Killed With an Apple Corer, She Asks What Does That Make Me."

Junkyard Ghost Revival


Anis Mojgani - 2008
    Junkyard Ghost Revival is an award winning poetry collection of 7 modern touring authors: Derrick Brown, Anis Mojgani, Buddy Wakefield, Robbie Q, Sonya Renee, Andrea Gibson and Cristin O'keefe Aptowicz

Faithful and Virtuous Night


Louise Glück - 2014
    Her Poems 1962-2012 was hailed as "a major event in this country's literature" in the pages of The New York Times. Every new collection is at once a deepening and a revelation. Faithful and Virtuous Night is no exception. You enter the world of this spellbinding book through one of its many dreamlike portals, and each time you enter it's the same place but it has been arranged differently. You were a woman. You were a man. This is a story of adventure, an encounter with the unknown, a knight's undaunted journey into the kingdom of death; this is a story of the world you've always known, that first primer where "on page three a dog appeared, on page five a ball" and every familiar facet has been made to shimmer like the contours of a dream, "the dog float[ing] into the sky to join the ball." Faithful and Virtuous Night tells a single story but the parts are mutable, the great sweep of its narrative mysterious and fateful, heartbreaking and charged with wonder.

Stryker: The Siege of Sadr City


Konrad R.K. Ludwig - 2013
    For nearly three months, American and Iraqi troops fought for control over the most dangerous urban district of Baghdad, against the ruthless insurgent militia of the Jaish al-Mahdi - a struggle that would change the face of the entire war.Sgt Ludwig's gripping narrative offers and unfiltered view of the Final Battle of Sadr City, as seen through his eyes from behind the wrath of a machine gun. Still a young idealistic boy, he enlists with a high-impact urban assault Stryker unit known as "Bull Company" and comes face-to-face with his own oblivion. Up against the full might of the Jaish al-Mahdi, they embark on a one-way mission deep behind enemy lines, to capture a well-guarded militia stronghold and defend their ground "for as long as it takes."This is the story of what really happened in the late years of Operation Iraqi Freedom.The story our media neglected to tell.

Mihai Eminescu: Poezii alese / Selected Poems


Adrian George Sahlean - 2000
    The book was awarded the Eminescu Gold Medal' in 2000, when Eminescu was declared 'UNESCO-Year-2000-Poet-Of-The-Year'. The volume includes some the 'national' poet's time-honored gems like Luceafarul/The Evening Star, Glossa, Scrisoarea I / First Epistle Satire, Stelele-n Cer/Stars in the Sky, La Steaua/Onto the Star, among others.

A Heart Full of Love


Javan - 1990
    0-935906-02-9$5.00 / Javan Press

Event Factory


Renee Gladman - 2010
    Although fluent in the native language, she quickly finds herself on the outside of every experience. Things happen to her, events transpire, but it is as if the city itself, the performance of life there, eludes her. Setting out to uncover the source of the city’s erosion, she is beset by this other crisis—an ontological crisis—as she struggles to retain a sense of what is happening.Event Factory is the first in a series of novels (also available are the second, The Ravickians; the third, Ana Patova Crosses a Bridge; and the fourth, Houses of Ravicka) that Renee Gladman is writing about the invented city-state of Ravicka, a foreign “other” place fraught with the crises of American urban experience, not least the fundamental problem of how to move through the world at all.

The Zen of Zim: Baseball, Beanballs and Bosses


Don Zimmer - 2004
    His first book, Zim-A Baseball Life, was a New York Times bestseller and one of the best baseball memoirs ever published. Now, in The Zen of Zim, one of baseball's most beloved figures offers readers an insightful look into the baseball of yesterday and today. Baseball fans will love hearing Zim's positions on such things as pitching inside, managing, bosses, and more.With more than fifty-six years in baseball, Don Zimmer had seen it all, or so he thought before he ran into George Steinbrenner. Here Zimmer provides a revealing account of his eight years as Joe Torre's right-hand man-and the jealousy, vindictiveness, and pettiness that ultimately destroyed a twenty-five-year friendship with Steinbrenner.Zim will also discuss the circumstances that led to his charging onto the field at Fenway Park and throwing a haymaker at Boston Red Sox pitcher Pedro Martinez. He'll share with readers what it was like to work for other baseball owners; shed new light on general managers like Branch Rickey and Dan Duquette; and critique the managing styles of some of the most famous and notorious skippers of the twentieth century, from Casey Stengel and Earl Weaver to Gene Mauch and Billy Martin.In a chapter called "What Have They Done to My Game?," Zim will offer a crash course in baseball anthropology, describing how the game and its players have changed over the past fifty years and showing how big money and free agency have destroyed clubhouse camaraderie and turned a team sport into a transient game. In contrast, he celebrates his close-knit teammates on the 1955 Brooklyn Dodgers team and the lifelong friendships that were made.Zim has seen it all, and here readers learn even more of his life and dreams and of baseball through a half century of experience. It is a story jam-packed with laughs and anecdotes, with excitement and comedy. And it is superbly told.