This free Kindle book features interviews, essays, excerpts, and other fun extras about the year’s top 20 titles: Donna Tartt talks about her eating habits while writing The Goldfinch; Khaled Hosseini’s publicist discusses what it’s like to be on a national tour with him; David Finkel discusses the emotional impact following the 2-16 infantry battalion in Thank You for Your Service; and much more.

    Here is a poet talking to you instead of around himself, while doing absolutely brilliant and outrageous things with language."--Publishers WeeklyStarred Review in Booklist "[C]hoices of poems from each of Harrison's books are passionate and sharp... Of special note is a section from Letters to Yesenin, a book-length poem, and the title poem from The Theory and Practice of Rivers , which contains these echoing lines, 'I forgot where I heard that poems / are designed to waken sleeping gods.' Reading this essential volume, one might imagine that the gods are, indeed, staying up late, reading lights on, turning the pages."Jim Harrison: The Essential Poems is distilled from fourteen volumes--from visionary lyrics and meditative suites to shape-shifting ghazals and prose-poem letters. Teeming throughout these pages are Harrison's legendary passions and appetites, his meditations, rages, and love-songs to the natural world.The New York Times concluded a review from early in Harrison's career with a provocative quote: "This is poetry worth loving, hating, and fighting over, a subjective mirror of our American days and needs." That sentiment still holds true, as Jim Harrison's essential poems continue to call for our fiercest attention.Also included are full-color images of poem drafts--both typescripts and holographs--as well as the letter Denise Levertov sent to publisher W.W. Norton in the early 1960s, advocating for Harrison's debut collection.In his essay "Poetry as Survival," Jim Harrison wrote, "Poetry, at its best, is the language your soul would speak if you could teach your soul to speak." The Essential Poems is proof positive that Jim Harrison taught his soul to speak."In this unforgiving literary moment, we must deal honestly with [Harrison's] life and work, as they are inextricable in a way that is not true of other poets...These poems bear-crawl gorgeously after a genuine connection to being, thrashing in giant leaps through the underbrush to find consolation, purpose, and redemption. In his raw, original keening he ambushes moments of unimaginable beauty, one after another, line after line...The Essential Poems demonstrates perfectly why we should turn to Harrison again. He lived and breathed an American confrontation with the physical earth, married himself to a universe of bodies and stumps and birds, did not try to shuck his grotesque masculinity and stared hard with his one good eye (the left was blinded when he was seven) at the inescapable, beckoning finger of death." --Dean Kuipers, LitHub"The Essential Poems provides a good introduction--or reintroduction--to the work of this singular writer... these pieces illustrate Harrison's range and his ease with various formats, from lyric poems to meditative suites to prose poems. They also spotlight his deep, rugged kinship with rural landscapes and the natural world, where 'the cost of flight is landing.'" --The Washington Post"Jim Harrison's latest collection, The Essential Poems, contains...engaging and enlightening poems [that] should be taught, learned, and loved. Remember this."--New York Journal of Books"Had he been a chef, all the other foodies would have talked about how Jim Harrison dealt with big flavors. In his poems, they're all there -- love and death, remorse and longing, the rocket contrails of living. There's not a lot of small talk in The Essential Poems... this book grabs you by the collar and tells you in eleven hundred ways to wake up."--John Freeman, Executive Editor, "Recommended Reading from Lit Hub Staff""Jim Harrison had an appetite. He devoured the natural world with gusto and wrote about it with wild energy and sweetly caustic wit...Harrison was also a prodigious poet, and this thoughtfully curated collection [The Essential Poems] showcases him at his best. Like his fiction, the poems observe the collision between civilization and the wildness outside our cities; they act like geocaches both harrowing and beautiful... Organized chronologically, the material here becomes a time line distilling Harrison's signature concerns."--Alta"It is hard-boiled poetry, some of the best of its kind, and one is not surprised to know that Harrison has written very tough novels... His poetic vision is at the heart of it all."--Harper's

    His Nobel Lecture offers a powerful defense of poetry as "the ship and the anchor" of our spirit within an ocean of violent, divisive world politics.

    Because let’s face it! We hoomans are obviously stupid and trust me unicorns are never wrong. Did you know? The horn of the unicorn symbolizes ultimate truth and it has the power to pierce the chest of anyone who tries to lie. Damn!‘Uuuuuuuunicornnnnnnnnnnnnn,’ I yawned, waking up, after being thrown back to our crap-shit called Earth.‘So fellow hoomans, let’s begin.’About the book:This book is a sarcastic and humorous take on various themes like love, life, humanity, healing, and heartbreak - expressed through 51 beautiful chapters of relatable quotes, musings and poems. It basically deals with what we humans go through on a day-to-day basis. Moreover, every chapter is accompanied by a unique and perfectly orchestrated author's rant or opinion focused on one single person; You.

    

    This new edition has been updated by his friend and former Rolling Stone comrade Mitch Glazer and includes an epilogue about the memorial concerts for Timothy that James Taylor helped organize.

    It does get into some darker areas of Doc's life, such as Merle's death, but it also is a celebration of the man through the eyes and ears of those who know him." - Steve Carr, docsguitar.com"Hard to believe it's been 50 years since Ralph Rinzler first introduced guitarist Doc Watson to the larger world. It's a fitting anniversary for the first book-length biography on Doc to appear. It was long overdue. This is a valuable, anecdotal work anyone interested in Doc's music and life will enjoy reading." - Bluegrass Unlimited"This is a highly informative, fascinating biography of the great Doc Watson. What a life. It's a page-turner that will keep you up past your bedtime. Don't miss it." - The Inland Northwest Bluegrass Association"A very well researched biography... The story of Doc Watson's life is one of tragedy and success. The author provides a vivid image of Doc's early childhood [and his] years with Merle, and gravely describes the impact of Merle's untimely death. The book is hard to put down..." - Tom Duplissey, Bay Area Bluegrass Association"Musicologists will appreciate the chapters on Doc's singing style and guitar work... Music fans will delight in the book as a whole, a splendid recounting of Doc Watson as man whose '...approach to folk music on a guitar was like Horowitz's approach to the piano...'" - Gary Presley, The Internet Review of BooksAbout the AuthorKent Gustavson, PhD is a professor of writing, language and leadership at Stony Brook University, where he is currently the faculty director of the undergraduate Leadership & Development and Community Service Living Learning Centers. As the host of Sound Authors, he has interviewed hundreds of award-winning musicians and authors, and his music has been featured on National Public Radios All Songs Considered. He lives and works in Sound Beach, New York.

    Circling themes of intimacy and time, they return to the urgency of conversation: that fragile bridge across the frozen attitudes that divide our world. But at the heart of the collection is a deeper preoccupation, with those blurry places where humans might walk with gods, where the body might touch the beyond, where the enchanted might intersect effortlessly with the everyday. Where one stumbles upon what the poet simply calls ‘love without a story’.

    Stranger Music presents a magnificent cross-section of Cohen's work--including the legendary songs Suzanne, Sisters of Mercy, Bird on a Wire, Famous Blue Raincoat, I'm Your Man, and The Future; selections from such books as Flowers for Hitler, Beautiful Losers, and Death of a Lady's Man, and eleven previously unpublished poems. This volume demonstrates definitively that Cohen is a writer of dazzling intelligence and a force that transcends genres.

    The special disaster in which the name originated had long been lost from memory when the poet Longfellow chose the spot as a background for his description of the “Wreck of the Hesperus,” and gave it an association that it will scarcely lose while the English language endures. Nor does it matter to the legend lover that the ill-fated schooner was not “gored” by the “cruel rocks” just at this point, but nearer to the Gloucester coast.

    

    Tsvetaeva's poetry was often of a very passionate and almost obsessive nature. She writes of unrequited love and heartbreak, of her admiration for other writers, of the devastation of war, and of her generally troubled life. Nonetheless, she is always able to contain this raw emotion in an extremely rigorous and disciplined form, unique only to her. Especially in her later poetry, frequent enjambments, inner rhymes, short lines, word play, and numerous allusions dominate her work. In this dual-language selection, Andrey Kneller offers his attempts to capture this distinctive style of Marina Tsvetaeva's poetry by preserving both the message and the music of the originals.

    He spent his early childhood in Astrakhan where his father worked as a shipping agent, but when the boy was only five years old, his father died, and he was sent to live with his maternal grandparents. This was not a happy time for the young Gorky as conditions were poor and often violent. At the age of eight, the boy's grandfather forced him to quit school and apprenticed him to several tradesmen including a shoemaker and an icon painter. Fortunately, Gorky also worked as a dishwasher on a Volga steamer where a friendly cook taught him to read, and literature soon became his passion. At the age of twelve, Gorky ran away from home and barely survived, half starving, moving from one small job to the next. He was often beaten by his employers and seldom had enough to eat. The bitterness of these early experiences led him to choose the name Maxim Gorky (which means "the bitter one") as his pseudonym.

    Tate’s remarkable work—filled with dark wit, dry humor, and deceptive simplicity—is considered among the most accessible poetry written in the last several decades, and it has inspired acclaimed poet W.S. Merwin to write, “Mr. Tate’s gift is such that many of [his] poems move me at least to plain envy of what he can do.”

    It is an invitation to my thoughts