This collection suggests that a person is like a world, full of mysteries and wonders–and equally in need of an encyclopedia, a compendium of everything known. The long title sequence offers entries such as “The Sun” (“There is one mind in all of us, one soul, / who parches the soil in some nations / but in others hides perpetually behind a veil”), “The Elephant” (“How to explain my heroic courtesy?”), “The Pigeon” (“Once startled, you shall feel hours of weird sadness / afterwards”), and “Randall Jarrell” (“If language hurts you, make the damage real”). The mysteriously emotional individual poems coalesce as a group to suggest that our natural world is populated not just by fascinating creatures–who, in any case, are metaphors for the human as Chiasson considers them– but also by literature, by the ghosts of past poetries, by our personal ghosts. Toward the end of the sequence, one poem asks simply, “Which Species on Earth Is Saddest?” a question this book seems poised to answer. But Chiasson is not finally defeated by the sorrows and disappointments that maturity brings. Combining a classic, often heartbreaking musical line with a playful, fresh attack on the standard materials of poetry, he makes even our sadness beguiling and beautiful.

    From a writer who “adds new dimensions of depth and substance to the modern crime novel,” this thrilling and critically acclaimed series follows a tormented ex-cop from Philadelphia to South Florida on a quest to earn redemption for his dark past (Michael Connelly).  The Blue Edge of Midnight: After a shootout during a convenience store holdup led to the accidental death of a twelve-year-old, Max Freeman left the Philadelphia police department behind for a life in exile in the Florida Everglades. Since then, he’s lived in seclusion, haunted by guilt, with the humid night and the nocturnal predators of the swamp as his only company. But everything changes when he discovers a young girl’s body floating in the muddy waters and becomes the prime suspect for her murder. To prove his innocence, Freeman must find the real killer—and confront his own tortured soul—before it’s too late.  A Visible Darkness: When five elderly women are murdered in Fort Lauderdale, Max Freeman is determined to get to the bottom of it. His friend, lawyer Billy Manchester, believes the crimes are tied to a conspiracy to collect on the women’s life insurance policies. But when Freeman uncovers a shocking betrayal, he soon realizes the gruesome plot reaches further than anyone thought possible. Now, it’s a race against the clock to hunt down the psychopath behind the murders—before the killer sets his sights on Freeman himself.  Shadow Men: In the 1920s, three of Mark Mayes’s ancestors left to help build the first road through the Everglades, backbreaking labor from which they never returned. Now, decades later, Mayes has discovered letters that point to murder as the cause of their disappearance, and he hires Max Freeman to investigate. But as Freeman follows the trail of evidence, he incurs the wrath of the corporation that built the road—and realizes the case may not be as cold as everyone assumed.

    The four Crawford siblings might know all there is to know about their chosen careers, but they have no idea how relationships work. Growing up in a small town full of nosy neighbors, hilarious antics, and family that never butts out, you'd think they'd figure it out.Between the axe throwing, the apology chickens and competitive Scrabble, our heroes just might find true love. Eventually.This complete series features four full-length romantic comedies that will have you snorting with laughter as you follow Hunter, Diana, Archer and Fletcher Crawford up the creek with broken paddles.Can the Crawfords get their act together and figure out how to love? Dive into this steamy series (try to avoid the mating skunks) and escape with feel-good fiction.This set includes:The Nerd and the NeighborThe Botanist and the BillionaireThe Midwife and the MoneyThe Planner and the Player

    Moss uncovers remarkable historical anecdotes, which are accompanied by Gorey's absurdly deadpan drawings. Although the insightful scenarios involving Emily Dickinson, Mozart, Henrik Ibsen, and El Greco are all the product of Moss's fertile imagination, his uncanny emulation of style makes us believe they (just possibly) might be true. 25 illustrations.

    

    The turbulent political weather of the twenty-first century generates anxiety and makes it difficult to know how to react. Olivia Laing makes a brilliant, inspiring case for why art matters more than ever, as a force of both resistance and repair. Art, she argues, changes how we see the world. It gives us X-ray vision. It reveals inequalities and offers fertile new ways of living.Funny Weather brings together a career’s worth of Laing’s writing about art and culture, and their role in our political and emotional lives. She profiles Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O’Keeffe, interviews Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith, writes love letters to David Bowie and Wolfgang Tillmans, and explores loneliness and technology, women and alcohol, sex and the body. With characteristic originality and compassion, Funny Weather celebrates art as an antidote to a terrifying political moment.

    Great Freedom, whereby you are not bound by the life you live in.The writings of Truth that guides you to the life of wisdom, cleanses your mind and leads you to the true and eternal world.

    Here are reflections on cowboys real and fake, tractor-driving lessons, outhouses, and the uses of baling wire; here are ranch marriages, enduring and not; family legacies; loss and renewal. Westerners will find their friends and neighbors in these pages; others will find a vivid portrait of the women of a region all too often mythologized.

    For anyone who's been let down by life and love, these poems reveal that the most important person one can fall in love with is oneself.

    Readers will relate to Crewe’s ache at missing her mom, her nostalgia for her childhood, her frustrations at raising teenagers, and her impatience for terrible parking lot etiquette in equal measure. The book spans sixteen years’ worth of columns for The Cape Bretoner Magazine, Cahoots Magazine, and The Chronicle Herald.Are You Kidding Me?! is a side-splitting, heartwarming, Cape Breton–flavoured celebration of the little things.

    Michael Theune's breakthrough concept encourages students, teachers, and writers to use structure as a tool to see the fundamental affinities between strikingly different kinds of poetry and radically different literary eras. The book includes examination of the mid-course turn and the elegy, as well as the ironic, concessional, emblem, and retrospective-prospective structures, among others. In addition, 14 contemporary poets provide an example of and commentary on their own work.

    For readers devoted to poetry, it offers illuminating examples of the infinitely various ways a poem reaches a reader.In both the book and the videos on the accompanying DVD, poems by Sappho, Shakespeare, Keats, Whitman, and Dickinson as well as contemporary poets are introduced by people from across the United States—a construction worker, a Supreme Court justice, a glassblower, a marine—each of whom speaks about his or her connection to the poem. Their comments are variously poignant, funny, heartening, tart, penetrating, and eccentric, showing some of the ways poetry is alive for American readers. An Invitation to Poetry will inspire a fresh experience of poetry's pleasure and insight.

    Featuring a beautifully diverse and inspirational set of voices from around the world, that includes some of today’s most influential modern poets, with additional contest winners chosen from 4,500 submissions, Crown Anthology is curated to be a light in the wild dark, illuminating the crown that exists in everyone.

    They had some good times. There was a whiteboard in the conference room, and often cartoons were drawn on this whiteboard. The cartoons were of varying quality. By the end of the year, with the help of a similar committee of high school students in Ann Arbor, and their guest editor, Rachel Kushner, they selected the contents of this anthology. The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 features stories about Bulgarian spaceships, psychedelic mushroom therapy, and a cyclorama in Iowa. If you don’t know what a cyclorama is, you aren’t alone. Read on to find out.The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2016 includes N. R. KLEINFIELD,  ANNA KOVATCHEVA, DAN HOY, ANTHONY MARRA, MICHAEL POLLAN, MARILYNNE ROBINSON, DANA SPIOTTA, ADRIAN TOMINE, INARA VERZEMNIEKS and othersRachel Kushner, guest editor, is the author of The Flamethrowers, which was a finalist for the 2013 National Book Award and one of the New York Times’s top five novels of 2013. Kushner’s debut novel, Telex from Cuba, was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Award, a winner of the California Book Award, and a New York Times bestseller and Notable Book.

    "Discovered" by Andy Warhol in 1966, the VU - with their original line-up of Lou Reed, John Cale, Sterling Morrison, and Mo Tucker - would soon become the house band of the avantgarde, composing songs simultaneously furious in their abrasiveness and beautiful in their pathos, standing in striking contrast to the prevailing flower power of the era. All Yesterdays' Parties gathers for the first time almost all of the published writings contemporary with the band's existence-from sources as mainstream as the New York Times to vanished voices of the counterculture like Oz, Fusion, and Crawdaddy! The book is a revealing snapshot of an era by trailblazing rock writers such as Lester Bangs, Robert Greenfield, and Paul Williams. With photographs, posters, and other visual evocations of the period throughout, All Yesterdays' Parties is an invaluable resource, a trove of lore for anyone interested in the VU, their roots, and legacy.