Here is Mowat's memoirs of his service in World War II, his letters to and from his father, and his bizarre tale of steering German war materials back home to Canada. Photographs.

    Uncovering Pauline Johnson’s complex and dramatic personality, Flint & Feather is studded with triumph and tragedy, mystery and romance—a first-rate biography blending turn-of-the-century Canadian history and the vibrant story of a woman whose unforgettable voice still echoes through the years.

    Born in Montreal to an upper-middle class family, Frank’s life took a downturn as a young man when he was sexually assaulted by a priest. He began drinking at an early age and was soon destitute, living in degradation on the streets of Toronto. By way of a sympathetic employer, the Salvation Army, and Alcoholics Anonymous, O’Dea quit drinking and started a small business that developed into the Second Cup coffee chain. Over the years, his philanthropic activities extended to AIDS fundraising, child literacy in the Third World, and landmine removal. His message is simple: HOPE, VISION, ACTION.

    The title of her new collection, Scattered at Sea, evokes notions of dispersion, diaspora, sowing one’s wild oats, having one’s mind expanded or blown, losing one’s wits, and mortality. Making use of dramatic monologue, elegy, humor, and collage, these poems explore hedonism, gender, ancestry, reincarnation, bereavement, and the nature of prayer. Groping for an inclusive, imaginative, postmodern spirituality, they draw from an array of sources, including the philosophy of the ancient Stoics, diagnostic tests for Alzheimer’s disease, 1950s recipes, the Babylonian Talmud, and Walter Benjamin’s writing on his drug experiences.

    Runaway effects of climate change have triggered the collapse of nation/states and wiped out over a third of the global population. One of the survivors, a former soldier nicknamed Mercy, suffers from PTSD and is haunted by guilt and lingering memories of his family. His pain is eased when he meets a dancer named Ruby, a performer who breathes new life into his carefully constructed existence. But when his long-lost brother Leo arrives with news that Mercy's children have been spotted, the two brothers travel into the wilderness to look for them, only to find that the line between truth and lies is trespassed, challenging Mercy's own moral code about the things that matter amid the wreckage of war and tragedy.Set against a sparse yet fantastical landscape, The Mercy Journals explores the parameters of personal morality and forgiveness at this watershed moment in humanity's history and evolution.Claudia Casper's previous novels include The Reconstruction (St. Martin's Press).

    

    "Eula Biss writes in spare brushstrokes that evoke an emotional universe, by turns funny, scary, dreamlike, haunting. These prose poems are shards of gleaming observation, fragments of intimacy and illusion. Here we find our families and ourselves, our words and our silences"-Martin Espada. "With deceptively quiet, unflinching compassion, Eula Biss records the perceptual wedges that cleave the self from its origins. The family history refracted here is mutable, notable, more gravid than grave. THE BALLOONISTS holds a fresh line on confession, biography, and the formal uses of information in poetry"-Rebecca Wolff.

    They're so ridiculous you may think they're fiction. Like the time I went to a drive-in X-rated movie without realizing my parents were in the next car. Or the time I let my kid throw a rock through our living room window. There's the time I bought a camouflage thong in a bait shop and the time I ruined a kid's birthday party. And the other time I ruined a kid's birthday party. I can't guarantee that these stories will make you laugh, but I can guarantee that I didn't make them up.

    With Every Mistake is not only a collection of the very best of Dyer’s recent work, but an examination of how, time and again, the media skews fact and opinion, wielding formidable influence on how we all shape our own thoughts. And why is so much of the information wrong? Is it herd instinct, official manipulation, robber-baron owners with ideological obsessions — or just the conflict between the inherently bitty, short-term nature of news reporting and analysis and the longer perspectives needed to understand what is actually going on? How much misinformation stems from simple ignorance and laziness?

    This is a communal effort by the Pushcart Press staff, contributing editors, and hundreds of small presses. For this edition distinguished poets Julie Sheehan and Tom Sleigh served as poetry editors. The result is an introduction to a literary world that few readers have access to, where much of today's important new writing is published, far from the commercial influence of the conglomerates. In reviewing last year's edition, Donna Seaman of Booklist commented: "A brimming, vibrant anthology-the perfect introduction to new writers and adventurous new work by established writers . . . extraordinary in its range of voices and subjects. Here is literature to have and to hold." The Pushcart Prize has been chosen for the Ivan Sandrof Lifetime Achievement recognition by the National Book Critics Circle and the Writers for Writers award from Poets Writers / Barnes Noble.

    Carver Country presents the stark but human reality of one man's world, a man who was generous in his spirit and in his gifts, and who rose above his beginnings - but Raymond Carver never left his native ground or gave up his love for its terrain and its people. Raymond Carver's gritty texts, including his poems, short stories and unpublished letters, combined with Bob Adelman's photographs of Carver's people and haunts, re-create the world of this major writer, bringing to life the bleak, blue-collar towns, people, and places that became the inspiration for much of his work. Includes 113 duotone photos.

    In a series of candid, vulnerable, and wise essays that takes a closer look at what it means to love someone, be loved, and how we present our love to the world, Catron deconstructs her own personal canon of love stories. She delves all the way back to 1944, when her grandparents first met in a coal mining town in Appalachia, to her own dating life as a professor in Vancouver, drawing insights from her fascinating research into the universal psychology, biology, history, and literature of love. She uses biologists’ research into dopamine triggers to ask whether the need to love is an innate human drive. She uses literary theory to show why we prefer certain kinds of love stories. She urges us to question the unwritten scripts we follow in relationships and looks into where those scripts come from in the first place. And she tells the story of how she decided to test a psychology experiment that she’d read about—where the goal was to create intimacy between strangers using a list of thirty-six questions—and ended up in the surreal situation of having millions of people following her brand-new relationship. In How to Fall in Love with Anyone Catron flips the script on love and offers a deeply personal, and universal, investigation.

    In a helicopter above the barren lands of the subarctic, in a canoe with his four-year-old son, aboard seaplanes, and along the Underground Railroad, Will's travels have taken him from Cape Spear on the coast of Newfoundland to the sun-dappled streets of old Victoria.Funny, poignant, and insightful, Beauty Tips from Moose Jaw is a provocative tribute to a land that is akin to a series of loosely connected outposts peopled with some of the most interesting folks in the world.

    Dawn Davies is in the third category. A six-foot-tall divorcee, she isn’t chatty, couldn’t care less about anyone’s potty training progress, doesn’t care to share her own children’s milestones with people who don’t love them. But even if she has never fit in with other moms, she has raised three children with her own particular brand of fierce, unflagging love. In stories that cut to the quick, we see Davies grow from a young girl who moves to a new town every couple of years; to a misfit teenager who finds solace in a local music scene; to an adrift twenty-something who summons inner strength as she holds the hand of a dying stranger; to a woman dealing with difficult pregnancies and post-partum depression. And in her powerful titular story, we see Davies struggling with the weight of knowing that her son is deeply troubled.Mothers of Sparta is not a blow-by-blow of Davies’ life but rather an examination of the exquisite and often painful moments of a life, the moments we look back on and say, That one, that one mattered. Straddling the fence between humor and, well…not humor, Davies has written a book about what it’s like to be a woman trying to carve a place for herself in the world, no matter how unyielding the rock can be.

    In this, we are rich. We begin with abundance. But while much is written about our city these hard days, it is typically meant to explain Detroit to those who live elsewhere. Much of this writing is brilliant, but our anthology, this anthology, is different: it is a collection of Detroit stories for Detroiters. Through essays, photographs, poetry, and art, this anthology collects the stories we tell each other over late nights at the pub and long afternoons on the porch. We share them in coffee shops, at church social hours, in living rooms, and while waiting for the bus. These are stories addressed to the rhetorical “you”—with the ratcheted up language that comes with it—and these are stories that took real legwork to investigate. We may be lifelong residents, newcomers, or former Detroiters; we may be activists, workers, teachers, artists, healers, or students. But a common undercurrent alights our work that is collected here: we are a city moving through the fire of transformation. We are afire.Featuring essays, photographs, poetry, and art by Terry Blackhawk, Grace Lee Boggs, John Carlisle, Desiree Cooper, dream hampton, francine j. harris, Steve Hughes, Jamaal May, Tracie McMillan, Ken Mikolowski, Marsha Music, Shaka Senghor, Thomas J. Sugrue, and many others.