In THE REALLY FUNNY THING ABOUT APATHY, Chelsea Martin's charming but merciless prose employs mathematical paradoxes and theories of infinity to examine the inner workings of the bored and culturally over-stimulated while they idly consider the meaning of life. Overwhelmed and assaulted by their own inner monologues, these characters stumble through a series of external events, obsessing over the possible connections and ultimately assigning deep meaning to them.

    This year's exceptional volume, edited by Robert Creeley, a figure revered across teh wide spectrum of American poetry, features a diverse mix of established masters, rising stars and the leading lights of a younger generation. The pleasure of the poems selected here, Creeley explains in his introduction, is "that they caught my fancy, some almost outrageously, some by their quiet, nearly diffident manner, some by unexpected turns of thought or insight, others by a confident authority and intent." With comments from the poets elucidating their work, a thought-provoking introduction from Creeley, and Lehman's always popular foreword assessing the current state of poetry, The Best American Poetry 2002 will prove as irresistible to new readers as it is indispensable for poetry fans everywhere.

    Vangie and June make out with their boyfriends together in the same car; they pass dirty notes to each other during the day at school. They tell each other everything: "That was the kind of friends we were".After they graduate, things begin to shift. Vangie gets a job waitressing and moves in with Del; June, unable to get a job anywhere but the local factory, moves in with Ray and his older brother Luke. As they become more involved in their lives with their men, they see each other infrequently, but not so seldom that it doesn't become clear to Vangie that there's something dangerous going on, that June has crossed a line with the men in her life that even Vangie would not.

    Gallery owner Ethan Muller can see its brilliance—and money-making potential. When Ethan displays the art, the show attracts the attention of the police. Because the subjects of the pictures look exactly like the victims in a long-cold murder case. Ethan has received a letter saying stop, stop, stop. And the still-missing genius may be the link to a madman—or the madman himself.

    Justin Savage, illegitimate son of shipping magnate Nathaniel Savage, heads out to sea in 1851 as a cabin boy on one of his father's clipper ships. When the ship is captured by pirates, Justin is forced to act against his own family's ships by the pirates' leader, the gorgeous Madame Ching.

    Across five decades, Rolling Stones drummer Charlie Watts has had the best seat in the house. Charlie Watts, the anti-rock star--an urbane jazz fan with a dry wit and little taste for the limelight--was witness to the most savage years in rock history, and emerged a hero, a warrior poet. With his easy swing and often loping, uneven fills, he found nuance in a music that often had little room for it, and along with his greatest ally, Keith Richards, he gave the Stones their swaggering beat. While others battled their drums, Charlie played his modest kit with finesse and humility, and yet his relentless grooves on the nastiest hard-rock numbers of the era ("Gimme Shelter," "Street Fighting Man," "Brown Sugar," "Jumpin' Jack Flash," etc.) delivered a dangerous authenticity to a band that on their best nights should have been put in jail. Author Mike Edison, himself a notorious raconteur and accomplished drummer, tells a tale of respect and satisfaction that goes far beyond drums, drumming, and the Rolling Stones, ripping apart the history of rock'n'roll, and celebrating sixty years of cultural upheaval. He tears the sheets off of the myths of music making, shredding the phonies and the frauds, and unifies the frayed edges of disco, punk, blues, country, soul, jazz, and R&B--the soundtrack of our lives. Highly opinionated, fearless, and often hilarious, Sympathy is as an unexpected treat for music fans and pop culture mavens, as edgy and ribald as the Rolling Stones at their finest, never losing sight of the sex and magic that puts the roll in the rock --the beat, that crazy beat!--and the man who drove the band, their true engine, the utterly irreplaceable Charlie Watts.

    The siblings, who have lost both their parents, are unusually attached, and Hayes fears his untoward secret feelings for his sister. This rich backstory is intercut with scenes of his soul-altering hours on the march and at the front—the slaughter of barely grown young men who only days before whooped it up with him in a regimental ball game; his temporary deafness and disorientation after a shell blast; his fevered attempt to find safe haven after he has been deserted by his own comrades—and, later, in a Washington military hospital, where he finds himself mute and unable even to write his name. In this twilit realm, among the people he encounters—including a compassionate drug-addicted amputee, the ward matron who only appears to be his enemy, and the captain who is convinced that Hayes is faking his illness—is a gray-bearded eccentric who visits the ward daily and becomes Hayes’s strongest advocate: Walt Whitman. This timeless story, whose outcome hinges on friendships forged in crisis, reminds us that the injuries of war are manifold, and the healing goodness in the human soul runs deep and strong.

    Includes DVD. What happens when a person loses hope and yet still has the urge to make a photograph or draw with a stick in the dirt? Kate Greenstreet would like you to read this book as if you had found it left behind on the empty bus seat next to you--a document not directly addressing the question Why do we make art, but one that notices that one does make art, despite conditions, and that one would regardless. THE LAST 4 THINGS comes with a DVD of two movies created by the author. A poem is made by composition, by putting things together, and when you read this book your hands tingle. THE LAST 4 THINGS brings craftsmanship to reverie; it turns dreaming into meaningful work. It is a serious approach to the grammar of our emotions and you do well to read it with your hands--Thomas Basboll.

    Following Pulitzer Prize finalist Ron Padgett's 2013's Collected Poems (winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize and the William Carlos Williams Prize) Alone and Not Alone offers new poems that see the world in a clear and generous light.From "The World of Us":Don't go around all daythinking about life—doing so will raise a barrierbetween you and its instants.You need those instantsso you can be in them,and I need you to be in them with mefor I think the world of usand the mysterious barricadesthat make it possible.

    All the poems are in William Stafford's familiar, reflective voice, and some had been freshly typed at the time of Stafford's death in August of 1993. The book is hospitable to a full range of experiences, moods, stunts with language, tones, expressive landmarks, and intimacies with the universe. Long considered a major voice in twentieth century American poetry, William Stafford is also one of our nation's most popular poets.

    O'Leary to Barack Obama. "Flexing impressive literary chops, the beer vendor/creative-writing professor captures both the tough, defensive exterior and the vulnerable, often-broken heart of his city."— Timeout Chicago"Chicago, a page at a time. Michael Czyzniejewski gets right to the point in telling the city's stories." — Chicago Tribune"...Michael Czyzniejewski’s “Chicago Stories,” forty fictional monologues riffing on the common culture of the Windy City’s shared history, projected forward into a possible future. Not quite historical fiction—more like historical jazz." — Newcity Lit"In 'Chicago Stories,' Michael Czyzniejewski summons all of Chicago — its ghosts, living and dead, its heroes and fools, sinners and saints, its people and places and all of its occasions — and in these pages they have gathered, strange and unlikely bedfellows, to sing a new song for Chicago. It will twist your arm behind your back, this song. It will break your fingers."— Billy Lombardo, author of The Man With Two Arms and The Logic of a Rose: Chicago Stories

    Drawing on philosophy, literature, neuroscience, and other fields of study, Ligotti takes the penetrating lens of his imagination and turns it on his audience, causing them to grapple with the brutal reality that they are living a meaningless nightmare, and anyone who feels otherwise is simply acting out an optimistic fallacy. At once a guidebook to pessimistic thought and a relentless critique of humanity's employment of self-deception to cope with the pervasive suffering of their existence, The Conspiracy against the Human Race may just convince readers that there is more than a measure of truth in the despairing yet unexpectedly liberating negativity that is widely considered a hallmark of Ligotti's work.

    In MILLENNIUM, Hakim Bey both sustains and expands the ideas of his groundbreaking work, THE TEMPORARY AUTONOMOUS ZONE. Here, Bey suggests that mere detachment from (or even outright rejection of) the monolith of global capital is not enough; that either we accept ourselves as the 'last humans,' or else we accept ourselves as the opposition. The book also contains an illuminating interview with Bey, in which he discusses his body of work and assesses our collective position at the turn of the millennium.

    The pervasiveness of images of torture, horror, and war has all but demolished the twentieth-century hope that such imagery might shock us into a less alienated state, or aid in the creation of a just social order. What to do now? When to look, when to turn away?Genre-busting author Maggie Nelson brilliantly navigates this contemporary predicament, with an eye to the question of whether or not focusing on representations of cruelty makes us cruel. In a journey through high and low culture (Kafka to reality TV), the visual to the verbal (Paul McCarthy to Brian Evenson), and the apolitical to the political (Francis Bacon to Kara Walker), Nelson offers a model of how one might balance strong ethical convictions with an equally strong appreciation for work that tests the limits of taste, taboo, and permissibility.

    In the privacy of their homes, who can save them from themselves? In the forests and hills and on the beautiful lakes, what could possibly be wrong? Even in the sweet hometown, with its kindly police, menace lurks in a thousand disguises. Mystery and magic surround this metropolis of the imagination. Once again, James Tate has given us a world of surprising pleasures:... lost in the interstellar space between teacups in the cupboard, found in the beak of a downy woodpecker, the lovers staring into the void and then jumping over it, flying into their beautiful tomorrows like the heroes of a storm.