An open bedroom door. An ill-timed squat. Dogs seem to have impeccable timing. Yet how quickly calamity turns to comedy in the company of a dog, and the wrong moment turns out to be just the right one. In this delightful follow-up to Dog Is My Co-Pilot, which won the Best Book of the Year award from the Dog Writers Association of America, the editors of The Bark bring together more stories, essays, and artwork that highlight the hilarity of dog behavior and the comical interactions between dog people and their four-legged friends. From playful puppies who wreak havoc in the home to dogs with a whole array of comic shticks and tricks, Howl celebrates the verve and the laughs pets offer their people. It includes laugh-out-loud reflections (and confessions), rib-tickling tales, and whimsical vignettes from well-known writers such as:• Dave Barry• Margaret Cho• Al Franken• Kinky Friedman• Pam Houston• Haven Kimmel• Neal Pollack• And many more!From the Hardcover edition.

    Fifty-five acclaimed and emerging writers—including Emma Bolden, Ron Carlson, Kelly Cherry, Stuart Dybek, Blake Kimzey, Roland Leach, Bobbie Ann Mason, Diane Williams, and Hiromi Kawakami—have made the debut of The Best Small Fictions 2015 something significant, something worthwhile, and something necessary. Featuring spotlights on Pleiades journal and Michael Martone, this international volume—with Pulitzer Prize–winning author Robert Olen Butler serving as guest editor and award-winning editor Tara L. Masih as series editor—is a celebration of the diversity and quality captured in fiction forms fewer than 1,000 words. ................................................."Whatever one calls them—flash fictions, microfictions, short shorts—the number of outlets where such pieces are published continue to grow along with the interest of readers and writers in the form. The time is right for a Best of the Year anthology."—Stuart Dybek, author of The Coast of Chicago and Ecstatic Cahoots"These small fictions are small only in length, not in impact. Their minuteness provides a different lens upon life—one that illuminates the telling yet elusive moments that bigger stories often overlook. A different slant on the truth emerges not in spite of their length, but because of it. Short shorts often seem like the quiet stepchild in the fiction family—overshadowed by vociferous novels, not quite dressed in the right attire as conventional short stories. A series celebrating these tiny gems is long overdue."—Grant Faulkner, cofounder of 100 Word Story, author of Fissures"The loud and long message of the seemingly quiet and the definitely short is in ample supply in The Best Small Fictions 2015. From a mother’s fury over misspelled words in Dee Cohen’s ‘By Heart’, to a father’s disintegration in David Mellerick Lynch’s ‘Lunar Deep’, there is pathos, depth, and welcome language-fireworks in these small gems. Chekhov would be proud of how briefly these writers manage to speak on lengthy subjects."—Nuala Ní Chonchúir, author of Miss Emily"The Best Small Fictions 2015 is essential reading for anyone who enjoys not just small fiction, but fiction in general. Don't miss it!"—Robert Swartwood, editor of Hint Fiction:An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer

    Chronicling the last few raucous years in American politics, Lithgow takes readers verse by verse through the history of Donald Trump's presidency.- Lampoons the likes of Betsy DeVos, William Barr, Rudy Giuliani, and dozens more.- Illustrated from cover to cover with Lithgow's never-before-seen line drawings.- Draws inspiration from A. A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, and even Mother Goose.- Great for fans of A Very Stable Genius by Mike Luckovich, Win Bigly: Persuasion in a World Where Facts Don't Matter by Scott Adams, and The Donald J. Trump Presidential Twitter Library by The Daily Show with Trevor Noah.The poems collected in Dumpty draw inspiration from A. A. Milne, Lewis Carroll, Edward Lear, Rodgers and Hammerstein, Mother Goose, and many more. A feat of laugh-out-loud lyrical storytelling, this timely volume is bound to bring joy to poetry lovers, political junkies, and Lithgow fans alike.

    Ben Rawlence's The Treeline takes us along this critical frontier of our warming planet from Norway to Siberia, Alaska to Greenland, to meet the scientists, residents and trees confronting huge geological changes. Only the hardest species survive at these latitudes including the ice-loving Dahurian larch of Siberia, the antiseptic Spruce that purifies our atmosphere, the Downy birch conquering Scandinavia, the healing Balsam poplar that Native Americans use as a cure-all and the noble Scots Pine that lives longer when surrounded by its family.It is a journey of wonder and awe at the incredible creativity and resilience of these species and the mysterious workings of the forest upon which we rely for the air we breathe. Blending reportage with the latest science, The Treeline is a story of what might soon be the last forest left and what that means for the future of all life on earth.

    She loves houses: viewing them, negotiating their price, dreaming up interior plans, hiring tradespeople to do the work and overseeing renovations. She loves houses so much that she’s moved thirty-two times.There are good reasons for her latest house move, but after viewing sixty homes, Jane and her husband succumb to the emotional fatigue of an overheated English housing market and buy a wreck in the town of Bristol that is overpriced, will require more money to renovate than they have and that neither of them particularly like.As Jane’s nightmare renovation begins, her mind returns to the Canadian homes where she grew up with parents who moved and renovated constantly around the Toronto area. Suddenly, the protective seal is blown off Jane’s memory of a strict and peripatetic childhood and its ancillary damage—lost friends, divorces, suicide attempts—and the past threatens to shake the foundations of her marriage. This latest renovation dredges a deeper current of memory, causing Jane to question whether in renovating a house she is in fact attempting to renovate her past.With humour and irreverence, Open House reveals that what we think we gain by constantly moving house actually obscures the precious and vital parts of our lives that we leave behind.This is a memoir that will appeal to anyone whose pulse quickens at the mere mention of real estate.

    It began life scribbled on airline sick bags during Cave’s 22-city tour of North America in 2014. It soon grew into a restless full-length contemporary epic. Spurred by encounters with modern day North America, and racked by romantic longing and exhaustion, Cave teases out the significant moments, the people, the books and the music that have influenced and inspired him, and drops them into his Sick Bag.The Sick Bag Song blends poetry, lyrics, memories, musings, flights of fancy and journal entries. Both mythic and contemporary, it lies somewhere between The Wasteland and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas and explores and develops the imaginative universe of Nick Cave.The sumptuous physical edition reproduces in full colour twenty-two sick bags, each hand-customised by Nick, that are integrated throughout the text.