It was originally published in 1986.

    His picaresque travels are filled with beguiling and hilarious characters: nineteenth-century author Ambrose Bierce; an unknown group of famous poets; a twenty-first-century treasure hunter in the Gulf of Mexico; an ex-Nazi mechanic shepherding an old Mexican road race; a stenographer who records every passing moment; and various incarnations of the trickster devil.As bold, ambitious, and funny as it is unconventional, Nothing Happened and Then It Did is a deep and lasting pleasure.

    There have been hardcovers and paperbacks, an issue with two spines, an issue with a magnetic binding, an issue that looked like a bundle of junk mail, and an issue that looked like a sweaty human head. McSweeney’s has won multiple literary awards, including two National Magazine Awards for fiction, and has had numerous stories appear in The Best American Magazine Writing, the O. Henry Awards anthologies, and The Best American Short Stories. Design awards given to the quarterly include the AIGA 50 Books Award, the AIGA 365 Illustration Award, and the Print Design Regional Award.

    . . not for the obliquities and tenuosities of fiction.” Still, the novelist’s shaping hand, his gift for telling detail, can be detected in many of these literary considerations. Books by Edith Wharton, Dawn Powell, John Cheever, and Vladimir Nabokov are incisively treated, as are biographies of Isaac Newton, Abraham Lincoln, Queen Elizabeth II, and Helen Keller. As George Steiner observed, Updike writes with a “solicitous, almost tender intelligence. The critic and the poet in him . . . are at no odds with the novelist; the same sharpness of apprehension bears on the object in each of Updike’s modes.”

    Salinger, to name just a few. Now Duncan distills his remarkable powers of observation into this unique collection of short stories and essays. At the heart of Duncan's tales are characters undergoing the complex and violent process of transformation, with results both painful and wondrous. Equally affecting are his nonfiction reminiscences, the "river teeth" of the title. He likens his memories to the remains of old-growth trees that fall into Northwestern rivers and are sculpted by time and water. These experiences—shaped by his own river of time—are related with the art and grace of a master storyteller. In River Teeth, a uniquely gifted American writer blends two forms, taking us into the rivers of truth and make-believe, and all that lies in between.

    He skillfully portrays the daily lives of herdsmen and hunter-gatherers; the drama of the predator kills; the hundreds of exotic animals; the breathtaking landscapes; and the area's turbulent natural, political, and social histories.

    One midsummer week over sixty years later, Olivia Laing walked Woolf's river from source to sea. The result is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love. Along the way, Laing explores the roles rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature and mythology alike. To the River excavates all sorts of stories from the Ouse's marshy banks, from the brutal Barons' War of the thirteenth century to the 'Dinosaur Hunters', the nineteenth-century amateur naturalists who first cracked the fossil code. Central among these ghosts is, of course, Virginia Woolf herself: her life, her writing and her watery death. Woolf is the most constant companion on Laing's journey, and To the River can be read in part as a biography of this extraordinary English writer, refracted back through the river she loved. But other writers float through these pages too - among them Iris Murdoch, Shakespeare, Homer and Kenneth Grahame, author of the riverside classic The Wind in the Willows. The result is a wonderfully discursive read - which interweaves biography, history, nature writing and memoir, driven by Laing's deep understanding of science and cultural history. It's a beautiful, lyrical work that marks the arrival of a major new writer.

    Each selection showcases a writer's unique voice to demonstrate how writers present themselves through their work and to provide students with models they can use to develop their own voices. Arranged alphabetically by author and by five types of writing (informal, personal, expository, and argumentative writing, as well as short fiction) and with minimal apparatus, the readings allow instructors to be flexible and allow the writing to speak for itself.

    From the thawing tundra linking a Yup'ik village in Alaska to its hunter-gatherer past to the shifting sand dunes revealing the impressively preserved homes of neolithic farmers in Scotland, Jamie explores how the changing natural world can alter our sense of time. Most movingly, she considers, as her father dies and her children leave home, the surfacing of an older, less tethered sense of herself. In precise, luminous prose, Surfacing offers a profound sense of time passing and an antidote to all that is instant, ephemeral, unrooted.

    He helps a widower search for his wife's wedding ring amid plane-crash wreckage in Borneo and accompanies topless dancers on a bird-watching expedition in California. From the Maldives to Sacramento, from Cannes to Washington Heights, Eric Hansen has a way of getting himself into the most sacred ceremonies and the most candid conversations.

    Written by a passionate and professional geologist who has spent countless hours in the field exploring and photographing the state, In Search of Ancient Oregon is a book for all those interested in Oregon's landscapes and environments. It presents fine-art-quality color photographs of well-known features such as Mount Hood, Crater Lake, Smith Rock, Steens Mountain, the Columbia River Gorge, and Cannon Beach, and scenic, not so well known places such as Jordan Craters, Leslie Gulch, Abert Rim, Hells Canyon, Elkhorn Mountains, and Three Fingered Jack. Each of the more than 220 stunning photographs is accompanied by readable text, presenting the story of how Oregon's diverse landscapes evolved — and what we may expect in the future. Until now, no book has presented this dynamic story in a way that everyone interested in Oregon's natural history can easily understand. The combination of extraordinary photographs and the author's lucid explanations make this book both unique and essential for those curious about our own contemporary landscape.

    . .'Tucked away along a shady path towards the north-east edge of Hampstead Heath is a sign: Women Only. This is the Kenwood Ladies' Bathing Pond. Officially opened to the public in 1925, it is the only wild swimming spot in the UK that is reserved for women.Created centuries ago, the Heath's chain of ponds are one of the sources of the River Fleet that runs subterraneously through London. Swimming in the Ladies' Pond's green, silty, silky waters, it's hard to avoid the feeling that you are moving through history and outside of time.On a hot summer's day, thousands of swimmers from eight to eighty-odd can be found queuing to take a dip before sunbathing in the adjoining meadow. In the cooler months, when the water temperature plummets, the Pond is still visited daily by hardy regulars, many of whom have been swimming there for decades.Combining personal reminiscence with reflections on the history of the place over the years and through the seasons, for the first time this collection brings together writers' impressions of the Pond.

    He has claimed as his turf "our soul history, the germinal material, vast and brooding, that is always left out of more orthodox (all of them) books about America" (Jim Harrison, on Blood Orchid).In this seminal book, Bowden turns his fearless gaze toward the future, the future we can feel hurtling toward us as fuel reserves dwindle, species die out, terrorism flourishes, the Earth warms, and our ability to be fully awake — alert and impassioned in our lives — wanes. Weaving together natural history, memoir, reportage, and sheer virtuosic writing, he takes us on a furious tour of our emerging reality, his observations from the borderlands — of nations, laws, species, and desire — all the more searing for his refusal to be our scourge.Bowden has always had the gift of prophecy, but Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing is proof that the times have caught up with his vision. We need that vision now more than ever.

    We pause in our work, tune out of a conversation, and turn toward the outside. Our eyes simply gaze, without seeing, at a landscape whose familiarity becomes the customary ground for distraction: the usual rooftops, the familiar trees, a distant crane. The way of life for most of us in the twenty-first century means that we spend most of our time indoors, in an urban environment, and our awareness of the outside world comes via, and thanks to, a framed glass hole in the wall.In Windows on the World: Fifty Writers, Fifty Views, architect and artist Matteo Pericoli brilliantly explores this concept alongside fifty of our most beloved writers from across the globe. By pairing drawings of window views with texts that reveal--either physically or metaphorically--what the drawings cannot, Windows on the World offers a perceptual journey through the world as seen through the windows of prominent writers: Orhan Pamuk in Istanbul, Daniel Kehlmann in Berlin, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie in Lagos, John Jeremiah Sullivan in Wilmington, North Carolina, Nadine Gordimer in Johannesburg, Xi Chuan in Beijing. Taken together, the views--geography and perspective, location and voice--resonate with and play off each other.Working from a series of meticulous photographs and other notes from authors' homes and offices, Pericoli creates a pen-and-ink illustration of each window and the view it frames. Many readers know Pericoli's work from his acclaimed series for The New York Times and later for The Paris Review Daily, which have a devoted following. Now, Windows on the World collects from Pericoli's body of work and features fifteen never-before-seen windows in one gorgeously designed volume, as well as a preface from the Paris Review's editor Lorin Stein. As we delve into what each writer's view may or may not share with the others', as we look at the map and explore unfamiliar views of cities from around the world, a new kind of map begins to take shape.Windows on the World is a profound and eye-opening look inside the worlds of writers, reminding us that the things we see every day are woven into our selves and our imaginations, making us keener and more inquisitive observers of our own worlds.

    Gruchow turns a naturalist's eye on a wilderness of wolves, moose, and loons as he visits national parks and other scenic spots. Drawing on the works of Thoreau and Wendell Berry, he explores the relationship of person to place.