With a different die-cut on every page, Tree of Codes explores previously unchartered literary territory. Initially deemed impossible to make, the book is a first — as much a sculptural object as it is a work of masterful storytelling. Tree of Codes is the story of an enormous last day of life — as one character's life is chased to extinction, Foer multi-layers the story with immense, anxious, at times disorientating imagery, crossing both a sense of time and place, making the story of one person’s last day everyone’s story. Inspired to exhume a new story from an existing text, Jonathan Safran Foer has taken his "favorite" book, The Street of Crocodiles by Polish-Jewish writer Bruno Schulz, and used it as a canvas, cutting into and out of the pages, to arrive at an original new story told in Jonathan Safran Foer's own acclaimed voice.

    In the folk/blues tradition behind "Rhyme," in the incantatory pattern of "Behind the Motel," in the voices from past and present in "Letters Censored, Shredded, Returned to Sender or Judged Unfit to Send," in the dystopic scenes and intimate encounters of "Draft # 2006," in the mysterious negotiations of the title poem, the tempos and moods of this book constantly vary. Here, Rich draws on the artistic means of a lifetime.

    In her deft hands, “relationships and mundane activities take on mythic qualities” (The Wall Street Journal).In this collection, Bender’s unique talents sparkle brilliantly in stories about people searching for connection through love, sex, and family—while navigating the often painful realities of their lives. A traumatic event unfolds when a girl with flowing hair of golden wheat appears in an apple orchard, where a group of people await her. A woman plays out a prostitution fantasy with her husband and finds she cannot go back to her old sex life. An ugly woman marries an ogre and struggles to decide if she should stay with him after he mistakenly eats their children. Two sisters travel deep into Malaysia, where one learns the art of mending tigers who have been ripped to shreds.In these deeply resonant stories—evocative, funny, beautiful, and sad—we see ourselves reflected as if in a funhouse mirror. Aimee Bender has once again proven herself to be among the most imaginative, exciting, and intelligent writers of our time.

    Some were previously published. Some are brand-spanking new. The opening story, "State Liquor," concerns a twenty-five-year-old woman and her eighteen-year-old husband trying to buy alcohol on their way to their strip mall jobs, the afternoon of their wedding. In "Fistful," a pregnant teenager gets revenge on the young man who both impregnated and beat her, before leaving town with another man. In "Habitrail," a woman returns home after the death of her father, to find her husband in communication with the television set and a god he calls Chaos, rather than her. There are over ninety stories in this collection. Repeated themes include: driving, smoking, teenagers, drinking, escape, the Midwest, masturbation, self-loathing, blood and loneliness.

    Sea Serpents. Pirates. Dragons. Follow Darek of the Red Claw Clan through this three book box set, a young sailor crossing blades with ruthless pirates and warring clans. As his hidden powers grow, first in his natural ability to commune with sea dragons, so too does his uncanny dragon-riding skill and sudden bursts of psi power. Yet a foul wind blows across the serpent deeps, bringing with it a former apprentice, Cyrus, a forsaken sorcerer who wields terror and death. The Dragonclaw Islands are thrust into the brink of war as Darek struggles to find his path, unlock his skills, though alienated from his sister and parents. Is he destined to become the Mage Reborn? Ever more does he realize he must stop the tides of war, bring order to clan and family while the rising menace of Cyrus lurks unseen. Taken under the wing of the ailing Dragon Mage Agrippa, Darek uses his powers to unite the Dragon Riders against the growing swarm of sea serpents controlled by Cyrus’s forbidden magic. The fires of rebellion, stoked by a Pirate Queen, plunge the Islanders into an all-out war among dragons, sea serpents, and monsters of the deep. But are Darek’s powers enough to combat these foes, especially when he is linked to the pirates by blood bond and their beautiful queen? Dive into this world of adventure, imagination, and danger that fans of Dragonriders of Pern, Eragon, Dragonlance, Dragon Blood, Dragonvein, Temeraire, and Dragon School will love. Scroll up and one-click to buy this box set today while the introductory price lasts!

    She discovers often at night, often in nature the pleasures of rescuing a fleeting thought. Deeply moving, Woolgathering calls up our own memories, as the child glimpses and gleans, piecing together a crazy quilt of truths. Smith introduces us to her tribe, a race of cloud dwellers, and to the fierce, vital pleasures of cloud watching and stargazing and wandering.A radiant new autobiographical piece, Two Worlds (which was not in the original 1992 Hanuman edition of Woolgathering), and the author's photographs and illustrations are also included. Woolgathering celebrates the sacred nature of creation with Smith's beautiful style, acclaimed as glorious (NPR), spellbinding (Booklist), rare and ferocious (Salon), and shockingly beautiful (New York Magazine).

    Philip Zimbardo talks about his famous “Stanford Prison Experiment” and how it relates to abuses of Abu Ghraib. Harvard neuroscientist Josh Greene reports on the ways our brains react to ethical dilemmas. Jonathan Haidt explains why we object to incest and how that relates to disagreements between conservatives and liberals. Renowned Primatologist Frans de Waal juxtaposes human behavior with that of the bonobo (a species he terms the "hippie ape.") And much more. A Very Bad Wizard is essential reading for anyone curious about the origins and inner workings of our moral lives.

    Within these poems, we see the city as distant lover, we hear "the sound that comes from all / the hurt & want that leads a man to turn his back to the world." We see that and we see each reason why we return to what pains us.

    However, he still has a chance to win back his throne. The next man or woman to hatch a dragon automatically becomes the ruler. Each member of the royal family is gifted with a dragon egg, but it is the work of a lifetime to hatch it.The first time Corvus touches his dragon egg, he receives an odd notification: He has found a soulbound item and is tasked with an epic quest to hatch it... but only if he can walk the winding path of the dragon mage.Armed with notifications, skill increases, and levels only he can see, Corvus is determined to hatch his dragon.

    I am not impatient—My skin will wait to greet its old complexions.I'll lie here till the world swims back again. —from "Mummy of a Lady Named Jemutesonekh"Thomas James's Letters to a Stranger—originally published in 1973, shortly before James's suicide—has become one of the underground classics of contemporary poetry. In this new edition, with an introduction by Lucie Brock-Broido and four of James's poems never before published in book form, this fraught and moving masterpiece is at last available.Letters to a Stranger is a new book in the Graywolf Poetry Re/View Series, edited by Mark Doty, dedicated to bringing essential books of contemporary American poetry back into print.

    While trying to unravel the mystery, Pemberton disappears, sending McIlvaine, his employer, the editor of an evening paper, in pursuit of the truth behind his freelancer’s fate. Layer by layer, McIlvaine reveals a modern metropolis surging with primordial urges and sins, where the Tweed Ring operates the city for its own profit and a conspicuously self-satisfied nouveau-riche ignores the poverty and squalor that surrounds them. In E. L. Doctorow’s skilled hands, The Waterworks becomes, in the words of The New York Times, “a dark moral tale . . . an eloquently troubling evocation of our past.”

    It is a story of bridges -- bridges spanning the rivers of Philadelphia and Pittsburgh, bridges arching over the rifts that have divided our communities, our country, our hearts. Narrated in the bluesy voices of its three main characters, Two Cities is a simple love story, but it is also about the survival of an endangered black urban community and the ways that people discover for redeeming themselves in a society that is failing them. With its indelible images of confrontation and outrage, matched in equal measure by lasting impressions of hope, Two Cities is a compassionate, lacerating, and nourishing novel.

    With poems in the leading journals of the day -- American Poetry Review, Grand Street, Conjunctions, The Boston Review, to name just a few -- Gander plumbs the erotic depths of human interaction with the land. The poems in Science Steepleflower test this relationship with what Publisher's Weekly has called "an inbred (and often haunting) spirituality", bringing us to new vistas of linguistic and perceptive grace.

    Cummings's affirmation of life resolved into serenity as he described himself as someone "whose only happiness is to transcend himself, whose every agony is to grow." This collection of Cummings reading his own poetry embodies this in an unforgettable way.While perhaps best remembered for his use of such visual devices as typography and punctuation, the sheer sound of Cummings's work imparts a greater, deeper understanding of how its cadences reveal its profound meaning. This rich sampling of his poems and lectures is rendered in what the great Robert Graves called Cummings "own beautifully modulated voice."

    In this, the first shot fired over the bow of the 2004 Presidential election, Michael Moore aims to unseat the man who slithered into the White House on tracks built by the bloody hands of Enron and greased with the oil of his daddy. As if an unelected, semi-literate president weren't problem enough, America's Democrats have managed to take the liberty out of "liberal," signing on with the G.O.P. for dirty corporate money and the ill-gotten gains of globalization. The "left" is just as satisfied as the right to stand idly by as the chasm between the haves and the have-nots grows wider and wider. Thank god for Michael Moore because Dude, Where's My Country tells us precisely what went wrong, and, more importantly, how to fix things. In a voice that is fearless, funny, and furious, Moore takes readers to the edge of righteous laughter and divine revenge.