In this single, from n+1 (Issue 12), Kent Russell gives a remarkable (and very funny) report on the festival and a sympathetic account of the situation of the white poor in the US.

    

    This updated edition features new material.

    They are about guns, campaign buttons, and a cabin in the Vermont woods that stinks of wood smoke and kerosene -- and about their associations of pleasure, menace, and regret.The resulting volume may be compared to the plays that have made Mamet famous: it is finely crafted and deftly timed, and its precise language carries an enormous weight of feeling.

    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.

    

    Three epic thru-hikes totalling 5840 miles. Will one Englishman dare to face his fears?Three books in one - Over 800 pages of adventure! Book #1 - The Journey in Between A man at a crossroads. A thousand-mile hike. A life forever changed. Keith Foskett was the definition of restless. Drifting aimlessly, he knew a piece was missing from his life. But when a stranger in a Greek bar tells him about a world-famous pilgrim’s trail, the chance encounter sets Foskett’s life in a new 1,000-mile direction. On El Camino de Santiago, the wanderer copes with extreme temperatures, fake faith healers, and insatiable kleptomaniacs. Threatened with arrest for ‘not sleeping’ and suffering with excruciating blisters, he pushes himself to new limits.Keith Foskett’s travelogues have been shortlisted for Outdoor Book of the Year multiple times by The Great Outdoors magazine. Awash with vivid descriptions and a cast of engaging real-life characters, the author delivers a humorous and mesmerizing tale of adventure and metamorphosis. The Journey in Between is a daring travel memoir. If you like indulging your inner adventurer, taking the less popular fork in the road, and visiting foreign locations, then you’ll love Keith Foskett’s transformative tale.  Book #2 - The Last Englishman A real-life adventurer. A gruelling pan-American trek. Will one Englishman dare to face his fears?Born traveller Keith Foskett had thousands of miles of thru-hiking experience when he prepared for his toughest challenge yet: a gruelling 2,640-mile hike from Mexico to Canada. In a six-month journey along America’s Pacific Crest Trail, he crossed the arid expanses of California’s deserts, the towering peaks of Oregon’s volcanic landscape, and the dense forests of Washington.Battling phobias of bears, snakes, critters and camping in the woods after dark, can Foskett find new ways to achieve his ultimate goal when the worst winter in years bears down on the trail?Veteran storyteller Keith Foskett lets you join him for a trek across the greatest long-distance hiking trail on Earth. With witty humour, astute observations, and a delightful cast of characters, you’ll discover a compelling narrative that turns the travelogue formula on its head. The Last Englishman is an extraordinary travel memoir by an experienced long-distance hiker. If you believe there’s more to life than work, yearn for new horizons and challenges, and believe in overcoming adversity, then you’ll love Keith Foskett’s tale of exploration.  Book #3 - Balancing on Blue One man’s remarkable challenge. 2,000+ miles of unforgiving wilderness. Can he escape the mundane to become a thru-hiker?When this long-distance hiker chose to backpack all 2,180 miles of the Appalachian Trail, he left ordinary life behind for five months. Enduring an incredible test of physical and psychological strength, Foskett was pushed to his limits…Accompanied by an array of eclectic characters – including a drug dealer, a world-champion juggler and a sex-starved Minnesotan – he weaves a route through some of America's wildest landscapes and history, and writes with insight, humour and reflection. Attempting to keep his English sense of humour alive amidst the bumps and bruises, can he survive his journey of self-discovery to emerge victorious?Balancing on Blue is a superb standalone travel memoir. If you like living outside the box, escaping into the wild, and journeying deep into the unknown, then you’ll love this courageous trek.

    Some didn’t make it out alive. After hearing whispers that seemed almost too awful to believe, BuzzFeed News investigative reporter Christine Kenneally embarked on a years-long journey to find out what really went on in these institutions. What she discovered was even more horrifying than the legend: the systematic abuse and even the alleged murder of children by nuns. Her searing report, which is part investigation, part true crime drama, part ghost story, cracks open a secret history of American life — and adds a vast new dimension to the Catholic church’s mistreatment of children. From a world shrouded in secrecy, Kenneally tells the story of St. Joseph’s Orphanage in Burlington, Vermont, and of Sally Dale, the plucky redhead who was the apple of the nuns’ eyes. Until they decided to make an example of her, administering daily torments, isolating her from the rest of the world, and convincing her that she would never escape. Of all the children who passed through St. Joseph’s, she may have been there the longest. The horrors she suffered and the deaths she said she witnessed did not come into full view until the day, decades later, when she attended a St Joseph’s reunion. Then the past came flooding back like a torrent. Along with scores of other survivors, and guided by an idealistic young lawyer, Sally somehow found the courage to come forward and tell the world what she had experienced. She wanted more than anything else to be heard and believed. But she was going up against one of the most powerful institutions in the world, and she was in for the fight of a lifetime. The legal battle that ensued upended every assumption that the people of Burlington had. Could memory be trusted? Could forgetting be forgotten? Could a pleasant community turn a blind eye to evil? And could nuns, the very women charged with protecting these most vulnerable members of society, have instead tortured or even killed them? The Catholic sex abuse scandal – which most recently yielded a grand jury report on how the church hid the crimes of hundreds of priests — shattered the silence that for so long had protected the church. But the truth about what went on inside its orphanages has somehow remained all but unspoken, even as other countries have undertaken huge national inquiries. In the US, there has been no reckoning. The orphanages’ dark secrets, like the dead children who haunt survivors’ dreams, still lay buried. Until now. Through painstaking reporting, based in thousands of pages of documents — many of them secret — and interviews with survivors, Kenneally connects what happened at St. Joseph’s to similar accounts that emerged from seven countries across three continents, revealing a terrible matrix of corroboration.

    Then came the water, and for five days, the country’s oldest hospital was under siege. The never-before-told story of the heroic doctors, nurses — and patients — who fought to survive Hurricane Katrina at Charity Hospital in New Orleans.The story traces a remarkable five-day transformation of an infirm institution, caught in a sea of death and indifference, into an island of care and tenderness.

    Everybody over the age of 60 should read it and ponder their probable future.” - Henry MarshWhat is a good death? How would you choose to live your last few months? How do we best care for the rising tide of very elderly?This unusual and important book is a series of reflections on death in all its forms: the science of it, the medicine, the tragedy and the comedy. Dr David Jarrett draws on family stories and case histories from his thirty years of treating the old, demented and frail to try to find his own understanding of the end. And he writes about all the conversations that we, our parents, our children, the medical community, our government and society as a whole should be having.Profound, provocative, strangely funny and astonishingly compelling, it is an impassioned plea that we start talking frankly and openly about death. And it is a call to arms for us to make radical changes to our perspective on ‘the seventh age of man’.

     It's meant to be a very easy read; not a book you read systematically from beginning to end but rather a book to read during those times you find reading a book overwhelming. How we choose to look at something is essential to our happiness, and the author, Dushka Zapata, hopes to leave readers with a little of that.

    At the time of his death, he had suffered from multiple sclerosis for many years and was almost completely paralyzed, but his wonderful, playful mind remained quite undimmed. In the ten sections of Stories I Forgot to Tell You, Gallagher moves freely and intuitively between the present and the past to evoke the life they shared together and her life after his death, alone and yet at the same time never without thoughts of him, in a present that is haunted but also comforted by the recollection of their common past. She talks—the whole book is written conversationally, confidingly, unpretentiously—about small things, such as moving into a new apartment and setting it up, growing tomatoes on a new deck, and as she does she recalls her missing husband’s elegant clothes and English affectations, what she knew about him and didn’t know, the devastating toll of his disease and the ways the two of them found to deal with it. She talks about their two dogs and their cat, Bones, and the role that a photograph she never took had in bringing her together with her husband. Her mother, eventually succumbing to dementia, is also here, along with friends, an old typewriter, episodes from a writing life, and her husband’s last days. The stories Gallagher has to tell, as quirky as they are profound, could not be more ordinary, and yet her glancing, wry approach to memory and life give them an extraordinary resonance that makes the reader feel both the logic and the mystery of a couple’s common existence. Her prose is perfectly pitched and her eye for detail unerring. This slim book about irremediable loss and unending love distills the essence of a lifetime.

    Following in the maverick mold of Quentin Tarentino, Spike Lee, and Richard Rodriguez, Joe Queenan becomes an auteur and, in the process, funnier than ever, as he tries to master the art of writing, directing, scoring, casting, and marketing a movie--all by himself.

    Then she was diagnosed with ALS, and her world turned upside down. I Remember Running is Darcy's story of change and loss and challenges during her first year with ALS, as she struggles to make sense of her diagnosis and redefine herself in the face of this terminal illness. With unflagging courage, wit, and eloquence, Darcy shares what she calls her "fast-forward" life, a life in which she applies for disability, leaves her job, and plans her own funeral as well as meets and moves in with her true love, buys a house, and gives birth to her first child in less time than it takes most of us to accomplish even one of these things. Beautifully written and wholly inspiring, I Remember Running proves that it is possible to live a rich, meaningful life after being diagnosed with a terminal illness, and will move readers to see the world in a different light.

    Mine is predicated on formative years spent cleaning my father’s calf pens: Just keep shoveling until you’ve got a pile so big, someone has to notice. The fact that I cast my life’s work as slung manure simply proves that I recognize an apt metaphor when I accidentally stick it with a pitchfork. . . . Poetry was my first love, my gateway drug—still the poets are my favorites—but I quickly realized I lacked the chops or insights to survive on verse alone. But I wanted to write. Every day. And so I read everything I could about freelancing, and started shoveling."  The pieces gathered within this book draw on fifteen years of what Michael Perry calls "shovel time"—a writer going to work as the work is offered. The range of subjects is wide, from musky fishing, puking, and mountain-climbing Iraq War veterans to the frozen head of Ted Williams. Some assignments lead to self-examination of an alarming magnitude (as Perry notes, "It quickly becomes obvious that I am a self-absorbed hypochondriac forever resolving to do better nutritionally and fitness-wise but my follow-through is laughable.") But his favorites are those that allow him to turn the lens outward: "My greatest privilege," he says, "lies not in telling my own story; it lies in being trusted to tell the story of another."