Because those wobbly stones are only inches above the quotidian rush, what’s jotted there has an immediacy that is intimate and close to life. Kooser, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and a former U.S. poet laureate, has filled scores of workbooks. The Wheeling Year offers a sequence of contemplative prose observations about nature, place, and time arranged according to the calendar year. Written by one of America’s most beloved poets, this book is published in the year in which Kooser turns seventy-five, with sixty years of workbooks stretching behind him.

    A practicing physician for more than 40 years, Williams worked in the idiom of modern American speech ― unlike his friend and mentor, Ezra Pound ― and his poems are redolent with a warmth and generosity of spirit. The Beat poets were particularly impressed with the accessibility of his language, and Williams's widely quoted dictum, "No ideas but in things," influenced a generation of American poets.This fine selection offers readers the opportunity to study and enjoy the richness and variety of Williams's early work. More than 70 poems, published between 1917 and 1921, include "Peace on Earth," "Tract," "El Hombre," "Danse Russe," "Keller Gegen Dom," "Willow Poem," "Queen-Anne's-Lace," "Portrait of a Lady," "The Widow's Lament in Springtime," and many others.

    By 1666, the king s soldiers were given lists of the names of the Scottish Covenanters by the curates, who then hunted them down and persecuted them. This is the story of Will Wallace who begins in the service of the King, searching for Andrew Black, a defiant Protestant. But Will soon joins Black as a follower of Christ, and becomes one of the hunted and harried himself. This is an inspiring story, of both the hard truth of those who perished for the cause of Christ and Christian liberty, and the triumph of Christ s love and strength to the faithful saints who persevere in His name. It is a marvelous record of the power of God. "

    

    Bedazzled by tales of gold and movie stardom, she tricks them into buying tickets for America. Yet no sooner do they land on the squalid Lower East Side of Manhattan, than Malka is crippled and abandoned in the street.Taken in by a tough-loving Italian ices peddler, she manages to survive through cunning and inventiveness. As she learns the secrets of his trade, she begins to shape her own destiny. She falls in love with a gorgeous, illiterate radical named Albert, and they set off across America in an ice cream truck. Slowly, she transforms herself into Lillian Dunkle, "The Ice Cream Queen" -- doyenne of an empire of ice cream franchises and a celebrated television personality. Lillian's rise to fame and fortune spans seventy years and is inextricably linked to the course of American history itself, from Prohibition to the disco days of Studio 54. Yet Lillian Dunkle is nothing like the whimsical motherly persona she crafts for herself in the media. Conniving, profane, and irreverent, she is a supremely complex woman who prefers a good stiff drink to an ice cream cone. And when her past begins to catch up with her, everything she has spent her life building is at stake.

    The pair's innovative and authentic adaptation of Dante's epic, coupled with Birk's striking play on Gustave Dor's classic illustrations, make this a "Divine Comedy" for the 21st century. Acclaimed by both the literary and art worlds; rife with contemporary turns of phrase and slang (just as the original poem was written in the vernacular of its day) and pointed visions of the afterlife as contemporary cities; and rich with bold allusion, cultural critique, and witthis is the must-have collection of modern classics.

    In a year that sees a Scottish referendum on independence, Linda Colley analyses some of the forces that have unified Britain in the past.She examines the mythology of Britishness, and how far - and why - it has faded. She discusses the Acts of Union with Wales, Scotland and Ireland, and their limitations, while scrutinizing England's own fractures. And she demonstrates how the UK has been shaped by movement: of British people to other countries and continents, and of people, ideas and influences arriving from elsewhere.As acts of union and disunion again become increasingly relevant to our daily lives and politics, Colley considers how - if at all - the pieces might be put together anew, and what this might mean.Based on a 15-part BBC Radio 4 series.

    Rural lifestyle. Something has to give... Lucy McIntosh is a city girl through and through. She works in an advertising agency in Edinburgh with her boyfriend Jake, and her life is a whirl of deadlines, corporate parties, and coffee shops. Then Lucy learns that she is to inherit a hotel in the Highlands from her long-lost Uncle Calum. At first insistent that she will sell it to fund her and Jake’s move to London, she arrives in her uncle’s village to find The Mormaer Inn, a huge, tumbledown place perpetually on the brink of failure – and falls in love with it. Lucy is determined to restore the hotel to former glories. But her dream is blocked at every turn by obstacles. Rooms that need complete renovation, staff members who need personality transplants … and Graham Sutherland. His family have been local landowners for generations, and he wants the Inn for himself. Graham wants to demolish the hotel to build a holiday park, and is so confident Lucy will sell to him that he has already applied for planning permission. He is furious to think that naïve newcomer Lucy might have her own plans for the hotel – and adamant he’ll get what he wants …

    It is a literature dominated by a deep sense of wonder, wild inventiveness and a profound sense of the uncanny, in which the natural world and the power of the individual spirit are celebrated with astonishing imaginative force. Skifully arranged by theme, from the hero-tales of Cú Chulainn, Bardic poetry and elegies, to the sensitive and intimate writings of early Celtic Christianity, this anthology provides a fascinating insight into a deeply creative literary tradition.

    The only good news is that Steven, her increasingly distant teenage son, is about to move back in with her. The bad news is that Bob, her ex-husband, wants the house. Trisha's mind is unexpectedly made up when she inherits a place in the Highlands. Having pictured a rural idyll, she finds rain, sheep, a jaywalking dog and kamikaze midges. And more rain. Her social life is so limited that she even contemplates joining the Inversnechty Mental Health Awareness Group just for the craic. Then three nurses on holiday leave from Saudi invite Trisha to a ceilidh. A night of whisky-fuelled high jinks with a frozen salmon ensues which leads to a significant encounter with Spider, the local Lothario, and a dramatic discovery that will change Trisha's future forever.

    While Johnson focuses on Scotland itself, Boswell is even keener on presenting his friend to the notables of his homeland. Together they form a complete account of a fascinating journey, two intriguing personalities, and of a society coming to terms with itself after a period of drastic upheaval.

    

    Controversial but successful on the London stage, this play reveals the fate of a "notorious woman" in Victorian England.

    It is yet another virtuosic showcase for Charles Wright's acclaimed descriptive powers, and also an inquiry into the nature of description itself, both seductive and dangerous: "a virtual world/ Unfit for the virtuous." Like his previous books, Sestets is seeded with the lyrics of old love songs and spirituals, and "there is always room to connect his highly polished poems to the world where most of us lead mundane lives" (Miami Herald). Soaring and earthy, lyrical and direct, Charles Wright is an American treasure, and his search for a truth that transcends change and death settles finally on the beauties of nature and language: "Time is a graceless enemy, but purls as it comes and goes."

    That must’ve been why the robbers used hammers.”Orphaned Mary lives with her granpa, but after he is mixed up in a robbery at the bookies where he works, they flee to the Isle of Skye. Gradually, Mary realises that her granpa is involved. And the robbers are coming after him–and their money.Mary’s quirky outlook on life, loss, and her love of all things Elvis, will capture your heart. Full of witty Scots banter, Mary’s the Name will have you reaching for the hankies, first with laughter, then with tears.Heart-warming and heart-breaking, this darkly comic debut is from a fresh voice set to become Scotland’s answer to Roddy Doyle.