Under Nina Baym's direction, the editors have considered afresh each selection and all the apparatus to make the anthology an even better teaching tool.

    Their numbers make them one of the largest recent immigrant groups in our nation. Today, significant Hmong populations can be found in California, Minnesota, Wisconsin, North Carolina, Michigan, and Colorado, and St. Paul boasts the largest concentration of Hmong residents of any city in the world.In this groundbreaking anthology, first-and second-generation Hmong Americans--the first to write creatively in English--share their perspectives on being Hmong in America. In stories, poetry, essays, and drama, these writers address the common challenges of immigrants adapting to a new homeland: preserving ethnic identity and traditions, assimilating to and battling with the dominant culture, negotiating generational conflicts exacerbated by the clash of cultures, and developing new identities in multiracial America. Many pieces examine Hmong history and culture and the authors' experiences as Americans. Others comment on issues significant to the community: the role of women in a traditionally patriarchal culture, the effects of violence and abuse, the stories of Hmong military action in Laos during the Vietnam War. These writers don't pretend to provide a single story of the Hmong; instead, a multitude of voices emerge, some wrapped up in the past, others looking toward the future, where the notion of "Hmong American" continues to evolve.In her introduction, editor Mai Neng Moua describes her bewilderment when she realized that anthologies of Asian American literature rarely contained even one selection by a Hmong American. In 1994, she launched a Hmong literary journal, Paj Ntaub Voice, and in the first issue asked her readers "Where are the Hmong American voices?" Now this collection--containing selections from the journal as well as new submissions--offers a chorus of voices from a vibrant and creative community of Hmong American writers from across the United States.Contributors: BC, Bee Cha, True Hang, Sharon Her, May Lee, Kou Lor, Pacyinz Lyfoung, Mai Neng Moua, Vayong Moua, Noukou Thao, Bryan Thao Worra, Va-Megn Thoj, Ka Vang, M.S. Vang, Mayli Vang, Soul Choj Vang, Hawj Xiong, Kao Xiong with Dia cha, Pa Xiong, Naly Yang, Peter Yang, Kao Yongvang

    Don't lose more time searching for the perfect poems or readings - I've already done all the hard work to save you the trouble. This book combines several well known anthologies and brings you well over 1000 poems since 1250. The original anthologies used as a source are: 1919 Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Oxford Book of English Verse, and 1917 The New Poetry - An Anthology - Edited by Harriet Monroe and Alice Corbin Henderson.

    But it is at its most acute in the “world cities” where the rich choose to live (or invest their fortunes in real estate). Nowhere is this more evident than New York City, where the top 1% earns upwards of $500,000/year, while 22,000 children are homeless.What does this chasm of wealth feel like to people who live and work in NYC? The stories in Tales of Two Cities mix fiction and reportage to convey the indignities and heartbreak, the callousness and solidarities, of living side-by-side with people who have a stupefyingly different income.In these pages we read of the polarizing effect of a violent attack on the Q train as it crosses the Manhattan Bridge, of the subterranean lives of homeless people who must find a bed in the city’s underground tunnels, and of the rage felt by a millionaire at being stuck in a snowstorm. We hear of the stresses that burgeoning gentrification can bring to neighbors in a Brooklyn apartment block, and of the way destitution in India shapes the perception of poverty in New York for an immigrant from the sub-continent. We walk past the luxury pet spas and yoga studios that have opened next to cheap hair braiding salons and detox clinics in Hamilton Heights, witness the shenanigans of seriously alienated night shift paralegals, and find out what it’s like to be a housing defendant standing up for tenants whose landlords go to shocking lengths to raise rents.Eschewing more direct sociological or economic analysis, the pieces here focus on the human dimension of penury and profligacy coexisting in the tightest of quarters. In his successful election campaign, Mayor Bill de Blasio referred often to the “tale of two cities” that is life in today’s New York. With writing that will move the reader, not just emotionally but perhaps, too, to action, this anthology gives life to the meaning of those words in the streets and buildings of the metropolis.

    Here is a big, wise, and diverse book, shot through with simple truths of life as it's really lived. Illustrations.

    This anthology features both established food writers and rising stars cooking up everything from erudite culinary history to food-inspired memoirs. By turns opinionated, evocative, sensuous, and just plain funny, it's a tasty sampler to dip into time and again.As in previous editions, Best Food Writing 2009 will include top-notch writers like Colman Andrews, Anthony Bourdain, Frank Bruni, Bill Buford, Madhur Jaffrey, Ruth Reichl, Raymond Sokolov, Calvin Trillin, Alice Waters, and many others.

    But distinguished poets Mark Strand and Eavan Boland have produced a clear, super-helpful book that unravels part of the mystery of great poems through an engaging exploration of poetic structure. Strand and Boland begin by promising to "look squarely at some of the headaches" of poetic form: the building blocks of poetry. The Making of a Poem gradually cures many of those headaches.Strand, who's won the Pulitzer Prize and a MacArthur Fellowship and has served as U.S. Poet Laureate, and Boland, an abundantly talented Irish poet who has also written a beautiful book of essays on writing and womanhood, are both accustomed to teaching. Strand, now at the University of Chicago, and Boland, a Stanford professor, draw upon decades in the classroom to anticipate most questions.Ever wonder what a pantoum is? A villanelle? A sestina? With humor, patience, and personal anecdotes, Strand and Boland offer answers. But the way they answer is what makes this book stand out. The forms are divided into three overarching categories: metrical forms, shaping forms, and open forms. "Metrical forms" include the sonnet, pantoum, and heroic couplet. "Shaping forms" explains broader categories, like the elegy, ode, and pastoral poem. And "open forms" offers new takes on the traditional blueprints, exploring poems like Allen Ginsberg's "America."Each established form is then approached in three ways, followed by several pages of outstanding poems in that form. First, the editors offer a "page at a glance" guide, with five or six characteristics of that specific form presented in a brief outline. For example, the pantoum is defined like this:   1) Each pantoum stanza must be four lines long.   2) The length is unspecified but the pantoum must begin and end with the same line.   3) The second and fourth lines of the first quatrain become the first and third line of the next, and so on with succeeding quatrains.   4) The rhyming of each quatrain is abab.   5) The final quatrain changes this pattern.   6) In the final quatrain the unrepeated first and third lines are used in reverse as second and fourth lines.With this outline, it's easy to identify the looping pantoum. In the second piece of the pantoum section, Strand and Boland include a "History of the Form" section, again condensed to one page. Here, we learn that the pantoum is "Malayan in origin and came into English, as so many other strict forms have, through France." Indeed, both Victor Hugo and Charles Baudelaire tried their hands at the pantoum. As always, Strand and Boland offer some comparison to the other forms, which helps explain why a poet might choose to write a pantoum over, say, a sonnet or a sestina:"Of all verse forms the pantoum is the slowest. The reader takes four steps forward, then two steps back. It is the perfect form for the evocation of a past time." Next, the editors include "The Contemporary Context," which introduces several of the pantoums of this century. Finally, in what may be the book's best feature, they provide a close-up of a pantoum, an approach they repeat for each form discussed. In this case, it's the "Pantoum of the Great Depression" by Donald Justice. The editors offer some biographical information on Justice, and then they map out how that specific poem gets its power. This "poet's explanation" of the workings of a poem is invaluable, especially when it comes from leading poets such as Stand and Boland. What's more, these remarks are transferable. Reading how Strand and Boland view a dozen poems transforms the way one reads. With any future poem, you can look for what Strand and Boland have found in the greats.The editors offer their readers a great start, with a list for further reading and a helpful glossary. If anything can get a person excited about poetry, this selection of poems can -- though the editors, as working poets, readily admit their choices are idiosyncratic. Gems here include the best work of lesser-known poets, including several "poets' poets." For example, Edward Thomas, a prominent reviewer in his day and a close friend of Robert Frost's, is represented by "Rain," an absolutely brilliant blank-verse poem which begins:      Rain, midnight rain, nothing but wild rain      On this bleak hut, and solitude, and me      Remembering again that I shall die      And neither hear the rain nor give it thanks      For washing me cleaner than I have been       Since I was born into this solitude. Thomas's poem -- and other treasures here -- introduces readers to what and how poets read to learn to make poems. Of course, many of the usual suspects are found here, but the surprises are exciting, and even the old favorites seem new when the editors explain why and how a particular poem seems beautiful. This is particularly evident in their discussion of Edna St. Vincent Millay's rushing, initially breathless sonnet "What Lips My Lips Have Kissed, and Where, and How, " which reads:      What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why,      I have forgotten, and what arms have lain      Under my head till morning, but the rain      Is full of ghosts tonight, that tap and sigh      Upon the glass and listen for reply,       And in my heart there stirs a quiet pain      For unremembered lads that not again      Will turn to me at midnight with a cry.       Thus in the winter stands the lonely tree      Nor knows what birds have vanquished one by one,      Yet knows its boughs more silent than before:       I cannot say what loves have come and gone,       I only know that summer sang in me      A little while, that in me sings no more. In the "close-up" section, Strand and Boland offer an biographical paragraph that mentions that in 1923, Millay became the first woman to win a Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. They then discuss Millay's "distinctive and unusual" approach to the sonnet form: "Instead of taking the more leisurely pace of the public sonnet that had been the 19th-century model, she drove her sonnets forward with a powerful lyric music and personal emphasis."The editors point out Millay's heavy reliance on assonance and alliteration, and then note how she takes advantage of the different tempos the sonnet offers:"Here she uses her distinctive music and high diction to produce an unusually quick-paced poem in the first octave and then a slower, more reflective septet where the abandoned lover becomes a winter tree. This ability of the sonnet, to accommodate both lyric and reflective time, made it a perfect vehicle for highly intuitive twentieth-century poets like Millay."That simple explanation of the sonnet as a form able to "accommodate both lyric and reflective time" helps clarify most sonnets. But Strand and Boland are careful not to explain everything. The deepest beauty, as they explain in their introductory essays on their attraction to form, is built on mystery. And it is that attempt to understand the greatest mysteries that defines the greatest poems. Similarly, mystery often drives poets to write, as Strand explains in his essay on Archibald MacLeish's "You, Andrew Marvell," which Strand describes as the first poem he wished he had written himself in his early years as a poet:"Although I no longer wish I had written 'You, Andrew Marvell,' I wish, however, that I could write something like it, something with its sweep, its sensuousness, its sad crepuscular beauty, something capable of carving out such a large psychic space for itself&. There is something about it that moves me in ways I don't quite understand, as it were communicating more than what it actually says. This is often the case with good poems -- they have a lyric identity that goes beyond whatever their subject happens to be."With this book, Strand and Boland help quantify the explicable parts of a "lyric identity." Understanding form, the editors believe, is one way to begin understanding a poem's beauty. This lucid, useful book is a wonderful guide to that mysterious music.—Aviya Kushner

    A party girl’s addiction gives birth to a monster within. Man’s best friend must fend off a woman’s greatest nightmare…Scare Street is proud to present eleven chilling tales of the supernatural, in one monstrous volume. Horror authors Ron Ripley, David Longhorn, Sara Clancy, and many more unite to bring you a terrifying collection of short stories, each one guaranteed to haunt your dreams. And each one more chilling than the last.Once you start reading you won’t be able to stop. Because when these authors sink their teeth into you, it’s already too late.The only way to escape from these nightmares… is to wake up screaming.

    It is our hope that in this anthology you will find a story to love. We come from as varied backgrounds as we do locations. Hawaii to New York, California to Texas, and Texas to Tennessee; we have come together to share our love of storytelling. The characters within these pages are a wondrous mix as well. A flamboyant Knoxville designer, a 1900s investigative reporter, a neurosurgeon, a coroner, a woman dripping of Russian opulence and Parisian elegance, a detective that has simply had enough, and a Tennessee Police Chief all fill the pages and the imagination in Death of Choice. Come along with us to a Children’s Cemetery, 1920’s London, a daisy fresh diner in L.A., a fog shrouded barn, a small town in Tennessee, a Honolulu beach, and meet a collection of short stories from writers that will give you chills, thrills, and a set of tales you will long remember. Our hope is through these intriguing introductions you will discover an author or two you will want to read more of, and get to know better. Each of the authors in this anthology have many more books for you to enjoy. So find that spot where you love to curl up and read, and enjoy this collection of murder, mayhem and mystery. Micheal Maxwell Editor and Compiler September 2015

    He sets his eyes upon the people, the beautiful places and the spectacular wildlife. He captures the adventure and joy filled in the way of life in the hills vividly. This collection of fiction and non-fiction works is a must-read for ardent Ruskin Bond fans.

    Alone in his apartment, he reads stories aloud to the point he has them memorized. Sometimes he fantasizes that he wrote them. Sometimes, when they’re his very favorite stories, he’ll fantasize about reading them in front of an audience and taking credit for them. The audience in these fantasies always loves him and gives him the respect he deserves.David Sedaris didn’t write the stories in Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules . But he did read them. And he liked them enough to hand pick them for this collection of short fiction. Featuring such notable writers as Lorrie Moore, Alice Munro, Joyce Carol Oates, Jean Thompson, and Tobias Wolff, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules includes some of the most influential and talented short story writers, contemporary and classic.Perfect for fans who suffer from Sedaris fever, Children Playing Before a Statue of Hercules will tide them over and provide relief.2 hrs 56 mins

    In the style of Studs Terkel (Working, Hard Times, The Good War) and Dave Isay (Listening Is an Act of Love), Londoners offers up  the stories, the gripes, the memories, and the dreams of those in the great and vibrant British metropolis who “love it, hate it, live it, left it, and long for it,” from a West End rickshaw driver to a Soldier of the Guard at Buckingham Palace to a recovering heroin addict seeing Big Ben for the very first time. Published just in time for the 2012 London Olympic Games, Londoners is a glorious literary celebration of one of the world’s truly great cities.

    But no animal was dearer to his heart, and no animal provided him with more heartwarming and wonderful tales. With over a million copies sold, James Herriot's Favorite Dog Stories has inspired dog lovers the world over. After being out of print for many years, it is now again available in an affordable, beautifully repackaged hardcover edition, filled with original watercolors that illustrate Herriot's charming and wholesome tales. This classic heartwarming collection of ten stories about dogs - from border collies and sheepdogs to the exploits of Tricki Woo, the unforgettable Pekinese - by the late author of All Creatures Great and Small is prefaced by a moving introduction from Herriot himself - the very last piece of writing the beloved author ever completed. So, follow the master veterinarian as he journeys through Yorkshire, caring for big dogs and small with his characteristic gentleness and peace, profound observation, and deep, loving humor.A warm and joyful collection of James Herriot’s loving tales of our furry friends. From delightful old favorites like Tricki Woo to heartwarming stories of Brandy, Hermann, Jock, and more. James Herriot’s Favorite Dog Stories is a must-have for any dog lover.Contains:“Tricki Woo Goes Crackerdog” * “Prince and the Card Above the Bed” * “Jock Top Dog” * Tricki Woo “A Triumph of Surgery” * “Jake Rides into Town”* Gyp “Only One Woof” * Roy “From Rags to Riches” * Tricki Woo “A Judge of Form” * Hermann “A Happy Ending” * Brandy “The Dustbin Dog”

    They share their knitting triumphs and disasters as well as their life triumphs and disasters…These essays will break your heart. They will have you laughing out loud." —Ann Hood, from the introductionWhy does knitting occupy a place in the hearts of so many writers? What’s so magical and transformative about yarn and needles? How does knitting help us get through life-changing events and inspire joy? In Knitting Yarns, twenty-seven writers tell stories about how knitting healed, challenged, or helped them to grow. Barbara Kingsolver describes sheering a sheep for yarn. Elizabeth Berg writes about her frustration at failing to knit. Ann Patchett traces her life through her knitting, writing about the scarf that knits together the women she’s loved and lost. Knitting a Christmas gift for his blind aunt helped Andre Dubus III knit an understanding with his girlfriend. Kaylie Jones finds the woman who used knitting to help raise her in France and heals old wounds. Sue Grafton writes about her passion for knitting. Also included are five original knitting patterns created by Helen Bingham.Poignant, funny, and moving, Knitting Yarns is sure to delight knitting enthusiasts and lovers of literature alike.

    over one million words of divinely (and diabolically) inspired fantasy, adventure, and romance.Join the freshest voices in urban fantasy and paranormal, New York Times, USA Today, and Amazon bestselling authors, on unique journeys to heaven, hell, and worlds beyond.