When sixteen-year-old Jason Bock and his friends create their own religion to worship the town's water tower, what started out as a joke begins to take on a power of its own.
Between 1965 and 2003, Jean Valentine published nine critically acclaimed collections of poetry, including Dream Barker(winner of the Yale Younger Poets Award), Ordinary Things, and The River at Wolf. Spare and intensely-felt, Valentine's poems present experience as only imperfectly graspable. This volume gathers together all of Valentine's published poems, presenting them alongside a stunning new collection.
Valentine's poetry is as recognizable...
Arc of Justice artfully captures a tumultuous period in American history as it tells a shocking story of violence and racial strife. The grandson of a slave, Dr. Ossian Sweet moved his family to an all-white Detroit neighborhood in 1925. When his neighbors attempted to drive him out, Sweet defended himself-resulting in the death of a white man and a murder trial for Sweet. There followed one of the most important (and shockingly unknown) cases in...
"Brimming with rich descriptions of a beautiful country….The News From Paraguay evolves from a quirky, elegant tale of an unconventional love affair into a sweeping epic." - Fort Worth Star-Telegram
Lily Tuck's impressive novel offers a kaleidoscopic portrait of 19th century Paraguay, a largely untouched wilderness where European and American figures mix with the Spanish aristocracy of the capital and the indigenous peoples from the surrounding...
Thirteen-year-old Ratchet spends a summer in Maine with her eccentric great-aunts Tilly and Penpen, hearing strange stories from the past and encountering a variety of unusual and colorful characters.
... Reality has put itself so solidly before me
there's little need for mystery...Except for us, for how we take the world
to us, and make it more, more than we are, more even than itself.
-from "The World"
In his first volume since Repair, C. K. Williams treats the characteristic subjects of a poet's maturity- the loss of friends, the love of grandchildren, the receding memories of childhood, the baffling illogic of current events-with an intensity...
A survivor of the Cuban Revolution recounts his pre-war childhood as the religiously devout son of a judge, and describes the conflict's violent and irrevocable impact on his friends, family, and native land.
In a future where humans despise clones, Matt enjoys special status as the young clone of El Patrón, the 142-year-old leader of a corrupt drug empire nestled between Mexico and the United States.
In June of 1989 Paul McLeod, a newspaper publisher and recent widower, travels to Greece, where he falls for a young American artist and reflects on the complicated truth about his marriage. Six years later, again in June, Paul's death draws his three grown sons and their families back to their ancestral home. Fenno, the eldest, a wry, introspective gay man, narrates the events of this unforeseen reunion. Far from his straitlaced expatriate life as...
Living in the inner city amidst guns and poverty, fifteen-year-old LaVaughn learns from old and new friends, and inspiring mentors, that life is what you make it--an occasion to rise to.
The author offers a look at depression in which he draws on his own battle with the illness and interviews with fellow sufferers, researchers, doctors, and others to assess the complexities of the disease, its causes and symptoms, and available therapies. This book examines depression in personal, cultural, and scientific terms. He confronts the challenge of defining the illness and describes the vast range of available medications, the efficacy...
Enid Lambert begins to worry about her husband when he begins to withdraw and lose himself in negativity and depression as he faces Parkinson's disease.
From the Publisher: Gloria Whelan's National Book Award-winning novel chronicles the breathtaking story of a remarkable young woman who dares to defy fate. Like many girls her age in India, thirteen-year-old Koly faces her arranged marriage with hope and courage. But Koly's story takes a terrible turn when in the wake of the ceremony, she discovers she's been horribly misled; her life has been sold for a dowry. In prose both graceful and unflinching,...
From the author of Mayflower, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye—the riveting bestseller tells the story of the true events that inspired Melville's Moby-Dick. Winner of the National Book Award, Nathaniel Philbrick's book is a fantastic saga of survival and adventure, steeped in the lore of whaling, with deep resonance in American literature and history. In 1820,...
During the summer of 1971 in a small Texas town, thirteen-year-old Toby and his best friend Cal meet the star of a sideshow act, 600-pound Zachary, the fattest boy in the world.