Cover of Lesser Ruins

Lesser Ruins

Mark Haber

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781566897198
Publisher Description

From the author of Reinhardt's Garden and Saint Sebastian's Abyss comes a breathless new novel of delirious obsession. Bereft after the death of his ailing wife, a retired professor has resumed his life's work--a book that will stand as a towering cathedral to Michel de Montaigne, reframing the inventor of the essay for the modern age. The challenge is the litany of intrusions that bar his way--from memories of his past to the nattering of smartphones to his son's relentless desire to make an electronic dance album. As he sifts through the contents of his desk, his thoughts pulsing and receding in a haze of caffeine, ghosts and grievances spill out across the page. From the community college where he toiled in vain to an artists' colony in the Berkshires, from the endless pleasures of coffee to the finer points of Holocaust art, the professor's memories churn with sculptors, poets, painters, and inventors, all obsessed with escaping both mediocrity and themselves. Laced with humor as acrid as it is absurd, Lesser Ruins is a spiraling meditation on ambition, grief, and humanity's ecstatic, agonizing search for meaning through art. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Wapiti Wilderness

Wapiti Wilderness

Margaret E. Murie

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780870811555
Publisher Description

In alternate chapters, Olaus tells of his work as a field biologist for the old U.S. Bureau of Biological Survey and recounts stories of his studies of the elk and the other great animals of the West. And Mrs. Murie, from her side, describes their life together, on the trail, in the various camps, and nature adventures in that wilderness in all sea (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Tinkers

Tinkers

Paul Harding

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781942658603
Publisher Description

Special edition of Paul Harding's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel--featuring a foreword by Marilynne Robinson and book club extras inside (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Straw Dogs

Straw Dogs

Thoughts on Humans and Other Animals

John Gray

Book Info

Publisher
Granta Books (Uk) (2002), 264 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781862075122
Publisher Description

A demolition of two and half thousand years of thought (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Thousand-Mile Summer

Thousand-Mile Summer

Colin Fletcher

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781648373763
Publisher Description

Backcountry hiking legend Colin Fletcher embarks on foot to explore the eastern edge of California from Mexico to Oregon. He chronicles his six-month trek vividly portraying the unique landscape and people he encounters along the way. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Barbarian Days

Barbarian Days

A Surfing Life

William Finnegan

Book Info

Publisher
Penguin (2016), 466 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780143109396
Publisher Description

Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Autobiography Included in President Obama’s 2016 Summer Reading List “Without a doubt, the finest surf book I’ve ever read . . . ” —The New York Times Magazine Barbarian Days is William Finnegan’s memoir of an obsession, a complex enchantment. Surfing only looks like a sport. To initiates, it is something else: a beautiful addiction, a demanding course of study, a morally dangerous pastime, a way of life. Raised in California and Hawaii, Finnegan started surfing as a child. He has chased waves all over the world, wandering for years through the South Pacific, Australia, Asia, Africa. A bookish boy, and then an excessively adventurous young man, he went on to become a distinguished writer and war reporter. Barbarian Days takes us deep into unfamiliar worlds, some of them right under our noses—off the coasts of New York and San Francisco. It immerses the reader in the edgy camaraderie of close male friendships forged in challenging waves. Finnegan shares stories of life in a whites-only gang in a tough school in Honolulu. He shows us a world turned upside down for kids and adults alike by the social upheavals of the 1960s. He details the intricacies of famous waves and his own apprenticeships to them. Youthful folly—he drops LSD while riding huge Honolua Bay, on Maui—is served up with rueful humor. As Finnegan’s travels take him ever farther afield, he discovers the picturesque simplicity of a Samoan fishing village, dissects the sexual politics of Tongan interactions with Americans and Japanese, and navigates the Indonesian black market while nearly succumbing to malaria. Throughout, he surfs, carrying readers with him on rides of harrowing, unprecedented lucidity. Barbarian Days is an old-school adventure story, an intellectual autobiography, a social history, a literary road movie, and an extraordinary exploration of the gradual mastering of an exacting, little-understood art. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of In Praise of Shadows

In Praise of Shadows

Jun'ichirō Tanizaki and Junʾichirō Tanizaki

From Peter Miller's book .

Added:  9/16/2024

Book Info

Publisher
Leetes Island Books (1977), 68 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780918172020
Publisher Description

Widely considered to be a classic, this essay on Japanese aesthetics by a major author ranges from the patina of lacquerware and the custom of moon-viewing to monastery toilets and the lighting in a brothel, while contrasting the Japanese sense of subtlety and nuance with Western imports such as electric lighting. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Emerald Mile

The Emerald Mile

The Epic Story of the Fastest Ride in History Through the Heart of the Grand Canyon

Kevin Fedarko

Book Info

Publisher
Simon and Schuster (2014), 448 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781439159866
Publisher Description

The epic story of the fastest boat ride in history, on a hand-built dory named the "Emerald Mile," through the heart of the Grand Canyon on the Colorado river. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Metazoa

Metazoa

Animal Life and the Birth of the Mind

Peter Godfrey-Smith

Book Info

Publisher
Picador (2021), 352 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781250800268
Publisher Description

"Enthralling . . . breathtaking . . . Metazoa brings an extraordinary and astute look at our own mind’s essential link to the animal world." —The New York Times Book Review (Editors' Choice) "A great book . . . [Godfrey-Smith is] brilliant at describing just what he sees, the patterns of behaviour of the animals he observes." —Nigel Warburton, Five Books The scuba-diving philosopher who wrote Other Minds explores the origins of animal consciousness Dip below the ocean’s surface and you are soon confronted by forms of life that could not seem more foreign to our own: sea sponges, soft corals, and serpulid worms, whose rooted bodies, intricate geometry, and flower-like appendages are more reminiscent of plant life or even architecture than anything recognizably animal. Yet these creatures are our cousins. As fellow members of the animal kingdom—the Metazoa—they can teach us much about the evolutionary origins of not only our bodies, but also our minds. In his acclaimed 2016 book, Other Minds, the philosopher and scuba diver Peter Godfrey-Smith explored the mind of the octopus—the closest thing to an intelligent alien on Earth. In Metazoa, Godfrey-Smith expands his inquiry to animals at large, investigating the evolution of subjective experience with the assistance of far-flung species. As he delves into what it feels like to perceive and interact with the world as other life-forms do, Godfrey-Smith shows that the appearance of the animal body well over half a billion years ago was a profound innovation that set life upon a new path. In accessible, riveting prose, he charts the ways that subsequent evolutionary developments—eyes that track, for example, and bodies that move through and manipulate the environment—shaped the subjective lives of animals. Following the evolutionary paths of a glass sponge, soft coral, banded shrimp, octopus, and fish, then moving onto land and the world of insects, birds, and primates like ourselves, Metazoa gathers their stories together in a way that bridges the gap between mind and matter, addressing one of the most vexing philosophical problems: that of consciousness. Combining vivid animal encounters with philosophical reflections and the latest news from biology, Metazoa reveals that even in our high-tech, AI-driven times, there is no understanding our minds without understanding nerves, muscles, and active bodies. The story that results is as rich and vibrant as life itself. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Disordered Cosmos

The Disordered Cosmos

A Journey Into Dark Matter, Spacetime, and Dreams Deferred

Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Book Info

Publisher
Bold Type Books (2022), 352 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781541724686
Publisher Description

From a star theoretical physicist, a journey into the world of particle physics and the cosmos -- and a call for a more just practice of science. In The Disordered Cosmos, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein shares her love for physics, from the Standard Model of Particle Physics and what lies beyond it, to the physics of melanin in skin, to the latest theories of dark matter -- all with a new spin informed by history, politics, and the wisdom of Star Trek. One of the leading physicists of her generation, Dr. Chanda Prescod-Weinstein is also one of fewer than one hundred Black American women to earn a PhD from a department of physics. Her vision of the cosmos is vibrant, buoyantly non-traditional, and grounded in Black feminist traditions. Prescod-Weinstein urges us to recognize how science, like most fields, is rife with racism, sexism, and other dehumanizing systems. She lays out a bold new approach to science and society, beginning with the belief that we all have a fundamental right to know and love the night sky. The Disordered Cosmos dreams into existence a world that allows everyone to experience and understand the wonders of the universe. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Heart of the Wild

The Heart of the Wild

Essays on Nature, Conservation, and the Human Future

Ben A. Minteer and Jonathan B. Losos

Book Info

Publisher
Princeton University Press (2024), 280 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780691228624
Publisher Description

"How do we keep a love of nature and the wild alive in our increasingly human-dominated world? According to the scientists and writers in this book, doing so is of paramount significance; however, the answer is not necessarily blanket preservation of wild places, which is increasingly unrealistic. Rather, the answer to "how to care for nature" is more nuanced and often entails acceptance of a broader definition of wild as well and what it means to experience nature. This book will be divided into two parts. In the first part, authors will explore and complicate what wildness means. For example, science writer Emma Marris argues that spontaneous vegetation and free-roaming animals in cities actually possess more autonomy than the wolves or pines of Yellowstone; biologist Jonathan Losos asks whether invasive species are necessarily detrimental and may even play a role in restoring ecosystems; and psychologist Susan Clayton discusses new ways of experiencing nature, particularly via technology, and what the benefits and limitations may be. In the second half of the book, essays will reflect on the roles of naturalism, natural history, and nature education & communication in helping us connect with wild species and landscapes at a time when many of those connections have frayed or even lost altogether"-- (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Lipstick Traces

Lipstick Traces

A Secret History of the Twentieth Century, Twentieth Anniversary Edition

Greil Marcus

Book Info

Publisher
Harvard University Press (2009), 496 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780674034808
Publisher Description

Taking as a starting point the nihilism and anger expressed by punk, Marcus investigates the underground, alternative and revolutionary movements in art, music and other cultural forms. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Ishmael

Ishmael

A Novel

Daniel Quinn

Book Info

Publisher
Bantam (1995), 338 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780553375404
Publisher Description

One of the most beloved and bestselling novels of spiritual adventure ever published, Ishmael has earned a passionate following. This special twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new foreword and afterword by the author. “A thoughtful, fearlessly low-key novel about the role of our species on the planet . . . laid out for us with an originality and a clarity that few would deny.”—The New York Times Book Review Teacher Seeks Pupil. Must have an earnest desire to save the world. Apply in person. It was just a three-line ad in the personals section, but it launched the adventure of a lifetime. So begins an utterly unique and captivating novel. It is the story of a man who embarks on a highly provocative intellectual adventure with a gorilla—a journey of the mind and spirit that changes forever the way he sees the world and humankind’s place in it. In Ishmael, which received the Turner Tomorrow Fellowship for the best work of fiction offering positive solutions to global problems, Daniel Quinn parses humanity’s origins and its relationship with nature, in search of an answer to this challenging question: How can we save the world from ourselves? Explore Daniel Quinn’s spiritual Ishmael trilogy: ISHMAEL • MY ISHMAEL • THE STORY OF B Praise for Ishmael “As suspenseful, inventive, and socially urgent as any fiction or nonfiction you are likely to read this or any other year.”—The Austin Chronicle “Before we’re halfway through this slim book . . . we’re in [Daniel Quinn’s] grip, we want Ishmael to teach us how to save the planet from ourselves. We want to change our lives.”—The Washington Post “Arthur Koestler, in an essay in which he wondered whether mankind would go the way of the dinosaur, formulated what he called the Dinosaur’s Prayer: ‘Lord, a little more time!’ Ishmael does its bit to answer that prayer and may just possibly have bought us all a little more time.”—Los Angeles Times (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Flowers of Evil

Flowers of Evil

Charles Baudelaire

Book Info

Publisher
New York Review of Books (2024), 289 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781681378282
Publisher Description

Inspired, seminal translations of one of the greatest poets of all time by Edna St. Vincent Millay and George Dillon, now available in a sleek new edition. Charles Baudelaire invented modern poetry, and Flowers of Evil has been a bible for poets from Arthur Rimbaud to T. S. Eliot to Edna St. Vincent Millay, who, with George Dillon, composed an inspired rhymed version of the book published in 1936 and reprinted here, with the French originals, for the first time in many years. Millay and Dillon, while respectful of the spirit of the originals, lay claim to them as to a rightful inheritance, setting Baudelaire’s flowing lines to the music of English. The result is one of the most persuasive renditions of the French poet’s opulence, his tortured consciousness, and his troubling sensuality, as well as an impressive reimagining of his rhymes and rhythms on a par with Marianne Moore’s La Fontaine or Richard Wilbur’s Molière. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Setting Sun

The Setting Sun

太宰治

Book Info

Publisher
New Directions Publishing (1968), 196 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780811200325
Publisher Description

Novel of present day Japan. Reaction of an upper-class family to the war and the resultant cultural impact. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Alternatives

The Alternatives

A Novel

Caoilinn Hughes

Book Info

Publisher
Penguin (2024), 353 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780593545003
Publisher Description

“A tale about sisterhood, a novel of ideas, a chronicle of our collective follies, a requiem for our agonizing species, The Alternatives unfolds in a prose full of gorgeous surprises and glows with intelligence, compassion, and beauty.” —Hernan Diaz From the writer Anthony Doerr calls “a massive talent,” the story of four brilliant Irish sisters, orphaned in childhood, who scramble to reconnect when the oldest disappears into the Irish countryside The Flattery sisters were plunged prematurely into adulthood when their parents died in tragic circumstances. Now in their thirties—all single, all with PhDs—they are each attempting to do meaningful work in a rapidly foundering world. The four lead disparate, distanced lives, from classrooms in Connecticut to ritzy catering gigs in London’s Notting Hill, until one day their oldest sister, a geologist haunted by a terrible awareness of the earth’s future, abruptly vanishes from her work and home. Together for the first time in years, the Flatterys descend on the Irish countryside in search of a sister who doesn’t want to be found. Sheltered in a derelict bungalow, they reach into their common past, confronting both old wounds and a desperately uncertain future. Warm, fiercely witty, and unexpectedly hopeful, The Alternatives is an unforgettable portrait of a family perched on our collective precipice, told by one of Ireland’s most gifted storytellers. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Museum of Other People

The Museum of Other People

From Colonial Acquisitions to Cosmopolitan Exhibitions

Adam Kuper

Book Info

Publisher
Pantheon (2024), 433 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780593700679
Publisher Description

A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK • From one of the world’s most distinguished anthropologists, an important and timely work of cultural history that looks at the origins and much debated future of anthropology museums “A provocative look at questions of ethnography, ownership and restitution . . . the argument [Kuper] makes in The Museum of Other People is important precisely because just about no one else is making it. He asks the questions that others are too shy to pose. . . . Required reading.” –Financial Times (UK) In this deeply researched, immersive history, Adam Kuper tells the story of how foreign and prehistoric peoples and cultures were represented in Western museums of anthropology. Originally created as colonial enterprises, their halls were populated by displays of plundered art, artifacts, dioramas, bones, and relics. Kuper reveals the politics and struggles of trying to build these museums in Germany, France, and England in the mid-19th century, and the dramatic encounters between the very colorful and eccentric collectors, curators, political figures, and high members of the church who founded them. He also details the creation of contemporary museums and exhibitions, including the Smithsonian, the Harvard’s Peabody Museum of American Archaeology and Ethnology, and the famous 1893 World’s Columbian Exposition in Chicago which was inspired by the Paris World Fair of 1889. Despite the widespread popularity and cultural importance of these institutions, there also lies a murky legacy of imperialism, colonialism, and scientific racism in their creation. Kuper tackles difficult questions of repatriation and justice, and how best to ensure that the future of these museums is an ethical, appreciative one that promotes learning and cultural exchange. A stunning, unique, accessible work based on a lifetime of research, The Museum of Other People reckons with the painfully fraught history of museums of natural history, and how curators, anthropologists, and museumgoers alike can move forward alongside these time-honored institutions. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Waves in an Impossible Sea

Waves in an Impossible Sea

How Everyday Life Emerges from the Cosmic Ocean

Matt Strassler

Frrom Sean Carroll's podcast.

Added:  5/14/2024

Book Info

Publisher
Basic Books (2024), 256 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781541603301
Publisher Description

A theoretical physicist takes readers on an awe-inspiring journey—found in "no other book" (Science)—to discover how the universe generates everything from nothing at all: "If you want to know what's really going on in the realms of relativity and particle physics, read this book" (Sean Carroll, author of The Biggest Ideas in the Universe). In Waves in an Impossible Sea, physicist Matt Strassler tells a startling tale of elementary particles, human experience, and empty space. He begins with a simple mystery of motion. When we drive at highway speeds with the windows down, the wind beats against our faces. Yet our planet hurtles through the cosmos at 150 miles per second, and we feel nothing of it. How can our voyage be so tranquil when, as Einstein discovered, matter warps space, and space deflects matter? The answer, Strassler reveals, is that empty space is a sea, albeit a paradoxically strange one. Much like water and air, it ripples in various ways, and we ourselves, made from its ripples, can move through space as effortlessly as waves crossing an ocean. Deftly weaving together daily experience and fundamental physics—the musical universe, the enigmatic quantum, cosmic fields, and the Higgs boson—Strassler shows us how all things, familiar and unfamiliar, emerge from what seems like nothing at all. Accessible and profound, Waves in an Impossible Sea is the ultimate guide to our place in the universe. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Sun House

Sun House

A Novel

David James Duncan

Enjoyed author David James Duncan's essay about Barry Lopez in Going to See.

Added:  5/7/2024

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780316129374
Publisher Description

An epic comedy about love, spirit, and the quest for transcendence in an anything-but-transcendent America, from the author of the perennial cult bestsellers The River Why and The Brothers K. A random bolt from a DC-8 falls from the sky, killing a child and throwing the faith of a young Jesuit Jesuit into crisis. A boy's mother dies on his fifth birthday, sparking a lifetime of repressed anger that he unleashes once a year in reckless duels with the Fate, God, or Power who let the coincidence happen. A young woman on a run in Seattle experiences a shooting star moment that pierces her with a love that will eventually help heal the Jesuit, the angry young man, and innumerable others. The journeys of this unintentional menagerie carry them to the healing lands of Montana and a newly founded community--where nothing tastes better than Maker's Mark mixed with glacier ice, and nothing seems less likely than the soul-filling delight a troupe of spiritual refugees, urban sophisticates, road-weary musicians, and local cowboys begin to find in each other's company. With Sun House, David James Duncan continues exploring the American search for meaning and love that he began in his acclaimed novels The River Why and The Brothers K. This stunning novel, set amid the gorgeous landscapes of the American West, illuminates the contemporary world through the prisms of Eastern wisdom, cast-off ecstatic religious ideals, and the unpredictable, expansive yearnings of the human heart. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Prisoners of the American Dream

Prisoners of the American Dream

Politics and Economy in the History of the US Working Class

Mike Davis

Book Info

Publisher
Verso Books (2018)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781786635907
Publisher Description

A brilliant and comprehensive study of class struggle in the United States Prisoners of the American Dream is Mike Davis’s brilliant exegesis of a persistent and major analytical problem for Marxist historians and political economists: Why has the world’s most industrially advanced nation never spawned a mass party of the working class? This series of essays surveys the history of the American bourgeois democratic revolution from its Jacksonian beginnings to the rise of the New Right and the re-election of Ronald Reagan, concluding with some bracing thoughts on the prospects for progressive politics in the United States. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of I Cheerfully Refuse

I Cheerfully Refuse

Leif Enger

Book Info

Publisher
Atlantic Monthly Press (2024)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780802162939
Publisher Description

A career defining tour-de-force from New York Times bestselling, award-winning and "formidably gifted" (Chicago Tribune) author of Peace Like a River Leif Enger. A storyteller "of great humanity and huge heart" (Minneapolis Star Tribune), Leif Enger debuted in the literary world with Peace Like a River which sold over a million copies and captured readers' hearts around the globe. Now comes a new milestone in this boldly imaginative author's accomplished, resonant body of work. Set in a not-too-distant America, I Cheerfully Refuse is the tale of a bereaved and pursued musician embarking under sail on a sentient Lake Superior in search of his departed, deeply beloved, bookselling wife. Rainy, an endearing bear of an Orphean narrator, seeks refuge in the harbors, fogs and remote islands of the inland sea. Encountering lunatic storms and rising corpses from the warming depths, Rainy finds on land an increasingly desperate and illiterate people, a malignant billionaire ruling class, crumbled infrastructure and a lawless society. Amidst the Gulliver-like challenges of life at sea and no safe landings, Rainy is lifted by physical beauty, surprising humor, generous strangers, and an unexpected companion in a young girl who comes aboard. And as his innate guileless nature begins to make an inadvertent rebel of him, Rainy's private quest for the love of his life grows into something wider and wilder, sweeping up friends and foes alike in his strengthening wake. I Cheerfully Refuse epitomizes the "musical, sometimes magical and deeply satisfying kind of storytelling" (Los Angeles Times) for which Leif Enger is cherished. A rollicking narrative in the most evocative of settings, this latest novel is a symphony against despair and a rallying cry for the future. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of You Are Here

You Are Here

Poetry in the Natural World

Ada Limón

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781571315687
Publisher Description

Published in association with the Library of Congress and edited by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, a singular collection of poems reflecting on our relationship to the natural world by fifty of our most celebrated contemporary writers. For many years, "nature poetry" has evoked images of Romantic poets standing on mountain tops. But our poetic landscape has changed dramatically, and so has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States, Ada Limón, this book challenges what we think we know about "nature poetry," illuminating the myriad ways our landscapes--both literal and literary--are changing. You Are Here features fifty previously unpublished poems from some of the nation's most accomplished poets, including Joy Harjo, Diane Seuss, Rigoberto González, Jericho Brown, Aimee Nezhukumatathil, Paul Tran, and more. Each poem engages with its author's local landscape--be it the breathtaking variety of flora in a national park, or a lone tree flowering persistently by a bus stop--offering an intimate model of how we relate to the world around us and a beautifully diverse range of voices from across the United States. Joyful and provocative, wondrous and urgent, this singular collection of poems offers a lyrical reimagining of what "nature" and "poetry" are today, inviting readers to experience both anew. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Partnership Charter

The Partnership Charter

How To Start Out Right With Your New Business Partnership (or Fix The One You're In)

David Gage

Book Info

Publisher
Basic Books (AZ) (2004), 274 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780738208985
Publisher Description

Written with the business partnership in mind, this useful guide to launching a successful joint business venture helps readers chart these often treacherous waters by offering a map for negotiating difficult subjects, power struggles, clashes of personal styles, and other potential problems that can torpedo any business venture. Original. 20,000 first printing. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Villain's Dance

The Villain's Dance

Fiston Mwanza Mujila

Saw this in come through the shop...

Added:  3/5/2024

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781646051274
Publisher Description

Following the international success of his debut novel Tram 83, Fiston Mwanza Mujila is back with his highly anticipated second novel, which follows a remarkable series of characters during the Mobutu regime. The Democratic Republic of Congo, otherwise known as Congo-Kinshasa or DRCongo, has had a series of names since its founding. The name of Zaire best corresponds to the experience of the novel's characters. The years of Mobutu's regime were filled with utopias, dreams, fantasies and other uncontrolled desires for social redemption, the quest for easy enrichment and the desecration of places of power. Among these events: Zairians' immigration to Angola during the civil war boycotting the borders inherited from colonization, as if the country did not have its own diamonds, and the occupation of public places by children from outside. The author creates the atmosphere of the time through a roundup of characters: the diviner Tshiamuena, also known as Madonna of the Cafunfo mines, prides herself of being God with whoever is willing to listen to her. Franz Baumgartner, an apprentice writer originally from Austria and rumba lover, goes around the bars in search of material for his novel. Sanza, Le Blanc and other street children share information to the intelligence services when they are not living off begging and robbery. Djibril, taxi driver, only lives for reggae music. As soon as night falls, each character dances and plays his own role in a country mined by dictatorship. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of You Glow in the Dark

You Glow in the Dark

Liliana Colanzi

ND. Cool publisher's description. Bolivia!

Added:  3/1/2024

Book Info

Publisher
New Directions Publishing Corporation (2024)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780811237185
Publisher Description

Introducing the Bolivian writer Liliana Colanzi, You Glow in the Dark glimmers with an unearthly light and a nearly radioactive power "The literature of irreality let me sink into a stranger world."-- Liliana Colanzi (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of In Common With

In Common With

The Fish Wars, the Boldt Decision, and the Fight to Save Salmon in the Pacific Northwest

Bill Wilkerson

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781737595342
Publisher Description

After a court ruling turned a fight over salmon into chaos, a group of leaders had a new idea: bringing adversaries together to collaborate, reversing the decline of fish runs and transforming fisheries management all along the Pacific Coast. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Book of Love

The Book of Love

A Novel

Kelly Link

Saw so many folks talking about this one. I'd say the review in The Guardian finally compelled me to put this on my list.

Added:  2/25/2024

Book Info

Publisher
Random House (2024), 641 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780812996593
Publisher Description

In the long-awaited debut novel from bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize finalist Kelly Link, three teenagers become pawns in a supernatural power struggle. “A dizzying dream ride you will never forget.”—Leigh Bardugo “An incredible achievement.”—Cassandra Clare “Kelly Link is our greatest living fabulist.”—Carmen Maria Machado The Book of Love showcases Kelly Link at the height of her powers, channeling potent magic and attuned to all varieties of love—from friendship to romance to abiding family ties—with her trademark compassion, wit, and literary derring-do. Readers will find joy (and a little terror) and an affirmation that love goes on, even when we cannot. Late one night, Laura, Daniel, and Mo find themselves beneath the fluorescent lights of a high school classroom, almost a year after disappearing from their hometown, the small seaside community of Lovesend, Massachusetts, having long been presumed dead. Which, in fact, they are. With them in the room is their previously unremarkable high school music teacher, who seems to know something about their disappearance—and what has brought them back again. Desperate to reclaim their lives, the three agree to the terms of the bargain their music teacher proposes. They will be given a series of magical tasks; while they undertake them, they may return to their families and friends, but they can tell no one where they’ve been. In the end, there will be winners and there will be losers. But their resurrection has attracted the notice of other supernatural figures, all with their own agendas. As Laura, Daniel, and Mo grapple with the pieces of the lives they left behind, and Laura’s sister, Susannah, attempts to reconcile what she remembers with what she fears, these mysterious others begin to arrive, engulfing their community in danger and chaos, and it becomes imperative that the teens solve the mystery of their deaths to avert a looming disaster. Welcome to Kelly Link’s incomparable Lovesend, where you’ll encounter love and loss, laughter and dread, magic and karaoke, and some really good pizza. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Soil

Soil

The Story of a Black Mother's Garden

Camille T Dungy

Was reminded about this in an NYRB piece.

Added:  2/23/2024

Book Info

Publisher
Simon and Schuster (2023), 336 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781982195304
Publisher Description

"Poet and scholar Camille T. Dungy recounts the seven-year odyssey to diversify her garden in the predominately white community of Fort Collins, Colorado. When she moved there in 2013, with her husband and daughter, the community held strict restrictions about what residents could and could not plant in their gardens. In resistance to the homogeneous policies that limited the possibility and wonder that grows from the earth, Dungy employs the various plants, herbs, vegetables, and flowers she grows in her garden as metaphor and treatise for how homogeneity threatens the future of our planet, and why cultivating diverse and intersectional language in our national discourse about the environment is the best means of protecting it"-- (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Virga & Bone

Virga & Bone

Essays from Dry Places

Craig Childs

I enjoyed Atlas of a Lost World.

Added:  2/23/2024

Book Info

Publisher
Torrey House Press (2019), 120 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781948814188
Publisher Description

Writer and adventurer Craig Childs dwells upon desert icons--human, animal, and otherwise--in these contemplative and visceral essays. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Fiber

Fiber

Rick Bass

I stumbled on a Rick Bass book at the store, and after reading his biography, stood puzzled as to why I didn't know his work. His work looks like the kind of thing I like.

A bit of casual searching turned up all kinds of little things that got me even more curious. Opposition to the Pacific Northwest Trail? A curious anecdote about wanting to mow Eudora Welty's lawn? An almost overwhelming love for a forest? Where will these breadcrumbs lead?

Not totally sure where to start.

Added:  2/23/2024

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780820320632
Publisher Description

A acclaimed nature writer offers a moving portrayal of the attempt to save the pristine Yaak Valley of Montana through a fictional overview of the personalities and steps necessary to build the concern and active support necessary for preservationist action. UP. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Practice of the Wild

The Practice of the Wild

Essays

Gary Snyder

Book Info

Publisher
National Geographic Books (2020)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781640094215
Publisher Description

A collection of captivatingly meditative essays that display a deep understanding of Buddhist belief, wildness, wildlife, and the world from an American cultural force. With thoughts ranging from political and spiritual matters to those regarding the environment and the art of becoming native to this continent, the nine essays in The Practice of the Wild display the deep understanding and wide erudition of Gary Snyder. These essays, first published in 1990, stand as the mature centerpiece of Snyder's work and thought, and this profound collection is widely accepted as one of the central texts on wilderness and the interaction of nature and culture. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Super-Infinite

Super-Infinite

The Transformations of John Donne

Katherine Rundell

Book Info

Publisher
Picador USA (2023)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781250872500
Publisher Description

Winner of the 2022 Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction Winner of the 2022 Slightly Foxed Best First Biography Prize Shortlisted for the 2023 Plutarch Award A Wall Street Journal Top 10 Best Book of 2022 A New York Times Notable Book of the Year Named a Best Book of the Year by The New Yorker, Times Literary Supplement, and Literary Hub From the standout scholar Katherine Rundell, Super-Infinite presents a sparkling and very modern biography of John Donne: the poet of love, sex, and death. Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, a priest, a member of Parliament—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a sixteen-year-old girl without her father’s consent, struggled to feed a family of ten children, and was often ill and in pain. He was a man who suffered from surges of misery, yet expressed in his verse many breathtaking impressions of electric joy and love. In Super-Infinite, Katherine Rundell embarks on a fleet-footed act of evangelism, showing us the many sides of Donne’s extraordinary life, his obsessions, his blazing words, and his tempestuous Elizabethan times—unveiling Donne as the most remarkable mind and as a lesson in living. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Plains

The Plains

Gerald Murnane

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781930974289
Publisher Description

Fiction. Born in Melbourne, Austrailia, in 1939, Gerald Murnane recently retired as the senior lecturer in fiction writing at Deakin University with a reputation as one of the finest writers in his country. He is the author of seven highly praised books of fiction, most of which are still widely unknown and underappreciated by American readers. "The Plains is parable, fable, allegory, analogue, mythology, and vision. It is also subtly satirical and often ingeniously funny . . . Gerald Murnane is unquestionably one of the most original writers working in Australia today and THE PLAINS is a fascinating and rewarding book"--The Australian. Foreword by Andrew Zawacki, editor of VERSE magazine. The Plains was first published in Austrailia in 1982. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Pictures from an Institution

Pictures from an Institution

A Comedy

Randall Jarrell

Director Steven Soderbergh raved, convincingly I thought, about this one,

Added:  1/13/2024

Book Info

Publisher
University of Chicago Press (2010), 287 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780226393759
Publisher Description

Beneath the unassuming surface of a progressive women’s college lurks a world of intellectual pride and pomposity awaiting devastation by the pens of two brilliant and appalling wits. Randall Jarrell’s classic novel was originally published to overwhelming critical acclaim in 1954, forging a new standard for campus satire—and instantly yielding comparisons to Dorothy Parker’s razor-sharp barbs. Like his fictional nemesis, Jarrell cuts through the earnest conversations at Benton College—mischievously, but with mischief nowhere more wicked than when crusading against the vitriolic heroine herself. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Timberline

Timberline

Mountain and Arctic Forest Frontiers

Stephen F. Arno and Ramona P. Hammerly

Book Info

Publisher
Mountaineers Books (1984), 316 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780898860856
Publisher Description

Originally published in 1984, this is a classic in Western natural history now made available again to climbers, hikers, and other enthusiasts. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of In Praise of Paths

In Praise of Paths

Walking Through Time and Nature

Torbjorn Ekelund

Book Info

Publisher
Greystone Books (2022), 240 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781771649957
Publisher Description

An ode to paths and the journeys we take through nature, as told by a gifted writer who stopped driving and rediscovered the joys of traveling by foot.Torbjorn Ekelund started to walk-everywhere-after an epilepsy diagnosis affected his ability to drive. The more he ventured out, the more he came to love the act of walking, and an interest in (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Bomb Power

Bomb Power

The Modern Presidency and the National Security State

Garry Wills

Erik Baker summarizes Willis' concept of "bomb power" succinctly in The Baffler:

the way that the very existence of the United States’ nuclear arsenal fundamentally constrains the possibility of exercising democratic oversight of the nation’s military. The power to annihilate all human civilization cannot sanely be disposed of by popular vote. The bomb is a weapon suited only to a benevolent dictator, and that is how the United States came to envision the presidency in the nuclear age—culturally, politically, and even legally. Autocracy, of course, was easier to produce than benevolence. The bomb demands secrecy; secrecy demands lying; and lying demands lawlessness.

Added:  12/27/2023

Book Info

Publisher
Penguin (2011), 278 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780143118688
Publisher Description

Assesses the role of the atomic bomb in altering the nature of American democracy, tracing the secrecy of the Manhattan Project, the ways the bomb changed the institution of the presidency, and the state of war alert that has existed since its invention. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Deep Woods

Deep Woods

John Burroughs

Book Info

Publisher
Syracuse University Press (1998), 244 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780815604167
Publisher Description

John Burroughs is generally credited with having popularized the American nature essay as a literary genre. He journeyed to Yellowstone with President Theodore Roosevelt and hiked around the Grand Canyon and the Yosemite Valley with John Muir. Collected here are natural history essays from the books that span Burroughs's most productive years, from 1871 to 1912. In these essays, Burroughs writes of the seasons, of his beloved Catskill Mountains, the Adirondacks, the Maine woods, and the far west of Yosemite and coastal Alaska. Burroughs set the tone for a literary tradition that continues today. As Richard F. Fleck notes in the introduction: "Surely all American nature writers owe some debt to John Burroughs who takes the reader along the trail and gives him the sight, sound, and scent of the deep woods." (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Empire

Empire

Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri

A book I have often wished to have read, most recently on the death of Antonio Negri.

Added:  12/27/2023

Book Info

Publisher
Harvard University Press (2001), 497 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780674006713
Publisher Description

Empire, as Hardt and Negri demonstrate, is the new political order of globalization. Their book shows how this emerging structure is fundamentally different from the imperialism of European dominance and capitalist expansion in previous eras. Rather, today’s Empire draws on the hybrid identities and expanding frontiers of U.S. constitutionalism. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Home Ground

Home Ground

A Guide to the American Landscape

Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781595341754
Publisher Description

A landmark work hailed as an homage to landscape and language, now in a redesigned, field guide edition (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Annals of the Former World

Annals of the Former World

John McPhee

Book Info

Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2000), 712 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780374518738
Publisher Description

The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion years Twenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of North America at about the fortieth parallel and, in the process, come to an understanding not only of the science but of the style of the geologists he traveled with. The structure of the book never changed, but its breadth caused him to complete it in stages, under the overall title Annals of the Former World. Like the terrain it covers, Annals of the Former World tells a multilayered tale, and the reader may choose one of many paths through it. As clearly and succinctly written as it is profoundly informed, this is our finest popular survey of geology and a masterpiece of modern nonfiction. Annals of the Former World is the winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Young Men and Fire

Young Men and Fire

Twenty-fifth Anniversary Edition

Norman Maclean

Book Info

Publisher
University of Chicago Press (2017), 370 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780226450353
Publisher Description

Twenty-five years after its first publication, Young Men and Fire is read avidly by students of literary nonfiction for its blend of hard-earned research, memoir, and an old man's wisdom. It tells one of the most infamous stories in the history of wildland firefighting: On August 5, 1949, a crew of fifteen of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. On the ground, they were joined by a local fireguard. Two hours after the jump, all but three of the men were dead or mortally burned. For forty years, Maclean was haunted by these deaths. And for the last years of his life, he struggled to write a book that would put back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch disaster and to give it the dignity of tragedy. The result is both the definitive account of what happened to the Smokejumpers on that remote Montana mountainside in 1949, and the narrative of a writer's quest for meaning in the face of elusive facts and the waning energies of old age. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Eastbound

Eastbound

Maylis De Kerangal

9781953861504

Emily Eakin's rave on the NYT's podcast about their 10 Best Books of the Year really sold me.

Added:  12/8/2023

Book Info

Publisher
Archipelago (2023), 137 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781953861504
Publisher Description

In this gripping tale, a Russian conscript and a French woman cross paths on the Trans-Siberian railroad, each fleeing to the east for their own reasons Perfect for fans of Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle and The Lincoln Highway by Amor Towles Eastbound is both an adventure story and a duet of two vibrant inner worlds. In mysterious, winding sentences gorgeously translated by Jessica Moore, De Kerangal gives us the story of two unlikely souls entwined in a quest for freedom with a striking sense of tenderness, sharply contrasting the brutality of the surrounding world. Racing toward Vladivostok, we meet the young Aliocha, packed onto a Trans-Siberian train with other Russian conscripts. Soon after boarding, he decides to desert and over a midnight smoke in a dark corridor of the train, he encounters an older French woman, Hélène, for whom he feels an uncanny trust. A complicity quickly grows between the two when he manages to urgently ask—through a pantomime and basic Russian that Hélène must decipher—for her help to hide him. They hurry from the filth of his third-class carriage to Hélène’s first-class sleeping car. Aliocha now a hunted deserter and Hélène his accomplice with her own inner landscape of recent memories to contend with. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Day

Day

A Novel

Michael Cunningham

Book Info

Publisher
Random House (2023), 289 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780399591341
Publisher Description

A “quietly stunning” (Ocean Vuong) exploration of love and loss, the struggles and limitations of family life—and how we all must learn to live together and apart—from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Hours “Along with George Eliot, Michael Cunningham belongs in that rare group of novelists who hold the world close, with apparently infinite respect, compassion, and tenderness, all while describing the world and its inhabitants unsparingly.”—Tony Kushner April 5, 2019: In a cozy brownstone in Brooklyn, the veneer of domestic bliss is beginning to crack. Dan and Isabel, husband and wife, are slowly drifting apart—and both, it seems, are a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie. Robbie, wayward soul of the family, who still lives in the attic loft; Robbie, who, trying to get over his most recent boyfriend, is living vicariously through a glamorous avatar online; Robbie, who now has to move out of the house—and whose departure threatens to break the family apart. And then there is Nathan, age ten, taking his first uncertain steps toward independence, while his sister, Violet, five, does her best not to notice the growing rift between her parents. April 5, 2020: As the world goes into lockdown, the cozy brownstone is starting to feel more like a prison. Violet is terrified of leaving the windows open, obsessed with keeping her family safe. Isabel and Dan communicate mostly in veiled sleights and frustrated sighs. And dear Robbie is stranded in Iceland, alone in a mountain cabin with nothing but his thoughts—and his secret Instagram life—for company. April 5, 2021: Emerging from the worst of the crisis, the family reckons with a new, very different reality—and with what they’ve learned, what they’ve lost, and how they might go on. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Kairos

Kairos

Jenny Erpenbeck

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780811229340
Publisher Description

Jenny Erpenbeck's much anticipated new novel Kairos is a complicated love story set amidst swirling, cataclysmic events as the GDR collapses and an old world evaporates (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Northwest Forest Plan

The Northwest Forest Plan

A History

K. Norman Johnson, Jerry F. Franklin, and Gordon H. Reeves

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780870712241
Publisher Description

Tree sitters. Logger protests. Dead owls and threatened biologists. Dying timber towns. The Timber Wars consumed the Pacific Northwest in the 1980s and 1990s, a flashpoint for a web of environmental, economic, cultural, and political issues. The Northwest Forest Plan (NWFP), officially adopted in 1994, was central to these controversies: it arose out of the environmental mandates of the EPA and imposed rules about forest harvest and species protection. Widely considered one of the most important federal forest policies and a landmark in ecosystem management, the NWFP was intended to protect the region's remaining old growth forests and sensitive wildlife species, which came to include broader habitat protection goals. Based on a series of studies and hearings that started in 1993, the Northwest Forest Plan was the result of research by a multi-disciplinary team known as the Forest Ecosystem Management Assessment Team, and spearheaded by the so-called Gang of Four: K. Norman Johnson, Jerry F. Franklin, Jack Ward Thomas, and John Gordon. The Northwest Forest Plan: A History, written by two of the "Gang," provides an in-depth history of the Northwest Forest Plan, in which the authors describe its causes, development, adoption, and implementation. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Cascadia Revealed

Cascadia Revealed

A Guide to the Plants, Animals & Geology of the Pacific Northwest Mountains

Daniel Mathews

Book Info

Publisher
Timber Press (2021), 585 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781643261010
Publisher Description

“A love poem to the living things that inhabit the mountains and rivers of Washington, coastal Oregon, and southwestern British Columbia.” —Saul Weisberg, executive director, North Cascades Institute More than just a field guide, Cascadia Revealed is the essential trailside reference for naturalists, hikers, and campers. With engaging prose and precise science, Dan Mathews brings the mountains alive with stories of their formation and profiles of the plants, animals, and people that live there. This is the perfect overview to help you discover the wonders of the region. Covers the Coast and Cascade Ranges, the Olympic Mountains, the Ranges of Vancouver Island, and the Coast Mountains of southwestern British Columbia Describes more than 950 species of plants and animals User-friendly, color-coded layout, with helpful keys for easy identification (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of House Lessons

House Lessons

Renovating a Life

Erica Bauermeister

Book Info

Publisher
Sasquatch Books (2021), 250 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781632173867
Publisher Description

From New York Times Bestselling Author Erica Bauermeister comes a memoir about the power of home and the transformative act of restoring one house in particular. “I think anyone who saves an old house has to be a caretaker at heart, a believer in underdogs, someone whose imagination is inspired by limitations, not endless options.” In this mesmerizing memoir-in-essays, Erica Bauermeister renovates a trash-filled house in eccentric Port Townsend, Washington, and in the process takes readers on a journey to discover the ways our spaces subliminally affect us. A personal, accessible, and literary exploration of the psychology of architecture, as well as a loving tribute to the connections we forge with the homes we care for and live in, this book is designed for anyone who’s ever fallen head over heels for a house. It is also a story of a marriage, of family, and of the kind of roots that settle deep into your heart. Discover what happens when a house has its own lessons to teach in this moving and insightful memoir that ultimately shows us how to make our own homes (and lives) better. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Treacle Walker

Treacle Walker

Alan Garner

Book Info

Publisher
Simon and Schuster (2023), 160 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781668025512
Publisher Description

Shortlisted for the 2022 Booker Prize An extraordinary, “playful, moving, and wholly remarkable” (The Guardian) coming-of-age novel filled with myth and magic from one of England's greatest living writers. An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock is trying to make sense of the world. Living alone in an old house, he spends his time reading comic books, collecting birds’ eggs, and playing with marbles. When one day a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears on a horse and cart, offering a cure-all medicine, a mysterious friendship develops and the young boy is introduced to a world beyond his wildest imagination. Luminous, evocative, and sparely told, Treacle Walker is a stunning fusion of myth, folklore, and the stories we tell ourselves. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of How Life Works

How Life Works

A User's Guide to the New Biology

Philip Ball

Book Info

Publisher
Picador (2024)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781529095982
Publisher Description

undefined (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Mountains of Fire

Mountains of Fire

The Menace, Meaning, and Magic of Volcanoes

Clive Oppenheimer

Saw in store. Later saw a review in NYRB.

Added:  11/28/2023

Book Info

Publisher
University of Chicago Press (2023), 376 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780226826349
Publisher Description

"Volcanologist and filmmaker Clive Oppenheimer offers here a seemingly impossible tour, showing readers places difficult to access, even before one considers climbing a volcano. Oppenheimer worked closely with North Korean researchers in a scientific mission to study Mount Paektu, a volcano name sung in national anthems on both sides of the Demilitarized Zone. He ventured through Chad to the Tibesti Mountains; their most emblematic volcano, Emi Koussi, is the highest point in the Sahara and has a caldera colossal enough to enclose a city the size of Boston. He has voyaged south to the hottest place on the coldest continent, studying gases emitted from Antarctica's Mount Erebus. This geographic range is matched by the diversity of subjects that Oppenheimer examines to reveal how entangled volcanic activity is with our climate and environment, as well as our economy, politics, culture, and beliefs. These adventures and investigations make clear the dual purpose of volcanology--both to understand volcanoes for science's sake and to serve the communities endangered and entranced by these mountains of fire. Readers learn of historic voyages to these enigmatic places and travel alongside Oppenheimer, peering from the crater's edge with assorted monitoring devices, climbing toward the summit to compare the volcano itself to images captured safely from space, hunting for the far-flung deposits of Earth's greatest eruptions, and meeting with others who live with volcanoes. With each measurement and conversation, Oppenheimer shows the importance of listening to experts, communities, and the Earth"-- (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Earlier

Earlier

Sasha Frere-Jones

I have been an admirer of SFJ for a long while but totally missed that he was publishing a book until it was already out, and his interview on the LARB Radio Hour sold me.

Added:  11/26/2023

Book Info

Publisher
MIT Press (2023), 201 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781635901962
Publisher Description

Sasha Frere-Jones’s evolution as a writer and musician with the deceptively casual intelligence that marks all of his work. Shuttling between his first year of life (1967) and the year he wrote the book (2020), Earlier is a glorious sequence of moments, a record of the experiences that set the shape of a life. Frere-Jones’s prose floats between clinically precise fragments and emotional impressions of revelations, pleasures, and accidents. It’s a book about how lives happen and sensibilities form. As fellow music critic Alex Ross observes, “It is weird to write a book about yourself, as this book is well aware. Gazing in the mirror is not mass entertainment. Sasha Frere-Jones, a writer of nonchalant, rope-a-dope power, drops the illusion of self-knowledge and instead offers up a kaleidoscope of memory shards, faithful to the chaos of inner and outer worlds. Earlier is funny, cool, raw, wise, and secretly sublime.” Begun in 2010, Earlier was completed at the request of Deborah Holmes, to whom the book is dedicated. Holmes is the mother of Frere-Jones’s two boys, Sam and Jonah. Diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in July of 2020, Holmes died in January of 2021. Earlier is the last book she read. Frere-Jones says, “Deborah was the most enthusiastic reader I’ve ever met. She read when she wasn’t doing something else, and that never changed. She asked me to write this when we met, in 1990. I am sorry I made her wait so long.” (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Madrona Project: the Universe Is a Forest

The Madrona Project: the Universe Is a Forest

Michael Daley and Finn Wilcox

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781737040835
Publisher Description

If the Universe is a kind of tree, as John Muir implies, love of forests must be at its root. This book is an arrangement of appreciations for trees as they sustain human consciousness, as they shape us and as we ourselves continue to learn from them. If the Universe is a kind of tree, as John Muir implies, poetry and the love of forests must be at its root. This fifth issue of The Madrona Project is an arrangement of appreciations of trees--urban, rural and wild--as they sustain human consciousness. Trees that have shaped us and that we ourselves continue to help, continue to grow with, continue to learn from. These poems and essays include work by: Bob Arnold, John Brandi, Kathleen Flenniken, Holly Hughes, Kim Stafford, Clemens Starck, Charles Goodrich, Jim Dodge, Jerry Martien, Ann Spiers, Risa Dennenberg, Sherry Mossafer Rind, Art Goodtimes, Tess Gallagher, Carlos Reyes, Kathleen Alcala, and a host of poets, essayist and artists from the Pacific Northwest, the American Southwest, throughout the Left Coast, from Israel, Canada, and the Netherlands. Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. Art. Nature. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Living

The Living

A Novel

Annie Dillard

Book Info

Publisher
Harper Perennial (1993), 420 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780060924119
Publisher Description

This New York Times bestselling novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard is a mesmerizing evocation of life in the Pacific Northwest during the last decades of the 19th century. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast

Unsettling Native Art Histories on the Northwest Coast

Kathryn Bunn-Marcuse and Aldona Jonaitis

Book Info

Publisher
University of Washington Press (2020), 344 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780295747149
Publisher Description

Inseparable from its communities, Northwest Coast art functions aesthetically and performatively beyond the scope of non-Indigenous scholarship, from demonstrating kinship connections to manifesting spiritual power. Contributors to this volume foreground Indigenous understandings in recognition of this rich context and its historical erasure within the discipline of art history. By centering voices that uphold Indigenous priorities, integrating the expertise of Indigenous knowledge holders about their artistic heritage, and questioning current institutional practices, these new essays "unsettle" Northwest Coast art studies. Key themes include discussions of cultural heritage protections and Native sovereignty; re-centering women and their critical role in transmitting cultural knowledge; reflecting on decolonization work in museums; and examining how artworks function as living documents. The volume exemplifies respectful and relational engagement with Indigenous art and advocates for more accountable scholarship and practices. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Been Outside

Been Outside

Adventures of Black Women, Nonbinary, and Gender Nonconforming People in Nature

Amber Wendler and Shaz Zamore

I saw this in the Mountaineers Books section of the 2023 GiveBooks catalog fo the bookstore. Glad to see more written on this topic.

Added:  11/10/2023

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781680515923
Publisher Description

"Stories and inspiration from contemporary Black women and nonbinary writers in nature and science"-- (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Lightning Rods

Lightning Rods

Helen DeWitt

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780811220347
Publisher Description

From the acclaimed author of The Last Samurai, Lightning Rods is "the most well-executed literary sex comedy" of our time. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Long Form

The Long Form

Kate Briggs

The latest offering from the Dorothy Project, as usual, looks really good to me.

Book Info

Publisher
New York Review of Books (2023)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781948980210
Publisher Description

From the award-winning author of the book-length essay This Little Art, a debut novel that reaches back to the start of the novel tradition and outward to the complexities of contemporary life. Helen and her young baby, Rose, are awake. It is first thing on a new morning. They move, they rest, they communicate; Rose feeds. Thoughts and associations travel far beyond the remit of the front room in their rented flat, which they pace, and which, alive with them, continually becomes new. Their delicate balance is interrupted by the delivery of A History of Tom Jones by Henry Fielding—a novel that describes itself, semi-seriously, as inventing the novel-form for the very first time. As the morning progresses, Helen starts reading it. Indirectly, and each in their own distinct ways, Helen and Rose start thinking about it: its claims to newness, its length, its essayistic digressions, its invitation to imagine old and new forms of life, writing, and experience. The Long Form, Windham Campbell Prize–winner Kate Briggs’s long-awaited debut fiction, unmakes and remakes the novel to meditate on very real social issues, from housing, to care-taking, to friendship, laying bare the settings and support structures that make durational forms of co-existence first thinkable, then possible. At once acrobatic and deeply attentive, The Long Form insists on the creativity inherent in everyday life, showing how the acts of social composition (living arrangements) are continuous with the acts of artistic composition (page arrangements). It is a brilliant novel of profound contrasts and productive co-dependencies, in which the small details of a day speak to the largest questions of form, responsibility, continuation, and love. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Georgics of Virgil (Bilingual Edition)

The Georgics of Virgil (Bilingual Edition)

Virgil and David Ferry

I've never read this one in its entirety, and an episode of In Our Time (good stuff on that reading list btw) really sold me. on it.

Is it hard to pick a translation?

In the meantime, there are versions available online.

Remember, kiddos: labor omnia vincit improbus.

Added:  9/7/2023

Book Info

Publisher
Macmillan (2006), 227 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780374530310
Publisher Description

John Dryden called Virgil's Georgics, written between 37 and 30 B.C.E., "the best poem by the best poet." The poem, newly translated by the poet and translator David Ferry, is one of the great songs, maybe the greatest we have, of human accomplishment in difficult--and beautiful--circumstances, and in the context of all we share in nature. The Georgics celebrates the crops, trees, and animals, and, above all, the human beings who care for them. It takes the form of teaching about this care: the tilling of fields, the tending of vines, the raising of the cattle and the bees. There's joy in the detail of Virgil's descriptions of work well done, and ecstatic joy in his praise of the very life of things, and passionate commiseration too, because of the vulnerability of men and all other creatures, with all they have to contend with: storms, and plagues, and wars, and all mischance. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of A Shining

A Shining

Jon Fosse

Cercador prize got me, and then I saw that Le Monde called the newly-minted Nobel Laureate, “the Beckett of the twenty-first century.” EYES EMOJI.

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781945492778
Publisher Description

A man starts driving without knowing where he is going. He alternates between turning right and left, and ultimately finds himself stuck at the end of a forest road. It soon grows dark and begins to snow. But instead of searching for help, he ventures, foolishly, into the dark forest. Inevitably, the man gets lost, and as he grows cold and tired, he encounters a glowing being amid the obscurity. Strange, haunting and dreamlike, A Shining is the latest work of fiction by National Book Award-finalist Jon Fosse, the Beckett of the twenty-first century" ( Le Monde ). (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Working the Woods, Working the Sea

Working the Woods, Working the Sea

An Anthology of Northwest Writings

Finn Wilcox and Jeremiah Gorsline

Book Info

Publisher
Pleasure Boat Studio (2008), 388 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781929355402
Publisher Description

Cultural Writing. Essays. Poetry. WORKING THE WOODS, WORKING THE SEA is a unique collection of poetry and prose by Gary Snyder, Tom Jay, Holly Hughes, Tim McNulty, Jim Dodge and many more of the North Pacific Coast. Deeply connected to the earth and sea through physical work, these writers speak eloquently of the beauty and power of their environments and of their shared labor and sense of community. With its wit, song and wisdom, this book will take you out to sea and "back to the land." (Publisher's Description)

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Klee Wyck

Emily Carr and Kathryn Bridge

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Publisher
Douglas & McIntyre Limited (2004), 152 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781553650256
Publisher Description

The legendary Emily Carr was primarily a painter, but she first gained recognition as a writer. Her first book, published in 1941, was titled Klee Wyck ("Laughing One"), in honour of the name that the Native people fo the west coast gave her as an intrepid young woman. The book was a hit with both critics and the public, won the prestigious Governor Generals' Award and has been in print ever since. Emily Carr wrote these twenty-one word sketches after visiting and living with Native people, painting their totem poles and villages, many of them in wild and remote areas. She tells her stories with beauty, pathos and a vivid awareness of the comedy of people and situations. A few years after Carr's death, signifcant deletions were made to her book for an educational edition. This new, beautifully designed keepsake volume restores Klee Wyck to its original published verison, making the complete work available for th e first tim in more than fifty years. In her intriguing introduction, archivist and writer Kathryn Bridge puts Klee Wyck into the context of Emily Carr's life and reveals the story behind the expurgations. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Ways of Being

Ways of Being

Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

James Bridle

Book Info

Publisher
Picador USA (2023)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781250872968
Publisher Description

Artist, technologist, and philosopher James Bridle’s Ways of Being is a brilliant, searching exploration of different kinds of intelligence—plant, animal, human, artificial—and how they transform our understanding of humans’ place in the cosmos. What does it mean to be intelligent? Is it something unique to humans or shared with other beings—beings of flesh, wood, stone, and silicon? The last few years have seen rapid advances in “artificial” intelligence. But rather than a friend or companion, AI increasingly appears to be something stranger than we ever imagined, an alien invention that threatens to decenter and supplant us. At the same time, we’re only just becoming aware of the other intelligences that have been with us all along, even if we’ve failed to recognize or acknowledge them. These others—the animals, plants, and natural systems that surround us—are slowly revealing their complexity, agency, and knowledge, just as the technologies we’ve built to sustain ourselves are threatening to cause their extinction and ours. What can we learn from them, and how can we change ourselves, our technologies, our societies, and our politics to live better and more equitably with one another and the nonhuman world? The artist and maverick thinker James Bridle draws on biology and physics, computation, literature, art, and philosophy to answer these unsettling questions. Startling and bold, Ways of Being explores the fascinating, strange, and multitudinous forms of knowing, doing, and being that make up the world, and that are essential for our survival. Includes illustrations (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Rediscovery of America

The Rediscovery of America

Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U. S. History

Ned Blackhawk

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Publisher
Yale University Press (2023), 611 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780300244052
Publisher Description

A sweeping and overdue retelling of U.S. history that recognizes that Native Americans are essential to understanding the evolution of modern America The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, however, with a new generation of scholars insists that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America. Ned Blackhawk interweaves five centuries of Native and non‑Native histories, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Native American self-determination in the late twentieth century. In this transformative synthesis he shows that * European colonization in the 1600s was never a predetermined success; * Native nations helped shape England's crisis of empire; * the first shots of the American Revolution were prompted by Indian affairs in the interior; * California Indians targeted by federally funded militias were among the first casualties of the Civil War; * the Union victory forever recalibrated Native communities across the West; * twentieth-century reservation activists refashioned American law and policy. Blackhawk's retelling of U.S. history acknowledges the enduring power, agency, and survival of Indigenous peoples, yielding a truer account of the United States and revealing anew the varied meanings of America. (Publisher's Description)

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Trail of the Lost

The Relentless Search to Bring Home the Missing Hikers of the Pacific Crest Trail

Andrea Lankford

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ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780306831959
Publisher Description

From an award-winning former law enforcement park ranger and investigator, a female-driven true crime adventure that follows the author's quest to find missing hikers along the Pacific Crest Trail by pairing up with an eclectic group of unlikely allies As a park ranger on the National Park Service's law enforcement team, Andrea Lankford led search and rescue missions in some of the most beautiful (and dangerous) landscapes in America, from Yosemite and Zion to the Grand Canyon. But though she had the official support of the agency, Andrea found herself increasingly frustrated with the service's bureaucratic idiosyncrasies, and after twelve years, she finally left the force, haunted by her own failure to find a lost hiker in 1995. Two decades later, however, she stumbles across a mystery that pulls her right back where she left off: three young men have vanished from the Pacific Crest Trail, the 2,650-mile trek made famous by Cheryl Strayed, and no one has been able to find them. It's bugging the hell out of her. Andrea's concern leads her to a wild environment she didn't have to traverse when she last searched for the lost: missing person Facebook groups. Andrea launches an investigation, joining forces with an eclectic team of amateurs who are determined to solve the cases by land and by screen: a mother of the missing, a retired pharmacy manager, and a mapmaker who monitors terrorist activity for the government. Together, they track the activities of kidnappers and murderers, investigate a cult, rescue a psychic in peril, cross paths with an unconventional scientist, and reunite an international fugitive with his family. Searching for the missing is a brutal psychological and physical test with the highest possible stakes, and it takes its toll on each of them. And the insidious nature of the internet wreaks havoc on their investigation, with obsessive "fans" of missing person pages offering fabricated clues, financial requests, and, most damaging of all, false hope. But their hardships begin to bear strange fruits. They discover clues--bloody socks on the trail, a novel with underlined passages, bones in the desert--that were missed by the authorities, ones that lead them to places and people they never saw coming. TRAIL OF THE LOST is a female-driven true crime adventure that explores the power and limits of determination, generosity, and hope. It paints a vivid picture of hiker culture and its complicated relationship with the ever-expanding online realm. It offers a deep awe of the natural world, even as it unearths just how vast and treacherous it can be. And along the way, Andrea tells the tale of the incredible strength and inventiveness that brought three bodies home, and that changed the searchers' lives forever. On the TRAIL OF THE LOST, you may not find what you are looking for, but you will certainly find more than you seek. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Door

The Door

Magda Szabo

Book Info

Publisher
New York Review of Books (2015), 289 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781590177716
Publisher Description

One of The New York Times Book Review's "10 Best Books of 2015" An NYRB Classics Original The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives. She is Magda’s housekeeper and she has taken control over Magda’s household, becoming indispensable to her. And Emerence, in her way, has come to depend on Magda. They share a kind of love—at least until Magda’s long-sought success as a writer leads to a devastating revelation. Len Rix’s prizewinning translation of The Door at last makes it possible for American readers to appreciate the masterwork of a major modern European writer. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Alexander Von Humboldt and the United States

Alexander Von Humboldt and the United States

Art, Nature, and Culture

Eleanor Jones Harvey

Book Info

Publisher
Princeton University Press (2020), 445 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780691200804
Publisher Description

The enduring influence of naturalist and explorer Alexander von Humboldt on American art, culture, and politics Alexander von Humboldt (1769–1859) was one of the most influential scientists and thinkers of his age. A Prussian-born geographer, naturalist, explorer, and illustrator, he was a prolific writer whose books graced the shelves of American artists, scientists, philosophers, and politicians. Humboldt visited the United States for six weeks in 1804, engaging in a lively exchange of ideas with such figures as Thomas Jefferson and the painter Charles Willson Peale. It was perhaps the most consequential visit by a European traveler in the young nation's history, one that helped to shape an emerging American identity grounded in the natural world. In this beautifully illustrated book, Eleanor Jones Harvey examines how Humboldt left a lasting impression on American visual arts, sciences, literature, and politics. She shows how he inspired a network of like-minded individuals who would go on to embrace the spirit of exploration, decry slavery, advocate for the welfare of Native Americans, and extol America's wilderness as a signature component of the nation's sense of self. Harvey traces how Humboldt's ideas influenced the transcendentalists and the landscape painters of the Hudson River School, and laid the foundations for the Smithsonian Institution, the Sierra Club, and the National Park Service. Alexander von Humboldt and the United States looks at paintings, sculptures, maps, and artifacts, and features works by leading American artists such as Albert Bierstadt, George Catlin, Frederic Church, and Samuel F. B. Morse. Published in association with the Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC Exhibition Schedule Smithsonian American Art Museum, Washington, DC September 18, 2020–January 3, 2021 (Publisher's Description)

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Thirst

2600 Miles to Home

Heather Anderson

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ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781680512366
Publisher Description

Beautiful and deftly written and intimate and searing in its honesty, Anish's is a quest to conquer the trail and her own inner darkness. --Kristine Morris, Foreword Reviews (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Book of Form and Emptiness

The Book of Form and Emptiness

A Novel

Ruth Ozeki

Book Info

Publisher
Penguin (2021)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780399563645
Publisher Description

Winner of the Women’s Prize for Fiction “No one writes like Ruth Ozeki—a triumph.” —Matt Haig, New York Times bestselling author of The Midnight Library “Inventive, vivid, and propelled by a sense of wonder.” —TIME “If you’ve lost your way with fiction over the last year or two, let The Book of Form and Emptiness light your way home.” —David Mitchell, Booker Prize-finalist author of Cloud Atlas A boy who hears the voices of objects all around him; a mother drowning in her possessions; and a Book that might hold the secret to saving them both—the brilliantly inventive new novel from the Booker Prize-finalist Ruth Ozeki One year after the death of his beloved musician father, thirteen-year-old Benny Oh begins to hear voices. The voices belong to the things in his house—a sneaker, a broken Christmas ornament, a piece of wilted lettuce. Although Benny doesn't understand what these things are saying, he can sense their emotional tone; some are pleasant, a gentle hum or coo, but others are snide, angry and full of pain. When his mother, Annabelle, develops a hoarding problem, the voices grow more clamorous. At first, Benny tries to ignore them, but soon the voices follow him outside the house, onto the street and at school, driving him at last to seek refuge in the silence of a large public library, where objects are well-behaved and know to speak in whispers. There, Benny discovers a strange new world. He falls in love with a mesmerizing street artist with a smug pet ferret, who uses the library as her performance space. He meets a homeless philosopher-poet, who encourages him to ask important questions and find his own voice amongst the many. And he meets his very own Book—a talking thing—who narrates Benny’s life and teaches him to listen to the things that truly matter. With its blend of sympathetic characters, riveting plot, and vibrant engagement with everything from jazz, to climate change, to our attachment to material possessions, The Book of Form and Emptiness is classic Ruth Ozeki—bold, wise, poignant, playful, humane and heartbreaking. (Publisher's Description)

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Facts About the Moon

Poems

Dorianne Laux

Book Info

Publisher
National Geographic Books (2007)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780393329629
Publisher Description

"Laux writes gritty, tough, lyrical poems that depict the actual nature of life in the West today."—Philip Levine In her powerful fourth collection, Dorianne Laux once again strikes fire from neighborhood moments: a quiet street at dusk, a pool hall, a bare tree. Focusing on the grace of working people, she captures the pain and beauty of women in all their variety, caught in the "lunar pull" of our time. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Winter Recipes from the Collective

Winter Recipes from the Collective

Poems

Louise Glück

Book Info

Publisher
Farrar, Straus and Giroux (2021), 80 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780374604103
Publisher Description

A haunting new book by a poet whose voice speaks of all our lifetimes The 2020 Nobel Prize winner Louise Glück’s thirteenth book is among her most haunting. Here as in the Wild Iris there is a chorus, but the speakers are entirely human, simultaneously spectral and ancient. Winter Recipes from the Collective is chamber music, an invitation into that privileged realm small enough for the individual instrument to make itself heard, dolente, its line sustained, carried, and then taken up by the next instrument, spirited, animoso, while at the same time being large enough to contain a whole lifetime, the inconceivable gifts and losses of old age, the little princesses rattling in the back of a car, an abandoned passport, the ingredients of an invigorating winter sandwich, a sister’s death, the joyful presence of the sun, its brightness measured by the darkness it casts. “Some of you will know what I mean,” the poet says, by which she means, some of you will follow me. Hers is the sustaining presence, the voice containing all our lifetimes, “all the worlds, each more beautiful than the last.” This magnificent book couldn’t have been written by anyone else, nor could it have been written by the poet at any other time in her life. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage

The Selected Stories of Bette Howland

Bette Howland

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Publisher
Public Space Books, A (2020), 336 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780998267555
Publisher Description

The acclaimed collection that restored to the literary canon "a long-overlooked artist of live-wire incisiveness, shredding wit, and improbable beauty." (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Death by Landscape

Death by Landscape

Elvia Wilk

Book Info

Publisher
National Geographic Books (2022)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781593767150
Publisher Description

From the acclaimed author of the novel Oval comes a book of “fan nonfiction” about living and writing in the age of extinction In this constellation of essays, Elvia Wilk asks what kinds of narratives will help us rethink our human perspective toward Earth. The book begins as an exploration of the role of fiction today and becomes a deep interrogation of the writing process and the self. Wilk examines creative works across time and genre in order to break down binaries between dystopia and utopia, real and imagined, self and world. She makes connections between works by such wide-ranging writers as Mark Fisher, Karen Russell, Han Kang, Doris Lessing, Anne Carson, Octavia E. Butler, Michelle Tea, Helen Phillips, Kathe Koja, Jeff and Ann VanderMeer, and Hildegard von Bingen. What happens when research becomes personal, when the observer breaks through the glass? Through the eye of the fan, this collection delves into literal and literary world-building projects—medieval monasteries, solarpunk futures, vampire role plays, environments devoid of humans—bridging the micro and the macro and revealing how our relationship to narrative shapes our relationships to the natural world and to one another. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Next Shift

The Next Shift

The Fall of Industry and the Rise of Health Care in Rust Belt America

Gabriel Winant

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ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780674292192
Publisher Description

The American working class didn't disappear with the manufacturing economy. It transformed. Instead of unionized blue-collar men, today's working class is dominated by underpaid women in service jobs--especially health care. With recognition of this shift, Gabriel Winant argues, may come political clout. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of In the Ruins of Neoliberalism

In the Ruins of Neoliberalism

The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West

Wendy Brown

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ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780231193856
Publisher Description

Across the West, hard-right leaders are surging to power on platforms of ethno-economic nationalism, Christianity, and traditional family values. Is this phenomenon the end of neoliberalism or its monstrous offspring? In the Ruins of Neoliberalism casts the hard-right turn as animated by socioeconomically aggrieved white working- and middle-class populations but contoured by neoliberalism's multipronged assault on democratic values. From its inception, neoliberalism flirted with authoritarian liberalism as it warred against robust democracy. It repelled social-justice claims through appeals to market freedom and morality. It sought to de-democratize the state, economy, and society and re-secure the patriarchal family. In key works of the founding neoliberal intellectuals, Wendy Brown traces the ambition to replace democratic orders with ones disciplined by markets and traditional morality and democratic states with technocratic ones. Yet plutocracy, white supremacy, politicized mass affect, indifference to truth, and extreme social disinhibition were no part of the neoliberal vision. Brown theorizes their unintentional spurring by neoliberal reason, from its attack on the value of society and its fetish of individual freedom to its legitimation of inequality. Above all, she argues, neoliberalism's intensification of nihilism coupled with its accidental wounding of white male supremacy generates an apocalyptic populism willing to destroy the world rather than endure a future in which this supremacy disappears. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of We Need New Stories

We Need New Stories

The Myths that Subvert Freedom

Nesrine Malik

Book Info

Publisher
National Geographic Books (2022)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781324021896
Publisher Description

Named a Most Anticipated Book of Spring 2021 by Publishers Weekly A rigorous examination of six political myths used to deflect and discredit demands for social justice. In 2016, presidential candidate Donald Trump declared: "I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct." Reeling from his victory, Democrats blamed the corrosive effect of "identity politics." When banned from Twitter for inciting violence, Trump and his supporters claimed that the measure was an assault on "free speech." In We Need New Stories, Nesrine Malik explains that all of these arguments are political myths—variations on the lie that American values are under assault. Exploring how these and other common political myths function, she breaks down how they are employed to subvert calls for equality from historically disenfranchised groups. Interweaving reportage with an incendiary analysis of American history and politics, she offers a compelling account of how calls to preserve "free speech" are used against the vulnerable; how a fixation with "wokeness," "political correctness," and "cancel culture" is in fact an organized and well-funded campaign by elites; and how the fear of racial minorities and their “identity politics” obscures the biggest threat of all—white terrorism. What emerges is a radical framework for understanding the crises roiling American contemporary politics. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Independent People

Independent People

Halldor Laxness

Book Info

Publisher
Vintage (1997), 513 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780679767923
Publisher Description

From the Nobel Prize-winning Icelandic author, a magnificent, epic novel—"funny, clever, sardonic and brilliant" (Annie Proulx)—at last available to contemporary American readers. Set in the early twentieth century, Independent People recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. If Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic and, at the same time, terrifying and bleakly comic. Having spent eighteen years in humiliating servitude, Bjartur wants nothing more than to raise his flocks unbeholden to any man. But Bjartur's spirited daughter wants to live unbeholden to him. What ensues is a battle of wills that is by turns harsh and touching, elemental in its emotional intensity and intimate in its homely detail. Vast in scope and deeply rewarding, Independent People is a masterpiece. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Sea of Cortez

Sea of Cortez

A Leisurely Journal of Travel and Research

John Steinbeck and Edward F. Ricketts

Book Info

Publisher
Penguin Group USA (2009), 598 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780143117216
Publisher Description

The collaboration of two friends-one a novelist, one a novelist, one a marine biologist-produced a volume in which fascinating popular science is woven into a narrative of man's dreams, his ideals, and his accomplishments through the centuries. Sea of Cortez is one of those rare books that are all things to all readers. Actually the record of a brief collecting expedition in the lonely GUlf of California, it will be science to the scientist, philosophy to the philosopher, and to the average man an adventure in living and thinking. Sea of Cortez is a book to be read and remembered on two levels. It is a journey through a remote and beautiful corner of the world, a diary filled with the daily excitements and triumphs of skillful and energetic men. It is also an invitation to see the world anew from a fresh vantage point and perhaps with a broader and more understanding spirit. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Piranesi

Piranesi

Susanna Clarke

Book Info

Publisher
Bloomsbury Publishing USA (2021), 273 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781635577808
Publisher Description

New York Times Bestseller Winner of the Women's Prize for Fiction World Fantasy Awards Finalist The instant New York Times bestselling novel from the author of Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell, an intoxicating, hypnotic book set in a dreamlike alternative reality. Piranesi's house is no ordinary building: its rooms are infinite, its corridors endless, its walls are lined with thousands upon thousands of statues, each one different from all the others. Within the labyrinth of halls an ocean is imprisoned; waves thunder up staircases, rooms are flooded in an instant. But Piranesi is not afraid; he understands the tides as he understands the pattern of the labyrinth itself. He lives to explore the house. There is one other person in the house-a man called The Other, who visits Piranesi twice a week and asks for help with research into A Great and Secret Knowledge. But as Piranesi explores, evidence emerges of another person, and a terrible truth begins to unravel, revealing a world beyond the one Piranesi has always known. For readers of Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane and fans of Madeline Miller's Circe, Piranesi introduces an astonishing new world, an infinite labyrinth, full of startling images and surreal beauty, haunted by the tides and the clouds. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of In the Shadow of the Mountain

In the Shadow of the Mountain

A Memoir of Courage

Silvia Vasquez-Lavado

Book Info

Publisher
Henry Holt (2022)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781250776747
Publisher Description

"When Silvia's mother called her home to Peru, she knew something finally had to give. A Latinx hero in the elite macho tech world of Silicon Valley, privately, she was hanging by a thread. She was deep in the throes of alcoholism, hiding her sexuality from her family, and repressing the abuse she'd suffered as a child. Her visit to Peru would become a turning point in her life. Silvia started climbing. Something about the brute force required for the ascent--the restricted oxygen at altitude, the vast expanse of emptiness around her, the risk and spirit and sheer size of the mountains, the nearness of death--woke her up. And then, she took her biggest pain to the biggest mountain: Everest. 'The Mother of the World,' as it's known in Nepal, allows few to reach her summit, but Silvia didn't go alone. She gathered a group of young female survivors and led them to base camp alongside her, their strength and community propelling her forward. In the Shadow of the Mountain is a remarkable story of heroism, one which awakens in all of us a lust for adventure, gratitude for the strong women in our lives, and faith in our own resilience" (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Just City

Just City

Jo Walton

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781250811837
Publisher Description

Here in the Just City you will become your best selves. You will learn and grow and strive to be excellent. Created as an experiment by the time-traveling goddess Pallas Athene, the Just City is a planned community, populated by over ten thousand children and a few hundred adult teachers from all eras of history, along with some handy robots from the far human future--all set down together on a Mediterranean island in the distant past. The student Simmea, born an Egyptian farmer's daughter sometime between 500 and 1000 A.D, is a brilliant child, eager for knowledge, ready to strive to be her best self. The teacher Maia was once Ethel, a young Victorian lady of much learning and few prospects, who prayed to Pallas Athene in an unguarded moment during a trip to Rome--and, in an instant, found herself in the Just City with grey-eyed Athene standing unmistakably before her. Meanwhile, Apollo--stunned by the realization that there are things mortals understand better than he does--has arranged to live a human life, and has come to the City as one of the children. He knows his true identity, and conceals it from his peers. For this lifetime, he is prone to all the troubles of being human. Then, a few years in, Sokrates arrives--the same Sokrates recorded by Plato himself--to ask all the troublesome questions you would expect. What happens next is a tale only the brilliant Jo Walton could tell. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Friend (National Book Award Winner)

The Friend (National Book Award Winner)

A Novel

Sigrid Nunez

Book Info

Publisher
Penguin (2019), 226 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780735219458
Publisher Description

WINNER OF THE 2018 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER "A beautiful book … a world of insight into death, grief, art, and love." —Wall Street Journal "A penetrating, moving meditation on loss, comfort, memory...Nunez has a wry, withering wit." —NPR "Dry, allusive and charming…the comedy here writes itself.” The New York Times A moving story of love, friendship, grief, healing, and the magical bond between a woman and her dog. When a woman unexpectedly loses her lifelong best friend and mentor, she finds herself burdened with the unwanted dog he has left behind. Her own battle against grief is intensified by the mute suffering of the dog, a huge Great Dane traumatized by the inexplicable disappearance of its master, and by the threat of eviction: dogs are prohibited in her apartment building. While others worry that grief has made her a victim of magical thinking, the woman refuses to be separated from the dog except for brief periods of time. Isolated from the rest of the world, increasingly obsessed with the dog's care, determined to read its mind and fathom its heart, she comes dangerously close to unraveling. But while troubles abound, rich and surprising rewards lie in store for both of them. Elegiac and searching, The Friend is both a meditation on loss and a celebration of human-canine devotion. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Desert Notebooks

Desert Notebooks

A Road Map for the End of Time

Ben Ehrenreich

Book Info

Publisher
National Geographic Books (2020)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781640093539
Publisher Description

Layering climate science, mythologies, nature writing, and personal experiences, this New York Times Notable Book presents a stunning reckoning with our current moment and with the literal and figurative end of time. Desert Notebooks examines how the unprecedented pace of destruction to our environment and an increasingly unstable geopolitical landscape have led us to the brink of a calamity greater than any humankind has confronted before. As inhabitants of the Anthropocene, what might some of our own histories tell us about how to confront apocalypse? And how might the geologies and ecologies of desert spaces inform how we see and act toward time—the pasts we have erased and paved over, this anxious present, the future we have no choice but to build? Ehrenreich draws on the stark grandeur of the desert to ask how we might reckon with the uncertainty that surrounds us and fight off the crises that have already begun. In the canyons and oases of the Mojave and in Las Vegas’s neon apocalypse, Ehrenreich finds beauty, and even hope, surging up in the most unlikely places, from the most barren rocks, and the apparent emptiness of the sky. Desert Notebooks is a vital and necessary chronicle of our past and our present—unflinching, urgent—yet timeless and profound. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Wild Mind, Wild Earth

Wild Mind, Wild Earth

Our Place in the Sixth Extinction

David Hinton

Book Info

Publisher
Shambhala Publications (2022), 145 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781645471479
Publisher Description

Exploring the confluence of ancient Chinese spirituality and modern Western environmental thought, Wild Mind, Wild Earth reveals the unrecognized kinship of mind and nature that must be reanimated if we are to end our destruction of the planet. Earth is embroiled in its sixth major extinction event—this time caused not by asteroids or volcanos, but by us. At bottom, preventing this sixth extinction is a spiritual/philosophical problem, for it is the assumptions defining us and our relation to earth that are driving the devastation. Those assumptions insist on a fundamental separation of human and earth that devalues earth and enables our exploitative relation to it. In Wild Mind, Wild Earth, David Hinton explores modes of seeing and being that could save the planet by reestablishing a deep kinship between human and earth: the insights of primal cultures and the Ch’an (Zen) Buddhism of ancient China. He also shows how these insights have become well-established in the West over the last two hundred years, through the work of poets and philosophers and scientists. This offers marvelous hope and beauty—but like so many of us, Hinton recognizes the sixth extinction is now an inexorable and perhaps unstoppable tragedy. And he reveals how those primal/Zen insights enable us to inhabit even the unfurling catastrophe as a profound kind of liberation. Wild Mind, Wild Earth is a remarkable and revitalizing journey. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Dilla Time

Dilla Time

The Life and Afterlife of J Dilla, the Hip-Hop Producer Who Reinvented Rhythm

Dan Charnas

Book Info

Publisher
MCD (2022)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780374139940
Publisher Description

"Equal parts musicology, biography, and cultural history, Dilla Time chronicles the invention of a new kind of beat by the most underappreciated musical genius of our time"-- (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Earth Keeper

Earth Keeper

Reflections on the American Land

N. Scott Momaday

Book Info

Publisher
Harper (2020), 96 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780063009332
Publisher Description

A beautifully written and poignant tribute to the Earth, from Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist and poet N. Scott Momaday. One of the most distinguished voices in American letters, N. Scott Momaday has devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially its oral tradition. A member of the Kiowa tribe who was born and grew up on Indian reservations throughout the Southwest, Momaday has an intimate connection to the land he knows well and loves deeply. In Earth Keeper: Reflections on an American Land, Momaday reflects on his native ground and its influence on his people. "When I think about my life and the lives of my ancestors, I am inevitably led to the conviction that I, and they, belong to the American land. This is a declaration of belonging. And it is an offering to the earth." he writes. Earth Keeper is a story of attachment, rooted in oral tradition. Momaday recalls stories of his childhood that have been passed down through generations, stories that reveal a profound and sacred connection to the American landscape and a reverence for the natural world. In this moving work, he offers an homage and a warning. Momaday reminds us that the Earth is a sacred place of wonder and beauty; a source of strength and healing that must be protected before it's too late. As he so eloquently yet simply reminds us, we must all be keepers of the Earth. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Happily

Happily

A Personal History-with Fairy Tales

Sabrina Orah Mark

Book Info

Publisher
Random House (2023), 225 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780593242476
Publisher Description

A beautifully written memoir-in-essays on fairy tales and their surprising relevance to modern life, from a Jewish woman raising Black children in the American South—based on her acclaimed Paris Review column “Happily” “One of the most inventive, phenomenally executed books I’ve read in decades.”—Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy The literary tradition of the fairy tale has long endured as the vehicle by which we interrogate the laws of reality. These fantastical stories, populated with wolves, kings, and wicked witches, have throughout history served as a template for understanding culture, society, and that muddy terrain we call our collective human psyche. In Happily, Sabrina Orah Mark reimagines the modern fairy tale, turning it inside out and searching it for the wisdom to better understand our contemporary moment in what Mark so incisively calls “this strange American weather.” Set against the backdrop of political upheaval, viral plague, social protest, and climate change, Mark locates the magic in the mundane and illuminates the surreality of life as we know it today. She grapples with a loss of innocence in “Sorry, Peter Pan, We’re Over You,” when her son decides he would rather dress up as Martin Luther King, Jr., than Peter Pan for Halloween. In “The Evil Stepmother,” Mark finds unlikely communion with wicked wives and examines the roots of their bad reputation. And in “Rapunzel, Draft One Thousand,” the hunt for a wigmaker in a time of unprecedented civil unrest forces Mark to finally confront her sister’s cancer diagnosis and the stories we tell ourselves to get by. Revelatory, whimsical, and utterly inspired, Happily is a testament to the singularity of Sabrina Orah Mark’s voice and the power of the fantastical to reveal essential truths about life, love, and the meaning of family. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Becoming Kin

Becoming Kin

An Indigenous Call to Unforgetting the Past and Reimagining Our Future

Patty Krawec

Book Info

Publisher
Augsburg Fortress Publishers (2022), 225 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781506478258
Publisher Description

Patty Krawec guides readers through Native and settler history, myth, identity, and spirituality in this primer on settler colonialism. Braiding together historical and cultural analysis, Indigenous ways of knowing, and threads of communal memory, Krawec crafts a stunning call to unforget our history and become better relatives to one another. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Two Sherpas

Two Sherpas

Sebastián Martinez Daniell

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781913867416
Publisher Description

Mount Everest, and all it means to royalty, explorers, imperialists, and two sherpas, perched on a cliffside, waiting for a man on the ledge below to move. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Quantum Listening

Quantum Listening

Pauline Oliveros

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781838003944
Publisher Description

What is the difference between hearing and listening? When do you stop hearing the sound? When does memory begin? Is sound intelligent? Does sound have consciousness? Beginning in the 1960s, musician and composer Pauline Oliveros started experimenting with bringing together meditation, political activism and experimental music, eventually creating Deep Listening - a practice that she said was for humanitarian purposes; specifically healing. Quantum Listening is a manifesto for listening as activism. Quantum listening is listening to listening in order to attune to our bodies, the earth and one another in an increasingly loud and noisy world. Through simple listening exercises and eloquent writing, Oliveros shows how Deep Listening is the foundation for a radically transformed social matrix in which compassion and love are the core motivating principles to guide creative decision-making and our actions in the world. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Affinities

Affinities

On Art and Fascination

Brian Dillon

Book Info

Publisher
New York Review of Books (2023), 321 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781681377261
Publisher Description

A meditation on the power and pleasures of the image, from paintings to photographs to migraine auras, by one of Britain's finest literary minds. In Affinities, Brian Dillon, who Joyce Carol Oates has said writes “fascinating prose . . . on virtually any subject,” explores images and artists he is drawn to and analyzes the attraction. What does it mean to claim affinity with a picture? What do feelings of affinity imply about the experience of art and of the world? Affinities is a critical and personal study of a sensation that is not exactly taste, desire, or solidarity, but has aspects of all three. Approaching this subject via discrete examples, Dillon examines works by artists such as Dora Maar and Andy Warhol, Rinko Kawauchi and Susan Hiller, as well as scientific or vernacular images of sea creatures and migraine auras. Written as a series of linked essays, Affinities completes a trilogy, with Essayism and Suppose a Sentence, about the intimate and abstract pleasures of reading and looking. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

Samuel Johnson's Eternal Return

Martin Riker

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781566895286
Publisher Description

After he dies, Samuel Johnson inhabits one body after the next, waiting for a chance to return to his son. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

John Vaillant

Book Info

Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company (2006), 273 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780393328646
Publisher Description

Traces the political, religious, and scientific factors that contributed to the seemingly inexplicable decision of logger-turned-activist Grant Hadwin to destroy the world's only giant golden spruce tree, describing the tree's role as a scientific puzzle, an object of reverence to the seafaring Haida tribe, and the violent contributions of the logging industry. First serial, The New Yorker. 70,000 first printing. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Winter Brothers

Winter Brothers

A Season at the Edge of America

Ivan Doig

Book Info

Publisher
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt (1980), 268 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9780156972154
Publisher Description

NORTHWEST. (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Women to Reckon with

Women to Reckon with

Untamed Women of the Olympic Wilderness

Gary L. Peterson and Glynda Peterson Schaad

Book Info

Publisher
Poseidon Peak Pub. (2007), 109 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781578333875
Publisher Description

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Cover of Home Ground

Home Ground

A Guide to the American Landscape

Barry Lopez and Debra Gwartney

Book Info

ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781595341754
Publisher Description

A landmark work hailed as an homage to landscape and language, now in a redesigned, field guide edition (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Unsettled Ground

Unsettled Ground

The Whitman Massacre and Its Shifting Legacy in the American West

Cassandra Tate

Book Info

Publisher
National Geographic Books (2020)
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781632172501
Publisher Description

Washington State Book Award Finalist A highly-readable, myth-busting history of the Whitman Massacre—a pivotal event in the history of the American West—that includes the often-missing Indian point of view In 1836, Marcus and Narcissa Whitman, devout missionaries from upstate New York, established a Presbyterian mission on Cayuse Indian land near what is now the fashionable wine capital of Walla Walla, Washington. Eleven years later, a group of Cayuses killed the Whitmans and eleven others in what became known as the Whitman Massacre. The attack led to a war of retaliation against the Cayuse; the extension of federal control over the present-day states of Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and parts of Montana and Wyoming; and martyrdom for the Whitmans. Today, however, the Whitmans are more likely to be demonized as colonizers than revered as heroes. “[Tate] tells the Cayuse’s side of the story with empathy and clarity . . . a meticulously researched book.” —The Seattle Times (Publisher's Description)

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Cover of Dispatches from Pluto

Dispatches from Pluto

Lost and Found in the Mississippi Delta

Richard Grant

Book Info

Publisher
Simon and Schuster (2015), 320 pages
ISBN/EAN Product Code
9781476709642
Publisher Description

New Yorkers Grant and his girlfriend Mariah decided on a whim to buy an old plantation house in the Mississippi Delta. This is their journey of discovery to a remote, isolated strip of land, three miles beyond the tiny community of Pluto. They learn to hunt, grow their own food, and fend off alligators, snakes, and varmints galore. They befriend an array of unforgettable local characters, capture the rich, extraordinary culture of the Delta, and delve deeply into the Delta's lingering racial tensions. As the nomadic Grant learns to settle down, he falls not just for his girlfriend but for the beguiling place they now call home. (Publisher's Description)

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