A landmark anthology envisioned by Tracy K. Smith, Poet Laureate of the United StatesAmerican Journal presents fifty contemporary poems that explore and celebrate our country and our lives. Poet Laure
A sensitive and nuanced exploration of a seldom-discussed subject by an acclaimed novelistThe fourteenth volume in the Art of series conjures an ethereal subject: the idea of mystery in fiction. Myst
A brilliant and exhilarating sequence of aphorisms from one of our greatest essayistsThere will come a time when people decide you’ve had enough of your grief, and they’ll try to take it away from you
Brief, jagged, haiku-like, Jim Moore's poems in Invisible Strings observe time moving past us moment by moment. In that accrual, line by line, is the anxiety and acceptance of aging, the mounting los
David Rivard's new poetry collection describes the many powers---psychological and historical---that flow through people's lives in acts of faith, greed, pleasure, celebrity, gossip, and consolation.
In this groundbreaking memoir, Stephen Elliott pursues parallel investigations: a gripping account of a notorious San Francisco murder trial, and an electric exploration of the self. Destined to be a
In Dean Young’s sprawling and subversive first book of prose on poetry, imagination swerves into primitivism and surrealism and finally toward empathy. How can recklessness guide the poet, the
A finely crafted debut, winner of the 2009 Bakeless Nonfiction PrizeKim Dana Kupperman’s essays plumb the emotional and spiritual depths of a transitory life. Her episodic “missives”
The powerful and influential last poems of an unsung master, now again available, with a new introduction by National Book Award winner Mark DotyJames L. White’s The Salt Ecstasies—originally publishe
Winner of the 2009 Bakeless Fiction Prize, a confident debut collection about life on and around the Mattaponi Indian Reservation Set on the Mattaponi Indian Reservation and in its surrounding counti
“Castle tells a terrific story, dire and confusing and convincing.” —Scott Bradfield, The New York Times Book ReviewEric Loesch, a private man with a shadowy past, returns to his ho
"A brilliantly inventive writer ... he understands the nature of storytelling and is at once terribly moving and wildy funny." --A.S. ByattObabakoak is a shimmering, mercurial collection about life i
An unsentimental vision of the west, new and old, comes to life in a gritty new collection of stories by the author of Snow, AshesIn Ghosts of Wyoming, Alyson Hagy explores the hardscrabble lives and
With intelligence and precision, Ellen Bryant Voigt parses out the deft and alluring shape of poetic language in The Art of Syntax. Through brilliant readings of poems by Bishop, Frost, Kunitz, Lawre
Fiction imagines for us a stopping point from which life can be seen as intelligible,” asserts Joan Silber in The Art of Time in Fiction. The end point of a story determines its meaning, and on
A career-spanning collection by one of greece’s most loved and lyrical contemporary poets, Katerina Anghelaki-RookeI wasn’t weaving, I wasn’t knitting I was writing something
New poetry by Dobby Gibson, author of Polar, which ?teems with a language so alive and so imaginative that one cannot help but read on with wonder and rapture? (The Bloomsbury Review)We have to escap
Brian Culhane’s deeply felt and accomplished debut, winner of the poetry foundation’s Emily Dickinson First Book AwardLet just one of those quicksilver hours be returned to me, With
In The Yellow-Lighted Bookshop, a Book Sense selection, Lewis Buzbee celebrates the unique experience of the bookstore—the smell and touch of books, the joy of getting lost in the deep canyons
"It is impossible to read Tess Gallagher's poems without being drawn into their mesmerizing rhythms and convinced of the rightness of her intense yet unforced images." --Joyce Carol Oates
In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic, editor, and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. "Memoir is, for better and often for worse, the genre of our times," Birke
The author of eight books of fiction, Ron Carlson has been praised as "a master of the short story" (Booklist). In this essay, he offers a full range of notes for the writer and gives rare insight in
Fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot discusses and illustrates the hidden subtextual overtones and undertones in fictional works haunted by the unspoken, the s
An innovative and engaging nonfiction debut by “an original new voice” (Publishers Weekly) and the winner of the 2006 Graywolf Press Nonfiction PrizeIn this sparkling nonfiction deb
An essential collection of essays by important contemporary poets about the forms and rhetorical strategies of lyric poetryWe are delighted when we recognize patterns and continuities, as we are deli
The winner of the 2005 Cave Canem Poetry Prize, Lions Don't Eat Us introduces a fierce and wise new voiceThere’s nothing to be afraid of.Don’t ever let boys kiss you.Be nice. One da
Now in paperback, the highly acclaimed collection by Scottish poet Don Paterson, winner of the 2003 Whitbread Poetry Award and the T.S. Eliot Prize Dear son, I was mezzo del camminand the true pa
The first book of inventive prose by a poet whose writing “refuses to cut emotional corners and yet achieves a sense of lyric absolution” (Seamus Heaney)I: What do the dead think about, anyway?G: For
The eagerly anticipated second collection by poet and esteemed critic Stephen Burt Flaunting your useless knowledge has failed you again,Though it was all they had taught you.
Kate Braverman grew up in Los Angeles in the late 1950s at the time when glitz was just beginning to be manufactured. Her Los Angeles was made up of stucco tenements, welfare, and the marginalized. I
The first publication in the United States of celebrated contemporary Israeli poet Agi Mishol, winner of the Yehuda Amichai Poetry PrizeYou are only twenty and your first pregnancy is an exploding bo
After a brilliant youth, the painter Roderic Kennedy's life has been overtaken by a series of crises - alcoholism, the failure of his marriage to an Italian woman, and estrangement from his three dau
With its defiance for any one tradition or voice, Thomas Sayers Ellis’s debut becomes a powerful argument against monotony A dream. A democracy. A savage liberty. And yet another anthem
The Award-winning poet Carl Phillips grapples with issues of authority, identity, and beauty in these sensual and deeply intelligent essaysThe "coin of the realm" is, classically, the currency that f
With a poet's precision and an intellectually adventurous spirit, Elizabeth Alexander explores a wide spectrum of contemporary African American artistic life through literature, paintings, popular me
Poet Katie Ford's debut collection confronts God in a language as shifting and ecstatic as divine encounter This comes out of folklore. Invented because tenderness at times must be written in. There
This is a deeply felt and highly informed essay collection about life in the American west by one of the finest writers ever to emerge from that region. As the Seattle Times has said of Owning It All
In surprising turns through different American cities, mindsets, and eras, and through the strange rhythms of dreaming, the celebrated poet Elizabeth Alexander composes her own kind of improvisationa
Carl Phillips is the author of nine previous books of poems, including Quiver of Arrows: Selected Poems, 1986-2006; Riding Westward; and The Rest of Love, a National Book Award finalist. He teaches at
