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The title cloud of Matt Donovan's A Cloud of Unusual Size and Shape refers to the volcanic eruption of Mount Vesuvius that in 79 AD buried the city of Pompeii under twenty feet of ash. It's no surprise, then, that Donovan found the sacred ruins a site of inspiration and power, using their legacy to form the beginning of this extraordinary nonfiction debut. Donovan pursues the image of the cloud throughout these 15 spell-binding essays on ruin and...
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San Antonians love Cary Clack for the sparkle of wit and wisdom he brings to them in his column in the San Antonio Express-News. But his style and sensibility make his work equally popular far beyond that city. He offers pithy, probing coverage of national issues such as terrorism, racism, and child abuse, but his keen sense of humor often turns to the stuff of everyday life such as the inexplicable power of Krispy Kreme doughnuts and his terror of...
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Lauded poet Christopher Merrill hatched a brilliant plan: invite six other poets to join him in four days of writing in Iowa City. The poets would write for 30 minutes, creating a poem of 15 lines, and then read it aloud to the group. As poets heard the poems, they noted memorable words, images, and lines, which they would borrow to insert in subsequent poems of their own. These rounds continued, until, in a process of call and response and unprecedented...
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America is at a crossroads. Conflicting political and social perspectives reflect a need to collectively define our moral imperatives, clarify cultural values, and inspire meaningful change. In that patriotic spirit, hundreds of writers, artists, scientists, and political and community leaders have come together since the 2016 presidential election to offer their impassioned letters to America in a project envisioned and published by the online journal...
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A Gathering of Birds is an anthology containing selected prose about birds by nineteen famous authors, such as Hudson, Audubon, and Thoreau, and includes brief biographical information about each. The New York Times called the collection 'a delightful gathering' that Mr. Peattie has presented, and his own contributions to the book make it something new and valuable in this field. '
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In what could be boldly called a new genre, Gerald Stern reflects with wit, pathos, rage, and tenderness, on 85 years of life. In 70 short, intermingling pieces that constitute a kind of diary of a mind, Stern moves nimbly between the past and the present, the personal and the philosophical. Creating the immediacy of dailiness, he writes with entertaining engagement about what he's reading, be it Spinoza, Maimonides, John Cage, Etheridge Knight, James...
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“San Antonio Stories” is a collection of forty true tales, epic adventures, and intimate revelations from the heart of one of America's fastest growing and most culturally diverse cities.
There is the hilarious chronicle of being crowned Turkey Queen of Cuero, as well as stories of finding one's place as an immigrant or refugee, the heartbreak of being on the AIDS epidemic's front lines, and the redemption in writing My Little Pony fan fiction....
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In this thoughtful, affectionate collection of interviews and letters spanning three decades, beloved poet Gary Snyder talks with South African writer and scholar Julia Martin. Over this period many things changed decisively-globally, locally, and in their personal lives-and these changing conditions provide the back story for a long conversation. It begins in the early 1980s as an intellectual exchange between an earnest graduate student and a generous...
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The word "terroir" refers to the climate and soil in which something is grown. In this essay collection, Natasha Sajé applies this idea to people and their relationships, exploring in particular how the immigrant experience has shaped her identity. As she revisits people and literature across her life, she plumbs the language through the lens of place, which becomes a powerful, grounding motif: her experiences as the child of European refugees in...
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In the course of researching dogwood trees, beloved poet and essayist Christopher Merrill realized that a number of formative moments in his life had some connection to the tree named--according to one writer--because its fruit was not fit for a dog. As he approached his sixtieth birthday, Merrill began to compose a self-portrait alongside this tree whose lifespan is comparable to a human's and that, from an early age, he's regarded as a talisman....
11) The Grand Array
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The Grand Array is a stunning collection of 18 essays by widely published and highly acclaimed poet Pattiann Rogers. Written over a span of 25 years, these essays show Rogers daringly yet delicately laying out her vision of the essential unity and interdependence of science, spirituality, the arts, and the sensual experience of the physical world. Composed in an anecdotal and lyrical - but never dogmatic - style, The Grand Array takes us on a journey...
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A Kite in the Wind is an anthology of essays by 20 veteran writers and master teachers. While the contributors offer specific, practical advice on such fundamental aspects of craft as characterization, character names, the first person point of view, and unreliable narrators, they also give extended, thoughtful consideration to more sophisticated topics, including imminence," or the power of a sense of beginning; creating and maintaining tension;...
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In her nearly sixty-year career as a groundbreaking primatologist and a passionate conservationist, Jane Goodall has touched the hearts of millions of people. The Jane Effect: Celebrating Jane Goodall is a collection of testimonies by her friends and colleagues honoring her as a scientific pioneer, an inspiring teacher, a devoted friend, and an engaging spirit whose complex personality tends to break down usual categories. Jane Goodall is the celebrity...
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When you stray from a trail and strike out into the woods, you are bushwhacking. The term implies a physical thrashing about, pushing past branches, slicing through thickets, leaping across downed trees, but it also implies a certain fortitude and resilience to seek places unknown. In “Bushwhacking”, Jennifer McGaha borrows the term, likening it to what writers do when faced with the equally daunting blank page. Exploring the wilderness of your...
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Dream Song is the story of John Berryman, one of the most gifted poets of a generation that included Elizabeth Bishop, Randall Jarrell, Robert Lowell, and Dylan Thomas. Using Berryman's unpublished letters and poetry, as well as interviews with those who knew him intimately, Paul Mariani captures Berryman's genius and the tragedy that dogged him, while at the same time illuminating one of the most provocative periods in American letters. Here we witness...
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In a collection of musings that is as much historical record and a memoir, Coleen Grissom provides a unique view of life on and off an American university campus. As an administrator and faculty member at Trinity University in San Antonio for over five decades, Grissom has seen the feminist movement take hold, the sexual revolution take off, and the tragic deaths of students, friends, and family. Her honest, witty, and acerbic words have urged students,...
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The public face of Washington-the gridiron of L'Enfant's avenues, the buttoned-down demeanor Sloan Wilson's archetypal "Man in the Grey Flannel Suit," the monumental buildings of the Triangle-rarely gives up the secrets of this city's rich life. But, beneath the surface there are countless stories to be told. From the early swamp days to the Civil War, the "gilded age" to the New Deal and McCarthy eras, as the center of world power to its underlying...
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In One-Way Tickets, Borinsky offers up a splendid tour across 20th-century literatures, providing a literary travelogue to writers and artists in exile. She describes their challenges in adjusting to new homelands, issues of identity and language, and the brilliant works produced under the discomforts and stresses of belonging nowhere. Speaking with the authority of first-hand experience, Borinsky relates the story of her own family-Eastern European...
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Reverential, celebratory, antagonistic, and even erotic, this remarkable collection of essays interprets the Psalms as a collection of poetry. Written by 14 acclaimed poets, the essays approach the Psalms from a personal, often autobiographical perspective, demonstrating how relevant they remain for today's readers. Alicia Ostriker examines the Psalms' glory and their terror in a moving essay that revels in their moods of joy while acknowledging the...
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A prolific writer, famous pacifist, respected teacher, and literary mentor to many, William Stafford is one of the great American poets of the 20th century. His first major collection--Traveling through the Dark--won the National Book Award. William Stafford published more than sixty-five volumes of poetry and prose and was Poetry Consultant to the Library of Congress--a position now know as the Poet Laureate. Before William Stafford's death in 1993,...
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