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Named One of the Best Books of the Year by the St. Paul Pioneer Press"An absorbing bildungsroman that grapples with strikingly contemporary issues of gender and religious identification"--New York Times Book Review"An exquisite portrait of a Renaissance woman pursuing her artistic destiny in England and Italy, who may--or may not--be Shakespeare's Dark Lady."--Margaret George, best-selling author of Elizabeth I Aemilia Bassano Lanier is beautiful and accomplished, but her societal conformity ends there. She frequently cross-dresses to escape her loveless marriage and to gain freedoms only men enjoy--and then a chance encounter with a ragged, little-known poet named Shakespeare changes everything.The two outsiders strike up a literary bargain: they leave plague-ridden London for Italy, where they begin secretly writing comedies together and where Will falls in love with the beautiful country--and with Aemilia, his Dark Lady. Their Italian idyll, though, cannot last. Will gains fame and fortune for their plays back in London and years later publishes the sonnets mocking his former muse. Not one to stand by in humiliation, Aemilia takes up her own pen in her defense, and in defense of all women."The idea of a smart, beautiful, artistic woman telling Shakespeare, 'We shall write comedies, you and I' is as heady as the elderflower wine Aemilia's household staff brews."--Washington Post "Atmospheric, well-researched, carefully plotted...and, like Shakespeare's plays, chock-full of equal parts mirth and pith to please all."--Minneapolis Star Tribune

With grace, humor, and irresistible recipes, the author of Girl Sleuth takes us on her journey as an amateur chef, amateur farmer, and amateur parent Melanie Rehak was always a passionate cook and food lover. Since reading the likes of Michael Pollan, Eric Schlosser, and Wendell Berry, she'd tried to eat thoughtfully as well. But after the birth of her son, Jules, she wanted to know more: What mattered most, organic or local? Who were these local farmers? Was it possible to be an ethical consumer and still revel in the delights of food? And why wouldn't Jules eat anything, organic or not? Eating for Beginners details the year she spent discovering what how to be an eater and a parent in today's increasingly complicated world. She joined the kitchen staff at applewood, a small restaurant owned by a young couple committed to using locally grown food, and worked on some of the farms that supplied it. Between prepping the nightly menu, milking goats, and sorting beans, Rehak gained an understanding of her own about what to eat and why. (It didn't hurt that, along the way, even the most dedicated organic farmers admitted that their children sometimes ate McDonald's.) And as we follow her on her quest to find the pleasure in doing the right thing?and become a better cook in the bargain?we too will make our peace with food.

A brutal car accident that claimed the life of her best friend has left seventeen-year-old Catherine in a state of shock and severe depression. She longs to move forward with her life, but feels she can't until she is somehow assured of her friend's forgiveness. On a Christmas visit to her grandmother in Pasadena, a mysterious and handsome stranger approaches Catherine at church claiming that he can put her in touch with her dead friend. Catherine is wary of the stranger's claims and his ghostly appearance but feels he may be the only key to escaping her past. She tells no one of the meeting but is approached by an elderly woman who warns her of the stranger's powers. The woman's teenage diary and eerie rumors surrounding other troubled girls who have disappeared from the church community leave Catherine fearful of the stranger's true intentions. She realizes she must find some way to confront this supernatural presence as well as the ghosts of her past.A classic ghost story from one of Clarion's most distinguished authors. Eve Bunting brings a new edge to the genre of suspense by interweaving contemporary issues with sharp and frightful storytelling.

From the best-selling author of The Vanishing of Esme Lennox comes a spellbinding novel that shows there are no accidents, in life and in love.Frustrated with her parents' genteel country life, Lexie Sinclair plans her escape to London. There, she takes up with Innes Kent, a magazine editor who introduces her to the thrilling, underground world of bohemian, postwar Soho. She learns to be a reporter, comes to know art and artists, and embraces her freedom fully. So when she finds herself pregnant, she doesn't hesitate to have the baby on her own. Later, in present-day London, a young painter named Elina dizzily navigates the first weeks of motherhood and finds she can't remember giving birth, while her boyfriend Ted is flooded with memories and images he cannot place. As their stories unfold--moving in time and changing voice chapter by chapter--a connection between the three of them takes shape that drives the novel towards a tremendous revelation. Praised by The Washington Post as a "breathtaking, heart-breaking creation," The Hand That First Held Mine is a gorgeous and tenderly wrought story about the ways in which love and beauty bind us together.

In Fun with Problems, Robert Stone demonstrates once again that he is "one of our greatest living writers" (Los Angeles Times). The pieces in this new volume vary greatly in length-some are almost novellas, others no more than a page-but all share the signature blend of longing, violence, black humor, sex and drugs that has helped Stone illuminate the dark corners of the human soul. Entire lives are laid out with remarkable precision, in captivating prose: a screenwriter carries on a decades-long affair with a beautiful actress, whose descent into addiction he can neither turn from nor share; a bored husband picks up a mysterious woman only to find that his ego has led him woefully astray; a world-beating Silicon Valley executive receives an unwelcome guest at his mansion in the hills; a scuba dive guides uneasy newlyweds to a point of no return. Fun with Problems showcases Stone's great gift: to pinpoint and make real the impulses-by turns violently coercive and quietly seductive-that cause us to conceal, reveal, and betray our very selves.

Nathanael West was a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities and absurdities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, " Miss Lonelyhearts "and the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood, "The Day of the Locust." Eileen McKenney, accidental muse and literary heroine, fled Cleveland in search of romance and adventure, inspiring her sister s humorous stories, "My Sister Eileen," which led to stage, film, and television adaptations.

Three warnings for readers who hate surprises: 1. Beware of slivers, 2. and gamblers, 3. and aces.Zebulon Crabtree found all that out the hard way back in 1849 when his mother and father shipped him off to St. Louis to apprentice with a tanner. Too bad he had serious allergies to fur and advice from his parents. Hearing the beat of a different drummer, Zeb takes up with a riverboat gambler who has some special plans for him, crosses paths with a slave who turns out to be a better friend than cook, and learns that some Indian medicine men can see even though blind. And then there's the Brotherhood?the one that Zeb can't seem to get out of . . . Lucky for us, the price of living in turbulent times is often a good story, and Zeb spins an unforgettable one.

One of our most enduring national myths surrounds the men and women who fought in the so-called "Good War." The Greatest Generation, we're told by Tom Brokaw and others, fought heroically, then returned to America happy, healthy and well-adjusted. They quickly and cheerfully went on with the business of rebuilding their lives.In this shocking and hauntingly beautiful book, historian Thomas Childers shatters that myth. He interweaves the intimate story of three families?including his own?with a decades' worth of research to paint an entirely new picture of the war's aftermath. Drawing on government documents, interviews, oral histories and diaries, he reveals that 10,000 veterans a month were being diagnosed with psycho-neurotic disorder (now known as PTSD). Alcoholism, homelessness, and unemployment were rampant, leading to a skyrocketing divorce rate. Many veterans bounced back, but their struggle has been lost in a wave of nostalgia that threatens to undermine a new generation of returning soldiers. Novelistic in its telling and impeccably researched, Childers's book is a stark reminder that the price of war is unimaginably high. The consequences are human, not just political, and the toll can stretch across generations.

"Night Navigation" opens on a freezing-rain night in upstate New York: the kindling gone, the fire in the woodstove out. Del s thirty-seven-year-old manic-depressive son needs a ride, but she s afraid to make the long drive north to the only detox that has a bed.

In Speaking Your Way to Success, Sheryl Lindsell-Roberts draws on 25 years of experience as a business communications expert to deliver straightforward guidelines for today's professionals on how to speak powerfully and effectively. Whether talking in front of a large group or engaging in a one-to-one conversation, this book will help anyone to speak up, speak well, and get noticed.Chapters include:-- Making Introductions-- Developing Listening Skills-- Using Politically Neutral Language-- Interviewing and Being Interviewed-- Speaking in Public-- Communicating Cross-Culturally-- Harnessing the Power of Today's Multigenerational WorkforceIn her signature no-nonsense style, Lindsell-Roberts shows speakers how to pay attention to their audience, support their words with body language, interject stories the audience will relate to and enjoy, encourage audience interaction, and more.This book is packed with specific suggestions that can be applied immediately on topics such as giving and receiving compliments, keeping a conversation going, asking for a raise, and cold calling. There are strategies for introducing yourself when you don't know anyone at an event, techniques for initiating conversation, and a checklist for rating your listening skills. Lindsell-Roberts also has a proven, no-fail attack plan for how to work a room.Stop lurking quietly in the shadows and start speaking your way to success!

You'd think Polly Martin would have all the answers when it comes to love?after all, her grandmother is the famous syndicated advice columnist Miss Swoon. But after a junior year full of dating disasters, Polly has sworn off boys. This summer, she's going to focus on herself for once. So Polly is happy when she finds out Grandma is moving in?think of all the great advice she'll get. But Miss Swoon turns out to be a man-crazy sexagenarian! How can Polly stop herself from falling for Xander Cooper, the suddenly-hot skateboarder who keeps showing up while she's working at Wild Waves water park, when Grandma is picking up guys at the bookstore and flirting with the dishwasher repairman? No advice column can prepare Polly for what happens when she goes on a group camping trip with three too many ex-boyfriends and the tempting Xander. Polly is forced to face her feelings and figure out if she can be in love?and still be herself.

Bioterrorism has come to a small town in New Jersey. Two residents die of brain aneurysms within twenty-four hours and several teens become ill with a mysterious flu, leading the government to suspect that a terrorist cell has unleashed a deadly biochemical agent. With each glass of water they drink, the people of Trinity Falls are poisoning themselves.A world away in Pakistan, a sixteen year old computer genius working as a spy for the U.S. sees an influx of chatter from extremists about a substance they call Red Vinegar that will lead to many deaths. Can he warn the victims before it's too late?

An intensely emotional and redemptive memoir about a mother's mission to rescue her runaway daughters After a miserably failed marriage, Debra Gwartney moves with her four young daughters to Eugene, Oregon, for a new job and what she hopes will be a new life for herself and her family. The two oldest, Amanda, 14, and Stephanie, 13, blame their mother for what happened, and one day the two run off together?to the streets of their own city, then San Francisco, then nowhere to be found. The harrowing subculture of the American runaway, with its random violence, its horrendously dangerous street drugs, and its patchwork of hidden shelters is captured by Gwartney with brilliant intensity in Live Through This as she sets out to find her girls. Though she thought she could hold her family together by love alone, Gwartney recognizes over the course of her search where she failed. It's a testament to her strength?and to the resilience of her daughters?that after several years they are a family again, forged by both forgiveness and love.

When we bite into a steak's charred crust and pink interior, we bite into contradictions that have branded our nation from the start. We taste the competing fantasies of British pastoralists and Spanish ranchers that erupted in land wars between a wet-weather East and a desert West. We savor the ideas of wilderness and progress that clashed when we replaced buffalo with cattle, and then cowboys with industrial machines. We witness rugged individualism and corporate technology collide when we breed, feed, slaughter, package, and distribute the animals we turn into meat. And we participate?like the cattlemen, chefs, feedlot operators, and scientists Fussell talks with?in the mythology that inspires cowboys to become technocrats and presidents to play cowboy. A celebration and an elegy for a uniquely American Dream, Raising Steaks takes an "unflinching look at the ethical and environmental implications of modern meat ... yet leaves us with a powerful hankering for a thick T-bone grilled rare"--Michael Pollan

Many years ago, the storytellers say, the great King Arthur held court with his gallant Knights of the Round Table. Poor Givret, who is easily the shortest man at court, bears the brunt of their jokes. But what he lacks in stature, Givret makes up for in brains—and before he knows it, his quick thinking has landed him a place at the famous Round Table! And so beginneth the exciting and funny adventures of Sir Givret the Short, Brilliant, and Marvelous.

Donald Hall's remarkable life in poetry ? a career capped by his appointment as U.S. poet laureate in 2006 ? comes alive in this richly detailed, self-revealing memoir.Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where he first realized poetry was ?secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious,? and ends with what he calls ?the planet of antiquity,? a time of life dramatically punctuated by his appointment as poet laureate of the United States. Hall writes eloquently of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of adolescent efforts at poetry writing ? an endeavor he wryly describes as more hormonal than artistic. His painful formative days at Exeter, where he was sent like a naive lamb to a high WASP academic slaughter, are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard. Here he rubs elbows with Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, and Edward Gorey, and begins lifelong friendships with Robert Bly, Adrienne Rich, and George Plimpton. After Harvard, Hall is off to Oxford, where the high spirits and rampant poetry careerism of the postwar university scene are brilliantly captured. At eighty, Hall is as painstakingly honest about his failures and low points as a poet, writer, lover, and father as he is about his successes, making Unpacking the Boxes ? his first book since being named poet laureate ? both revelatory and tremendously poignant.

Nobel Prize-winner Jose Saramago's brilliant novel poses the question--what happens when the grim reaper decides there will be no more death? On the first day of the new year, no one dies. This of course causes consternation among politicians, religious leaders, morticians, and doctors. Among the general public, on the other hand, there is initially celebration--flags are hung out on balconies, people dance in the streets. They have achieved the great goal of humanity: eternal life. Then reality hits home--families are left to care for the permanently dying, life-insurance policies become meaningless, and funeral parlors are reduced to arranging burials for pet dogs, cats, hamsters, and parrots. Death sits in her chilly apartment, where she lives alone with scythe and filing cabinets, and contemplates her experiment: What if no one ever died again? What if she, death with a small d, became human and were to fall in love?

Sivakami was married at ten, widowed at eighteen, and left with two children. According to the dictates of her caste, her head is shaved and she puts on widow's whites. From dawn to dusk, she is not allowed to contaminate herself with human touch, not even to comfort her small children. Sivakami dutifully follows custom, except for one defiant act: She moves back to her dead husband's house to raise her children. There, her servant Muchami, a closeted gay man who is bound by a different caste's rules, becomes her public face. Their singular relationship holds three generations of the family together through the turbulent first half of the twentieth century, as India endures great social and political change. But as time passes, the family changes, too; Sivakami's son will question the strictures of the very beliefs that his mother has scrupulously upheld. The Toss of a Lemon is heartbreaking and exhilarating, profoundly exotic yet utterly recognizable in evoking the tensions that change brings to every family.

If Hamlet thought he had issues, he should have talked to Cooper Warner.

In this searching memoir, Rick Bass describes how he first fell in love with theWest -- as a landscape, an idea, and a way of life. Bass grew up in the suburban sprawl of Houston, attended college in Utah, and spent eight years working as a geologist in Mississippi before packing up and heading west in pursuit of something visceral and true. He found it in the remote Yaak Valley of northwestern Montana, where despite extensive logging, not a single species has gone extinct since the last Ice Age. Bass has lived in the Yaak ever since, a place of mountains, outlaws, and continual rebirth that transformed him into the writer, hunter, and activist that he is today. The West Bass found is also home to deep-rooted philosophical conflicts that set neighbor against neighbor -- disputes that Bass has joined reluctantly, but necessarily, to defend and preserve the wilderness that he loves.

Vicki Forman gave birth to Evan and Ellie, weighing just a pound at birth, at twenty-three weeks' gestation. During the delivery she begged the doctors to "let her babies go" -- she knew all too well that at twenty-three weeks they could very well die and, if they survived, they would face a high risk of permanent disabilities. However, California law demanded resuscitation. Her daughter died just four days later; her son survived and was indeed multiply disabled: blind, nonverbal, and dependent on a feeding tube.

The sixteen short stories featured in Skip Horack's prize-winning debut collection paint a richly textured vision of the American South. Set in the Gulf Coast over the course of a year torn halfway by the arrival of Hurricane Katrina, these stories, filled with humor, restraint, and verve, follow the lives of an assembly of unforgettable characters. An exonerated ex-con who may not be entirely innocent, a rabbit farmer in mourning, and an earnest young mariner trying to start a new life with his wife--all are characters that populate the spirited cities and drowsy parishes in Horack's marvelous portrait of the South. "A knockout winner" for guest judge Antonya Nelson, "The Southern Cross "marks the arrival of a standout new voice.