Within the recent explosion of creative nonfiction, a new type of form is quietly emerging, what Brenda Miller calls “hermit crab essays.” The Shell Game is an anthology of these intriguing essays that borrow their structures from ordinary, everyday sources: a recipe, a crossword puzzle, a Craig’s List ad. Like their zoological namesake, these essays do not simply wear their borrowed “shells” but inhabit them so perfectly that the borrowed structures are wholly in...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things.Who ponders the sock? This common object is something people tug on and take off daily with hardly a thought. Unraveling the garment's history, construction, and use, Kim Adrian's Sock reintroduces us to our own bodies- vulnerable, bipedal, and flawed.Sock reminds us that extraordinary secrets live in mundane material realities, and shows how this flop...

Clear-sighted, darkly comic, and tender, The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is about a daughter’s struggle to face the Medusa of generational trauma without turning to stone. Growing up in the New Jersey suburbs of the 1970s and 1980s in a family warped by mental illness, addiction, and violence, Kim Adrian spent her childhood ducking for cover from an alcoholic father prone to terrifying acts of rage and trudging through a fog of confusion with her mother, a suicidal inces...

The Lichtenberg Figures, winner of the Hayden Carruth Award, is an unconventional sonnet sequence that interrogates the relationship between language and memory, violence and form. “Lichtenberg figures” are fern-like electrical patterns that can appear on (and quickly fade from) the bodies of people struck by lightning.Throughout this playful and elegiac debut—with its flashes of autobiography, intellection, comedy, and critique—the vocabulary of academic theory collides w...

Essays on writing, moving among digression, reflection, imagination, and experience as a lover might, bringing art into the world.Boully’s essays are ripe with romance and sensual pleasures, drawing connections between the digression, reflection, imagination, and experience that characterize falling in love as well as the art of arranging words on a page. Literary theory, philosophy, and linguistics rub up against memory, dreamscapes, and fancy, making the practice...

“A sublime anthology” of essays, memoirs, stories and careful considerations from 66 writers riffing on a single word (Publishers Weekly, starred review).In this darb collection, Molly McQuade asks the question all writers love to answer: what one word means the most to you, thrills you, or sets your teeth on edge? And why?Writers respond with a wild gallimaufry of their choosing, from ardor to bitchin’ to th...

Hate to tell you, but you’re going to die. / Quite soon. Me, too. / Shuck off the wisdom while it’s warm. / Death does no harm / To wisdom.Sarah Tolmie’s second collection of poems is a traditional ars moriendi, a how-to book on the practices of dying. Confronting the fear of death head-on, and describing the rituals that mitigate it, the poems in The Art of Dying take a satirical look at the ways we explain, enshrine, and, above all, evade death in contemporary culture.

Zentangle Basics introduces you to today's hottest trend in drawing meditation. Using only pencil, pen, and paper, you'll learn how to draw 25 original tangles, and discover inspiring ideas for incorporating these designs into your art. This expanded workbook edition includes an interactive bonus section where you can get started with warm-up exercises, practice tangling, and experiment with strings and shading.With benefits including stress relief, inspiration, and improve...

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color . . .A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant lyric essayists.Maggie Nelson is the author of numerous books of poetry and nonfiction, including Something Bright, Then Ho...

DO YOUA) Know a human?B) Love a human?C) Have trouble dealing with humans?IF YOU'VE ANSWERED YES TO ANY OF THE ABOVE, THIS BOOK IS FOR YOUWhether you are planning a high level of human interaction or just a casual visit to the planet, this user-guide to the human race will help you translate their sayings, understand exotic concepts such as 'democracy' and 'sofas', and make sense of their habits and bizarre customs.A phrase book, a dictionary an...

From quiet, elegiac, contemporary tales to far-future, deep-space sagas, the stories chosen by series editor John Joseph Adams and guest editor Karen Joy Fowler for The Best American Science Fiction and Fantasy 2016 demonstrate the vast spectrum of what science fiction and fantasy aims to illuminate, displaying the full gamut of the human experience, interrogating our hopes and our fears—of not just what we can accomplish or destroy as a person, but what we can a...

An inspirational, instructional, and visually stimulating guide to sketching and drawing. Dare to Sketch is filled with practical tips about which materials to use, a variety of subject matter ranging from easy to more challenging, and wisdom about overcoming creative blocks and fear of making mistakes.A whimsical beginner's guide to sketching, covering all of the important basics: what kind of notebook to buy, what drawing materials to use, ideas for subj...