Hemingway once said, "There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit at a typewriter and bleed." That may be true, but a bottle of wine won’t hurt, and that is essentially what’s to be found in this slim volume of unique and powerful stories and parables. Author Pae Veo explores the life lessons to be learned in his often-Kafkaesque realms: isolation, failure, addiction, moral dilemmas and the absurdities of everyday life. In places where hope rarely ventures, imagination usually...

Most poets are or have been at one time or another members of what Mark Strand here calls “The Midnight Club”: they are insomniacs, or feel most productive in the middle of the night, or, if nothing else, are people whose work requires an openness to the dreams, visions, and scraps of inspired language that may drift across our path in the wee hours. In this selection, drawn from Knopf’s Poem-a-Day program (the daily e-mails we’ve sent to our fans every April for the last dozen years or mo...

**From the internationally celebrated author of Fugitive Pieces and the Griffin Poetry Prize-shortlisted collection Correspondences—and Toronto's Poet Laureate—comes a profoundly moving new collection of poetry of love and memory.In All We Saw, Anne Michaels returns to poetry with strikingly original lyrics to explore one of her essential concerns: "what love makes us capable of, and incapable of." In this passionate, piercing short collection, d...

Jack Prelutsky’s exploration of outer space is not for the faint of heart. No friendly little E.T.–type aliens await your arrival. There are many imaginative ways to perish in these darkly comedic cautionary verses about unexplored worlds so far beyond our solar system. The final poem is an environmental tour de force that packs a wallop. Here are poems the older reader will find great fun to memorize and rattle off to anyone who will listen! And there is a special bonus: anagrams for the ...

For thirty years now the Phoenix Poets series has been publishing the best poets working in English, from young poets publishing their first books to renowned masters at the peak of storied careers. This sample presents some of the best poets and poems from those three decades—it’s sure to whet your appetite and get you coming back for more!

MAN AND HIS MACHINES ARE DOING A GREAT JOB OF CONQUERING NATURE OF COURSE. DOES ANYONE DOUBT IT?

This carefully crafted ebook: "The Mocking-Bird (A Short Story From The American Civil War)" is formatted for your eReader with a functional and detailed table of contents. This story, first published in 1891, forms one of the great antiwar statements in American literature.Ambrose Gwinnett Bierce (1842 – 1914?) was an American satirist, critic, poet, editor and journalist. Bierce became a prolific author of short stories often humorous and sometimes bitter or macabre. He spoke out ...

A dream of desolation and death. A nightmare vision of a looming end, surrounded by hidden enemies and desperate strangers.His love taken. His hope lost. His life forfeit because of his failures, his inadequacies.How can this end be a beginning? And how can a dream seem so real?

“Tracy K. Smith’s poetry is an awakening itself.” —VogueCelebrated for its extraordinary intelligence and exhilarating range, the poetry of Tracy K. Smith opens up vast questions. Such Color: New and Selected Poems, her first career-spanning volume, traces an increasingly audacious commitment to exploring the unknowable, the immense mysteries of existence. Each of Smith’s four collections moves farther outward: when one seems to reach the limits o...

Gum. It’s been around for centuries—from the ancient Greeks to the American Indians, everyone’s chewed it. But the best kind of gum—bubble gum!—wasn’t invented until 1928, when an enterprising young accountant at Fleer Gum and Candy used his spare time to experiment with different recipes. Bubble-blowing kids everywhere will be delighted with Megan McCarthy’s entertaining pictures and engaging fun facts as they learn the history behind the pink perfection of Dubble Bubble.

The Best American Poetry series is a beloved mainstay of American poetry. This year's edition was edited by one of the most admired and acclaimed poets of his generation, Charles Wright. Known for his meditative and beautiful observations of landscape, change, and time,Wright brings his particular sensibility to this year's anthology, which contains an ecumenical slant that is unprecedented for the series. He has gathered an astonishing selection of work that incl...

When participants in a group-therapy session are asked to describe their first memories, long-buried demons and emotions flood out. It’s a valuable exercise for everyone except the story’s narrator.The thirteen stories in Andrew Pyper’s intense and artful short-story collection, Kiss Me, deal with the issues, sensibilities and intangible estrangements of contemporary youth. But there are no neat and tidy coming-of-age passages here: these are narratives about reaching out—...