The stories in William Lychack's dazzling new collection, The Architect of Flowers, explore the dear and inevitable distance between people in loving relationships and find hope in dark situations. With tiny, precise details, Lychack observes the overlooked moments of everyday life—the small failings between parents and children, the long-held secrets in married life.A small-town policeman brings himself to shoot a family's injured dog; an old woman secretly trains a crow to steal f...

A lyrical and evocative memoir from Frances Mayes, the Bard of Tuscany, about coming of age in the Deep South and the region’s powerful influence on her life.The author of three beloved books about her life in Italy, including Under the Tuscan Sun and Every Day in Tuscany, Frances Mayes revisits the turning points that defined her early years in Fitzgerald, Georgia. With her signature style and grace, Mayes explores the power of landscape, the ide...

This timeless classic now features a foreword written by New York Times bestselling author Judy Blume, as well as an exclusive interview with Beverly Cleary herself!In the first novel from Newbery Medal–winning author Beverly Cleary, boys and girls alike will be charmed instantly by an average boy whose life is turned upside down when he meets a lovable puppy with a nose for mischief.Just as Henry Huggins is complaining that nothing exciting ever happens, a friendly dog sit...

From the New York Times columnist, a portrait of a family and the cycles of joy and grief that mark the natural world: "Has the makings of an American classic." —Ann PatchettGrowing up in Alabama, Margaret Renkl was a devoted reader, an explorer of riverbeds and red-dirt roads, and a fiercely loved daughter. Here, in brief essays, she traces a tender and honest portrait of her complicated parents—her exuberant, creative mother; her steady, supportive father...

This trilogy of brilliant novels - The Sportswriter, Independence Day, and The Lay of the Land - that charts the life and times of one of the most beloved and enduring characters in modern fiction.When we meet Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter, his unguarded voice instantly wins us over and pulls us into a life that has been irrevocably changed by the loss of a marriage, a career, a child. We then follow Frank, ever brilliantly and hilariously o...

This classic story of a boy, a dog, and small-town America is "a rich experience all around.... Skip turns out to be a dog worth writing about.... I'd take him home in a shot" (The New York Times Book Review).In 1943 in a sleepy town on the banks of the Yazoo River, a boy fell in love with a puppy with a lively gait and an intelligent way of listening. The two grew up together having the most wonderful adventures. My Dog Skip belongs on the same s...

James Sallis is one of our great stylists and storytellers, whose deep interest in human nature is expressed in the powerful stories of men too often at odds with themselves as well as with the world around them.Where Turner moved is one of America's lost places, halfway between Memphis and forever. A place where you can bury the past and escape the pain of human contact, where you are left alone unless you want company, where conversation happens only when there's...

NBCC Award Winner: "The narrative lyrics in this remarkable collection . . . could stand as compressed stories about anxiety and the body." — The New York TimesVulnerable, tender, acute, these are serious poems, brave poems, exploring with honesty the ambiguous moment between the rapture of youth and the grace of acceptance. A daughter tends to aging parents. A woman struggles with infertility—"What if, instead of carrying / a child, I am supposed to carry ...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • The first volume of collected short fiction from the award–winning author of The Tortilla Curtain, featuring sixty-eight “varied, clever, and delightful” (The Chicago Tribune) short stories, including seven never-before-published tales“Each [story hops] with manic energy . . . at his vaulting, imaginative best Boyle suggests the bastard child of Flannery O’Connor and Monty Python.”—The Miami Her...

"A deeply beautiful book, with the fierce galloping pace of a great novel."—Liz Rosenberg Boston GlobeInformed by the death of a beloved brother, here are the stories of childhood, its thicket of sex and sorrow and joy, boys and girls growing into men and women, stories of a brother who in his dying could teach how to be most alive. What the Living Do reflects "a new form of confessional poetry, one shared to some degree by other women poets such ...

Jim Harrison's first novel—a walk on the wild side from "a force of nature in American letters" ( The Seattle Times).The *New York Times–*bestselling author of thirty-nine books of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry—including Legends of the Fall, Dalva, and Returning to Earth—Jim Harrison was one of our most beloved and acclaimed writers, adored by both readers and critics. Praised as "a raunchy, funny, swaggering, angry, cocksure b...

A man falls from a roof whilst spying on his beautiful widowed neighbour. A newly married couple seeking enlightenment take a three year vow of silence and move to a yurt in the Arizona desert. A handsome young man works in real-estate by day, but has a far more sinister profession by night. An elderly woman is determined to return to her home in the countryside, despite the knowledge that in doing so she may be signing her own death warrant. Giant men are kept in cages to ensure their nig...