"An impressively original novel. . . . comic in its vision [yet] serious, constantly surprising in its twists of plot and its reflections upon life." — Wall Street JournalMoving from Massachusetts to Kansas in 1855 with his new wife and a group of German carpenters, Gordon McKay is dead set on making his fortune raising bees—undaunted by Missouri border ruffians, newly-minted Darwinism, or the unsettled politics of a country on the brink of civil war.

In the early 1920s, nearly blind physics prodigy Mourly Vold finds out how to tap into the nation's long distance telephone lines. With the help of Alexander Graham Bell, Vold tries to warn the phone companies that would-be saboteurs could do the same thing, but they ignore him. Unfortunately, his taps do catch the notice of William Randolph Hearst, who hires Thomas Edison to get to the bottom of them—and the chase is on!

Bray seafront meets a garden of white roses. A migrant driver cleans his bus windows and a castaway lover follows new stars. Three sisters covet a tea-set and a stowaway rabbit escapes on the motorway. Fresh baked bread hugs a regretful holiday embrace and a cargo manifest reveals carefully boxed units of love and rage.This is what is washed to shore when eight writers and five photographers joined forces at the Mermaid Arts Centre. This is the cargo of our souls.The anthol...

What was life like for the scientists working at Los Alamos? Thomas McMahon imagines this life through the wide eyes of young Tim MacLaurin, the thirteen-year-old son of an MIT physicist who, inspired by a young woman named Maryann, worked on the project. Filled with the sensuous excitement of scientific discovery and the outrageous behavior of people pushed beyond their limits, Principles of American Nuclear Chemistry is a beautifully written coming-of-age story that explores the...

"An American Childhood more than takes the reader's breath away. It consumes you as you consume it, so that, when you have put down this book, you're a different person, one who has virtually experienced another childhood." — Chicago TribuneA book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburg...

**It’s holiday season in Absaroka County and Sheriff Walt Longmire gets personal in this delightful collection of four short stories from New York Times–bestselling author Craig Johnson.The hit drama Longmire is now streaming on Paramount+**Full of Longmire’s dry wit and good heart, Christmas in Absaroka County is a holiday must-have for every Longmire and Craig Johnson fan, and it also includes the first chapter of The Cold Dish...

"A groundbreaking work about race and the American landscape, and a deep meditation on nature…wise and beautiful."—Helen Macdonald, author of H is for HawkA Foreword Reviews Best Book of the Year and Nautilus Silver Award WinnerIn me, there is the red of miry clay, the brown of spring floods, the gold of ripening tobacco. All of these hues are me; I am, in the deepest sense, colored.Dating back to slavery, Edgefield County...

Finalist for the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize, a New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice, a Barnes & Noble Discover Great New Writers Selection, an Indies Choice Debut Pick, an Amazon Best Book of the Month, and winner of two New Mexico-Arizona Book Awards.The “haunting . . . impressive” (NYTBR) National Bestseller-imagining the untold human history of the making of the atomic bomb.They arrived in New Mexico ready for adventure, ...

From one of the world's most beloved writers and New York Times bestselling author of A Walk in the Woods and The Body, a vivid, nostalgic, and utterly hilarious memoir of growing up in the 1950s.Bill Bryson was born in the middle of the American century—1951—in the middle of the United States—Des Moines, Iowa—in the middle of the largest generation in American history—the baby boomers. As one of the best and funniest writers alive, he is...

This New York Times bestseller by the author of Blue Highways is "a majestic survey of land and time and people in a single county of the Kansas plains" ( Hungry Mind Review).William Least Heat-Moon travels by car and on foot into the core of our continent, focusing on the landscape and history of Chase County—a sparsely populated tallgrass prairie in the Flint Hills of central Kansas—exploring its land, plants, animals, and people until ...

Most people think of New Jersey as a suburban-industrial corridor that runs between New York and Philadelphia. Yet in the low center of the state is a near wilderness, larger than most national parks, which has been known since the seventeenth century as the Pine Barrens.The term refers to the predominant trees in the vast forests that cover the area and to the quality of the soils below, which are too sandy and acid to be good for farming. On all sides, however, developments of on...

Although Gerd Heinrich, a devoted naturalist, specialized in wasps, Bernd Heinrich tried to distance himself from his "old-fashioned" father, becoming a hybrid: a modern, experimental biologist with a naturalist's sensibilities.In this extraordinary memoir, the award-winning author shares the ways in which his relationship with his father, combined with his unique childhood, molded him into the scientist, and man, he is today. From Gerd's days as a soldier in Europe and the family'...