In the early eightiesm three extraordinary events interrupted Alice Walker's peaceful, reclusive life--the publication of the bestselling novel The Color Purple, the Pulitzer Prize, and an offer from Spielberg to make her novel into a film. This book chronicles that period of transition from recluse to public figure, and invites us to contemplate, along with her, the true significance of unanticipated gifts.
An impressive new collection from a poet whose previous book was a finalist for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award Taking its title from Heraclitus's most famous fragment, The River Twice is an elegiac meditation on impermanence and change. The world presented in these poems is a fluid one in which so much—including space and time, the subterranean realm of dreams, and language itself—seems protean, as the speaker's previously familiar understanding of the self and the larger systems around it gives way. Kathleen Graber’s poems wander widely, from the epistolary to the essayistic, shuffling the remarkable and unremarkable flotsam of contemporary life. One thought, one memory, one bit of news flows into the next. Yet, in a century devoted to exponentially increasing speed, The River Twice unfolds at the slow pace of a river bend. While the warm light of ideas and things flashes upon the surface, that which endures remains elusive—something glimpsed only for an instant before it is gone.
Jay McInerney has written unique, witty, vinous essays for over a decade. Here, with his trademark flair and expertise, McInerney provides a master class in the almost infinite varieties of wine, creating a collage of the people and places that produce it all over the world, from historic past to the often confusing present. Stretching from France and South Africa to Australia and New Zealand, McInerney's tour is a comprehensive and thirst-inducing expedition that explores viticulture, investigates great champagne and delves into a vast array of styles, capturing the passion that so many people feel for the world of wine.
Acclaimed travel writer Pam Mandel's thrilling account of a life-defining journey from the California suburbs to Israel to the Himalayan peaks and back. Given the choice, Pam Mandel would say no and stay home. It was getting her nowhere, so she decided to say yes. Yes to hard work and hitch-hiking, to mean boyfriends and dirty travel, to unfolding the map and walking to its edges. Yes to unknown countries, night shifts, language lessons, bad decisions, to anything to make her feel real, visible, alive. A product of beige California suburbs, Mandel was overlooked and unexceptional. When her father ships her off on a youth group tour of Israel, he inadvertently catapults his seventeen-year-old daughter into a world of angry European backpackers, seize-the-day Israelis, and the fall out of cold war-era politics. Border violence hadn't been on the birthright tour agenda. But then neither had domestic violence, going broke, getting wasted, getting sick, or getting lost. With no guidance and no particular plan, utterly unprepared for what lies ahead, Mandel says yes to everything and everyone, embarking on an adventure across three continents and thousands of miles, from a cold water London flat to rural Pakistan, from the Nile River Delta to the snowy peaks of Ladakh and finally, back home to California, determined to shape a life that is truly hers. An extraordinary memoir of going away and growing up, The Same River Twice follows Mandel's tangled journey and shows how travel teaches and changes us, even while it helps us become exactly who we have been all along.
A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • Odile Mével is a French clothing designer, her American husband, Max, an independent filmmaker. When Odile agrees to buy a selection of ceremonial May Day banners in the Soviet Union and deliver the contraband to Paris she earns a new job description: smuggler. Soon her fellow courier disappears, her apartment is ransacked, and her friend’s houseboat is firebombed. While Max has no inkling of Odile’s dealings, he finds himself embroiled in a baffling film world mystery of his own. As their escapades deepen and their deceptions multiply, Odile and Max discover their secrets are connected—endangering not only their marriage but their lives.
Ever since a childhood tragedy bonded Jessica Jensen to Oregon’s mighty Nesika River, she has seen herself as its guardian. Now a courageous field biologist, she has just finished gathering scientific evidence that could bring about the dismantling of the massive hydro dam that threatens to destroy her river. But then she discovers that her boss is suppressing her scientific evidence―leaving the dam’s fate at the mercy of a far-reaching corporate conspiracy—and she falls into a current of loss and desperation. As Jess’s life spirals out of control, she mysteriously starts to make contact with Piah, a member of the Native American Molalla tribe who lived on the riverbanks of the Nesika two hundred years before Jess. Piah, too, faces a terrible threat that could destroy all that’s left of her world. As the veil between their two worlds begins to lift, each woman learns important lessons from the other about how to love, and to rekindle their faith in the future—even in the face of tragic loss and uncertainty.
Few books have captured the haunting world of music and rivers and of the sport they provide as well as A River Never Sleeps. Roderick L. Haig-Brown writes of fishing not just as a sport, but also as an art. He knows moving water and the life within it—its subtlest mysteries and perpetual delights. He is a man who knows fish lore as few people ever will, and the legends and history of a great sport. Month by month, he takes you from river to river, down at last to the saltwater and the sea: in January, searching for the steelhead in the dark, cold water; in May, fishing for bright, sea-run cutthroats; and on to the chilly days of October and the majestic run of spawning salmon. All the great joy of angling is here: the thrill of fishing during a thunderstorm, the sight of a river in freshet or a river calm and hushed, the suspense of a skillful campaign to capture some half-glimpsed trout or salmon of extraordinary size, and the excitement of playing and landing a momentous fish. A River Never Sleeps is one of the enduring classics of angling. It will provide a rich reading experience for all who love fishing or rivers. Skyhorse Publishing is proud to publish a broad range of books for fishermen. Our books for anglers include titles that focus on fly fishing, bait fishing, fly-casting, spin casting, deep sea fishing, and surf fishing. Our books offer both practical advice on tackle, techniques, knots, and more, as well as lyrical prose on fishing for bass, trout, salmon, crappie, baitfish, catfish, and more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to publishing books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked by other publishers and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.
"Identity" has become a core concept of the social and cultural sciences. Bringing together perspectives from sociology, anthropology, psychology, history, and literary criticism, this book offers a comprehensive and critical overview on how this concept is currently used and how it relates to memory and constructions of historical meaning.
The New York Times–bestselling classic set amid the mountains and streams of early twentieth-century Montana, “as beautiful as anything in Thoreau or Hemingway” (Chicago Tribune). When Norman Maclean sent the manuscript of A River Runs Through It and Other Stories to New York publishers, he received a slew of rejections. One editor, so the story goes, replied, “it has trees in it.” Today, the title novella is recognized as one of the great American tales of the twentieth century, and Maclean as one of the most beloved writers of our time. The finely distilled product of a long life of often surprising rapture—for fly-fishing, for the woods, for the interlocked beauty of life and art—A River Runs Through It has established itself as a classic of the American West filled with beautiful prose and understated emotional insights. Based on Maclean’s own experiences as a young man, the book’s two novellas and short story are set in the small towns and mountains of western Montana. It is a world populated with drunks, loggers, card sharks, and whores, but also one rich in the pleasures of fly-fishing, logging, cribbage, and family. By turns raunchy and elegiac, these superb tales express, in Maclean’s own words, “a little of the love I have for the earth as it goes by.” “Maclean’s book—acerbic, laconic, deadpan—rings out of a rich American tradition that includes Mark Twain, Kin Hubbard, Richard Bissell, Jean Shepherd, and Nelson Algren.” —New York Times Book Review Includes a new foreword by Robert Redford, director of the Academy Award–winning film adaptation
Two childhood friends from Scotland and two illegitimate half-brothers from the south suffer and enjoy all manner of bizarre adventures that are somehow interconnected.
