Sara Eliza Johnson's stunning, deeply visceral first collection, Bone Map (2013 National Poetry Series Winner), pulls shards of tenderness from a world on the verge of collapse, where violence and terror infuse the body, the landscape, and dreams: a handful of blackberries offered from bloodied arms, bee stings likened to pulses of sunlight, a honeycomb of marrow exposed. “All moments will shine if you cut them open. / Will glisten like entrails in the sun.” With figurative language that makes long, associative leaps, and with metaphors and images that continually resurrect themselves across poems, the collection builds and transforms its world through a locomotive echo—a regenerative force—that comes to parallel the psychic quest for redemption that unfolds in its second half. The result is a deeply affecting composition that will establish the already decorated young author as an important and vital new voice in American poetry.
They left in the middle of the night—often carrying little more than the knowledge to follow the North Star. Between 1830 and the end of the Civil War in 1865, an estimated one hundred thousand slaves became passengers on the Underground Railroad, a journey of untold hardship, in search of freedom. In Through Darkness to Light: Photographs Along the Underground Railroad, Jeanine Michna-Bales presents a remarkable series of images following a route from the cotton plantations of central Louisiana, through the cypress swamps of Mississippi and the plains of Indiana, north to the Canadian border— a path of nearly fourteen hundred miles. The culmination of a ten-year research quest, Through Darkness to Light imagines a journey along the Underground Railroad as it might have appeared to any freedom seeker. Framing the powerful visual narrative is an introduction by Michna-Bales; a foreword by noted politician, pastor, and civil rights activist Andrew J. Young; and essays by Fergus M. Bordewich, Robert F. Darden, and Eric R. Jackson.
In 1925, Edwin A. Alderman, president of the University of Virginia, fulfilled a long-held dream by establishing a magazine at the institution founded by Thomas Jefferson just over one hundred years earlier. Not only did Alderman initiate publication of the Virginia Quarterly Review, he contributed an essay to its inaugural issue. Appearing as the first selection in this new volume of nonfiction from the VQR, Alderman's "Edgar Allan Poe and the University of Virginia" reflects the rare combination of literary sensibility and immersion in the political and social issues of the day, which has characterized the journal throughout its seventy-five-year history. As Alderman writes, "I may be frank and say that there was a time when Poe did not greatly appeal to me. I felt the sheer, clear beauty of his song..., but his detachment from the world of men, where my interests most centered, left me unresponsive and simply curious.... I have come, however, to see the limitations of that view, and to behold something admirable and strange and wonderful in this proud, gifted man." While the style and diction of the contributions have changed in the years since that first spring issue, a similar clarity of thought, deep intelligence, candor, and command of language can be found in every one of the fifty one essays assembled here by Alexander Burnham. From its home at One West Range, a few doors down from Poe's own room, the VQR has welcomed to its pages scholars such as Dumas Malone and Robert Coles, and writers whose books have become international bestsellers, including Arthur C. Clarke and Frances Mayes. Included here are some of the twentieth century's most brilliant thinkers and stylists, such international literary, political, and intellectual figures as Andre Gide, D. H. Lawrence, Aldous Huxley, Evelyn Waugh, T. S. Eliot, Eleanor Roosevelt, Thomas Mann, Jean-Paul Sartre, Bertrand Russell, and Robert Graves. George F. Kennan muses on "The Experience of Writing History," Henry Steele Commager asks "Do We Have a Class Society?," and Edmund S. Morgan considers the aloof character of George Washington. Carlos Baker tracks Ezra Pound through Venice, and Scott Donaldson ponders "The Jilting of Ernest Hemingway." These leading lights share space, as they do in every volume of the journal, with lesser-known but no less talented writers ruminating on the Battle of the Bulge, the Berlin Wall, the Bomb, and Vietnam, on growing up in Hollywood and living in Charlottesville, Virginia. Writers of the South are fittingly represented by Thomas Wolfe, Mary Lee Settle, and Louis D. Rubin Jr., but a quick scan of the table of contents reveals that the VQR has never been a regional magazine. As the current editor, Staige D. Blackford writes in his preface, "Since its inception, the Virginia Quarterly Review has tried to offer its readers a variety of essays on a variety of topics ranging from foreign affairs to domestic politics, from literature to travel, from sports to sex, from music to medicine." On the occasion of its seventy-fifth anniversary, We Write for Our Own Time amply and entertainingly reflects what the VQR's masthead has always proclaimed as its identity: "A National Journal of Literature and Discussion."
Take a stroll through the City by the Bay with renowned artist Wendy MacNaughton in this collection of illustrated documentaries. With her beloved city as a backdrop, a sketchbook in hand, and a natural sense of curiosity, MacNaughton spent months getting to know people in their own neighborhoods, drawing them and recording their words. Her street-smart graphic journalism is as diverse and beautiful as San Francisco itself, ranging from the vendors at the farmers' market to people combing the shelves at the public library, from MUNI drivers to the bison of Golden Gate Park, and much more. Meanwhile in San Francisco offers both lifelong residents and those just blowing through with the fog an opportunity to see the city with new eyes.
ONE OF TIME'S 10 BEST FICTION BOOKS OF 2020. Longlisted for the Joyce Carol Oates Prize. Named a Best Book of 2020 by NPR, Bustle, Good Housekeeping, the New York Public Library, Library Journal, Lit Hub, Electric Literature, and Tor.com "As enchanting as fairy tales, as mysterious as dreams, these exquisitely composed fictions are as urgent and original as any being written today.” —Sigrid Nunez, author of The Friend, winner of the 2018 National Book Award for Fiction An urgent and unsettling collection of women on the verge from Laura van den Berg, author of The Third Hotel I Hold a Wolf by the Ears, Laura van den Berg’s first story collection since her prizewinning book The Isle of Youth, draws readers into a world of wholly original, sideways ghost stories that linger in the mouth and the mind. Both timeless and urgent, these eleven stories confront misogyny, violence, and the impossible economics of America with van den Berg’s trademark spiky humor and surreal eye. Moving from the peculiarities of Florida to liminal spaces of travel in Mexico City, Sicily, and Iceland, I Hold a Wolf by the Ears is uncannily attuned to our current moment, and to the fears we reveal to no one but ourselves. In “Lizards,” a man mutes his wife’s anxieties by giving her a LaCroix-like seltzer laced with sedatives. In the title story, a woman poses as her more successful sister during a botched Italian holiday, a choice that brings about strange and destructive consequences, while in “Karolina,” a woman discovers her prickly ex-sister-in-law in the aftermath of an earthquake and is forced to face the truth about her violent brother. I Hold a Wolf by the Ears presents a collection of women on the verge, trying to grasp what’s left of life: grieving, divorced, and hyperaware, searching, vulnerable, and unhinged, they exist in a world that deviates from our own only when you look too closely. With remarkable control and transcendent talent, van den Berg dissolves, in the words of the narrator of “Slumberland,” “that border between magic and annihilation,” and further establishes herself as a defining fiction writer of our time.
An on-the-ground, intimate tour of the human toll of the nation's foreclosure crisis While working with his father's small company that "trashes out"— enters and empties—foreclosed homes in Florida, Paul Reyes wrote Exiles in Eden, a hard-hitting, personal, and poetic portrayal of his own family and the people and communities affected by the foreclosure crisis. Grounded in Florida and Reyes family history, and with character-driven visits to the dark corners of this crisis—including with those who are calling for revolution—Reyes explores the human element of this frightening rattling of the American Dream. From examining the unique "ecosystems" of each failed mortgage to witnessing parts of abandoned Florida returning to its wild natural state, Reyes takes the reader far from the machinations of Wall Street to the sun-baked side streets where the true costs of this crisis can be seen. The result is an extraordinary book about the allure and dream of home—and a portrait of an America where the exiled insist on the right to their own America dreams, even as the terms are forcibly redrawn.
