August Kleinzahler has earned admiration for his musical, precise, wise, and sometimes madcap poems that are grounded in the wide array of places, people, and most especially voices he has encountered in his real and imaginative worlds. Snow Approaching on the Hudson is a collection that moves seamlessly through the often hypnogogic, porous realms of dreams, the past and present, inner and outer landscapes. His haunting, shifting atmospheres are peopled by characters, intimately portrayed, that are at one historical and invented. The poet's signature rhythmic propulsion serves as the engine for his newest collection, and his always masterful free verse conveys a life thoroughly lived and brilliantly perceived.
In a debut of great delicacy and distinction, a young nature philosopher describes his journey as he follows the northern migration of the snow goose and reflects on the powerful attraction of home. Every spring, millions of geese embark on an arduous three-thousand-mile homeward journey from their winter quarters in the southern United States to their breeding grounds in the Canadian Arctic. One year William Fiennes, recovering from a long illness, decided to go with them. Intrigued by what he’d read about the birds’ extraordinary annual journey, he was also desperate to escape the depression that had dogged his convalescence, and the belief that at age twenty-six, his life had ground to a halt. Part memoir, part nature study, part travelogue, the story of Fiennes’s journey is not just about geese. It’s about homecoming: the birds on their long trip home, the pull of nostalgia, the urge to leave home and the even stronger urge to return. Fiennes is a gifted natural writer with a distinctive voice that is deeply thoughtful, wry and keenly observant. His book vibrates with ideas, with stories and anecdotes, with humankind as well as wild fowl. The joy of being alive, being on the move and – above all – going home are poignantly captured in this intelligent, exuberant book.
To honor FSG's 75th anniversary, here is a unique anthology celebrating the riches and variety of its poetry list—past, present, and future Poetry has been at the heart of Farrar, Straus and Giroux's identity ever since Robert Giroux joined the fledgling company in the mid-1950s, soon bringing T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop onto the list. These extraordinary poets and their successors have been essential in helping define FSG as a publishing house with a unique place in American letters. The FSG Poetry Anthology includes work by almost all of the more than one hundred twenty-five poets whom FSG has published in its seventy-five-year history. Giroux's first generation was augmented by a group of international figures (and Nobel laureates), including Pablo Neruda, Nelly Sachs, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky. Over time the list expanded to includes poets as diverse as Yehuda Amichai, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Grace Paley, Carl Phillips, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, James Schuyler, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, James Wright, and Adam Zagajewski. Today, Henri Cole, francine j. harris, Ishion Hutchinson, Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko, Valzhyna Mort, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Frederick Seidel are among the poets who are continuing FSG's tradition as a discoverer and promoter of the most vital and distinguished contemporary voices. This anthology is a wide-ranging showcase of some of the best poems published in America over the past three generations. It is also a sounding of poetry's present and future.
“With her trademark brio and deep-tissue understanding, Maria Tatar opens the glass casket on this undying story, which retains its power to charm twenty-one times, and counting.” —Gregory Maguire, author of Wicked The story of the rivalry between a beautiful, innocent girl and her cruel and jealous mother has been endlessly repeated and refashioned all over the world. The Brothers Grimm gave this story the name by which we know it best, and in 1937 Walt Disney sweetened their somber version to make the first feature-length, animated fairy tale, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs. Since then, the Disney film has become our cultural touchstone—the innocent heroine, her evil stepmother, the envy that divides them, and a romantic rescue from domestic drudgery and maternal persecution. But each culture has its own way of telling this story of jealousy and competition. An acclaimed folklorist, Maria Tatar brings to life a global melodrama of mother-daughter rivalries that play out in unforgettable variations across countries and cultures. “Fascinating...A strange, beguiling history of stories about beauty, jealousy, and maternal persecution.” —Wall Street Journal “Is the story of Snow White the cruelest, the deepest, the strangest, the most mythopoeic of them all?...Tatar trains a keen eye on the appeal of the bitter conflict between women at the heart of the tale...a feast of rich thoughts...An exciting and authoritative anthology from the wisest good fairy in the world of the fairy tale.” —Marina Warner “The inimitable Maria Tatar offers us a maze of mothers and daughters and within that glorious tangle an archetype with far more meaning than we imagine when we say ‘Snow White.’” —Honor Moore “Shocking yet familiar, these stories...retain the secret whisper of storytelling. This is a properly magical, erudite book.” —Literary Review
The Lands of Silence, A History of Arctic and Antarctic Exploration by Clements Robert Markham, first published in 1921, is a rare manuscript, the original residing in one of the great libraries of the world. This book is a reproduction of that original, which has been scanned and cleaned by state-of-the-art publishing tools for better readability and enhanced appreciation. Restoration Editors' mission is to bring long out of print manuscripts back to life. Some smudges, annotations or unclear text may still exist, due to permanent damage to the original work. We believe the literary significance of the text justifies offering this reproduction, allowing a new generation to appreciate it.
At the midpoint of the twentieth century, the First Nations people of Ontario’s underdeveloped hinterland lived primarily from the land. They congregated in summer in defined communities but in early autumn dispersed to winter camps to hunt, fish, and trap. Increasingly, however, they found they had to adapt to a different way of life, one closer to the Canadian mainstream. While lifestyles and expectations were clearly changing, the native people’s desire to maintain their rich and distinctive cultural traditions remained strong. John Macfie, then an employee with the Ontario Department of Lands and Forests, captured in photographs this turning-point in the lives of the Ojibway, Cre, and Oji-Cree, when their traditional culture still flourished but change was fast approaching.
History of exploration; early voyages for discovery of east and west coasts of northern North America, and overland expeditions of Hearne, Mackenzie, Franklin, Back, Dease and Simpson, and Rae.
Snow White and Rose Red live on the edge of the forest that conceals the elusive border of Faerie. They know enough about Faerie lands and mortal magic to be concerned when they find two human sorcerers setting spells near the border. And when the kindly, intelligent black bear wanders into their cottage some months later, they realize the connection between his plight and the sorcery they saw in the forest. This romantic version of the classic fairy tale features an updated introduction by its editor, Terri Windling.
A Few Acres of Snow allows readers to experience early Canadian history in the words of those who first explored, created, and documented the nation. Providing coast-to-coast representation and featuring a diverse range of social groups, the editors offer a refreshing look at the major events leading up to and including Confederation. Throughout, they rely on a careful selection of personal, formal, and legal documents to tell the story, including early travel narratives, literary writings by Susanna Moodie and Catherine Parr Trail, government reports on slavery in Canada, official letters on Irish immigration, and newspaper articles and speeches on the creation of the Dominion of Canada in 1867. In this trim new edition, each document is introduced with biographical information about the creator. Brand new chapters discuss the Loyalists in Nova Scotia, the War of 1812, and the Beothuk. Also new is a guide to critically reading and engaging with historical documents.
In a career-spanning selection of poems, August Kleinzahler captures the essence of the West's greatest music. In A History of Western Music, August Kleinzahler’s rhythmic, wry, kinetic style captures the ineffable power and beauty of great songs and artists, as well as the potency of our response to them. In this collection, music is inextricable from life, from landscape, and from the people we remember through it. The poet inhabits the minds and milieus of musicians; he hears arpeggios in the salon of Princesse Edmonde de Polignac and listens to the vibrations of a hummingbird through Béla Bartók. Kleinzahler’s verse not only contains the same sonorous beauty as the compositions he writes of but also the vitality and complexity of the moments we associate with them—the way the soundtrack of one’s life becomes defined by the scenes it scores, and vice versa. From John Coltrane to Annie Lenox, from opera to bebop and all the jingles and melodies in between, A History of Western Music is a portrait of the vast range of meaning and memory that music creates and contains in one’s life.
