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"Stern but compassionate, author Wendell Berry raises broader issues that environmentalists rarely focus on . . . In one sense Berry is the voice of a rural agrarian tradition that stretches from rural Kentucky back to the origins of human civilization. But his insights are universal because Our Only World is filled with beautiful, compassionate writing and careful, profound thinking." —Associated PressThe planet's environmental problems respect no national boundaries. From soil erosion and population displacement to climate change and failed energy policies, American governing classes are paid by corporations to pretend that debate is the only democratic necessity and that solutions are capable of withstanding endless delay. Late Capitalism goes about its business of finishing off the planet. And we citizens are left with a shell of what was once proudly described as The American Dream.In this collection of eleven essays, Berry confronts head–on the necessity of clear thinking and direct action. Never one to ignore the present challenge, he understands that only clearly stated questions support the understanding their answers require. For more than fifty years we've had no better spokesman and no more eloquent advocate for the planet, for our families, and for the future of our children and ourselves.

For the full course of his remarkable career, Gary Snyder has continued his study of Eastern culture and philosophies. From the Ainu to the Mongols, from Hokkaido to Kyoto, from the landscapes of China to the backcountry of contemporary Japan, from the temples of Daitokoji to the Yellow River Valley, it is now clear how this work has influenced his poetry, his stance as an environmental and political activist, and his long practice of Zen. Growing up in the Pacific Northwest, Asia became a vocation for Snyder. While most American writers looked to the capitals of Europe for their inspiration, Sndyer looked East. American letters is profoundly indebted to this geographical choice.Long rumored to exist, The Great Clod collects more than a dozen chapters, several published in The Coevolution Quarterly almost forty years ago when Snyder briefly described this work as "The China Book," and several others, the majority, never before published in any form. "Summer in Hokkaido," "Wild in China," "Ink and Charcoal, " "Stories to Save the World," "Walking the Great Ridge," these essays turn from being memoirs of travel to prolonged considerations of art, culture, natural history and religion. Filled with Snyder's remarkable insights and briskly beautiful descriptions, this collection adds enormously to the major corpus of his work, certain to delight and instruct his readers now and forever.

Wendell Berry’s Sabbath Poems are filled with spiritual longing and political extremity, memorials and celebrations, elegies and lyrics, alongside the occasional rants of the Mad Farmer, pushed to the edge yet again by his compatriots and elected officials. With the publication of this new complete edition, it has become increasingly clear that the Sabbath Poems have become the very heart of Berry’s work. And these magnificent poems, taken as a whole for the first time in This Day, have become one of the greatest contributions ever made to American poetry.

"The difference between the Parthenon and the World Trade Center, between a French wine glass and a German beer mug, between Bach and John Philip Sousa, between Sophocles and Shakespeare, between a bicycle and a horse, though explicable by historical moment, necessity, and destiny, is before all else a difference of imagination.The imagination is like the drunk man who has lost his watch, and must get drunk again to find it. It is as intimate as speech and custom, and to trace its ways we need to re-educate our eyes."--Guy Davenport Modernism spawned the greatest explosion of art, architecture, literature, painting, music, and dance of any era since the Renaissance. In its long unfolding, from Yeats, Pound and Eliot to Picasso and Matisse, from Diaghilev and Balanchine to Cunningham and Stravinsky and Cage, the work of Modernism has provided the cultural vocabulary of our time. One of the last pure Modernists, Guy Davenport was perhaps the finest stylist and most protean craftsman of his generation. Publishing more than two dozen books of fiction, essays, poetry and translations over a career of more than forty years, he was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship in 1990. In poetry and prose, Davenport drew upon the most archaic and the most modern of influences to create what he called "assemblages"--lush experiments that often defy classification. Woven throughout is a radical and coherent philosophy of desire, design and human happiness. But never before has Davenport's fiction, nonfiction, poetry and translations been collected together in one compendium. Eight years after his death, "The Guy Davenport Reader" offers the first true introduction to the far-ranging work of this neglected genius.

Praise for "Notes from a Bottle Found on the Beach at Carmel" "A unique tour de force" --"The New York Times Book Review" "One of the most remarkable books that I have read in a long time." --Kenneth Rexroth "Mr. Connell's NOTES are what one intelligent, sensitive artist has been able to salvage from all experience as testimony to the rather pathetic integrity of the human species in the face of extinction. The book is no manual or tract, however, although its political meaning is unmistakable, but a work of art, even a work of high art." --Hayden Carruth

More than 20 years after Where Bigfoot Walks was originally published, Dr. Robert Michael Pyle, a Yale-trained ecologist and a Guggenheim fellow, returns with a brand-new chapter that brings his work on the legend of Bigfoot into the new century

"Sand and stone are Earth's fragmented memory. Each of us, too, is a landscape inscribed by memory and loss. One life-defining lesson Lauret Savoy learned as a young girl was this: the American land did not hate. As an educator and Earth historian, she has tracked the continent's past from the relics of deep time; but the paths of ancestors toward her--paths of free and enslaved Africans, colonists from Europe, and peoples indigenous to this land--lie largely eroded and lost. In this provocative and powerful mosaic of personal journeys and historical inquiry across a continent and time, Savoy explores how the country's still unfolding history, and ideas of 'race, ' have marked her and the land. From twisted terrain within the San Andreas Fault zone to a South Carolina plantation, from national parks to burial grounds, from 'Indian Territory' and the U.S.-Mexico Border to the U.S. capital, Trace grapples with a searing national history to reveal the often unvoiced presence of the past. In distinctive and illuminating prose that is attentive to the rhythms of language and landscapes, she weaves together human stories of migration, silence, and displacement, as epic as the continent they survey, with uplifted mountains, braided streams, and eroded canyons"

Ann Pancake's 2007 novel Strange As This Weather Has Been exposed the devastating fallout of mountaintop removal mining on a single West Virginia family. In Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley, a follow–up collection of eleven astonishing novellas and short stories, Pancake again features characters who are intensely connected to their land––sometimes through love, sometimes through hate––and who experience brokenness and loss, redemption and revelation, often through their relationships to places under siege. Retired strip miners find themselves victimized by the industry that supported them; a family breaks down along generation lines over a fracking lease; children transcend addict parents and adult suicide; an urban woman must confront her skepticism about worlds behind this one when she finds bones through a mysterious force she can't name. Me and My Daddy Listen to Bob Marley explores poverty, class, environmental breakdown and social collapse while also affirming the world's sacredness. Ann Pancake's ear for the Appalachian dialect is both pitch–perfect and respectful, that of one who writes from the heart of this world. Her firsthand knowledge of her rural place and her exquisite depictions of the intricacies of families may remind one of Alice Munro.

This volume reprints the nearly two hundred pieces from his earlier Collected Poems, together with the poems from his most recent collections: Entries, Given, and Leavings, to create an expanded compilation. It contains all the poems from previous collections Mr. Berry wishes to collect, except no selections have been made from his ongoing sequence published as The Sabbath Poems.

“McGraw is wise and occasionally laugh–out–loud funny, with a seventh sense for the perfect turn of phrase . . . This quintessential collection of stories serves as an homage to the form while showcasing McGraw’s stunning talent and deep empathy for the idiosyncrasies, small joys, and despairs of human nature." —Publishers Weekly (starred and boxed review)In Joy, narrators step out of themselves to explain their lives to us, sometimes defensively, sometimes regretfully, other times deceitfully. Voices include those of the impulsive first–time murderer, the depressed pet sitter, the assistant of Patsy Cline, the anxiety–riddled new mother, the aged rock–and–roller, the girlfriend of your husband—human beings often (incredibly) unaware of the turning points staring them in the face."How can stories this brief be so satisfying? . . . [McGraw] deals with the profound, the dire, the mundane, and the ridiculous, paying particular attention to relationships between parents and children, siblings, spouses, criminals, and their victims. While some stories are meant purely to amuse, many are intense and beautiful . . . Fifty–three gems that demonstrate all the things a short story can do. Wow." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

A Russian immigrant narrates the humorous events behind the acquisiton of eight seemingly unimportant possessions which he has brought with him to the United States.

First published in 1971, "The Country of Marriage" is Wendell Berry's fifth volume of poetry. What he calls "an expansive metaphor" is "a farmer's relationship to his land as the basic and central relation of humanity to creation." "Similarly, marriage is the basic and central community tie; it begins and stands for the relation we have to family and to the larger circles of human association. And these relationships are in turn basic to, and may stand for, our relationship to God and to the sustaining mysteries and powers of creation." Each of the thirty-five poems in this collection is concerned with this metaphor. The long sequence that is itself entitled "The Country of Marriage," perhaps the finest single work in the book, is a grave, moving, and beautifully wrought love poem. But the shorter lyrics have an equal grace and beauty--writing that contains the exhilarating lucidity of mountain spring water. And there are most notably, several more poems about the "Mad Farmer," who advises us here to 'every day do something that won't compute.' Berry has here perfected a work that is immediately accessible but that becomes, as we read it again, always more satisfying, reverberant with manifold meanings.