The charming, return-to-the-land memoir of a refugee family who flees Nazi Germany and finds their true home in the backwoods of rural VermontAlice and Carl Zuckmayer lived at the center of Weimar-era Berlin. She was a former actor turned medical student, he was a playwright, and their circle of friends included Stefan Zweig, Alma Mahler, and Bertolt Brecht. But then the Nazis took over, and Carl’s most recent success—a play satirizing German militarism—impressed t...

"One of the distinguished gardening books of our time," from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Omnivore's Dilemma ( USA Today).Chosen by the American Horticultural Society as one of the 75 greatest books ever written about gardeningAfter Michael Pollan bought an old Connecticut dairy farm, he planted a garden and attempted to follow Thoreau's example: do not impose your will upon the wilder...

A "delightful, witty" memoir about starting over as a beekeeper in the Ozarks ( Library Journal).Alone on a small Missouri farm after a thirty-year marriage, Sue Hubbell found a new love—of the winged, buzzing variety. Left with little but the commercial beekeeping and honey-producing business she started with her husband, Hubbell found solace in the natural world. Then she began to write, challenging herself to tell the absolute truth about her life and th...

Part memoir, part micro-history, this is an exploration of the present through the lens of the past.We all know that the best way to study a foreign language is to go to a country where it's spoken, but can the same immersion method be applied to history? How do interactions with antique objects influence perceptions of the modern world?From Victorian beauty regimes to nineteenth-century bicycles, custard recipes to taxidermy experiments, oil lamps to an ic...

"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...

Illustrations by William Nicholson The Velveteen Rabbit or How Toys Become Real is a children's novel written by Margery Williams and illustrated by William Nicholson. It chronicles the story of a stuffed rabbit and his quest to become real through the love of his owner. The book was first published in 1922 and has been republished many times since. - Excerpted from Wikipedia the free encyclopedia.

A fable about the power of books and knowledge, "finely balanced between pathos and comedy," from one of Czechoslovakia's most popular authors ( Los Angeles Times).A New York Times Notable BookHaňtá has been compacting trash for thirty-five years. Every evening, he rescues books from the jaws of his hydraulic press, carries them home, and fills his house with them. Haňtá may be an idiot, as his boss calls him, but he is an idiot with a difference—t...

The forty-seven new works in this volume include poems on crickets, toads, trout lilies, black snakes, goldenrod, bears, greeting the morning, watching the deer, and, finally, lingering in happiness. Each poem is imbued with the extraordinary perceptions of a poet who considers the everyday in our lives and the natural world around us and finds a multitude of reasons to wake early.

"Some of the finest examples of contemporary, genuinely American prose. White's style incorporates eloquence without affection, profundity without pomposity, and wit without frivolity or hostility. Like his predecessors Thoreau and Twain, White's creative, humane, and graceful perceptions are an education for the sensibilities." — Washington PostThe classic collection by one of the greatest essayists of our time.Selected by E.B. White himself, this indispensable vo...

In Sleepless Nights a woman looks back on her life—the parade of people, the shifting background of place—and assembles a scrapbook of memories, reflections, portraits, letters, wishes, and dreams. An inspired fusion of fact and invention, this beautifully realized, hard-bitten, lyrical book is not only Elizabeth Hardwick’s finest fiction but one of the outstanding contributions to American literature of the last fifty years.

John Ashbery writes like no one else among contemporary American poets. In the construction of his intricate patterns, he uses words much as the contemporary painter uses form and color- words painstakingly chosen as conveyors of precise meaning, not as representations of sound. These linked in unexpected juxtapositions, at first glance unrelated and even anarchic, in the end create by their clashing interplay a structure of dazzling brilliance and strong emotional impact. From this preocc...

The writing of this book is for several reasons: one of which is an attempt to clarify to young Hutterites and also non-Hutterites how different we lived seventy-five years ago. I had an eventful childhood, which the readers may compare with their own. To compile a detailed account of colony life and history would be an extensive undertaking. So the reader will have to be content with the few details Ive presented which are relevant to my growing-up experience. Most events which include ot...