Maine curmudgeon John Gould offers humorous tongue-in-cheek advice for fathers-to-be with a non-medical, non-technical, non-scientific explanation of the masculine side of the matter, with much that is useful and nothing that is wholly useless.

Twelve Grindstones continues the laughter and wisdom, the leg-pulling and the literate chuckling of John Gould. Starting down the road to hilarity, there are some old stories and some new stories, all of them great stories from the canon of Maine folklore. Within are some long and some tall tales about blueberry picking, railroading, wood buying, lobster wars, and bootlegging.So sit down and put your feet up and prepare for some of the most amusing, preposterous, and heartwarming t...

There used to be a time when marvelous skyrockets could be purchased for a dime and the iceman came around once a week, when throwing a cap on and off took special talent and pants had watch pockets. When John Gould was young it didn't take much to amuse a boy. A boy would wake up in the morning ready to be "amazed all day long at all manner of things."Warmth, humor, nostalgia--these pages are filled with them, all conveyed lovingly in John Gould's signature wit. For anyone who has...

In 1940, the 1780-farmhouse that noted Maine essayist and curmudgeon John Gould’s great-grandfather built burned to the ground. To honor the generations that came before him, Gould there and then decided to rebuild the house in Lisbon Falls. Like his great-grandfather, Gould cut the timbers from the same woodlot, and the new house rose so smoothly, it seemed as if Great-Grandfather Jacob was building it himself. Memories clung to every beam and rafter and this host of recollections form th...

Another in John Gould's Maine series, And One to Grow On: Recollections of a Maine Boyhood, originally published in 1948, is a wonderful collection of anecdotes from the author's very own boyhood in his hometown—where the mailman was a spiritualist, the harbor master rated a Navy celebration, a circus went bankrupt, and practical jokers were well loved. The maybasketing, the church suppers, the picnics, fishing, are all vividly remembered…There is the story of Sophie whose death pro...

Beginning with the legendary story of a man in Jonesport (or was it Dexter or Waterford or Litchfield?) who raffled off his horse, which incidentally had been dead for some time, these twenty-nine tales cover the length and breadth of Maine and extend back to the sixteenth-century fishing camps that were set up a hundred years before Jamestown and Plymouth.Learn about the origin and history of “schoolmarms,” along with other classic tales on Down East thrift, the evils of drink, Mai...

John Gould believes that food should consist mostly of good things to eat. Here, he summons up, with a generous garnish of risible anecdote, an earlier day when natural foods were the only kind there were and meals were lovingly prepared. Recalling simpler days, Gould waxes nostalgic about such subjects as bread, coffee, and molasses cookies. Being of practical mind, he even throws in a few mouth-tingling recipes--from custard pies to clambakes. Rounded out with humorous drawings from his ...

Part fable, part folklore, The Fastest Hound Dog in the State of Maine is Yankee story telling at its very best. A man needs a dog to catch long-legged rabbits, so he buys a hound with longer legs than the rabbits. It's the fastest dog he's ever seen--the fastest dog anyone has ever seen. The dog is so fast, in fact, the man takes on the Bangor & Aroostook Railroad in some friendly competition. Hilarity ensues.Based on Maine folklore, and told as only John Gould can tell it, this s...

56 very short stories about death from Giller Prize finalist John GouldThe End of Me is an astonishing set of sudden stories about the experience of mortality. With an ear attuned to the uncanny and the ironic, John Gould catches his characters at moments of illumination as they encounter the mystery of their finite being. A marooned astronaut bonds with a bereft cat; kids pelt a funeral procession with plums; a young girl ponders the brief brutality of he...

John Gould's unrestrained humor is a pleasure--the dry Yankee kind that makes you laugh in retrospect. Throughout Neither Hay Nor Grass radiates the happy glow of warm family relationships studded with shrewd appraisals of nature--human, animal, governmental, and divine. Gould's signature salty irreverence is on full display as water pollution, bankers, income tax, education, and interior decorators all come in for a hearty lacing. At the same time, his articulate and boundless delight in ...

Maine's nationally acclaimed chronicler proves here that "the entire history of North America began in Maine."Long before Columbus sold Isabella his idea of a passage to Cathay, Irish fishermen went ashore in Maine to dry their cod. It's all here in this wild surmising history, from a columnist for the Christian Science Monitor.

John Gould Fletcher was born in Little Rock, Arkansas on the 3rd of January 1886 to a socially prominent family.He was educated at Phillips Academy, Andover before advancing to Harvard University, which he attended from 1903 to 1907, before dropping out after his father's death.As a young man Fletcher spent many years in England where he became part of the influential Imagist group of poets together with Amy Lowell and Ezra Pound.His first marriage came from a resum...