Philip Garrison says his book of essays is “in praise of mixed feelings,” particularly the mixed feelings he and his neighbors have toward the places they came from. His neighborhood is the Columbia Plateau, one of many North American nodes of immigration. Following a meandering, though purposeful trail, Garrison catches hillbillies and newer Mexican arrivals in ambiguous, wary encounters on a set four hundred years in the making, built on a foundation of Native American displacement. Garr...

Set primarily in Mexico and the American Northwest, yet equally at home with Achilleus on the Trojan plains or with Walt Whitman in his New Jersey home, these fifteen essays pass back and forth across international boundaries as easily as they cross the more fluid lines separating past and present. Part biography, part history, Augury is also something of a writer’s journal, a guide to Garrison’s imaginative journeys.

There is a part of Mexico, the west-central area encompassing the state of Jalisco and its capital, Guadalajara, which is the cradle of many significant cultural traditions that most of us associate with that great country: mariachi music, tequila and charreada (rodeos) to name a few. And Jalisco is Michael Hogan's intellectual inspiration for this bird's eye view of Mexico and elsewhere.Hogan writes with deep affection for his adopted country, mixed with an insider's keen interest ...

An essential anthology of an innovative American poetEdward Dorn was not only one of Americas finest poets but a rare critical intelligence and commentator. He was a student of Charles Olson, who helped him to see the American West as a site for his quest for self-knowledge; at the core of his work is a deep sense of place and the people who occupy it, underpinned by a wry ironic dissent. It was Dorns comic-epic masterpiece, Gunslinger, which began appea...

Winner of the Man Booker PrizeWinner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in FictionNamed one of the best books of by The New York Times Book Review and the Wall Street JournalA biting satire about a young man's isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court, Paul Beatty's The Sellout showcases a comic genius at the top of his game. It challenges the...

**This important and timely book from a Pulitzer Prize finalist follows the brutal journey a group of men take to cross the Mexican border."The single most compelling, lucid, and lyrical contemporary account of the absurdity of U.S. border policy" —The Atlantic**In May 2001, a group of men attempted to cross the Mexican border into the desert of southern Arizona, through the deadliest region of the continent, the "Devil's Highway." Three years later, Luis Alberto U...

Jane Doe lives in the shadows under an assumed name. A once-promising anthropologist and an expert on shamanism, everyone thinks she's dead. Or so she hopes.Jimmy Paz is a Cuban-American police detective. Straddling two cultures, he understands things others cannot.When the killings start -- a series of ritualistic murders -- all of Miami is terrified. Especially Jane. She knows the dark truth that Jimmy must desperately search to uncover. As their lives slowly interconnect...

Here is the definitive collection of poetry from one of America’s best-loved writers-now available in paperback. With the publication of this book, eight volumes of poetry were brought back into print, including the early nature-based lyrics of Plain Song, the explosive Outlyer & Ghazals, and the startling "correspondence" with a dead Russian poet in Letters to Yesenin. Also included is an introduction by Harrison, several previously uncollected poems, and "Geo-B...

What begins as a road trip through America soon becomes a journey of discovery into themselves and into the heart of the next-door neighbour they thought they knew. For Wayne Grady, the thrill of landscape and history is tempered by memories of racism and his own family roots. Merilyn Simonds, her ear tuned for the offbeat, finds curious echoes of the ex-pat promised land she grew up with. Together they travel against the tide of American history, followin...

Jim Harrison has probed the breadth of human appetites--for food and drink, for art, for sex, for violence and, most significantly, for the great twin engines of love and death. Perhaps no American writer better appreciates those myriad drives; since the publication of his first collection of poetry . . . Harrison has become their poet laureate.”--Salon.comIn Jim Harrison’s new book of poems, birds and humans converse, biographies are fluid, and unknown gods flutter just out of si...

The #1 New York Times–bestselling humorist's tribute to car travel is "a ride worth taking, even for readers who don't know an oil pan from a frying pan" ( The Washington Times).From a veteran of both Car and Driver and National Lampoon magazines, this hilarious book chronicles the golden age of the automobile in America—and takes us on a whirlwind tour of the world's most scenic and bumpiest roads in trouble-laden cross-country...

#1 Poetry Foundation BestsellerMichigan Notable BookA beautifully mysterious inquiry... Here Harrison-forthright, testy, funny, and profoundly discerning-a gruff romantic and a sage realist, tells tales about himself, from his dangerous obsession with Federico García Lorca to how he touched a bear’s head, reflects on his dance with the trickster age, and shares magnetizing visions of dogs, horses, birds, and rivers. Oscillating between drenching experience and intellectual...