Material Ecocriticism offers new ways to analyze language and reality, human and nonhuman life, mind and matter, without falling into well-worn paths of thinking. Bringing ecocriticism closer to the material turn, the contributions to this landmark volume focus on material forces and substances, the agency of things, processes, narratives and stories, and making meaning out of the world. This broad-ranging reflection on contemporary human experience and expression provokes new understandin...

Eric Heidle's "Ace in the Hole" nominated for a 2018 Edgar Award for Best Short Story!A Parade magazine pick, included in "Books We Love" section"What could be a more unlikely breeding ground for noir fiction than Montana, whose wide-open landscapes seem the polar opposite of the mean streets of Los Angeles? Yet certain noir standbys prove both malleable and fertile in these 14 new stories...If Mo...

An NYRB Classics OriginalDeep in Provence, a century ago, four stone houses perch on a hillside. Wildness presses in from all sides. Beyond a patchwork of fields, a mass of green threatens to overwhelm the village. The animal world—a miming cat, a malevolent boar—displays a mind of its own.The four houses have a dozen residents—and then there is Gagou, a mute drifter. Janet, the eldest of the men, is bedridden; he feels snakes writhing in his fingers and sp...

The Young Readers’ Edition of the New York Times Bestseller!“Abraham Lincoln: the dusty shoes, the weary eyes, the Jedi mastery of a jury in a true case of life and death. So pull up a chair….”—Diane SawyerAt the end of the summer of 1859, twenty-two-year-old Peachy Quinn Harrison was accused of murder in Springfield, Illinois. The man hired to save his life was none other than self-taught lawyer A...

Jewish people have always wandered. According to their origin story, they wandered from Ur of Chaldees to Canaan, then Egypt, and then back to Canaan. From there, they were exiled to Babylon, where they lived for centuries. They also settled in Persia, Egypt, Morocco, Spain, Italy, Turkey, Poland, Ukraine, England, and the United States, among other places. Diaspora became normal to Jews, and though they may have hoped for a return to their "Promised Land" at the "End of Days," they made s...

Where and what is the place of the wild? Is the goal of preserving biodiversity across the landscape of North America compatible with contemporary Western culture?Place of the Wild brings together original essays from an exceptional array of contemporary writers and activists to present in a single volume the most current thinking on the relationship between humans and wilderness. A common thread running through the volume is the conviction that everyone concerned with the...

"Poignant, sometimes harrowing." –Wall Street JournalThe defense lawyer for Martin Luther King, Jr., Rosa Parks, the Selma marchers, and other civil rights heroes reveals the true story of the historic trial that made Dr. King a national hero.Fred D. Gray was just twenty-four years old when he became the defense lawyer for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a young minister who had become the face of the bus boycott that...

The Rule-Out method of criminal defense, easily learned, gets most jurors to want to decide verdicts based solely on reasonable doubts -- which, perhaps unexpectedly, few jurors normally do on their own no matter how you explain it. Instead, most convictions result from burden shifting, the usual demand by jurors that the defense attorney prove innocence. Rule Out prevents this, teaches how to find plentiful reasonable doubts, and shows how to avoid the common practices that cause most con...

David Abram’s first book, The Spell of the Sensuous has become a classic of environmental literature. Now he returns with a startling exploration of our human entanglement with the rest of nature.As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we’ve ignored the wild intelligence of our bodies, taking our primary truths from tech...

For a thousand generations, human beings viewed themselves as part of the wider community of nature, and they carried on active relationships not only with other people but with other animals, plants, and natural objects (including mountains, rivers, winds, and weather patterns) that we have only lately come to think of as "inanimate." How, then, did humans come to sever their ancient reciprocity with the natural world? What will it take for us to recover a sustaining relationship with the...

Fobbit ’fä-b t, noun. Definition: A U.S. soldier stationed at a Forward Operating Base who avoids combat by remaining at the base, esp. during Operation Iraqi Freedom (2003–2011). Pejorative.Welcome to the FOB – Baghdad’s Forward Operating Base Triumph.This is the back-office of the battlefield, where Staff Sergeant Chance Gooding (a Fobbit through and through) spends his days tapping out press releases to turn the latest roadside bomb into something the fo...

As the climate veers toward catastrophe, the innumerable losses cascading through the biosphere make vividly evident the need for a metamorphosis in our relation to the living land. For too long we've inured ourselves to the wild intelligence of our muscled flesh, taking our primary truths from technologies that hold the living world at a distance. This book subverts that distance, drawing listeners ever deeper into their animal senses in order to explore, from within, the elemental kinshi...