A fictional meditation on time and experience—part journal, part meditation, part dreamscapeIn language that is frank and uncompromising, Rob Stephenson’s debut novel, Passes Through, moves forward in a rare and daring manner. Part journal, part meditation on aesthetics, part dreamscape, Passes Through investigates experience, identity, beauty, and sexuality, while provocatively complicating such distinctions as writing versus revision and imagina...

Transform your daily listening habits into a science-backed wellbeing practiceOver 90% of people listen to music daily, yet few understand how to harness it intentionally for emotional and mental wellbeing. Music Is the Answer: Practical Ways to Manage Stress, Sleep Better, and Live Brighter translates robust neuroscience research into actionable steps, empowering readers to use music for stress relief, deeper sleep, improved mood, and enhanced focus....

“A seriously funny book.”—Salman Rushdie“It pulverized me.”—Hernan DiazAn elegant, refreshed edition of Nicholson Baker’s stunning and highly influential first novel, a witty and boundlessly inventive homage to the profound, neglected details of everyday working lifeThe Mezzanine is a novel told through one man’s ride up an escalator in the office building where he works. In the hands of Nicholson Baker, th...

In The Book of Marvels, award-winning poet Lorna Crozier offers a delightful series of prose meditations on household objects: everything from doorknobs, washing machines, rakes, and zippers to the kitchen sink. Operating as a kind of a literary detective, Crozier brings her rapt attention to the everyday things she explores, uncovering the mystery that lies at their essence. She offers tantalizing glimpses of the household's inhabitants, too, probing hearts, brains, noses, and na...

From a New York Times–bestselling and National Book Critics Award–winning author comes a "small masterpiece" of fatherhood, childhood, and bottle-feeding ( Publishers Weekly).In a novel Entertainment Weekly called "intensely funny and moving," Nicholson Baker takes the reader on an intellectual odyssey over the course of the twenty minutes it takes a new father to give his baby daughter her bottle. Through inspired moments of mental fligh...

Lyn Hejinian is among the most prominent of contemporary American poets. Her poem My Life has garnered accolades and fans inside and outside academia. First published in 1980, and revised in 1987 and 2002, My Life is now firmly established in the postmodern canon. This Wesleyan edition includes the 45-part prose poem sequence along with a closely related ten-part work titled My Life in the Nineties. An experimental intervention into the autobiographical genre, My Life explores the many way...

“Fried’s stories are laugh-out-loud hilarious and wonderfully weird, yet his many strange worlds also have the power to haunt.” --Dan ChaonIn “Loeka Discovered,” a buzz flows throughout a lab when scientists unearth a perfectly preserved prehistoric man who suggests to them the hopefulness of life, but the more they learn, the more the realities of ancient survival invade their buoyant projections. “Frost Mountain Picnic Massacre” meditates on why an entire town en...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry (2010)Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award (2009)Rae Armantrout has always organized her collections of poetry as though they were works in themselves. Versed brings two of these sequences together, offering readers an expanded view of the arc of her writing. The poems in the first section, Versed, play with vice and versa, the perversity of human consciousness. They flirt with error and de...

The Burning Alphabet confirms and extends Barry Dempster’s reputation as one of Canada’s most respected poets. Underpinning these poems, as in his previous work, there lies an unswerving dedication to emotional and spiritual honesty, clear-eyed recognitions rendered without pomp. In one section, "Sick Days", he focuses on that "other place" of chronic illness. Other poems present arguments against suicide, and explore the tropical wonders of a woman’s closet. The closing section renders, w...

The New York Times has said that "Jorie Graham's poetry is among the most sensuously embodied and imaginative writing we have," and this new collection is a reminder of how startling, original, and deeply relevant her poetry is. In Sea Change, Graham brings us to the once-unimaginable threshold at which civilization as we know it becomes unsustainable. How might the human spirit persist, caught between its abiding love of beauty, its acknowledgment of continuing injury an...

Exciting music, delicious ironies, radiant self-awareness. With imagination, wit and scrupulous candour, Chris Hutchinson’s poems negotiate and renegotiate the shifting no-man’s-land between self and others, introspection and public life. Here are poems carrying unflinching perceptions on their own innovative, edgy music, refusing inflations of rhetoric and complacent notions of the inner life, bringing skeptical intelligence and radical imagination-those supposedly incompatible room-mates...

In Just Saying, improbable and even untenable speakers are briefly constituted—only to disappear. The result is part carnival, part nightmare. A television pundit's rhetoric segues into an unusual succulent with writhing maroon tongues. When the world suddenly becomes legible, is that revelation or psychosis? In this book, the voice of the Lord and/or the voice of the security state can come from anyplace. The problem of identity becomes acute. The poems in Just Saying may be imagined as c...