Counterpoint: 634 books

Bernard Malamud was one of the most accomplished American novelists of the postwar years. From the Pulitzer Prize winner The Fixer as well as The Assistant, named one of the best "100 All-Time Novels" by Time Magazine-to mention only two of the more than a dozen published books-he not only...

Award-winning novelist, poet and essayist, Lynne Sharon Schwartz returns with what is perhaps her most personal book yet. These memoirs, gathered under the title of “Intimacies,” are exactly that. Intimate recollections of her life, beginning with her serious heart-valve surgery and ranging back...

Centuries ago, when books were rare, those who owned them would lend them to friends, who in turn would copy out passages they especially liked before returning the precious book to its owner. These anthologies came to be known as Commonplace Books, and modern writers as different as W. H. Auden and...

An “immaculately written, trenchantly honest, hugely compelling” novel from the Giller Prize-winning author of Stranger (Globe and Mail).   When Morris Schutt, a prominent newspaper columnist, surveys his life over the past year, he sees disaster everywhere. His son has just been killed in Afghanistan,...

“Like fellow humorists Merrill Markoe and David Sedaris, she makes the most of her misfit existence . . . both harrowing and hilarious.” —Booklist (starred review) Known widely for her role in Strangers with Candy and her public radio appearances, Sarah Thyre delves here into her past...

By any measure, Gary Snyder is one of the greatest poets in America in the last century. From his first book of poems to his latest collection of essays, his work and his example, standing between Tu Fu and Thoreau, has been influential all over the world. Riprap, his first book of poems, was published...

"Excellent . . . Tracks the history of that greatest of all cultural institutions." —The Washington Post Libraries are much more than mere collections of volumes. The best are magical, fabled places whose fame has become part of the cultural wealth they are designed to preserve....

In making her selection for Pharos Editions, Dana Spiotta tells us how drawn she was by the work of Raymond Mungo. “[He] writes . . . about his own joy and his own pain, he is particularly good when he describes the land around him and how it feels on his body.” Indeed, if Henry David Thoreau...

**“In poetic prose . . . Nightingale’s intimate reflections and succulent style present a textured picture of the city and its people, culture, and antiquity.” —**Publishers Weekly Granada resident Steven Nightingale excavates the rich past of his adopted city and its surrounding countryside,...

Coast: the edge of land, or conversely the edge of sea. Range: a measure between limits, or the scope or territory of a thing. Coast Range, the debut collection of essays from writer Nick Neely, meticulously and thoughtfully dwells on these intersections and much more. The book’s title refers to...

With social networking and reality television, self-help columns and daytime talk shows, there’s an infinite array of platforms to both expose our deepest thoughts and examine the thoughts of others. In this age of non-stop communication, one’s privacy is subject to unrelenting examination, intrusion,...

A wildly inventive and deeply humorous collection of literary delights by one of the great contemporary masters of the short story. A hypothetical episode of Batman hilariously slowed down to soap-opera speed. A game of baseball as played by T. S. Eliot and Willem Big Bull de Kooning. A...

In Anarchy! An Anthology of Emma Goldman's Mother Earth, Peter Glassgold brings to the page political activist and anarchist Emma Goldman’s most radical contribution, Mother Earth, a monthly journal about social science and literature. Glassgold has compiled Mother Earth’s most provocative articles,...

The rooms we live in are always more than just four walls. As we decorate these spaces and fill them with objects and friends, they shape our lives and become the backdrop to our sense of self. One day, the houses will be gone, but even then, traces of the stories and the memories they contained will...