Off The Books: 26 books

Weaving the "Fourth World" of snails, ravens, and sloths with imagined worlds of our human fragility, our power to destroy and to love, D M Gordon's poems bring us face to face with the divine. Nightly, at the Institute of the Possible is often allegorical, language-rich, and always illuminating....

High Lonesome is a pasture on a West Texas ranch, a state of being, an affecting personal mythology. Poet Patricia Lee Lewis writes, "Think how brambles catch her petticoats, hold them 'til they tear, feed on blood....Say the old woman can find her way, can feel the thorns of walls," and...

Collection of short stories by Linda McCullough Moore. Linda is the author of the literary novel, The Distance Between, and more than 200 shorter works of fiction, essay, memoir and poetry, published in such places as The Massachusetts Review, The Sun, The Alaska Quarterly Review, Queen’s Quarterly,...

In 1965, the architect and design theorist Christopher Alexander published a landmark theoretical critique of modern urban design, and by extension, modern design in general. His critique was different from others of the day in that it was not based on a social or political argument, but on a structural...

Cities are experiencing a renaissance today, because we'e begun to understand how they really work -- and we've begun to make them work better for people.  This book is a lively, readable account of two revealing figures in the history of that renaissance: the urban economist Jane Jacobs and...

We are on the threshold of a new way of thinking about, learning, and practicing architecture. Ready to abandon design based on often-irrelevant images for a more meaningful paradigm, we find answers in combining timeless truths with recent scientific results. These explain how architecture can re-attach...

This collection of articles describes how to use design patterns to create better — more emotionally-responsive and human — architectural environments. The pattern concept was introduced by Christopher Alexander and his collaborators in 1977, and has enjoyed wide success outside architectural...

We are poised between an old world that no longer works and a new one struggling to be born. Surrounded by centralized hierarchies on the one hand and predatory markets on the other, people around the world are searching for alternatives. The Wealth of the Commons explains how millions of commoners...

In this brief, accessible volume, the authors — an urban philosopher and a mathematician-physicist — explain the surprising new findings from the sciences that are beginning to transform environmental design in the modern era. Authors Michael Mehaffy and Nikos Salingaros explore fractals, networks,...

“A little rebellion now and then is a good thing,” Thomas Jefferson wrote to his good friend James Madison in 1787, upon hearing the news of Shays’ Rebellion.  This is the story of how that little rebellion, largely centered in the Pioneer Valley in Massachusetts, became part of the cultural...

Tom Zink was born in a blizzard in 1947, a child of winter. Seasoned: A Memoir of Grief and Grace is the story of Tom’s unwitting grief journey of five decades that begins when his older brother Steve is hit by a car and killed while on the paper route the two boys shared. It’s the story of a...

Like photogravures, the images of Murmur and Crush etch memory and landscape into indelible emotional content. The road, once, the fields, now, a boy, an afternoon, wings, horses, orchards, and ladders appear and disappear, woven into reoccurring motifs, always unexpected and elemental. These poems...