Off The Common Books: 23 books

In the 1970s, on a backpacking adventure to Europe, Alma discovers her cousins in her grandfather's hometown in northern Italy near Lake Garda. As Alma bonds with Gianna, Catrina, Novella, Veronica and Kara, the girls become lasting friends, sharing their joys and sorrows with each other on their...

Ralph Waldo Emerson never tried to reinvent the institution of marriage, but his close friend, the writer Margaret Fuller, was freer to follow the dictates of self-reliance, and choose how she would make her commitments Born in 1810, Fuller received a boy's first-class education, and by the time she...

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....

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,...

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...

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...

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,...