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“How many a man has dated a new era in his life from the reading of a book,” wrote Henry David Thoreau in Walden. Today that book continues to provoke, inspire, and change lives all over the world, and each rereading is fresh and challenging. Yet as Thoreau's countless admirers know, there is more to the man than Walden. An engineer, poet, teacher, naturalist, lecturer, and political activist, he truly had multiple lives to lead, and each one speaks forcefully to us today.

Sponsored by the Thoreau Society, the brief, handsomely presented books in this series offer the thoughts of a great writer on a variety of topics, some that we readily associate with him, some that may be surprising. Each volume includes selections from his familiar published works as well as from less well known lectures, letters, and journal entries. The books include original engravings by renowned illustrator and book artist Barry Moser.

“[Dakotah] is about hope, disappointment, impermanence and erasure. . . . This is a meditation Bowden fans will not want to miss.”—Arizona Daily Star

“Bowden’s prose—bleak, fierce, surreal like a swirling sandstorm, like an endlessly ramifying arroyo—provided for me, in its rejection of facile theses and clear-cut answers, an honest mapping of our contemporary predicament.”—Leath Tonino, Lit Hub

The fourth installment in Charles Bowden's acclaimed “Unnatural History of America,” Dakotah uses America’s Great Plains as a lens—sometimes sullied, sometimes shattered, but always sharp—for observing pivotal moments in the lives of anguished figures, including himself.

In scenes that are by turns wrenching and poetic, Bowden describes the Sioux’s forced migrations and rebellions alongside his own ancestors’ migrations from Europe to Midwestern acres beset by unforgiving winters. He meditates on the life of his resourceful mother and his philosophical father, who rambled between farm communities and city life. Interspersed with these images are clear-eyed, textbook-defying anecdotes about Lewis and Clark, Daniel Boone, and, with equal verve, twentieth-century entertainers “Pee Wee” Russell, Peggy Lee, and other musicians. The result is a kaleidoscopic journey that penetrates the senses and redefines the notion of heartland. Dakotah is a powerful ode to loss from one of our most fiercely independent writers.

Reed Turchi’s debut collection, Dancing with Poets, explores what it means to make—and re-make—oneself amid a swirl of love, loss, and memory. In dive bars and art museums, baseball stadiums and blues clubs, Turchi summons his ghosts and invites them to sing their songs. A Grammy Award–winning musician as well as poet, Turchi is guided by finely honed rhythm and a singular sonic sensibility that coaxes music from poems that are narrative and lyric in turn. As a collection, Dancing with Poets remembers those the author has loved and lost, but avoids nostalgia, asking instead what futures may be built from grief and how love may grow on the other side of devastation. While the poems may swirl, their emotional truth remains crystalline: The characters, moments, and stories in each poem are infinitely recognizable—fantastic and quotidian in equal measure. Within these poems there are chicken tenders and high art, motorcycles and funerals—a familiar boyhood that happened to be spent surrounded by some of the finest American poets of the late twentieth century. In Dancing with Poets, Turchi invites his reader to join him—“to strut and spin” in grief and joy alike. 

Reed Turchi’s debut collection, Dancing with Poets, explores what it means to make—and re-make—oneself amid a swirl of love, loss, and memory. In dive bars and art museums, baseball stadiums and blues clubs, Turchi summons his ghosts and invites them to sing their songs. A Grammy Award–winning musician as well as poet, Turchi is guided by finely honed rhythm and a singular sonic sensibility that coaxes music from poems that are narrative and lyric in turn. As a collection, Dancing with Poets remembers those the author has loved and lost, but avoids nostalgia, asking instead what futures may be built from grief and how love may grow on the other side of devastation. While the poems may swirl, their emotional truth remains crystalline: The characters, moments, and stories in each poem are infinitely recognizable—fantastic and quotidian in equal measure. Within these poems there are chicken tenders and high art, motorcycles and funerals—a familiar boyhood that happened to be spent surrounded by some of the finest American poets of the late twentieth century. In Dancing with Poets, Turchi invites his reader to join him—“to strut and spin” in grief and joy alike. 

Wrestling with the experience of living online as a non-digital native 

Joanna Fuhrman didn’t grow up online. Her generation entered the digital age as adults, with optimism about the possibilities it would bring for community building. In the alien landscape of the internet, they indeed found moments of joy and connection, but they also watched in anguish as what had been sold as a utopian space instead magnified the anti-democratic demons of necrocapitalism. In this darkly comic and surreal collection, Fuhrman lets herself fall into the internet wormhole of these conflicting realities. With titles ranging from “You Won’t Believe How Your Favorite Childhood Star Looks Now” to “We’ll Burn That Algorithm When We Get to It,” the feminist prose poems in Data Mind remix the tropes of digital life with the puckishness and embodied urgency for which Fuhrman is celebrated. 

Contemporary playwright David Mamet's thought-provoking plays and screenplays such as Wag the Dog, Glengarry Glen Ross (for which he won the Pulitzer Prize), and Oleanna have enjoyed popular and critical success in the past two decades. Among the most prolific and provocative of writers, Mamet frequently draws emotional responses from both audiences and critics. Mamet in Conversation collects interviews with the playwright that offer readers insight into his life in the theater, his artistic vision, and the evolution of his craft. The interviews help followers of his work better understand the sensibilities that have informed his work in drama, film, and prose over a twenty-five-year career. The conversations collected here--several of which appear in print for the first time--allow a glimpse inside Mamet's creative process, and into the recurring motifs that drive his work. The range of topics is impressive and includes the celebratory purpose of theater, the responsibility of the playwright, writing for Hollywood, the seduction of fame, the search for truth and the merchandising of it, and the decay of culture. The interviews shed light on the personal as well: Mamet's return to Judaism, his appreciation of Midwestern virtues, his love of rural Vermont, the problems of embattled virtue, and the challenge of aging. The book includes transcripts of Mamet's engagingly candid broadcast interviews with Jim Lehrer and Charlie Rose of PBS, published here for the first time.

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERARY STUDIES

A philosophical and formally inventive inquiry into the experimental terrains of American speculative fiction, where meaning emerges through ambiguity, rupture, and critical refusal.

Dear Incomprehension: On American Speculative Fiction is a thought-provoking exploration of the fascinating field of contemporary speculative fiction, a genre that transcends boundaries and encompasses science fiction, fabulist tales, modern fairy tales, and experimental narratives that challenge the very essence of storytelling and reading.

Written as a philosophical essay that mirrors the unorthodox nature of the texts it analyzes, Dear Incomprehension examines American works that defy traditional narrative devices such as plot, character, logic, and even legibility. Drawing on a number of philosophical theories, among them object-oriented ontology and speculative realism, Vanderhaeghe argues that these unconventional works resist the standard tools of criticism, demanding instead a novel perspective and approach.

An in-depth resource for scholars and students of contemporary literature, philosophy, and digital literary studies, Dear Incomprehension offers a fresh framework for analyzing experimental fiction and alternative modes of meaning-making. It is a must-read for those seeking to grasp the complexities and nuances of American experimental and speculative fiction.

Donald Hall believes that American poetry, at the present moment, thrives both in quality and in leadership. In his latest collection of essays, reviews, and interviews, Hall counters the increasingly publicized view that poetry has an ever-diminishing importance in contemporary American culture. He resents the endlessly repeated cliché that finds poetry unpopular and losing popularity. Thus: Death to the Death of Poetry.

Throughout the pages of this latest offering in the Poets on Poetry series, Hall returns again and again to the theme of poetry's health, and offers essays praising contemporary poets, who serve as examples of poetry's thriving condition. In addition, Death to the Death of Poetry collects interviews in which Hall discusses the work of poetry--revisions, standards, the psychology and sociology of the poet's life.

The collection will be warmly received by Donald Hall's large readership, enhanced in 1993 by publication of two exemplary volumes: The Museum of Clear Ideas, his eleventh book of poetry; and his essay Life Work, which brought him both new and returning readers.

The first work to combine literary criticism with other forms of death penalty–abolitionist writing, Demands of the Dead demonstrates the active importance of literature and literary criticism to the struggle for greater justice in the United States. Gathering personal essays, scholarly articles, and creative writings on the death penalty in American culture, this striking collection brings human voices and literary perspectives to a subject that is often overburdened by statistics and angry polemics. Contributors include death-row prisoners, playwrights, poets, activists, and literary scholars.

Why does food taste better when you know where it comes from? Because history—ecological, cultural, even personal—flavors every bite we eat. Whether it’s the volatile chemical compounds that a plant absorbs from the soil or the stories and memories of places that are evoked by taste, layers of flavor await those willing to delve into the roots of real food. In this landmark book, Gary Paul Nabhan takes us on a personal trip into the southwestern borderlands to discover the terroir—the “taste of the place”—that makes this desert so delicious.

To savor the terroir of the borderlands, Nabhan presents a cornucopia of local foods—Mexican oregano, mesquite-flour tortillas, grass-fed beef, the popular Mexican dessert capirotada, and corvina (croaker or drum fish) among them—as well as food experiences that range from the foraging of Cabeza de Vaca and his shipwrecked companions to a modern-day camping expedition on the Rio Grande. Nabhan explores everything from the biochemical agents that create taste in these foods to their history and dispersion around the world. Through his field adventures and humorous stories, we learn why Mexican oregano is most potent when gathered at the most arid margins of its range—and why foods found in the remote regions of the borderlands have surprising connections to foods found by his ancestors in the deserts of the Mediterranean and the Middle East. By the end of his movable feast, Nabhan convinces us that the roots of this fascinating terroir must be anchored in our imaginations as well as in our shifting soils.

“A dark, troubling vision of life in the desert, defined broadly; of mountain lions and drug kingpins, Mexican hopes and Indian feuds.”
—Los Angeles Times

“In these powerful epic tales of the Sonora Desert, Bowden peoples the harsh land on both sides of the US-Mexican border with saints and sinners, but his enduring hero is the desert itself.”
—Kirkus Reviews