Bücher veröffentlicht von Houghton Mifflin

Tullivers, the former home of old Admiral Trigg and his sister Lucy, had stood empty for many months. Then, one bright April day, two newcomers move in -- an attractive young woman and her son -- and the villagers begin to show their interest and attention, especially several bachelors.

From a popular senior writer for Sports Illustrated comes this high-stakes, boys-on-the-road story about the most unlikely of phenoms-a heavyset, bipolar, and endlessly charming pool hustler named Kid Delicious In most sports the pinnacle is Wheaties-box notoriety. But in the world of pool, notoriety is the last thing a hustler desires. Such is the dilemma that faces one Danny Basavich, an affable, generously proportioned Jewish kid from Jersey, who flounders through high school until he discovers the one thing he excels at-the felt-and hits the road.Running the Table spins the outrageous tale of Kid Delicious and his studly-if less talented-set-up man, Bristol Bob. Never was there a more entertaining or mismatched pair of sidekicks, as together they go underground into the flavorfully seamy world of pool to learn the art of the hustle and experience the highs and lows of life on the road. Their four-year odyssey takes them from Podunk pool halls to slick urban billiard rooms across America, as they manage one night to take down as much as $30,000, only to lose so much the next night that they lack gas money to get home. With every stop, the action gets hotter, the calls get closer, and Delicious's prowess with a cue stick becomes known more and more widely. Ultimately, Delicious sheds his cover once and for all and becomes professional pool's biggest sensation since Minnesota Fats. In a book sure to appeal to fans of Bringing Down the House and Positively Fifth Street, Wertheim evokes a subculture full of nefarious but loveable characters and illuminates America's fascination with games and gambling. He also paints a lasting portrait of an insanely talented and magnetic hustler, who is literally larger than life.

Space Walk blasts off into realms of experience that show the imagination's limitless capacity to be both brutal and uplifting. While many of the poems in this daring collection confront head-on our current American realities of empire, state violence, the endless ?crisis chatter? of talking heads, and the eerie, weightless feeling of catastrophe, they are tethered to the gravitational pull of love and hope. In Sleigh's poems, rocket engines and pancake houses, space stations and mom's kitchen, terrorist organizations and Sundays in a museum are all part of love's galactic amplitude. Hailing Tom Sleigh's work, the Los Angeles Times has written that he ?stakes a claim on the planet of the imagination.? In The New Yorker's words, he ?asserts the importance of poetry itself,? showing us, in Space Walk, its restorative, recuperative powers.

One of the finest poets writing today, Grace Schulman finds order in art and nature that enables her to stand fast in a threatened world. The title refers to Itzhak Perlman's performance of a violin concerto with a snapped string, which inspires a celebration of life despite limitations. For her, song imparts endurance: Thelonious Monk evokes Creation; John Coltrane's improvisations embody her own heart's desire to ?get it right on the first take?; the wind plays a harp-shaped oak; and her immigrant ancestors remember their past by singing prayers on a ship bound for New York. In the words of Wallace Shawn, ?When I read her, she makes me want to live to be four hundred years old, because she makes me feel that there is so much out there, and it's unbearable to miss any of it.?

The New Yorker has written, "Gregerson's rich aesthetic allows her best poems to resonate metaphysically." In this new volume, Linda Gregerson makes clearer than ever her passionate premise that the metaphysical only and always derives from our profound embeddedness in physical reality. From subjects as diverse as the Nazi occupation of Poland and a breakthrough discovery in cell biology, Gregerson seeks to distill "the shape of the question," the tenuous connection between knowing and suffering, between the brightness of the body and the shadows of the mind. "Choose any angle you like," she writes, "The world is split in two." One poem, "Bicameral," moves from a child's cleft palate to a gunshot wound to the hanging skeins of a fabric in a postwar art exhibit. In the wool cut from the sheep to make the materials of art, she finds a tangled record of violence and repair: "The body it becomes will ever / bind it to the human and a trail of woe." Longtime readers of Gregerson's poetry will be facinated by her departure from the supple tercets in which she has worked for nearly twenty years: Magnetic North is a bold anthology of formal experiments. It is also a heartening act of sustained attention from one of our most mindful poets.

American politics has been hijacked. Over the past three decades, a fringe group of economic hucksters has corrupted and perverted our nation's policies. With dark, engaging wit, Jonathan Chait reveals how these canny zealots first took over the Republican Party and then gamed the political system and the media so that once unthinkable policies?without a shred of academic, expert, or even popular support?now drive the political agenda, regardless of which party is in power. Why have these ideas succeeded in Washington? How did a clique of extremists gain control of American economic policy and sell short the country's future? And why do their outlandish ideas still determine policy despite repeated electoral setbacks? Chait tells the outrageous and eye-opening story, expertly explaining just how politics and economics work in Washington. He has produced a riveting drama of greed and deceit that should be read by every concerned citizen, especially in an election year.

The time is 1950. The place is a small town in the Midwest. The girl is Claire, and she has a new black friend. But in an all-white town, how open can the girls be about their friendship?Now Claire faces being the ?new girl? in school. A year later, she is confronting betrayal . . . and sin. Finally, she is fifteen and in love. But it is not a love that can be spoken of, least of all by Claire.In five interrelated stories, Claire grows into a young woman, learning about racism, sex, and love along the way. Most of all, she learns about truth.

Young Dinadan has no wish to joust or quest or save damsels in distress or do any of the knightly things expected of him. He'd rather be a minstrel, playing his rebec and writing ballads. But he was born to be a knight, and knights, of course, have adventures.So after his father forces his knighthood upon him, he wanders toward King Arthur's court, in the company of a misguided young Welsh lad named Culloch. There Dinadan meets Sir Kai and Sir Bedivere, and the three find themselves accompanying Culloch on the worst sort of quest. Along the way, Dinadan writes his own ballads, singing of honor, bravery, loyalty, and courtly love-and becomes a player in the pathetic love story of Tristram and Iseult. He meets the Moorish knight Palomides, the clever but often exasperating Lady Brangienne, and an elvin musician named Sylvanus, along with an unusual collection of recreant knights and dimwitted defenders of chivalry. He learns that while minstrels sing of spectacular heroic deeds, honor is often found in simpler, quieter ways.

Untitled and unpunctuated, the seventy poems in this acclaimed collection seem to cascade from one page to another. Maurice Manning extolls the virtues of nature and its many gifts, and finds deep gratitude for the mysterious hand that created it all.that bare branch that branch made blackby the rain the silver raindrophanging from the black branchBoss I like that black branchI like that shiny raindrop Bosstell me if I'm wrong but it makesme think you're looking rightat me now isn't that a lark for meto think you look that wayupside down like a tree frogBoss I'm not surprised at allI wouldn't doubt it fora minute you're always upto something I'll say one thingyou're all right all right you areeven when you're hanging Boss

In these essays, Dirda introduces nearly 90 of the world's most entertaining books. Writing with affection and authority, he covers masterpieces of fantasy and science fiction, horror and adventure, as well as epics, history, essay and children's literature.

Eleanor Cahn, a professor of literature, wife of a preeminent surgeon, and devoted mother of two, is in Paris to present a paper on Anna Karenina. A chance encounter brings to the surface passions she has suppressed for years. As The Life Room unfolds, we learn the secrets of her erotic past: ethereal William, her high school boyfriend; her role as muse to troubled painter Adam; her marriage to loyal, steady Michael. On her return to New York, Eleanor's charged attraction to another man takes on a life of its own, threatening to destroy everything she has. Jill Bialosky has created a fresh, piercingly real heroine who must choose between responsibility and desire.

Since 2000, America's most ambitious young evangelicals have been making their way to Patrick Henry College, a small Christian school just outside the nation's capital. Most of them are homeschoolers whose idealism and discipline put the average American teenager to shame. And God's Harvard grooms these students to be the elite of tomorrow, dispatching them to the front lines of politics, entertainment, and science, to wage the battle to take back a godless nation. Hanna Rosin spent a year and a half embedded at the college, following the students from the campus to the White House, Congress, conservative think tanks, Hollywood, and other centers of influence. Her account captures this nerve center of the evangelical movement at a moment of maximum influence and also of crisis, as it struggles to avoid the temptations of modern life and still remake the world in its own image.

Today's dispute over the line between church and state (or the lack thereof) is neither the first nor the fiercest in our history. In a revelatory look at our nation's birth, Forrest Church re-creates our first great culture war?a tumultuous, nearly forgotten conflict that raged from George Washington's presidency to James Monroe's. Religion was the most divisive issue in the nation's early presidential elections. Battles raged over numerous issues while the bible and the Declaration of Independence competed for American affections. The religous political wars reached a vicious peak during the War of 1812; the American victory drove New England's Christian right to withdraw from electoral politics, thereby shaping our modern sense of church-state separation. No longer entangled, both church and state flourished.Forrest Church has written a rich, page-turning history, a new vision of our earliest presidents' beliefs that stands as a reminder and a warning for America today.

Renegade artist Harp Spillman is lower than a bow-legged fire ant. Because of an unhealthy relationship with the bottle, he s ruined his reputation as one of the South s preeminent commissioned metal sculptors. And his desperate turn to ice sculpting nearly led to a posse of angry politicians on his trail. With the help of his levelheaded and practical potter wife, Raylou, Harp understands that it s time to return to the mig welder. Yes, it s time to prove that he can complete a series of twelve-foot-high metal angelswelded completely out of hex nutsfor the city of Birmingham. Is it pure chance that the Elbow Boys, their arms voluntarily fused so they can t drink, show up in order to help Harp out in a variety of ways? And why did his neighbor smuggle anteaters into desolate Ember Glow? Is it true that there s no free will?

"I was almost born Happy." So begins "The Spanish Bow" and the remarkable history of Feliu Delargo, who just misses being "Feliz" by a misunderstanding at his birth, which he barely survives.

November 1944: Their B-24 bomber shot down on what should have been an easy mission off the Borneo coast, a scattered crew of Army airmen cut themselves loose from their parachutes only to be met by loincloth-wearing natives silently materializing out of the mountainous jungle. Would these Dayak tribesmen turn the starving airmen over to the hostile Japanese occupiers? Or would the Dayaks risk vicious reprisals to get the airmen safely home in a desperate game of hide-and-seek?

Join cult favorite Tony Vigorito in his acclaimed, surreal whirlwind of a novel exploring chaos theory. A prisoner spins a playing card into a somersault, stirring a wind that becomes a tornado that takes off the roof of a church in nearby Normal, Illinois. Elizabeth Wildhack is born in that church and someday she will meet that prisoner, a man named Diablo, on the streets of New Orleans--where a hurricane-like Great White Spot hovers off the coast. But how is it all interconnected? And what does it have to do with a time-traveling serf and a secret society whose motto is "Walk away?""Linguistic gymnastics abound... Vigorito demonstrates once again that he's a wild stylist... startlingly original... an entertaining anarchist..." --The Chicago Sun-Times

When Ted's five-year-old sister, Vicki, invents an imaginary friend, no one is too concerned . . . except that Vicki's friend has the never-popular name of Marella, and unlike most imaginary friends, Marella can move things. Ted might think Marella is a ghost, but why would a ghost haunt Vicki, of all people? And why would she suddenly move into a house Ted's family has lived in for ages? And why is Marella terrified of another ghost, a dark figure who seems to be hunting Ted? Hilarious, haunting, and unexpectedly moving, There's a Dead Person Following My Sister Around is Vivian Vande Velde at her frightening best.

After Grandma Mary dies, sixteen-year-old JP's safe, secure world quickly unravels. He finds himself living in complete chaos when his mother wins a farmhouse in an essay contest and insists on sharing her good fortune with other neighborhood outcasts. Suddenly there are no rules, and the house is filled with poets, musicians, a reformed drug addict, an abused teen, and too many others who seem to have replaced JP and his father in his mother's life. JP longs for his family to be restored to what it once was. But then somehow, amid the madness, his idea of family is redefined in ways he never expected.

[shared copy] The Starbuck family is anything but ordinary. There are two sets of Starbuck twins: preteens Liberty and July, and their little sisters Charly and Molly. But even more extraordinary is the fact that all four children have the ability to teleflash-they can talk to each other without saying a word! It's a power that comes in handy whenever these adventurous kids are on the trail of a villian. Before the Starbuck family embarks on a trip to New Mexico, a whisper comes through the wind to Liberty. It leads her and her twin, July, to an ancient hillside dwelling that was the site of a tragedy. In their quest to rectify the wrongs of the past, the twins encounter a group of thieves who will stop at nothing to steal the artifacts in the ancient home.

[shared copy] The Starbuck family is anything but ordinary. There are two sets of Starbuck twins: preteens Liberty and July, and their little sisters Charly and Molly. But even more extraordinary is the fact that all four children have the ability to teleflash-they can talk to each other without saying a word! It's a power that comes in handy whenever these adventurous kids are on the trail of a villian. When twins Liberty and July accompany their father on a business trip to London, a mysterious voice starts speaking through their teleflashing channels. Who is trying to contact them, and why? Using the detective skills of their hero, Sherlock Holmes, the twins set out to solve a puzzle that takes them on an exciting journey through the streets of London.