Bücher veröffentlicht von Houghton Mifflin

The hilarious opening of Almost does little to prepare either the reader or the narrator, Sophy Chase, for the drama of what is to come. Almost divorced, Sophy is in bed with her new lover — an art dealer and father of four young children — when the police call her with shocking news. Her almost ex-husband, Will, has died suddenly on the Massachusetts island where she left him just months before. Dazed and grief-stricken, Sophy takes off at once for Swansea Island, hurled back into a life and family — her husband’s grown twin daughters and their prickly mother — she had intended to leave behind.In the tension-filled days that follow, Sophy’s past and present collide as she struggles to find out how her husband died, what role she might have had in the sudden disappearance of her boyfriend’s ten-year-old daughter, and how she can maintain her equilibrium. The gulf between the island’s summer people and its year-rounders is brought vividly to life in the process, as is the particular beauty of a setting that resembles Nantucket and Martha’s Vineyard.A story about starting over and looking back, about the pain of staying and the consequences of leaving, and about a woman’s longing for children, Almost presses us to wonder how much responsibility we bear for other people’s happiness — and who exactly we are when we’re in limbo. By this riveting novel’s end, Sophy has it all figured out — almost.

In this exhilarating archaeological adventure, Nicholas Clapp seeks the truth behind the legend of the Queen of Sheba. Ever since she swept into the court of King Solomon three thousand years ago, her story has been told and retold, often getting diluted, amended, and reworked along the way. In a quest to collect clues to the mystery of Sheba, Clapp travels to Ethiopia, Yemen, Israel, and even a village in France. Using the latest technology, including satellite images and carbon-14 dating, and some recent archaeological discoveries, he pieces together the facts behind Sheba's multifaceted myth.

Steve Earle does everything he does with intelligence, creativity, passion, and integrity. In music, these strengths have earned him comparisons to Bruce Springsteen, the ardent devotion of his fans, and the admiration of the media. And Earle does a lot: he is singer, songwriter, producer, social activist, teacher. . . . He's not only someone who makes great music; he's someone to believe in. With the publication of his first collection of short stories, Doghouse Roses, he gives us yet another reason to believe. Earle's stories reflect the many facets of the man and the hard-fought struggles, the defeats, and the eventual triumphs he has experienced during a career spanning three decades. In the title story he offers us a gut-wrenchingly honest portrait of a nearly famous singer whose life and soul have been all but devoured by drugs. "Billy the Kid" is a fable about everything that will never happen in Nashville, and "Wheeler County" tells a romantic, sweet-tempered tale about a hitchhiker stranded for years in a small Texas town. A story about the husband of a murder victim witnessing an execution addresses a subject Earle has passionately taken on as a social activist, and a cycle of stories features "the American," a shady international wanderer, Vietnam vet, and sometime drug smuggler - a character who can be seen as Earle's alter ego, the person he might have become if he had been drafted. Earle is a songwriter's songwriter, and here he takes his writing gift into another medium, along with all the grace, poetry, and deep feeling that has made his music honored around the world.

THE CRYSTAL DESERT: SUMMERS IN ANTARCTICA is the story of life's tenacity on the coldest of Earth's continents. It tells of the explorers who discovered Antarctica, of the whalers and sealers who despoiled it, and of the scientists who are deciphering its mysteries. In beautiful, lucid prose, David G. Campbell chronicles the desperately short summers on the Antarctic Peninsula. He presents a fascinating portrait of the evolution of life in Antarctica and also of the evolution of the continent itself.

When Bill Gruber left Philadelphia for graduate school in Idaho, he and his wife decided to experience true rural living. His longing for the solitude and natural beauty that Thoreau found on Walden Pond led him to buy an abandoned log cabin and its surrounding forty acres in Alder Creek, a town considered small even by Idaho standards. But farm living was far from the bucolic wonderland he expected: he now had to rise with the sun to finish strenuous chores, cope with the lack of modern conveniences, and shed his urban pretensions to become a real local. Despite the initial hardships, he came to realize that reality was far better than his wistful fantasies. Instead of solitude, he found a warm, welcoming community; instead of rural stolidity, he found intelligence and wisdom; instead of relaxation, he found satisfaction in working the land. What began as a two-year experiment became a seven-year love affair with a town he'll always consider home.

From the microcosmic wilderness of an overgrown back yard to the cool, glassed-in exhibits in a natural history museum, Swallow swoops and darts, tangling the lines we draw between the wild and the cultivated. In her debut collection, Miranda Field explores a world composed equally of shadow and substance, filled not just with beauty but also with a kind of savage experience. But Swallow is more than a crisscrossing of boundaries. It is an imperative, a dare: Go ahead, do as Eve did; let hunger take you wherever it will. According to James Longenbach, these poems are "too beautifully made to idealize freedom, too much in love with vicissitude to idealize beauty. Read these poems, enter them, and be hungry forever."

Malinda Markham's peoms are inspired in part by her fascination with Japanese language, art, and literature. Her reactions to and interpretations of that country's history, culture, and people are in these verses, echoing with the voices and silences of women across time. Markham imagines the experiences of many women: a geisha laments her past in "Geisha Considered as Making," as a mother laments for her daughter's future in "Yield to This." Markham is intrigued with how language tries but ultimately fails to hold memory in place. She grapples with the translation of words and feeling and shows how this failure also brings a searching for belief - a word that repeats throughout these poems - in a world that cannot allow it. Writes Cole Swenson, "Markham's language has the delicacy of the fine bones of the inner ear; it is, itself, a form of listening - to insects, birds, traffic, to the world. Her listening brings things into being, catching the nuances of change, from season to season, culture to culture, impression to language. This is a radiant collection."

Beautifully crafted and movingly told, the stories in Talking in the Dark read like small exquisite novels. From betrayal to sacrifice, obsession to abandonment, each tale speaks the truth of the underside of love, evoking images of lowered voices and shared confessions. A single mother, haunted by loneliness and self-doubt, sleeps with her daughter's teenage boyfriend, and, in a scene of frightening family tension, turns her rage not toward the husband who abandoned her, but toward her daughter. A tennis player experiencing her first love becomes the victim of a young man's dangerous obsession. In prose filled with the subterfuges of desire and need, vibrant with the promise of love's birth or rebirth, Laura Glen Louis exposes the deepest chords of intimacy and imagines worlds that are layered and complete. Talking in the Dark showcases her original voice, one that arrives fully mature--incisive, unsparing, and ultimately hopeful.

Originally published as two distinct collections, Depraved and Insulting English brings to light the language's most offensive and obscene words-words that have fallen out of today's lexicon but will no doubt delight, amuse, and in some cases prove surprisingly useful. Who hasn't searched for the right word to describe a colleague's maschalephidrosis (runaway armpit perspiration) or a boss's pleonexia (insane greed)? And what better way is there to insult the scombroid landlord (resembling a mackerel) or that tumbrel of a brother-in-law (a person who is drunk to the point of vomiting) than by calling him by his rightful name? A compact compendium of ingenious words for anyone who's been tongue-tied, flabbergasted, or dumbfounded, Depraved and Insulting English supplies the appropriate vocabulary for any occasion. Word lovers, chronic insulters, berayers, bescumbers, and bespewers need fear no more-finding the correct word to wow your friends or silence your enemies just got a whole lot easier.

The story of the compass is shrouded in mystery and myth, yet most will agree it begins around the time of the birth of Christ in ancient China. A mysterious lodestone whose powers affected metal was known to the Chinese emperor. When this piece of metal was suspended in water, it always pointed north. This unexplainable occurrence led to the stone's use in feng shui, the Chinese art of finding the right location. However, it was the Italians, more than a thousand years later, who discovered the ultimate destiny of the lodestone and unleashed its formidable powers. In Amalfi sometime in the twelfth century, the compass was born, crowning the Italians as the new rulers of the seas and heralding the onset of the modern world. Retracing the roots of the compass and sharing the fascinating story of navigation through the ages, The Riddle of the Compass is Aczel at his most entertaining and insightful.

In Victoria Redel's mesmerizing first novel, the question of what happens when a mother loves her child too much is deeply and darkly explored. Left with a small fortune by her parents and the cryptic advice, "it would do to find a passion," Redel's narrator sets out to become a mother--a task she feels she can be adequately passionate about. She conceives her son Paul through a loveless one-night stand, surrounds him with a wonderful, magical world for two--a world filled with books, music, endless games, and bottomless devotion--and calls him pet names like Birdie, Cookie, Puppy, and Loverboy. She wonders, "Has ever a mother loved a child more?" But as life outside their lace curtains begins to beckon the school-age Paul, his mother's efforts to keep him content in their small world become increasingly frantic and ultimately extreme by all definitions. In this exquisite debut novel, Victoria Redel takes us deep into the mind of a very singular mother, exposing the dangerously whisper-thin line between selfless and selfish motivation that exists in all types of devotion.

Snow Mountain Passage is a powerful retelling of our most dramatic pioneer story--the ordeal of the Donner Party. Through the eyes of James Frazier Reed, one of the group's leaders, and the imagined "Trail Notes" of his daughter Patty, we journey along with the ill-fated group determined, at all costs, to make it to the California territory. James Reed is a proud, headstrong, yet devoted husband and father. As he and his family travel in the "Palace Car," a huge, specially built--and ultimately cumbersome--covered wagon, they thrill to new sights and cope with conflict and constant danger. Yet when a fight between Reed and another driver ends in death, Reed is exiled from the group and heads over the mountains alone. The fate of the other families, including Reed's wife and four children, is sealed when they set out across a new, untested route through the Sierra--their final mountain pass. Arriving at the foothills just as the snows start to fall, they are left stranded for months--starving, freezing, and battling to survive--while Reed journeys across northern California, trying desperately to find means and men for a rescue party. An extraordinary tale of pride and redemption, Snow Mountain Passage is a brilliantly imagined and grippingly told story straight from American history.*National Bestseller

In a small neighborhood, atop a hill in Pittsburgh, thrives a world where neighbors don't move away, where friends become family, and where community takes on a deeper meaning. Welcome to the inviting and intriguing neighborhood of Troy Hill. Unlike nearby towns, the families of Troy Hill have lived in the same neighborhood for generations, providing continuity in these women's lives and depth in their relationships. They christened babies, raised children, and even buried their loved ones together. Now in their seventies and eighties, the women of Troy Hill form a community of independent souls, who find joy in each other and solace in service. Troy Hill and these women resonate beyond this hilltop, providing insight into bonds between mothers and daughters, husbands and wives, sisters and friends. From them we learn to shape our lives with love and humor. Veteran reporter Clare Ansberry brings to life these vibrant women, and offers some invaluable lessons about acceptance, faith, and family. A portrait of American life and a hymn to the durability of the human spirit, The Women of Troy Hill is an inspiration for us all.

In the early 1900s, Bessie Bawtry, a small child with big notions, lives in a South Yorkshire mining town in England. Precocious and refined in a land of little ambition and much mining grime, Bessie waits for the day she can escape the bleak, coarse existence her ancestors had seldom questioned. Nearly a century later Bessie's granddaughter, Faro Gaulden, is listening to a lecture on genetic inheritance. She has returned to the depressed little town in which Bessie grew up and wonders at the families who never left. Confronted with what would have been her life had her grandmother stayed, she finds herself faced with difficult questions. Is she really so different from the South Yorkshire locals? As she soon learns, the past has a way of reasserting itself-not unlike the peppered moth that was once thought to be nearing extinction but is now enjoying a sudden unexplained resurgence. The Peppered Moth is a brilliant novel, full of irony, sadness, and humor.

In The Worst Day of My Life, So Far, acclaimed novelist M. A. Harper takes us into the complex mind of Jeanne Roth, a middle-aged woman forced to return to a home state she'd rather forget. An unlikely caretaker, Jeanne must come to terms with a past filled with the shadows of her mother--a once vibrant femme fatale now suffering from Alzheimer's. As she watches her mother's grace and charm slowly slip away, Jeanne is forced to reflect on her own goals and find a new hero to look up to. An expert at analyzing others while neglecting her own troubles, Jeanne is suddenly squaring off directly with the one person she has tried to avoid: herself.With witty and acerbic prose, Harper tells the poignant, yet hilarious, story of one woman's journey toward self-discovery and confidence. Through the ups and downs of Jeanne, we gradually learn how important it is to confront the thoughts and worries that plague our own lives. A timely legend that shows there are no dead ends in life-only long roads--The Worst Day of My Life, So Far will make you laugh and cry and want more.

From America's most celebrated living historian comes this "sprightly, straightforward account of the first third of an active and charmed life" (New York Times). Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. turns a studied eye on a personal past and reconstructs the history that has made him such an iconic figure for generations of readers. A LIFE IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY offers rare and revealing access to both the private world of a great American writer and the fine-grained texture of the American century. Ranging from a fondly remembered childhood in the Midwest to a fascinating, storied academic and political life, this volume is an important addition to Schlesinger's body of work, "every bit as well written as anything Schlesinger has done" (Providence Sunday Journal) and "sure to be used by students of the times for years to come" (Boston Globe). "With style and humor and a master historian's deft blending of personal detail with epic events" (Wall Street Journal), Schlesinger evokes the struggles, the questions, the paradoxes, and the triumphs that shaped our era as only he can do.

The grassroots publishing sensation continues with WOVEN ON THE WIND, the second volume of women's writing from the heart of the American West compiled by the editors and ranchers Linda Hasselstrom, Nancy Curtis, and Gaydell Collier. They called on women in sixteen states and provinces to write about their friendships with other women in the West, a subject that they discovered has all too often been overlooked or underplayed. The result is WOVEN ON THE WIND, a unique and exhilarating collection, "a beautiful, intricate mosaic of women as mothers as well as friends" (Fencepost). In a region where time and space are large and solitude is a fact of life, these women tell of the beauties, ironies, rigors, heartbreak, and humor of life and how it is uniquely enriched by friendships past and present. The voices in this volume -- unsentimental, unflinching, and utterly unforgettable -- take readers into the fields, kitchens, barns, and souls of nearly 150 women and reveal a vital part of the real western American story. "Here is the essence of the West -- not the myth, but the truth."

Set in the nation's capital, this delightful comedy of manners centers on the busy intersection of Dupont Circle, where old meets young, gay meets straight, rich meets poor, and past meets present. Love and family intersect in similar ways in Paul Kafka-Gibbons's witty and entertaining novel. In a plot revolving around a judicial hearing on gay marriage, Kafka-Gibbons explores the lives of three distinctly different couples, examining marriage and domesticity in all its contemporary guises. With great charm and goodwill, DUPONT CIRCLE engages the issues as well as the heart.

In her debut novel, Edie Meidav tells the tale of Henry Fyre Gould, a self-described anti-missionary who travels to Ceylon from the spiritualist salons of 1930s New York City. Driven by an arrogant faith in his ideals, Henry settles in the village of Rajottama, intent on establishing a model society built on the lost truths of Buddhism. Instead of a utopian village, he slowly finds a tinderbox of caste struggle, political rebellion, espionage, and erotic intrigue. In the tradition of Michael Ondaatje, Barbara Kingsolver, and Joseph Conrad, Meidav grapples with the consequences of the West's fascination with the East and explores the nature of faith and love.

Miss Read's delightful chronicles of life in Thrush Green continue with RETURN TO THRUSH GREEN. It's spring again in the village, and with the change of the seasons comes change in the lives of many villagers. The Young family's tranquility is disrupted by the sudden arrival of Joan's father, while Molly and Ben Curdle consider putting an end to their wandering days in order to finally settle down. Even the reappearance of Sexton Albert Piggot -- one of Thrush Green's more malevolent sorts -- cannot dim the happiness that inevitably prevails at Thrush Green.

Too many of us exercise to lose weight and stay fit. Jay Kimiecik believes that focusing on those reasons make sticking with a fitness plan almost impossible. With full appreciation of the real problems people have with exercising, he writes that we must instead find personal pleasure in any physical activity we choose. Kimiecik's infectious enthusiasm and easy four-step plan will turn anyone into an intrinsic exerciser for life.

From the best-selling author of THE ULTIMATE WORKOUT LOG and coauthor of FITNESS FOR DUMMIES, FITNESS FOR TRAVELERS is an informative and entertaining guide for travelers who want to stay fit on the road. It's tough enough to exercise regularly when you're at home. But when you're disoriented from jet lag, stressed out by business meetings, and daunted by unfamiliar or prehistoric exercise equipment, staying fit becomes an even bigger challenge. Suzanne Schlosberg, in conjunction with the American Council on Exercise -- the country's top workout watchdog -- tells readers how to stay fit, eat right, and feel great while traveling for business or pleasure. Schlosberg combines extensive resources with motivational advice from some of the world's busiest travelers to arm people of all fitness levels with the confidence, skills, and know-how to create their own travel fitness program. In this book, you will find* More than 25 workouts for any location or situation* Strategies for fitting fitness into your busy itinerary* Resources for finding gyms, running routes, and pools around the world* Guidance for creating your own travel workouts* Advice for eating more healthfully on the fly* Essential gadgets for the fit traveler's suitcase

This newly assembled volume draws from two books that were originally published in Galway Kinnell's first two decades of writing, WHAT A KINGDOM IT WAS (1960), which included the poem "The Avenue Bearing the Initial of Christ into the New World," and FLOWER HERDING ON MOUNT MONADNOCK (1964). Kinnell has revised some of the work in this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

This volume brings together BODY RAGS and MORTAL ACTS, MORTAL WORDS and THE PAST, three books that are central to the life’s work of one of the masters of contemporary poetry. Included here are many of Galway Kinnell’s best-loved and most anthologized poems. Kinnell has revised some of the poems for this new edition, and comments on his working method in a prefatory note.

A new collection of poetry by the director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, which celebrates its seventy-fifth anniversary in 2000. "Dark splendor" are the words Edward Hirsch uses to describe the poems of the award-winning author Michael Collier. Collier's new work balances on the ledge between the everyday and the unknown, revealing the hidden depths of relationships. The poems in THE LEDGE are narrative and colloquial, musical and crystalline, at once intimate and sharp-edged. They render the world beautifully mysterious as they slide into unexpected emotional territory. A son loses his father's favorite hammer, and with it his trust. In "The Wave," the enthusiastic crowd at a baseball game rises and sits in frightening unison, belying their hopeful cheering. In "Fathom and League," a dive two miles deep in the Pacific reveals the submerged volcanoes of the ocean and the soul. In many of the poems, the familiar animal world - of dogs and sparrows and possums in the yard - transfigures the view through a window. As director of the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference, Collier has reinvigorated one of America's most important literary institutions. The artistry and directness of THE LEDGE confirm his place among the most significant poets of his generation.

Mark Friedman's debut novel is an unflinchingly honest portrait of the relationship between siblings, the heartbreaking tale of two brothers whose lives lead to vastly different fates. The narrator, Joe Columbus, tells the story of his brother CJ's remarkable success as a professional baseball player in an effort to explain not only CJ's apparently charmed life but also his own failures - his envy, his crumbling marriage, his missteps and cowardice. A richly imagined story that explores both the grand and enduring allure of our national pasttime and the complications of our lives - our longings, losses, and regrets - COLUMBUS SLAUGHTERS BRAVES is a dark and comic and ultimately redemptive novel. Like W. P. Kinsella's SHOELESS JOE Joe and Michael Shaara's FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME, this is a poignant and compassionate work that introduces readers to a gifted and extraordinarily perceptive writer.