WINNER of the 2008 NOBEL PRIZE in LITERATURE
The Prospector is the crowning achievement from one of France's preeminent contemporary novelists and a work rich with sensuality and haunting resonance. It is the turn of the century on the island of Mauritius, and young Alexis L'Etang enjoys an idyllic existence with his parents and beloved sister: sampling the pleasures of privilege, exploring the constellations and tropical flora, and dreaming of treasure buried long ago by the legendary Unknown Corsair. But with his father's death, Alexis must leave his childhood paradise and enter the harsh world of privation and shame. Years later, Alexis has become obsessed with the idea of finding the Corsair's treasure and, through it, the lost magic and opulence of his youth. He abandons job and family, setting off on a quest that will take him from remote tropical islands to the hell of World War I, and from a love affair with the elusive Ouma to a momentous confrontation with the search that has consumed his life. By turns harsh and lyrical, pointed and nostalgic, The Prospector is "a parable of the human condition" (Le Mond) by one of the most significant literary figures in Europe today.


"Le Clézio's prose is so sensual and rhythmic it's hypnotic."
— Boston Phoenix

"A novel of intense beauty."
— Review of Contemporary Fiction

"A remarkable work."
— Booklist, starred review

Listen to NPR book critic Christopher Merill discuss The Prospector at "The World".

Housed at the Library of Congress, the archives of the Farm Security Administration constitute an essential visual record of American life from the late 1920s through the onset of the Second World War. Guided by the adroit hands and watchful eyes of the master photo editor Roy Stryker, the FSA archive includes the work of dozens of photographers, from acknowledged giants like Walker Evans, Ben Shahn, and Dorothea Lange to Marion Post Wolcott and Russell Lee, whose names and work may be less familiar.

Stryker's approach to his photographers' assignments was a bracing mix of structure and improvisation. He sent his artists across the country to shoot for a few weeks, mostly in small towns and rural areas. They worked from what Stryker called shooting scripts – laundry lists of possible subjects and situations – but were always free to explore their own perspectives on a locale, its inhabitants, and their activities. When negatives and prints arrived, Stryker would guide his artists with suggestions, advice, and sharp-eyed criticism, all designed to elicit their best work. At this he was strikingly successful.

This book collects work from nine of these trips – Evans in Louisana and Alabama, Shahn in West Virginia, Lange in California, and others – uniting them with Stryker's shooting scripts, letters, and other relevant archival documents. What emerges, beyond the images themselves, is a complex and vital overview of the FSA at work, not just the work, but how the work evolved and matured under Stryker's guidance. Appropriately, the book concludes with photographs of New Orleans, the only city photographed in depth by the FSA artists.

Reproduced in duotone, the 175 photographs in The Likes of Us – all printed from the original negatives at the Library of Congress – offer a rare opportunity not only to see a choice selection of famous and little-known images but also to understand the working of one of the government's most original and creative pre-war initiatives.

Selected images from the book:
   


Read Ron Slate's review of The Likes of Us.

The publisher first saw Kim Cunningham's artwork – and her father's clever and witty poetry – at an exhibition of New Hampshire artists near the company's warehouse in Peterborough. With two young children and bookcases brimming over with alphabet, animal, nonsense, and every other kind of children's book, it takes a lot to impress him. This work did; even an amateur could see at a glance that here was the Real Thing – both the rhymes and the images.

The verses by her father, a New York copywriter, are original, catchy, and sophisticated (or as sophisticated as you can get writing about vultures, gibbons, giraffes, and gnus).  Here's just a sample of Webster's ode to the yak:

        A shaggy species is the yak
        With hairy front and hairy back.
        It isn't very hard to spot him
        With hairy top and hairy bottom

        He doesn't mind that he's so shaggy
        If he wore pants, he'd like them baggy
        His coat's a frightful mess, and yet
        You'd dress as he does, in Tibet.

Below and beside here are some of Cunningham's prime specimens along with one verbal sidekick. If you are intrigued by the exotic, the colorful, the sublimely ridiculous, or the reductively sublime, this is a book to tickle your tailfeathers.

    THE SNAIL
    The snail's a funny little fellow    Whose body seems to run on Jell-o.    He slips and slides along the ground    And never makes the slightest sound.    He only has one foot, and so    His speed is very, very slow.        Still, moving at all is hard, you know,        When you carry your house wherever you go.


"The sweetest bedtime story since Goodnight Moon. . . . It's a great book for reading aloud, with illustrations worth studying. Adults might learn something, too." — Rebecca Rule, Nashua Telegraph

Kim Smith makes a living as a professional designer, but her real passion is her garden, a small and densely packed quarter acre beside her Gloucester seaside home, into which she has crammed nearly every species imaginable and a few (like apricots) that most of us would consider unimaginable. We are not going to claim that this is a book for all gardens and gardeners, but its twenty-two chapters really cover an immense amount of ground - all centered on the 5-6 coastal zones that cover most of the Eastern Seaboard from Georgia to Maine, while taking into account the expected vagaries of New England weather.

This is a book that should appeal equally to serious gardeners interested in the specifics of varieties and cultivars that thrive in coastal zones and garden designers who want to learn more about what lives best where. For Smith is wise in not writing merely about the plants, shrubs, and trees and their cultivation; this is a book as much about mood - about how to design and visualize a small garden - as it is about what varieties and cultivars to buy. Eclectic in its approach, incorporating quotations and citations from Eastern as well as Western sources, she challenges with the eye of an artist, but also with the down-and-dirty experience of someone wrestling with a small space, limited sunshine, the usual encroachments of blight, bugs, beasts, and the particular New England challenges of a relatively brief growing season and mediocre soil.

Illustrated in full color with her own drawings, this is a book that should recommend itself to anyone who gardens in the coastal zones of the eastern United States. What Smith suggests has been tried and tested, and what she proposes is both sensible and sensitive.

Electra to the Rescue brings young readers the captivating story of Electra Havemeyer Webb and her adventures in "America's attic." Illustrated throughout with archival images and full-color photographs of items from the Shelburne collection, the book is a splendid introduction not only to a dynamic, unconventional woman but also to the rich, colorful world of Americana – the "visual vernacular" of our nation's people. Electra's enthusiasm was in many ways childlike, and she collected things that fire the imagination of children: rag dolls, cast-iron banks, embroidery samplers, miniature circuses – even a working paddle-wheeler. Here is a book that perfectly embodies Electra's lifelong mission: to teach, in a unique and fun way, the American tradition of craftsmanship and the often sublime beauty of simple, everyday objects.

One of eight children, Laurie Lee was born in 1914, in Slad, Gloucestershire, then a remote corner of England. As his father was absent, the large family – five children from his father's first marriage and three from his second one – was brought up by his capable mother. "We lived where he had left us; a relic of his provincial youth; a sprawling cumbersome, countrified brood too incongruous to carry with him; and I, for one, scarcely missed him. I was perfectly content in this world of women . . . bullied and tumbled through the hand-to-mouth days, patched or dressed-up, scolded, admired, swept off my feet in sudden passions of kisses, or dumped forgotten among the unwashed pots."

Lee's memoir opens when he was just a baby – younger than three years old – and ends as he becomes a young man experiencing his first kiss. "I turned to look at Rosie. She was yellow and dusty with buttercups and seemed to be purring in the gloom; her hair was rich as a wild bee's nest and her eyes were full of stings. I did not know what to do about her, nor did I know what not to do. She looked smooth and precious, a thing of unplumbable mysteries, and perilous as quicksand."

This beloved classic describes a lost world, a world reflecting the innocence and wonder of childhood, and illuminating an era without electricity or telephones. This is England on the cusp of the modern era, but it could have been anywhere. This may explain why Cider with Rosie became an instant bestseller when it was published in 1959, selling over six million copies in the UK alone, and continues to be read by children and adults all over the world.

This is our fourth "handy book" by Dan Beard, the founder of the American Scouting movement, who believed that having boys build things with their hands was not only a detriment to making mischief, but also the basis for building great lives. In this belief, Beard was indefatigable, and every Scout worth his merit badge was expected to read his classic tract on camp-lore and woodcraft, which included instructions on how to build a good fire, cook venison, prepare for a camping trip, and use an axe and a saw.

When we published the first book in this series (The American Boy's Handy Book), we thought it might appeal to a few hundred aging Scouts who fondly remembered "the old days." How wrong we were! With over 600,000 copies in print, the book is still selling strong. As Beard directed in 1930, "So, Boys
of the Open, throw aside your new rackets, your croquet mallets, and your boiled shirts. Pull on your buckskin leggings, give a war whoop and be what God intended you should be; healthy wholesome boys. This great Republic belongs to you and so does this book." To which we can only say, "Amen!"

For more than five decades, George Tice has been photographing the landscape of America, and a number of his images have become icons of their time and field.  But no other state has held for him the particular affection of Maine – its rockbound coastline, its precarious and isolated islands, its independent and hardworking people. And unmistakably, there is the sense of coming from almost another time and place, and, in the last decade or so, of a landscape transforming itself all too quickly into the conventional palette of the twenty-first century – of its fast-food predictabilities, strip mall excrescences, and the anonymous tangles of the internet highway.

This book makes its focus the Maine we all want to remember and the coastline we perhaps visited at one time and grew to love. Tice, for the past five years, has concentrated on assembling and arranging his favorite photographs. The result is comparable in its scope to Szarkowski's portrait of Minnesota and in sympathy to Evans's elegy to Alabama. In all, 107 quadtone photographs, from the fogs off Eastport to the lobster boats off Monhegan, from the grain elevators of Portland to the Shakers of Sabbathday Lake. The emphasis is on the coast, on its ports, its people, its geography, and its architecture. And this seems excusable: for most of us, Maine is its coast. It predominates in our mind's eye, in the popular imagination, and in the images featured in this book.

Still, the real rationale of a book like this is to validate the vision and the work of an artist, and this ambition is more than justified by page after page of dauntingly beautiful images, carefully arranged and faultlessly printed. If Maine is a state you hold dear, this is a book that says it all.

Selected images from the book:
     

Metropolitan Tang is Cambridge poet Linda Bamber's first book of poetry, a debut that is erudite and sassy, urban and urbane. Whether she is examining the breakup of her marriage or watching bulls in a field, considering Derrida's concepts of "presence" or her hairdresser's less theoretical philosophy, Bamber receives stimuli as indiscriminately as an antenna, all eyes and ears; then her sharp and curious mind gets to work, turning over images and ideas until she finds their proper relations, making meaning out of random juxtapositions, sense out of chaos, or, if nothing else, a good joke out of a bad situation. Most first books of poetry are tentative experiments in voice; Bamber's voice, sensitive and, at the same time, wry, is clear throughout, uniquely hers and eminently likeable.
As a reader I have often wished, over the years, for a female poet in the style of [Frank] O'Hara: bopping but sincere, humanistic and grounded but exuberant and irreverent. Linda Bamber may be that person. 
– Tony Hoagland

Poets who can write prose that equals their poetry are rare. Wanda Coleman, Los Angeles's unofficial poet laureate, proves with this collection of thirteen new short stories an exception to the rule yet again. Jazz and Twelve O'Clock Tales owes its title to the lyrics of "Lush Life" by Billy Strayhorn, Duke Ellington's right-hand man. Like the heartbroken lover in Strayhorn's song, the characters in these stories lead lonely lives full of longing and potential stifled by racism, poverty, and absurd accidents of fate. And yet, even though they are trapped by the present moment, their inner lives are lush, a mirror of the city of angels in which they live, a metropolis, "always simmering," as Coleman writes in the final story, "ever waiting to be borne on that balmy promised crescendo."

Coleman applies a poet's economy of words to her fiction, setting a scene with lightning-quick strokes, letting a detail, a dialogue, or the brisk vernacular speak for itself. Or, alternatively, she will step in and take center stage, an omniscient voice seeing beyond the impending and inevitable tragedy, but powerless to change either narrative or outcome. Powerless, that is, only within the bounds of the story, for Coleman is an author devoted to change, personal and political, writing to affect the balance of power in America. "Nothing will satisfy me," she has written, "short of an open society and social parity."

Listen to the NPR review of Jazz & Twelve O'Clocl Tales from "All Things Considered."

Read a review of Jazz & Twelve O'Clock Tales at the San Francisco Gate.

"Every story in Jazz and Twelve O' Clock Tales conveys a fresh verbal improvisation, an unexpected lightness, and the sure understanding of the complexity of the world. Wanda Coleman is a poet and a musician."
— Maryse Condé, author of The Story of the Cannibal Woman and Who Slashed Celanire's Throat?

"Wanda Coleman is a distinctive and original voice in American letters. I love the way that she can combine the poetic and the conversational modes, the delicate way she balances between the comic and the tragic, the sly, insinuating complexity that runs under the surface of seemingly straightforward situations. The stories in Jazz and Twelve O' Clock Tales are inimitable creations—as is Wanda Coleman herself. She is a national treasure."
— Dan Chaon, author of You Remind Me of Me and Among the Missing