Remember the days when phone booths stood on every street corner? If you had to make a call, you'd step inside the little booth, lift the phone off the hook, put a coin in the slot, listen for the click, push the buttons, and hear it ring? And for only 25 cents, in the quiet of the booth, you could call your grandmother, or let the office know you were running late, or get directions for a birthday party. . .

This is the story of one of the last remaining phone booths in New York City, the Phone Booth on the corner of West End Avenue and 100th. Everyone used it — from ballerinas and girl scouts, zookeepers and birthday clowns, to cellists and even secret agents! The Phone Booth was so beloved that people would sometimes wait in line to use it. Kept clean and polished, the Phone Booth was proud and happy . . . until, the day a businessman strode by and shouted into a shiny silver object, "I'll be there in ten minutes!" Soon everyone was talking into these shiny silver things, and the Phone Booth stood alone and empty, unused and dejected.

How the Phone Booth saved the day and united the neighborhood to rally around its revival is the heart of this soulful story. In a world in which objects we love and recognize as part of the integral fabric of our lives are disappearing at a rapid rate, here is a story about the value of the analog, the power of the people's voice, and the care and respect due to those things that have served us well over time.

With his delightful, witty, and boldly colored illustrations that evoke Miroslav Sasek's mid-century modern aesthetic, Max Dalton simply and elegantly captures the energy and diversity of New York City and its inhabitants. A beauty to behold and a pleasure to read, The Lonely Phone Booth is sure to be a favorite among children and parents alike, and the real Phone Booth, which is still standing at West End Avenue and 100th Street, is worth a field trip!

From the Reviews

Evoking the same kind of New York charm as favorites like The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge and The House on East 88th Street, screenwriter Ackerman celebrates a humble phone booth (still standing at 100th Street and West End Avenue) that saves the Upper West Side--and vice versa. Fellow newcomer Dalton's retro vignettes set the scene with square-jawed men in skinny ties, Girl Scouts in braids, and assorted neighborhood clowns, ballerinas, and secret agents while Ackerman explains how things used to be. "Each week, phone company workers came to clean and polish the Phone Booth, to collect the deposited coins, and to make sure that its buttons were working properly." The booth has plenty of customers until people start holding "shiny silver objects" to their ears, puzzling the phone booth and eradicating the long lines of callers waiting "just to wish their grandmas a happy birthday." An electrical storm reveals the vulnerability of the cellphone network ("Hey, does this old thing work?" a construction foreman asks, eyeing the dilapidated booth), causing the locals to reevaluate its worth. Cultural history of the best sort.
— Publishers Weekly

Normal 0 0 1 300 1711 David R. Godine, Publisher 14 3 2101 11.1282 0 0 0

The Romantic Movement, its seeds planted in the seventeenth century, became the ascendant philosophical and aesthetic ethos of the nineteenth century. The opposite of Classicism, with its regard for order, rationality, rules, and balance, Romanticism gave primacy to the imagination, to the senses, to intuition and inspiration, putting a premium on the spectacular, the mysterious, the dramatic. Above all, its emphasis was faith in the self, in the individual. As a movement, Romanticism has been minutely examined in the genres of music, literature, and art. But in this comprehensive survey, we see its development in that most transient manifestation of human effort: the garden.




Romantic gardens were a source of sensory delight, moral instruction, spiritual insight, and artistic inspiration. Here nature stimulated reverie and sentiment. Rustic structures, inscribed monuments, sweeping vistas, and naturalistic lakes and cascades were elements in an ever-changing panorama. Nature, and by extension, gardens were expected to stir the imagination, to clear the mind, to relieve the soul of its burdens, to provide both solace and salvation.




In this book, containing a lengthy introductory essay on the nature of Romanticism, the authors demonstrate, through drawings and designs, watercolors, and engravings, a narrative of the course of Romanticism in Europe and America, where the landscape ideals of the creators of private gardens were translated into the designs for public parks. Here, illustrated in full color and described in detail, are the books, the essays, the prints, and the manuscripts that served as core documents of the Romantic Movement. In this impressive survey, Godine has joined with the Morgan Library and Museum and the Foundation for Landscape Studies to assemble a splendid array of seminal texts alongside outstanding works of art. The result is a scholarly and accessible book that reveals and illuminates the origins and impact of the movement that dominated both Europe and America between 1700 and 1900 in the realm of the garden.

One stormy night in 1826, just north of Galveston Bay, Old Bull, a Cheyenne Indian who had just seen the ocean for the first time, found himself trying to outrace a hurricane. Lifted from his horse, spun around, and thrown down in the bayou, Old Bull rode the current into a small canyon, and survived. He was the only one of his party to return from the expedition, arriving home nearly naked, nearly hallucinating, riding a horse.

Such is the auspicious beginning to the life of Jordan Coolwater, a distant relation to Old Bull, whom we meet as a boy in the 1970s, shooting turtles on a summer day, and being raised by his grandparents on Creek Indian land in the house of his great-great-grandfather, a survivor of the "Trail of Tears." Bearing the burden of his ancestry, Jordan Coolwater—from bored young boy, to thoughtful teenager, struggling artist, escaped convict, and finally, father—is the subject of Eddie Chuculate's prize-winning collection of linked short stories. The first story in the collection, "Galveston Bay, 1826," won an O'Henry Prize in 2007, and the second, "Yo Yo," received a Pushcart Prize Special Mention.

Reminiscent of Denis Johnson's Jesus's Son, Chuculate's gritty, deceptively simple stories also recall Junot Dias and Sherman Alexie. This is not only a portrait of a young Native American artist struggling with the two constants in his life, alcohol and art, but also a portrait of America, of its dispossessed, its outlaws, and its visionaries.

From the Reviews

"Chuculate writes forthright prose in a somber key, examining without judgment the lives of Native American characters like Old Bull, a Cheyenne who, in 'Galveston Bay, 1826,' the collection's one stand-alone story, ventures out to see the ocean for the first time, only to get savaged by a hurricane. Memory and will converge here to powerful effect."
— Publishers Weekly

"Every sentence is unexpected, yet infallible…. The calm, beautiful, unexplaining accuracy of description carries us right through the madness of the final adventure."
— Ursala K. Le Guin, author of The Left Hand of Darkness

"This is a book you'll rave about."
— Julie Shigekuni, author of A Bridge Between Us

Eddie Chuculate is Creek and Cherokee Indian from Muskogee, Oklahoma. He has a degree in creative writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts and is the second Native American to have held the Wallace Stegner fellowship at Stanford. He lives in Oklahoma.

The Inner Sky is a new selection of poems and prose by the great poet Rainer Maria Rilke, set with the original text and a facing page translation, and including more than a dozen works that have never before appeared in English. The translations, by the NEA and PEN-award-winning author and translator Damion Searls, are lively, moving, and appealing, and they give a new voice for Rilke in English: mystical but concrete, like Emily Dickinson or Gerard Manley Hopkins.

Searls's selection of texts clusters around a handful of related images and ideas – birds and trees, giving and receiving, working and waiting, girlhood and gardens – and presents a coherent vision of how we relate to the outer world and inner world of the imagination. Scholars and students of Rilke will benefit from the German and French originals opposite the translations, and two full indices of English and original titles and first lines. An annotated chronology and the translator's afterword complete this rich new volume, a necessary addition to even the most complete Rilke library, and the perfect introduction for those just getting to know this perennial master.


From the Reviews

Translating Rilke means entering quite an established literary tradition, one that is not lost on translator Damion Searls. Searls dedicates The Inner Sky to poet Anne Carson and previous Rilke translators and well-known literati Stephen Mitchell and Edward Snow. Winner of PEN and Fulbright awards, Searls endeavors to translate with "vigor and mysterious simplicity"; his rendering is as unconventional as it is enjoyable. His English, as he describes it in the collection's thoughtful afterword, highlights its Germanic ties to Rilke's "tongue-twistingly assonant" original language, oftentimes with an unusual twist in the English. No matter their level of familiarity with Rilke, The Inner Sky belongs on the bookshelf of any literature lover, thanks largely to Searls' deft translation and grouping of Rilke's work. This nontraditional collection predates prose poetry and short-short fiction, yet speaks to these contemporary styles of new craft.
— Rachel Mennies, ForeWord Magazine

Damion Searls has contributed thrilling new translations of this most familiar poet that show Rilke's thought in its rawest form. A must-read for Rilke fans, The Inner Sky will deepen the English-speaking world's perception of the man behind the well-wrought verses.
— Stephan Delbos, The Prague Post

The Austrian Robert Musil (1880-1942), a central figure in the modernist movement, is known primarily for his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities. But here, in these five stories—stories as crucial to the understanding of The Man Without Qualities (and Musil's immense literary influence and significance) as Joyce's Dubliners is to Ulysses, he displays another face, one that is by turn extravagant, sensual, mystical, and autobiographical. As Frank Kermode notes in his preface, these stories "are elaborate attempts to use fiction for its true purposes, the discovery and regeneration of the human world." In that redefinition of fiction, Robert Musil's name is writ large.

Five Women has gone through three printings as a Godine Nonpareil book. We are now proud to reissue it as the newest edition to the Verba Mundi library of modern world literature.


"In his descriptions of love affairs and especially in the portraits of women in love, Musil is truly original; in managing scenes of physical love, he has not been approached by any writer of the last fifty years." — V.S. Pritchett

Every year without fail, caribou from the Yukon and Alaska set off in early April to a small corner of Alaska to give birth to their young. The journey – an ordeal of mountains and blizzards, ravenous wolves, scant forage, and river crossings with ice chunks the size of pickup trucks – is the longest migration of any land animal on earth. Despite these formidable obstacles, the females find their way to the calving grounds on the coast of the Beaufort Sea, deliver their calves in June, and then begin their long journey home.

This is their story, told by an author who travels to the Arctic in his seventh decade to "witness a few moments of this endless turning circle of birth and rebirth" and to answer the question, "What is the true nature of the North?" Is it the good and generous land of which the Inuit sing, or, in the words of Arctic explorer, Elisha Kent Kane, "Horrible! Horrible!" a dwelling place of darkness and death?

Personal and profound, chock-full of adventure, literary references, natural history, and ecological concerns, Mr. Reid's memoir is moving and poignant, evocative and cautionary. Arctic Circle is a book, in short, that every reader concerned with the fate of the Far North should embrace

From the Reviews

Reid's yearning for the Arctic crystallized when he met Fred Meader in 1977. A homesteader living deep in the Alaskan wilderness, Meader was in California speaking about the environmental toll of oil drilling and advocating for protection of the magnificent Brooks Range. Because of heart-rending losses and tribulations, it took Reid many years to reach Alaska, and he now chronicles his bittersweet journeys in a meditative, affecting, and funny tale of adventure and revelation. Reid's big desire was to witness the great migration of the Porcupine caribou herd (named for the Porcupine River), which for thousands of years has made an unbelievably arduous annual trek to a coastal plain, where female caribous give birth and care for their young. As Reid recounts his Arctic sojourns with awe, lyricism, and bemusement, he subtly interlaces inner and outer worlds and traces the circles of struggle and understanding, life and death. Spectacular descriptions, charming wit, and forthright reflections on what makes a place sacred become striking testimony to the importance of the Arctic wild and the need to preserve it.
—Donna Seaman, Booklist

What Reid finds in the Arctic is a world that transcends easy definition. He guides us through his experiences in a book which is part memoir, part spiritual quest, and part adventure story, with a healthy dose of natural history. This book is perfect for anyone who enjoys a good travelogue or memoir, and the engaging blend of spiritual and scientific elements ensure a broad appeal.
—ForeWord Magazine

Reid’s book is not exactly a chronicle; it’s a poem, an ode to wild Alaska. It’s not only about nature, but also about human interaction with it, and specifically about the reactions of one human, himself, to it. Initially I was impatient with Reid’s prologue, his meandering and his failure to get on with it. But this book is not about plot or narrative tension; it’s about being there. And Reid has a talent for taking us there.
— The Internet Review of Books

Praised by Maxine Kumin as a "master craftsman," Donald Hall as "a true poet," and Philip Levine as "one of the great storytellers of contemporary poetry," Wesley McNair has selected for this volume a wide range of narratives, lyrics, and meditations. In these poems he recounts the struggles and small triumphs of his own life and the lives of others—misfits, dreamers, sufferers and loners—seeking insights into New England, America, and the more obscure geography of the human heart. McNair's verse, whether about the trauma of family conflict, the perseverance of those around him, or the solace of place, represents a singular achievement, described by the Ruminator Review as "one of the most individual and original bodies of work by a poet of his generation."
 
For more than 40 years Wesley McNair has been writing poems that have drawn praise from reviewers and fellow poets alike. Lovers of the Lost displays some of his best poetry from six previous volumes, incorporating it with a sampling of new work.
 
The selections and new poems gathered here explore personal experience and the experience of others with curiosity, humor, and deep feeling, which ranges from sorrow to joy. They reveal the formal variety that has always been evident in McNair's free verse, as well as his trademark craftsmanship. According to the Minneapolis Star Tribune, McNair's aim as a poet is to be "both accessible and complex." Drawn from life, his poems find their truths in the small, often overlooked events of our common existence.

Like many good fables, this story opens with a foundling left – rather inconveniently, if not surprisingly – in the woods. A large lizard, ever conscious of tripping hazards, picks up the infant and takes her home, where she soon grows into a pretty, pampered, and generally useless young woman named Isabella. Despite her adoptive mother's efforts (for the lizard is really a sorceress in disguise) to shape her up, the girl prefers the alluring life offered her by the charming Prince Rupert, a world of cooks and servants, palaces and jewels, luxury and indolence.

Luckily, the lizard woman is a canny, concerned parent. She does not suffer fools lightly and is not about to let her daughter's too-easy transition to palace life go unchallenged. And so she arranges a surprise transformation for her daughter – one that puts the prince's marital plans on hold and gives the sorceress just enough time to hammer home a few lessons about the downside of idleness, the inanity of vanity, and the satisfactions of self-reliance.

In this witty, modern interpretation of a classic Italian folktale, Leah Marinsky Sharpe has crafted a light-hearted mother-daughter fable with a moral that is sure to strike a chord with readers of all ages. The illustrations by Jane Marinsky glow with rich color and playful humor. Together, words and pictures provide a zesty treat for parents and children alike.

From the Reviews

"Rich storytelling and intricately imagined artwork make this debut a standout. [. . .] Marinsky's paintings, in the chalky, sun-bleached colors of the Italian renaissance, contain many small pleasures: the woods and flowers of medieval tapestries, the goat-headed princess licking cupcake batter off her goat nose, and a portrait of the shallow prince's just fate. A must for anyone who would rather be a sorceress than a princess."
— Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"Sharpe has made changes in theme (that goat's head was originally punishment for being ungrateful) and language, but this version, the story's first separate appearance in this country, will make a popular gift from parents and caregivers afflicted with similarly slothful younglings."
— Kirkus

"The cast of characters in this reinterpretation of an Italian folktale includes a lizard and witch, deserted baby, and a lovely, lazy girl troubled by a bout of goathead-itis. Not to mention a finicky prince who is shocked to discover a faun-like face on his girlfriend's body. The story is rich with subtle reminders to be self-reliant, productive, authentic, and watchful of the motivations of others. Marinsky's rich, renaissance-inspired artwork captures just the right imagery."
— Foreword Magazine

""The Goat-Faced Girl," a witty and richly illustrated retelling of an old Italian tale that will probably be new to most young American readers. Children ages 5-10 will relish Jane Marinsky's colorful, naïve-style paintings of Isabella learning to persevere, especially the image of her determinedly stirring a bowl of batter, unaware of the dab of chocolate on her goaty nose."
– The Wall Street Journal

Now a 10-Part Miniseries Airing on PBS!

Flora Thompson (1876–1947) wrote what may be the quintessential distillation of English country life at the turn of the twentieth century. In 1945, the three books Lark Rise (1939), Over to Candleford (1941), and Candleford Green (1943) were published together in one elegant volume, and this new omnibus Nonpareil edition, complete with charming wood engravings, should be a cause for real rejoicing.

In his introduction, H. J. Massingham observes that Thompson "possesses the attributes both of sympathetic presentation and literary power to such a degree of quality and beauty that her claims upon posterity can hardly be questioned." He calls the books themselves "a triune achievement: a triumph of evocation in the resurrecting of an age that, being transitional, was the most difficult to catch as it flew; another in diversity of rural portraiture engagingly blended with autobiography; and the last in the overtones and implications of a set of values which is the author's 'message'."

This is the story of three closely-related Oxfordshire communities – a hamlet, a village, and a town – and the memorable cast of characters who people them. Based on her own experiences as a child and young woman, it is keenly observed and beautifully narrated, quiet and evocative. The books have inspired two plays that ran in London, and a new ten-part BBC-TV drama series to be broadcast in the US in 2009.

"Our literature has no finer remembrancer . . . no observer so genuinely endearing."
– John Fowles, New Statesman
"Flora Thompson's great memoir of her Oxfordshire girlhood [is] a model of the form. The richness of the language, the lingering over detail and incident creates a haunting classic."– The New York Times

BOOK GROUP RESOURCES
Learn the basics by reading the Wikipedia article about the trilogy.Read about Flora Thompson or read some of her poetry.
Enjoy the resources on the BBC website about their television version.See if Lark Rise to Candleford is playing on PBS near you. Read a resident's tale of the villages portrayed in the trilogy.Explore the region, including Juniper Hill (Lark Rise), Buckingham (Candleford), and Fringford (Candleford Green).