Free Books from David R. Godine, Publisher!
David R. Godine

With any order of $25.00 or more, receive Cider with Rosie by Laurie Lee. This memoir of a young boy born in England on the cusp of the modern era and World War I was an instant bestseller upon publication in 1959. A $15.95 value!

With any order of $50.00 or more, we'll also send The Land of Green Ginger by Noel Langley, with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. A fantastical tale of adventure and mayhem by none other than the screenwriter of The Wizard of Oz. A $10.95 value!

With any order of $75.00 or more, we'll send you the two titles above, AND The Prospector by J. M. G. Le Clezio, translated from the French by Carol Marks. From the Nobel winner J. M. G. Le Clezio comes this novel of adventure, obsession, and buried treasure. A "parable of the human condition" (Le Monde). A $16.95 value!

Taking What I Like: Stories **FREE Download of 1st Story for a Limited Time!**
by Linda Bamber

For a limited time, you can download "Casting Call," the first short story in the collection, for FREE! Click here to download, or preview the story below.   "Casting Call" by Linda Bamber, from Taking What I Like  



Othello is the only minority member of the Department, so Desdemona, currently serving as Department Chair, is running an affirmative action search. A likely candidate reminds her of Othello in the old days, before he smothered her to death with a pillow; against her will, she develops a crush on the new guy. Iago gets into the act, stirring up mischief as before. Will it all end in tears once again? Read "Casting Call," one of eight stories in Linda Bamber's new collection, to find out. You'll find yourself caught between laughter and suspense as you encounter these and other familiar characters from Antony and Cleopatra to Henry IV, from Jane Eyre to real-life American artist Thomas Eakins.

Linda Bamber has combined her love of fiction from the past with her propensity to shake things up, taking what she likes and gleefully sharing it with us. As entertaining and contemporary as these stories are, they also remind us what we, too, love about the classic texts she takes apart and reassembles. Bamber's tales, like the best translations, exist independently while reminding us not to forget the plays and novels they treat. Alternating between admiration and attitude, the stories layer their plots with commentary, history, and politics, pausing as they build only to make room for the sanity and wit of the authorial voice. Emotional and genuine, these stories are also playful, inventive, and hilariously funny. From her long study of the Bard, Bamber has absorbed some of Shakespeare's own empathy, understanding, and expressive flair. It is not too much to say that her work takes its place in the same literary sphere as the works it engages.

Linda Bamber teaches in the English Department of Tufts University. Her poetry collection, Metropolitan Tang, was published by Black Sparrow/ Godine and Comic Women, Tragic Men, a scholarly book on Shakespeare, by Stanford University Press. She lives in Cambridge Massachusetts.

Praise for Taking What I Like

Like the best and most memorable teachers Bamber brings the past to bear on the present in ways that inform and exhilarate.
—Harvard Review

Author Ben Fountain chose Taking What I Like as one of his recommended reads for 2013—check out the full interview on NPR here.

Beneath the Streets of Boston
by Joe McKendry

Beckoning readers to explore the territory beneath Boston's streets, Joe McKendry explores a century-old world when Beantown designed and created the country's first subway. In stunning artwork and through a fascinating and historically accurate narrative of Boston's first "Big Dig," you will enter the subterranean realm of workers who dug miles of tunnels by hand. Using pick and shovels to create new routes, you'll discover how these workers burrowed deep below Boston Harbor, under Beacon Hill and the Old State House, and built the Longfellow Bridge to carry the trains over the Charles River to the center of Cambridge. You'll read lively first-hand accounts of the turn-of-the-century public's perception of the underground public transportation, including their fears (expressed fantastically through the gruesome image of a fanged and tentacled "subway microbe"), and learn how the system served as a model for the rest of the country in its ability to relieve traffic, mitigate congestion (which was even more severe a hundred years ago than today) and get people anywhere they wanted to go for only a nickel.

The Mary Azarian Address Book
by Mary Azarian

Right after we published Mary Azarian's A Farmer's Alphabet, some marketing genius in the company suggested the alphabetical images could easily be converted into an address book. This we did, and the spiralbound 6 × 9˝ version sold out and was reprinted twice. We still get so many requests for it that we've decided to issue a new and improved version, containing not only the standard address and phone numbers, but also e-mail addresses and cell phone numbers to bring it into the new millennium. It will be printed on a heavier paper, bound be­tween boards, and printed in two colors. Although it may not have many customers in haute couture circles or on Wall Street, our address book is the perfect way to carry and store contact information, and a lot more attractive than a BlackBerry.

An Artist in Venice
by Adam Van Doren

The city of Venice has always provided an almost irresistible lure for both writers and artists. Henry James loved it, as did Ruskin, Browning, Pound, and Brodsky. For artists, it has been a compulsory magnet since the time of Bellini and Canaletto. By the nineteenth century there was hardly an artist of note – Whistler and Turner, Sargent and Prendergast, Sickert and Bonington – who was not seduced by the city's charms, history, and aesthetic heritage.

For the depiction of Venice by artists, it's a high bar that's been set, but Adam Van Doren, grandson of the Pulitzer-prize-winning poet Mark Van Doren, convincingly confronts the competition in this charming memoir, a verbal and visual account of his love affair with the city. His story is personal; like all other artists, he sees the city with and through his own eyes, but he is also well-informed historically. He laces his tour with information, opinion, and citation. With Van Doren as guide, the reader's tour of the city is rich and convincing, filled with the presence of illustrious predecessors.

With an informed preface by the scholar Theodore Rabb and a charming foreword by Simon Winchester, with 23 full-color drawings by the author/artist, and even six pages of commendably lucid "Notes" on the personalities and structures discussed, this is a book that will proudly take its place alongside the many others that have celebrated this city for centuries.

Adam Van Doren studied architecture at Columbia University and painting at the National Academy of Design. He was a Visiting Artist at the American Academy in Rome, and has taught at the Institute of Classical Architecture in New York. He has exhibited at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C., among other institutions, and his work is included in the collections of the Art Institute of Chicago, The Yale University Art Gallery, The Addison Gallery of American Art, The Princeton University Art Museum, and The Wads­worth Atheneum, among others. Visit his website at www.adamvandoren.net.

Praise for An Artist in Venice

Architect and artist Van Doren offers a love letter to Venice in this elegant and slender volume, and he sings his praise to the city through majestic prose and 23 beautiful watercolor paintings of Venice.
—Publishers Weekly, starred review

[Van Doren] pulls off the not-inconsequential feat of conjuring some of the best-known views of the world with fresh eyes.
—The Wall Street Journal

This title is now available as an eBook through Google Play.

A Farmer's Alphabet
by Mary Azarian

Before she became a Caldecott medalist, Mary Azarian was a teacher in one of Vermont's last one-room schoolhouses. In the late 1970s, the state board of education commissioned her to create "a farmer's alphabet," a series of bold red-and-black woodcut prints featuring the 26 letters, A to Z, and depicting scenes from Vermont life. Now gathered in book form, printed in two colors on beautiful paper, these striking woodcuts give us a child's-eye view of rural New England – from Apple, Barn, and Cow to aX, Yawn, and Zinnia – a homey, large-as-life world that readers of every age will want to inhabit. No M for McDonalds in Azarian's world: only Maple Sugar.

Mary Azarian grew up on a small farm in Virginia, where she had horses, rabbits and chickens. After graduating from Smith College, where she studied printmaking with Leonard Baskin, she married and moved to a farm in northern Vermont. There she taught for four years in one of the last one-room schoolhouses in the state. She has been a full-time printmaker since 1969. Her other books include The Tale of John Barleycorn, The Man Who Lived Alone, and the Caldecott Medal-winning Snowflake Bentley.

Praise for A Farmer's Alphabet

No matter where children live – on a farm, in the suburbs or the city – they will love this handsome book.
—Smithsonian Magazine

A beautiful gift; a treasure to own.
—The Boston Globe

Each page is a frameable work of art.
—American Library Association Booklist

Azarian eschews the merely cute or quaint, creating a loving memorial to a way of life.
—School Library Journal

One Times Square
by Joe McKendry

Winner of a New York Times Best Illustrated Children's Book Award for 2012!

Named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2012!

At the heart of the non-stop bustle of modern Times Square stands One Times Square, the former headquarters of the New York Times and the skyscraper – now all but invisible behind billboards – that gave the square its name in 1904. Around it, a once-humble district of carriage houses and coal merchants at the intersection of Broadway and Seventh Avenue evolved into "The Crossroads of the World." Here impresarios and real-estate moguls vied to outdo each other as they built theaters and hotels, penny arcades and restaurants, dime museums and office towers in an unending cycle of reinvention and reimagination.

More than any other public space in New York City, Times Square is the place where Americans have gathered, in good times and in bad, to catch up on the latest news, to mark historic occasions, or just to meet a few friends. From the Stock Market crash in 1929 – when the building's iconic "Zipper" provided up-to-the-minute information – to the celebrations marking the end of the Second World War, to annual New Year's Eve festivities with the iconic descending lighted ball, the square and its tower have been an integral part of our history.

One Times Square explores the story of this fascinating intersection, starting when Broadway was a mere dirt path known as Bloomingdale Road, through the district's decades of postwar decay, to its renewal as a glittering tourist-friendly media mecca. McKendry's meticulous, lush watercolors take readers behind the famous Camel billboard to find out how it blew smoke rings over the square for 25 years, to the top of the Times Tower to see how the New Year's ball has made its descent for over 100 years, and onto construction sites as buildings grow up around One Times Square to dwarf what once ranked among the tallest buildings in the world.

Visit Joe McKendry's Amazon author page here.

Praise for One Times Square

Just like Times Square itself, the pages are filled to the brim.
—Kirkus Review

As an artist, McKendry is as versatile as Times Square itself, rendering sepia-toned watercolors just as adeptly as black-and-white line drawings, clarifying diagrams, streetscapes and full-spectrum painting. Much of the artwork feels deeply nostalgic, entirely appropriate to the subject matter – like leafing through an old issue of The Saturday Evening Post, with none of the pages falling out. Yet the layout, varied and lively but still with plenty of white space, feels entirely modern. This is both a handsome and highly readable book, one that will be pored over cover to cover by young New Yorkers, real and aspiring.
—The New York Times

The full Times review can be found here.

In this spectacular album of crisp sketches and meticulous paintings styled after archival and current photographs, McKendry (Beneath the Streets of Boston) serves up a fascinating biography of One Times Square . . . Architecture and history buffs--and, really, anyone with a sense of curiosity--will relish McKendry's visual approach.
—Publishers Weekly, Starred Review

Like Times Square itself, this book is pure visual stimulation . . . McKendry's text is full of juicy nuggets, but the engaging and nostalgia-inspiring sepia and full-color watercolors steal the show.
—Booklist

McKendry's book elegantly fuses watercolors and words to tell the story of one of America's most iconic addresses.
—Alex Marshall, Regional Plan Association

Rosemary Verey
by Barbara Paul Robinson

Rosemary Verey was the last of the great English garden legends. Although she embraced gardening late in life, she quickly achieved international renown. She was the acknowledged apostle of the "English style," on display at her home at Barnsley House, the "must have" adviser to the rich and famous, including Prince Charles and Elton John, and a beloved and wildly popular lecturer in America. A child of a generation born between the two World Wars, she could have easily lived a predictable and comfortable life, devoted to her family, church, and horses, but a devastating accident changed her life, and with her architect-husband, she went on to create the gardens at their home that became a mandatory stop on every garden tour in the 1980s and 1990s. At sixty-two, she wrote her first book, followed by seventeen more in twenty years. Her husband's death, shortly after her career began, added a financial imperative to her ambition. By force of character, hard work, and determination, she tirelessly promoted herself and her garden lessons, traveling worldwide to lecture, sell books, and strengthen her network.    

She was a natural teacher, encouraging her American fans to believe that they were fully capable of creating beautiful gardens while validating their quest for a native vernacular. She also re-introduced the English to their own gardening traditions. Drawing from garden history and its literature, she developed a language of classical formal design, embellished with her exuberant planting style. Here is her story, recounted by a successful Manhattan attorney who worked with her as a volunteer, who saw her as both a person and a professional, and who was close to her for the last twenty years of her life. A demanding and sometimes truculent taskmaster, and a relentless perfectionist, Rosemary Verey, in her life as in her work, was the very personification of the English garden style. Her influence will be felt for generations.

During a sabbatical from Debevoise & Plimpton where she was the first woman partner, Barbara Paul Robinson worked as a gardener for Rosemary Verey at Barnsley House. A hands-in-the-dirt gardener herself, she and her husband created their own gardens at Brush Hill in northwestern Connecticut, featured in articles, books, and on television. A frequent speaker, Barbara has published articles in the New York Times, Horticulture, Fine Gardening, and Hortus; she has also written a chapter in Rosemary Verey's The Secret Garden. The gardens can be viewed at www.brushhillgardens.com.

Praise for Rosemary Verey: The Life & Lessons of a Legendary Gardener

The definitive book on the great gardener and designer. Meticulously researched and invigorated by the author's own personal recollections, Barbara Paul Robinson has captured the essence of Rosemary Verey's genius for creating gardens and also her great capacity for friendship. Rosemary's influence on twentieth-century garden style remains her legacy to designers all over the world.
—Penelope Hobhouse

Truly great gardeners deserve a fine garden writer as a biographer. . . . Rosemary Verey, the former doyenne of twentieth-century English garden design, has found the ideal one in Barbara Paul Robinson. . . . Robinson is able to provide in-depth insight into her subject's character and personality as well as her genius for blending highly original landscape composition with great horticultural craft.
—Elizabeth Barlow Rogers

. . . all but channels the great Rosemary Verey herself.
—Berkshire Style

This title is now available as an eBook through Google Play.

Fauna and Family
by Gerald Durrell

Fauna and Family, also known as The Garden of the Gods, is the third in Durrell's Corfu trilogy that begins with his beloved classic, My Family and Other Animals and continues with Birds, Beasts and Relatives. In his foreword to Fauna and Family, Durrell confessed that in the first two books, "I had left out a number of incidents and characters that I would have liked to have described, and I have attempted to repair this omission in this book . . . I hope that it might give the same pleasure to its readers as apparently its predecessors have done, as for me it portrays a very important part of my life . . . which is a truly happy and sunlit childhood."

Also available from Godine: Fillets of Plaice

Karsh
selected, with an introduction & commentary by David Travis

In August and September of 1988, Yousuf Karsh's long-time assistant, Jerry Fielder, sat down with the master photographer and taped over nine hours of recollections of the many portrait sessions he'd experienced in one of the greatest careers in history. Karsh spoke of his sitters and his rags-to-riches life, including much that had never before been revealed or recorded. Previously, Karsh had often paired his full-page portraits with stories of his encounters with famous sitters. However, as his œuvre grew, the photographs soon eclipsed the commentary, and his essays were often edited down to captions.

Drawing from the newly rediscovered 1988 recordings, Karsh: Beyond the Camera reestablishes the original presentation of Karsh's work, pairing each photograph with the story of its making on the facing page. Published in an affordable small format paperback with flaps, Karsh's portraits are elucidated and complemented both by his own recollections and by the text of veteran curator David Travis. The resulting book, with its chronological rather than thematic arrangement of portraits, is a study of Karsh's artistic and stylistic development, offering the reader an unparalleled tour through the greatest images of the photographer's life work.

As much as Karsh wrote about his portrait sessions, he rarely revealed what he thought about himself. Travis constructs the compelling history of how a brilliant technician behind the camera was able to go beyond the studio trappings to plumb the psychological realm all great portrait photographers must navigate and master. Although Karsh had a deep understanding of the human psyche, he worked on an emotional level rather than an analytical one. Thus, his stories seldom addressed what he thought about his artistic experiences. This essential element of Karsh's work is what David Travis locates and fills in, drawing not only from the anecdotes themselves, but from the one thing that has been missing from all publications prior to this – the photographer's voice.

A renowned curator, David Travis has written extensively about modernist photography. In 1975, he founded the Department of Photography at the Art Institute of Chicago. During a thirty-five-year career, he organized more than 150 exhibitions, which toured museums in the United States, Europe, and Asia, and he has published many foundational texts in the field.

Praise for Karsh

Famously reticent about his work, this is a rare invitation to learn the stories behind Karsh's most famous meetings with great men and women, and of his aesthetic choices when met with the challenge of capturing them as they were.
—Publishers Weekly