Chericos newlywed librarian Maura Beth Mayhew is back from her honeymoon and she and Jeremy McShay are settling into married life. Maura Beths father has even given them the down payment on a charming cottage. But as the holidays approach, Chericos economy is struggling. Beloved local shops have closed, jobs have been lost, and theres even a mysterious crime spree afoot. Amid the gloom, Maura Beth decides what the community needs is a healthy dose...

"The National Road is a collection of essays about American places, each dealing with contentious matters: religion, politics, sex, race, poverty, loss and the stubborn persistence of national pride, despite abundant reasons for cynicism. An important question lies at the heart of this collection: what does it mean to "belong" in America in the midst of an era when rootedness to a particular piece of ground means less than at any time during our history?...

"The 2016 election left many people who are concerned about the environment fearful that progress on climate change would come screeching to a halt. But not Michael Bloomberg and Carl Pope. Bloomberg, an entrepreneur and former mayor of New York City, and Pope, a lifelong environmental leader, approach climate change from different perspectives, yet they arrive at similar conclusions. Without agreeing on every point, they share a belief that cities,...

Glenn D'Alessio's poems evoke with grace and wit a particular place and time: the North Shore of Long Island in the 1950's and 60s. But most of all, the capture an essence of childhood "when our eyes soared by the cold waters", a time of imagination facing the adult world , when joy and fear and wonder helped prepare us for the rest of our lives.

Young landowner Dai Liyan, afflicted with a chronic cough he imagines is tubercular, languishes in his sprawling, dilapidated estate, attended by his wife Yu Wen and loyal family retainer Lao Huang. Liyan's sister Dai Xiu, a giggly, high-spirited 16-year-old lives with them, a small bright spot in a pall of gloom. The unexpected arrival of Liyan's oldest childhood friend, Zhang Zhichen, temporarily energizes Liyan and the household, but circumstances...

"Shanghai, November 1937. Yaya, the eight-year-old daughter of a diamond merchant, lives a life of luxury in the French Concession in Shanghai. Her one great passion is the piano. While she is preparing for an important audition, her father decides that the family must leave town in the face of the imminent Japanese invasion. The evening before all the family is to leave, stubborn Yaya, unaware of the danger, runs away in an attempt to make it to...

"Thomas Hardy was fifty-eight before his first book of poetry, Wessex Poems, was published in 1898. By the time of his death in 1928, he was known as one of Britain's most distinguished poets. In The Complete Poems of Thomas Hardy, James Gibson has compiled the first complete edition of verse by this nineteenth-century Englishman. Included are previously uncollected poems, among which are examples of Hardy's finest work--"Domicilium" and the songs...