These two titles are both quippish guides through the labyrinths of serious art - topics that can be pretty overwhelming if you weren’t paying one bit of attention during Humanities 101. Both books, as the series title “Crash... Read More

Extraordinary stories can come from the most ordinary of lives. First-time author Gretchen Wilson’s chronicle of the life of her great-aunt is one such tale. With All Her Might is a compelling insider’s guide into the struggle that... Read More

Not so long ago, anyone perusing the shelves of a bookstore would have noted a philosophical split in available information on pregnancy and childbirth. Few, if any, books offered by traditional medicine practitioners mentioned both the... Read More

Of those poetry collections in the ecstatic genre, Sandra Alcosser’s "Except by Nature" is one of the best, deserving of its recent selection for the National Poetry Series. Poets of the ecstatic often craft images and language around... Read More

With this book John Engman joins the long, sad, wild tradition of the poete maudit. From Villon to Frank O’Hara to Charles Bukowski, these poor souls seem condemned to extravagant suffering, equally extravagant verse, and early death.... Read More

Fighting bird proprietor Sonny Cantrell slouches forward through a miasma of rural fits and starts into the tentative landscape of young manhood as the central character in Manley’s debut novel The Cock Fighter. Covering just two days... Read More

Barbara Kingsolver begins her introduction to the second edition of her only collection of poems, Another America, by declaring that she has “never yet been able to say out loud … I am a poet.” She attributes this, in part, to the... Read More

Why do men persist in destroying their habitat? In Nature and Madness, Paul Shepard offers a trenchant and well-argued philosophical response that even he acknowledges doesn’t fully explain the problem. It’s not just greed that leads... Read More