Midwife Patience Murphy has a gift: a talent for escorting mothers through the challenges of bringing children into the world. Working in the hardscrabble conditions of Appalachia during the Depression, Patience takes the jobs that no one else wants, helping those most in need—and least likely to pay. She knows a successful midwifery practice must be built on a foundation of openness and trust—but the secrets Patience is keeping are far too intimate and fragile for her to ever let anyone in.Honest, moving, and beautifully detailed, Patricia Harman's The Midwife of Hope River rings with authenticity as Patience faces nearly insurmountable difficulties. From the dangerous mines of West Virginia to the terrifying attentions of the Ku Klux Klan, Patience must strive to bring new light and life into an otherwise hard world.

Bernard Cornwell—"the most prolific and successful historical novelist in the world today" (Wall Street Journal)—returns to his Saxon Tales saga with the epic story of divided loyalties, bloody battles, and the struggle to unite Britain.At the onset of the tenth century, England is in turmoil. Alfred the Great is dead and his son Edward reigns as king. Wessex survives but peace cannot hold: the Danes in the north, led by Viking Cnut Longsword, stand ready to invade and will never rest until the emerald crown is theirs.Uhtred, once Alfred's great warrior but now out of favor with the new king, must lead a band of outcasts north to recapture his old family home, the impregnable Northumbrian fortress Bebbanburg.Loyalties will be divided and men will fall as each Saxon kingdom is drawn into the bloodiest battle yet with the Danes—a war that will decide the fate of every king, and the entire English nation.With The Pagan Lord, New York Times bestselling author Bernard Cornwell, "the reigning king of historical fiction" (USA Today), continues his magnificent epic of the making of England during the Middle Ages, vividly bringing to life the uneasy alliances, violent combat, and deadly intrigue that gave birth to the British nation.

Boston, 1926. The '20s are roaring. Liquor is flowing, bullets are flying, and one man sets out to make his mark on the world.Prohibition has given rise to an endless network of underground distilleries, speakeasies, gangsters, and corrupt cops. Joe Coughlin, the youngest son of a prominent Boston police captain, has long since turned his back on his strict and proper upbringing. Now having graduated from a childhood of petty theft to a career in the pay of the city's most fearsome mobsters, Joe enjoys the spoils, thrills, and notoriety of being an outlaw.But life on the dark side carries a heavy price. In a time when ruthless men of ambition, armed with cash, illegal booze, and guns, battle for control, no one—neither family nor friend, enemy nor lover—can be trusted. Beyond money and power, even the threat of prison, one fate seems most likely for men like Joe: an early death. But until that day, he and his friends are determined to live life to the hilt.Joe embarks on a dizzying journey up the ladder of organized crime that takes him from the flash of Jazz Age Boston to the sensual shimmer of Tampa's Latin Quarter to the sizzling streets of Cuba. Live by Night is a riveting epic layered with a diverse cast of loyal friends and callous enemies, tough rumrunners and sultry femmes fatales, Bible-quoting evangelists and cruel Klansmen, all battling for survival and their piece of the American dream. At once a sweeping love story and a compelling saga of revenge, it is a spellbinding tour de force of betrayal and redemption, music and murder, that brings fully to life a bygone era when sin was cause for celebration and vice was a national virtue.

From the legendary literary master, winner of the National Book Award and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates, a collection of thirteen spellbinding stories that maps the eerie darkness within us allInsightful, disturbing, and mesmerizing in their lyrical precision, the stories in Lovely, Dark, Deep display Joyce Carol Oates's astonishing ability to make visceral the fear, hurt, and uncertainty that lurks at the edges of ordinary lives.In "Mastiff," a woman and a man are joined in an erotic bond forged out of terror and gratitude. "Sex with Camel" explores how a sixteen-year-old boy realizes the depth of his love for his grandmother—and how vulnerable those feelings make him. Fearful that her husband is vanishing from their life, a woman becomes obsessed with keeping him in her sight in "The Disappearing." "A Book of Martyrs" reveals how the end of a pregnancy brings with it the end of a relationship. And in the title story, the elderly Robert Frost is visited by an interviewer, a troubling young woman who seems to know a good deal more about his life than she should.A piercing and evocative collection, Lovely, Dark, Deep reveals Joyce Carol Oates at her most imaginative and unsettling.

A 2004 PEN/Malamud Award winner, this collection celebrates the work of American artist Richard Bausch -- a writer the New York Times calls "a master of the short story." By turns tender, raw, heartbreaking, and riotously funny, the many voices of this definitive forty-two-story collection (seven of which appear here for the first time) defy expectation, attest to Bausch's remarkable range and versatility, and affirm his place alongside such acclaimed story writers as John Cheever, Flannery O'Connor, Raymond Carver, and Grace Paley.

The Intelligent HeartAccess the power of your heart's intelligence to improve your focus and creativity, elevate your emotional clarity, lower your stress and anxiety levels, strengthen your immune system, promote your body's optimal performance, and slow the aging process.

In this poetic and haunting tale set in contemporary Appalachia, New York Times bestselling author Ron Rash illuminates lives shaped by violence and a powerful connection to the landLes, a longtime sheriff, is just weeks from retirement when he is forced to contend with the ravages of crystal meth—and his own corruption—in his small Appalachian town. Meanwhile, Becky, a park ranger with a harrowing past, finds solace amid the lyrical beauty of the North Carolina mountains.Enduring the mistakes and tragedies that have indelibly marked them, they are drawn together by a reverence for the natural world. When an embittered elderly local is accused of poisoning a trout stream on the property of a nearby resort, Les and Becky are plunged into deep and dangerous waters, forced to navigate currents of disillusionment and betrayal that will force them to question themselves and test their tentative bond—and threaten to carry them over the edge.Echoing the lapsarian beauty of William Faulkner and the spiritual isolation of Carson McCullers, Above the Waterfall demonstrates the prodigious talent of an author hailed as "a gorgeous, brutal writer" (Richard Price) and "one of the best American novelists of his day" (Janet Maslin, New York Times). Unforgettable and evocative, tragic and indelible, Above the Waterfall is a breathtaking achievement from a literary virtuoso.

An untested young princess must claim her throne, learn to become a queen, and combat a malevolent sorceress in an epic battle between light and darkness in this spectacular debut—the first novel in a trilogy.Young Kelsea Raleigh was raised in hiding after the death of her mother, Queen Elyssa, far from the intrigues of the royal Keep and in the care of two devoted servants who pledged their lives to protect her. Growing up in a cottage deep in the woods, Kelsea knows little of her kingdom's haunted past . . . or that its fate will soon rest in her hands.Long ago, Kelsea's forefathers sailed away from a decaying world to establish a new land free of modern technology. Three hundred years later, this feudal society has divided into three fearful nations who pay duties to a fourth: the powerful Mortmesne, ruled by the cunning Red Queen. Now, on Kelsea's nineteenth birthday, the tattered remnants of the Queen's Guard—loyal soldiers who protect the throne—have appeared to escort the princess on a perilous journey to the capital to ascend to her rightful place as the new Queen of the Tearling.Though born of royal blood and in possession of the Tear sapphire, a jewel of immense power and magic, Kelsea has never felt more uncertain of her ability to rule. But the shocking evil she discovers in the heart of her realm will precipitate an act of immense daring, throwing the entire kingdom into turmoil—and unleashing the Red Queen's vengeance. A cabal of enemies with an array of deadly weapons, from crimson-caped assassins to the darkest blood magic, plots to destroy her. But Kelsea is growing in strength and stealth, her steely resolve earning her loyal allies, including the Queen's Guard, led by the enigmatic Lazarus, and the intriguing outlaw known simply as "the Fetch."Kelsea's quest to save her kingdom and meet her destiny has only just begun. Riddled with mysteries, betrayals, and treacherous battles, Kelsea's journey is a trial by fire that will either forge a legend . . . or destroy her.

Megan Kimble was a twenty-six-year-old living in a small apartment without even a garden plot to her name. But she knew that she cared about where her food came from, how it was made, and what it did to her body—so she decided to go an entire year without eating processed foods. Unprocessed is the narrative of Megan's extraordinary year, in which she milled wheat, extracted salt from the sea, milked a goat, slaughtered a sheep, and more—all while she was a busy, broke city-dweller.What makes a food processedThe answer to that question went far beyond cutting out snacks and sodas, and led to a fascinating journey through America's food system, past and present. Megan learned how wheat became white, how fresh produce was globalized, and how animals were industrialized. But she also discovered that in daily life—conjuring meals while balancing a job, social life, and even dating—our edible futures are inextricably tied to gender and economy, politics and money, work and play.Backed by extensive research and wide-ranging interviews, and including tips on how to ditch processed food and transition to a real-food lifestyle, Unprocessed offers provocative insights not only on the process of food but also the processes that shape our habits, communities, and day-to-day lives.

Former baseball slugger Darryl Strawberry, whose achievements on the field were often overshadowed by his struggles off the field, recounts the highs, the lows, and the lessons of hope and survival he learned along the way.The youngest son of Henry and Ruby Strawberry, Darryl grew up in a working-class neighborhood in Los Angeles, where he channeled his energy into baseball and basketball. The New York Mets drafted him in 1980, and he won the National League Rookie of the Year Award in 1983. Strawberry became the first National League player voted to the All-Star Game in each of his first four full seasons. Throughout the eighties and nineties, however, Strawberry faced many personal challenges, includ-ing drug use, tax evasion, solicitation, and allegations of domestic violence. His seasons with the Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees were interrupted by suspensions, visits to rehab, and treatment for colon cancer. But in 2006, Strawberry's life changed course dramatically. With his wife, Tracy, he devoted himself to his church and to his work with children and adults affected by autism and other developmental disorders.For the first time, in his own words, Darryl Strawberry delivers his inspirational narrative the extraordinary story of his life.

On Christmas morning in the year 800, Pope Leo III placed the crown of imperial Rome on the brow of a Germanic king named Karl. With one gesture, the man later hailed as Charlemagne claimed his empire and forever shaped the destiny of Europe. Becoming Charlemagne tells the story of the international power struggle that led to this world-changing event.Illuminating an era that has long been overshadowed by legend, this far-ranging book shows how the Frankish king and his wise counselors built an empire not only through warfare but also by careful diplomacy. With consummate political skill, Charlemagne partnered with a scandal-ridden pope, fended off a ruthless Byzantine empress, nurtured Jewish communities in his empire, and fostered ties with a famous Islamic caliph. For 1,200 years, the deeds of Charlemagne captured the imagination of his descendants, inspiring kings and crusaders, the conquests of Napolon and Hitler, and the optimistic architects of the European Union.In this engaging narrative, Jeff Sypeck crafts a vivid portrait of Karl, the ruler who became a legend, while transporting readers far beyond Europe to the glittering palaces of Constantinople and the streets of medieval Baghdad. Evoking a long-ago world of kings, caliphs, merchants, and monks, Becoming Charlemagne brings alive an age of empire building that continues to resonate today.

Hip: The History is the story of how American pop culture has evolved throughout the twentieth century to its current position as world cultural touchstone. How did hip become such an obsessionFrom sex and music to fashion and commerce, John Leland tracks the arc of ideas as they move from subterranean Bohemia to Madison Avenue and back again. Hip: The History examines how hip has helped shape -- and continues to influence -- America's view of itself, and provides an incisive account of hip's quest for authenticity.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

In Summer World: A Season of Bounty, Bernd Heinrich brings us the same bottomless reserve of wonder and reverence for the teeming animal life of backwoods New England that he brought us in Winter World: The Ingenuity of Animal Survival. Now he is focusing on the animal kingdom in the extremes of the warmer months, with all its feeding, nesting, fighting, and mating.Whether presenting disquisitions on ant wars, the predatory characteristics of wasps, the mating rituals of woodpeckers, or describing an encounter with a road full of wood frogs, Summer World never stops observing the beautifully complex interactions of animals and plants with nature, giving extraordinary depth to the relationships between habitat and the warming of the earth. How can cicadas survive and thrive at temperatures pushing 115°FDo hummingbirds know what they're up against before they migrate over the Gulf of MexicoWhy do some trees stop growing taller even when three months of warm weather remainWith awe and unmatched expertise, Heinrich explores hundreds of questions like these. Exquisitely illustrated with dozens of the author's own drawings, Summer World is Bernd Heinrich's most engaging book to date, a fascinating work from one of our very best science writers.

When small- and medium-sized business owners first hear George Cloutier's rules, they often think he's a madman. His controversial rules for doing business rules that aren't taught at Harvard Business School include:The best family business has one member.Weekends are for working, not playing golf or coaching.Never pay your vendors on time.Wear your control freak badge with pride.Quit denial: if your business is failing during a recession, it's your fault. As the founder and CEO of American Management Services, Cloutier has emerged as "the leading advocate for small business" (Reuters), having spent over thirty years guiding business owners through the tough choices that line the road to profitability. He and his company have worked with more than six thousand companies, averting certain ruin for some and generating seemingly impossible growth and profitability for others.Cloutier graduated from Harvard College and Harvard Business School, but the lessons in this book aren't from there. Unlike his classmates, most of whom headed straight to Wall Street, Cloutier has been on the docks at 2 a.m. counting heads of lettuce for food distributors to make sure nothing would disappear without a waybill. He's spent long, overnight hours in truck stops, making sure sticky fingers stayed out of the tills. Cloutier and his colleagues at American Management Services become personal pitt bulls to the CEOs who hire them, doing whatever it takes to bring their clients' businesses back into long-term profitability.Profits Aren't Everything, They're the Only Thing is the long- overdue wake-up call for 23 million small- and midsize business owners across America. This book serves up the hard-boiled, unadulterated truth to aspiring and established entrepreneurs, without apologies. His no-nonsense advice may be hard to hear at times, but it works.

Raised in small-town Arkansas, Billy Bob Thornton grew up amid a rich storytelling tradition. See, the South is just different than other places. . . . You can feel the ghosts there. As a kid, he would sit on the porch listening to his family or some old man down the road spinning yarns about colorful neighbors. These stories didn't have to be made up. The characters were already there, so the stories just came out of the characters we knew. Thus was borne his Oscar-winning masterpiece Sling Blade and now The Billy Bob Tapes a narrative based on late-night conversations with Kinky Friedman and other friends who gathered 'round to hear Billy mine a cave full of ghosts. Billy grew up shooting squirrels, playing drums in VFW clubs, and dreaming of rock 'n' roll stardom or pitching for the St. Louis Cardinals. Then at sixteen he took a drama class to meet chicks and met Mrs. Treadway, who noticed the young man's talent and encouraged him as an actor and writer. "You don't know what it's like to be a drama teacher in a small town in Arkansas where nobody really cares," she said, "but let me tell you something. You can do this." Everything I've accomplished since, I can trace back to this woman, Maudie Treadway.The colorful characters, stories, and experiences of his youth would find their way into Billy's work, in his films and music, and in his perspective and attitude. It's like the old saying goes: you can take the boy out of the hills, but you can't take the hills out of the boy. That boy did leave the hills for Hollywood Hills. A true fish out of water, he recalls stories of miserable jobs, the cheapest accommodations, and physical hunger but also a devoted writing partner Tom Epperson, a life-changing acting teacher in L.A., and a compassionate nurse who snuck him milk shakes when he was near starvation. But there was always the dream of being an actor, and his fortunes turned when he served hors d'oeuvres as a catering waiter to legendary director Billy Wilder, who advised him, "Write about your interesting life." Billy's long career in Hollywood yields stories of inspired collaborations and failed ones, true friendships with other actors and musicians, and good friends gone too soon. In The Billy Bob Tapes, he reflects on the critics, the culture around fame, and the challenges of conveying an artistic vision in film. Most striking is Billy's clear-eyed perspective about the magic of entertainment, and how we perceive it in a rapidly changing world. With passion, unvarnished honesty, wry humor, and a little help from friends Angelina Jolie, Robert Duvall, Dwight Yoakam, Tom Epperson, and Daniel Lanois, Billy Bob finally talks.

On the morning of February 24, 1942, on the Black Sea near Istanbul, an explosion ripped through a decrepit former cattle barge filled with Jewish refugees. One man clung fiercely to a piece of deck, fighting to survive. Nearly eight hundred others -- among them, more than one hundred children -- perished.In Death on the Black Sea, the story of the Struma, its passengers, and the events that led to its destruction are investigated and fully revealed in two vivid, parallel accounts, set six decades apart. One chronicles the international diplomatic maneuvers and callousness that resulted in the largest maritime loss of civilian life during World War II. The other recounts a recent attempt to locate the Struma at the bottom of the Black Sea, an effort initiated and pursued by the grandson of two of the victims. A vivid reconstruction of a grim exodus aboard a doomed ship, Death on the Black Sea illuminates a forgotten episode of World War II and pays tribute to the heroes, past and present, who keep its memory alive.

A sheriff . . . An outlaw . . . A legendary showdown. Billy the Kid a.k.a. Henry McCarty, Henry Antrim, and William Bonney was a horse thief, cattle rustler, charismatic rogue, and cold-blooded killer. A superb shot, the Kid gunned down four men single-handedly and five others with the help of cronies. Two of his victims were Lincoln County, New Mexico, deputies killed during the Kid's brazen daylight escape from the courthouse jail on April 28, 1881.After dispensing with his guards and breaking the chain securing his leg irons, the Kid danced a macabre jig on the jail's porch before riding away on a stolen horse as terrified townspeople and many sympathizers watched. For new sheriff Pat Garrett, an acquaintance of Billy's, the chase was on. . . . To Hell on a Fast Horse re-creates the thrilling manhunt for the Wild West's most iconic outlaw. It is also the first dual biography of the Kid and Garrett, each a larger-than-life figure who would not have become legendary without the other. Drawing on voluminous primary sources and a wealth of published scholarship, Mark Lee Gardner digs beneath the myth to take a fresh look at these two men, their relationship, and their epic ride to immortality.

Rand was initially puzzled as to why young spirits wanted to speak through her she had no children of her own and the responsibility of talking with people who had lost theirs seemed too great to bear. But the compelling answers came with time and patience: No one finds death more inexplicable than a grieving parent, thus no spirits are more motivated to make sense of it all for those they've left behind than young ones.These spirits clearly want to heal broken hearts and deepen our understanding of life and death, and Rand has the unique ability to help deliver their messages.Through her, young spirits talk freely about how to make sense of murder, suicide, and accidental deaths. They also discuss the different ways relationships on both sides can be mended, how the intergenerational cycle of abuse and addiction can be stopped, and how joy guides miscarried and aborted children can actually help those they've left behind move forward.The insights they share in this uniquely comforting book will surprise, inform, and inspire. What's more, their answers to our questions about death reveal many valuable tips for living a better life while on earth too.

The Apple Trees at Olema includes work from Robert Hass's first five books Field Guide, Praise, Human Wishes, Sun Under Wood, and Time and Materials as well as a substantial gathering of new poems, including a suite of elegies, a series of poems in the form of notebook musings on the nature of storytelling, a suite of summer lyrics, and two experiments in pure narrative that meditate on personal relations in a violent world and read like small, luminous novellas. From the beginning, his poems have seemed entirely his own: a complex hybrid of the lyric line, with an unwavering fidelity to human and nonhuman nature, and formal variety and surprise, and a syntax capable of thinking through difficult things in ways that are both perfectly ordinary and really unusual. Over the years, he has added to these qualities a range and a formal restlessness that seem to come from a skeptical turn of mind, an acute sense of the artifice of the poem and of the complexity of the world of lived experience that a poem tries to apprehend.Hass's work is grounded in the beauty of the physical world. His familiar landscapes San Francisco, the northern California coast, the Sierra high country are vividly alive in his work. His themes include art, the natural world, desire, family life, the life between lovers, the violence of history, and the power and inherent limitations of language. He is a poet who is trying to say, as fully as he can, what it is like to be alive in his place and time. His style formed in part by American modernism, in part by his long apprenticeship as a translator of the Japanese haiku masters and Czeslaw Milosz combines intimacy of address, a quick intelligence, a virtuosic skill with long sentences, intense sensual vividness, and a light touch. It has made him immensely readable and his work widely admired.

An intensely personal devotional book from Thomas Merton, the ultimate spiritual writer of our time, showing his contemplative and religious side through his prayers and rarely-seen drawings. The only Merton gift book available.Dialogues with Silence contains a selection of prayers from throughout Merton's life--from his journals, letters, poetry, books--accompanied by all 100 of Merton's rarely seen, delightful Zen-like pen-and-ink drawings, and will attract new readers as well as Merton devotees. There is no other Merton devotional like this, and the paperback edition will be elegantly designed and packaged.

You've met the Italian mobin The Godfather, now welcometo the real-life world of IrishAmerica's own murderous clanof organized crime The man who has remained silent for more than a decade finally speaks, revealing the gritty true story of his life inside the infamous South Boston Irish mob led by the elusive, Machiavellian kingpin Whitey Bulger, who to this day remains on the lam as one of the world's Ten Most Wanted criminals, second only to Osama bin Laden.John "Red" Shea was a top lieutenant in the South Boston Irish mob, rising to this position at the age of twenty-one. Thus began his tutelage under the notorious Irish godfather James "Whitey" Bulger. An ice-cold enforcer with a legendary red-hot temper, Shea was a legend among his Southie peers in the 1980s. From the first delivery truck he robbed at thirteen to the start of his twelve-year federal sentence for drug trafficking at twenty-seven, Shea was a portrait in American crime -- a terror, brutal and ruthlessly ambitious. Drug dealer, loan shark, money launderer, and multimillion-dollar narcotics kingpin, Shea was at the pinnacle of power -- until the feds came knocking and eventually obliterated the legendary mob in a well-orchestrated sweep of arrests, fueled by insider tips to the FBI and DEA. While Bulger's other top men turned informant to save their own hides, Shea alone kept his code of honor and his mouth shut -- loyalty that earned him a dozen years of hard time even as the man he was protecting turned out to be, himself, a rat. For in the end, in a remarkable show of betrayal, Bulger turned out to be the FBI's "main man" and top informant -- tipping off the feds for decades while still managing to operate one of the most murderous and profitable organized crime outfits of all time.In Rat Bastards, Shea brings that mysterious world and gritty urban Irish American street culture into sharp focus by telling his own story -- of his fatherless upbringing, his apprenticeship on the tough streets of Southie, and his love affair with trouble, boxing, and then the gangster life. In prose that is refreshingly honest, personal, and surprisingly tender, Shea tells his harrowing, unflinching, and unapologetic story. A man who did the crime, did the time, and held fast to the Irish code of silence, which he was raised to follow at any cost, Shea remains a man of honor and in doing so has become a living legend. One of the last of a dying breed, a true stand-up guy.Shea expects no forgiveness and makes no excuses for the life he chose. His story is intense, compelling, and in your face.