Books

Most of the stories in Dennis Must's provocative debut collection deal with characters from small towns in Pennsylvania factory towns with pottery plants and bronze foundries. These stories interlock to create a larger narrative about working-class people, whose lives are defined by the typical conflicts which shape most people's lives: marital conflicts, conflicts between relatives, inner conflicts over personal happiness and success, and struggles to understand the mysterious nature of life and death. The emotional mysteries of families is Must's domain.

author: Dennis Must ASIN or ISBN-10: 0887392288 binding: Paperback list price: $13.95 USD amazon price: $13.95

In 1869 Japan, a young woman escapes the confines of her arranged marriage by painting memories of her lover on mulberry paper. She secretly wraps the painting around a ceramic pot that's bound for Europe. In France, a disenchanted young man works as a clerk at an import shop. When he opens the box from Japan, he discovers the brilliant watercolor of two lovers locked in an embrace under a plum tree. He steals the painting and hides it in his room. With each viewing, he sees something different, and gradually the painting transforms him.

author: Nina Schuyler ASIN or ISBN-10: 1565124413 binding: Hardcover list price: $22.95 USD amazon price: $8.00 USD

The authors are both sophisticated and clear-sighted, and their instruction is clearly that of writers to other writers. Even published authors might find this book valuable. I recommend it highly. --Charles Baxter, author of Burning Down the House.This is the most literate, practical and inspired guide of its kind, as urgently useful to the developing writer as a dictionary or a muse. This book is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how fiction is made. --Carolyn Cooke, author of The BostonsThis is not simply a book about the craft of fiction.

author: Sarah Stone Ron Nyren ASIN or ISBN-10: 0205530125 binding: Paperback list price: $16.95 USD amazon price: $16.95

This intermediate/advanced guide to writing fiction emphasizes the revision process and uses craft discussions, exercises, and diverse examples to show the artistic implications of writing choices. This book addresses the major elements of fiction. Numerous examples, questions, and exercises throughout the book help readers reflect upon and explore writing possibilities. The mini-anthology includes a variety of interesting, illustrative, and diverse stories-North American and international, contemporary and classic, realistic and experimental.

author: Sarah Stone Ron Nyren ASIN or ISBN-10: 032119537X binding: Paperback list price: $87.20 USD amazon price: $82.60 USD

"Much madness is divinest sense," wrote Emily Dickinson, "And much sense the starkest madness." The idea that poetry and madness are deeply intertwined, and that madness sometimes leads to the most divine poetry, has been with us since antiquity. In his critical and clinical introduction to this splendid anthology--the first of its kind--psychiatrist and poet Mark S. Bauer considers mental disorders from multiple perspectives and challenges us to broaden our outlook.

author: Mark S Bauer ASIN or ISBN-10: 0195336410 binding: Paperback list price: $31.95 USD amazon price: $25.56 USD

The Sonnet is one of the distinguishing cultural markers of western civilization. Throughout our literary past, the sonnet has been used by our greatest poets--from Petrarch and Shakespeare to Borges and Auden. Now, in the twenty-first century, after a period of general dismissal in the latter decades of the twentieth century, the sonnet is in the midst of an extraordinary revival and has once again returned to the center of the literary landscape.

ASIN or ISBN-10: 0930982592 binding: Hardcover list price: $20.00 USD amazon price: $14.86 USD

For the first time in Penguin Classics-the incomparable verse of the ancient Greek lyric poet Sappho, in a brilliant new translation Sapho's writings are said to have filled nine papyrus rolls in the great library at Alexandria, but only one poem survives complete. This new translation of all of Sappho's extant poetry showcases the wide variety of themes in her work, from amorous songs celebrating adolescent females to poems of invocation, desire, spite, celebration, resignation, and remembrance.

author: Sappho ASIN or ISBN-10: 0140455574 binding: Paperback list price: $15.00 USD amazon price: $13.95 USD