New essays from the vantage point of very old age, once again “alternately lyrical and laugh-out-loud funny,” (New York Times) from the former poet laureate of the United States
Donald Hall has lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently by the New York Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a “treasure” of a book in which he “balance[s] frankness about losses with humor and gratitude” (Washington Post). Now nearing ninety, Hall delivers a new collection of self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging,
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The arsons started on a cold November midnight and didn’t stop for months. Night after night, the people of Accomack County waited to see which building would burn down next, regarding each other at first with compassion, and later suspicion. Vigilante groups sprang up, patrolling the rural Virginia coast with cameras and camouflage. Volunteer firefighters slept at their stations. The arsonist seemed to target abandoned buildings, but local police were stretched too thin to surveil them all. Accomack was desolate—there were hundreds of abandoned buildings. And by the dozen they were burning.
“One of the year’s best and most unusual true-crime books” (Christian Science Monitor),
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From a dazzling new literary voice, a debut memoir about a young woman learning to dance tango, becoming comfortable in her own skin and in the arms of others
Tango was an unlikely choice for Meghan Flaherty. A young woman living with the scars of past trauma, she was terrified of being touched and shied away from real passion. But by her late twenties, she knew something had to change. She dug up an old dream and tried on her dancing shoes.
In tango, there’s a leader and a follower, and, traditionally, the woman follows.
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Stacey Haney’s family has lived in the towns of Amity and Prosperity for 150 years. Struggling to support her children, in 2008 she agreed to let frackers extract natural gas from deep beneath her tiny, eight-acre farm. The initial royalty checks covered her mortgage, but she felt anything but relief: her animals had started developing mysterious illnesses, and her children became chronically sick too. Patches of grass were dying. The air and water smelled foul. Yet the energy company insisted that nothing was wrong—until Stacey and her neighbors enlisted a shrewd, relentless husband-and-wife attorney team. The ensuing investigation revealed deep rifts in Stacey’s rural community,
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Winner of the Pulitzer Prize
Winner of The National Book Critics Circle Award
One of the New York Times Book Review’s 10 Best Books of the Year
The first comprehensive historical biography of Laura Ingalls Wilder, the beloved author of the Little House on the Prairie books.
Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls—the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. But the true saga of her life has never been fully told.
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At the end of the 19th century, the Osage Indians were driven onto a presumed worthless expanse of land in northeastern Oklahoma. But their territory turned out to be atop one of the largest oil deposits in the United States; to obtain that oil, prospectors were required to pay the tribe for leases and royalties. By the 1920s, the members of Osage Nation had become the wealthiest people per capita in the world. And then the Osage began to die under mysterious circumstances.
As the death toll climbed to more than twenty-four and local law enforcement made little progress,
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