In Quotidiana Patrick Madden illuminates common actions and seemingly commonplace moments, making connections that revise and reconfigure the overlooked and underappreciated. Madden muses on the origins of human language, the curative properties of laughter, and the joys and woes of fatherhood. Sparked by considerations of selling garlic, washing ......
Young Harriet's father sells her as a slave to settle his gambling debt with an eccentric Indian-and her story is just beginning. Part Huck Finn, part True Grit, Harriet's story of her encounter with the dark and brutal history of the American West is a true original. When she escapes the strange mound-building obsession of her Pawnee captor, ......
Memoirs are as varied as human emotion and experience, and those published in the distinguished American Lives Series run the gamut. Excerpted from this series (called "splendid" by Newsweek) and collected here for the first time, these dispatches from American lives take us from China during the Cultural Revolution to the streets of New York in ......
In its infancy, major league baseball was anyone's game, open to a dizzying array of rogues and scamps, athletic giants and captains of industry, hustlers, managers, and umpires who transformed club-based teams into the first professional federations with formalized rules-and commercial considerations. This two-volume work-with its profiles of ......
"Combined here are two classics on the nature of native languages of North America: Boas' famous 1911 essay pointing to new methods of research and Powell's pioneering 1891 work on classification." - "Scholarly Books in America". "Two cognate essays - the first by the world famous anthropologist Franz Boas, expounding his phonetic and grammatical ......
"It is to me that we owe our immortality, and this is the story that proves it beyond all doubt." With this sentence Rene Belletto begins a novel that compresses every genre he has worked in-thriller, science fiction, experimental literature, horror-into one breathless narrative in which what is at stake is nothing less than our own immortality. ......
"Annie Ernaux's work," wrote Richard Bernstein in the New York Times, "represents a severely pared-down Proustianism, a testament to the persistent, haunting and melancholy quality of memory." In the New York Times Book Review, Kathryn Harrison concurred: "Keen language and unwavering focus allow her to penetrate deep, to reveal pulses of love, ......
What we know of Buffalo Bill Cody (1846-1917) is more myth than man. Yet the stage persona that took audiences by storm was based on the very real encounters of William F. Cody with the American West. This autobiography, infused with the drama of dime novels and stage melodramas that would transform the author into an American icon, recounts a ......
The South Dakota winter gives a man time to think. One subzero morning, as Dan O'Brien approaches his fiftieth year, the autumnal equinox of his life, he takes stock. Feeling a waning sense of purpose, he decides to devote himself entirely, for the first time in his life, to his greatest loves-falconry, his bird dogs, and the prairie he calls ......
