This hilarious collection of short stories from the award-winning humorist Simon Rich includes the story that inspired the Seth Rogen comedy An American Pickle. Having skewered the problems of falling in and out of love in The Last Girlfriend on Earth, Simon Rich's next book is another subject we can all relate to: parents and their kids. From the perils of raising an actual monster in Manhattan - it's pretty hard to find teachers who really understand the talents of a five-year-old with horns and a taste for blood - to Sell Out, the story of Simon's ancestor, returned to life decades after an industrial accident involving pickling brine, these stories are inventive, witty and sometimes a bit too much like real life.

Too Much on the Inside explores the depths of coincidence and human connection, as they collide with the impossible task of forgetting the past. Three immigrants, and one Canadian from rural Nova Scotia , all in their twenties, are soon to discover their interconnected fates. They are world travellers, escapists and dreamers, at a crossroads on Toronto 's Queen Street West , the setting for this novel and its quartet of voices. While each will experience love, culture shock and joy, it's their unique periphery that draws readers into their emotional worlds and orients them to the realities of life in countries as diverse as South Africa, Israel and Brazil. Too Much on the Inside is a human cross-section of romance, solitude and perseverance in the vein of such contemporary novels as Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad, Camilla Gibb's family saga The Petty Details of So and So's Life, and J.M. Coetzee's Disgrace, mixed with Botha's own sensitive style and charm.

In one of the intensely imaginative stories in Rivka Galchen's American Innovations, a narrator's furniture walks out on her. In another, the narrator feels compelled to promise to deliver a takeout order that has incorrectly been phoned in to her. In a third, the petty details around a property transaction detail the complicated pains and loves of a family. The stories in this unusual collection also have secret lives in conversation with earlier stories. As in the tradition of considering Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the Jar" as a response to John Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Galchen's "The Lost Order" covertly recapitulates James Thurber's "The Secret Life of Walter Mitty," while "The Region of Unlikeness" is a smoky and playful mirror to Jorge Luis Borges's "The Aleph." The title story, "American Innovations," reimagines Nikolai Gogol's "The Nose." Alternately realistic, fantastical, witty and lyrical, these are all deeply emotional tales, written in exuberant, pitch-perfect prose and shadowed by the darkly marvellous and the marvellously uneasy. Whether exploring the tensions in a mother-daughter relationship or the finer points of time travel, Galchen takes great risks, proving that she is a writer like none other today.

Fiction. Named one of Kirkus Reviews' Best Fiction Books of 2014. Each of the characters in SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER faces an unanticipated challenge: transporting a truckload of penguins across the country, arranging a proper Jewish burial for the remains of Gregor Samsa, and selling tombstones dressed as a Girl Scout. These stories explore the domestic and professional adventures of people in over their heads, while leavening their struggles with humor. "Jacob Appel's stories echo with secrets. There are the secrets we keep from those closest to us, of course. Our parents, our doctors, our clergy, our ex-wives and unrequited loves. Any run of the mill story has those. Good stories traffic in the kind of secrets we keep from ourselves. Why, for instance, what and who we love are so close in content and character to what we can't abide. Appel's that kind of trafficker. Even better, throughout this fine collection, he is most concerned with still another kind of secret: that which, when revealed, doesn't solve anything. Like the very best stories, they carry the mystery forward. Revelation, in the end, isn't an end at all. It's a beginning. SCOUTING FOR THE REAPER is full of such revelations. Here's hoping it signals the beginning of a long string of books penned by this talented polymath."--TJ Beitelman

Novelist, draughtsman, film-maker, essayist and critic - John Berger is one of the major European intellectuals of our time. For sixty years he has been challenging the way we see the world and how we think about it, in books like Ways of Seeing, Permanent Red, To the Wedding, A Painter of Our Time, Pig Earth, Once in Europa, Lilac and Flag and G. But although Berger has always written poetry, often smuggling poems inside books like The Seventh Man and The White Bird, this is the first time his poetry has been collected in English. Collected Poems reflects Berger's longstanding concerns with art and politics, love and war, history and memory, emigration, immigration and the life of the European peasantry. It includes well-known poems like 'The Ladle', 'Village Maternity' and 'Death of La Nan M.' as well over twenty previously unpublished poems. From 'My Coney' (written in 1952 when Berger was just twenty-six) to 'They Are the Last' written in 2008, Berger the poet demonstrates an enduring commitment to the extraordinary lives of ordinary people. These are perfectly framed still-life images, sensual and plain, delicate sketches of hard lives caught between the provisional quality of language and the permanence of things. John Berger's Collected Poems reveals its author to be a major poet of our time.

Novelist Guy Ableman is in thrall to his vivacious wife Vanessa. The trouble is, he is no less in thrall to her alluring mother, Poppy. His publisher has committed suicide and his agent is in hiding. In flight from personal disappointment and universal despair, Guy wonders if it's time to take his love for Poppy to another level.

"Not all things are blest, but the seeds of all things are blest." -- Muriel Rukeyser, "Elegy in Joy" First published by New Directions in 1949, Muriel Rukeyser's Elegies were written over a seven years period the end of the Spanish Civil War, World War II, Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the beginnings of the Cold War. Both and homage to Rilke's Duino Elegies and a spiritual reckoning that is particularly resonant today, these poems present no angelic orders, only the difficulties of living in the modern world, the depths of shipwreck, and "Love that gives us ourselves, in the world known to all."

Original and effortlessly clever, the stories in I Know Who You Remind Me of capture the sensibility of a generation with no cultural inhibitions to overcome. Naomi K. Lewis's characters bear the battlescars of adolescence and early adulthood - scars left when one classmate impersonates another in Internet pornography; a lover donates his eyeball in the heat of passion; sibling rivalry escalates into a low orbit. For these characters, everything is straight-on, never coy, and often deliciously funny.

A celebrated poet writes on the hidden beauty of American cities. This is the book of an urban mystic, someone who believes that the streets he walks, the incidents he sees and in which he sometimes plays a part have significance; he understands that the hidden beauty and music of New York City. Madison Avenue, the Brooklyn Bridge, Central Park appear and reappear as though they, the poet, and the work were inseparable. The people he recalls – a bag lady, E.E. Cummings – are as familiar to us as the city itself, but here they are lyrical and light, these poems also hold love, loss, melancholy, and tenderness –they reflect the incessant rhythms between a man and his surroundings.

Poetry. Finalist, Acorn-Plantos Award. Winner, Exit Through the Giftshop Award (2013). Best Poetry of 2012 selection, Winnipeg Free Press. Each new volume by Stuart Ross is a more confounding grab bag than the last. In YOU EXIST. DETAILS FOLLOW., his seventh full- length collection of poetry, Stuart Ross veers in opposite directions: narrative confessionalism poems, and works that might be considered abstract expressionist, and a lot both in between and beyond those boundaries. Still, each poem breathes with the signature weirdness, the sharp wit and gentle awe that Ross is known for. Here you'll find poems from Ross's ongoing auto-biographical Razovsky series, one-line poems, centos, fractured sonnets, poems composed through surrealist strategies, and more. Ross's absurdism doesn't rely on unconnected sentences, abstract thought, or an unusual, elevated vocabulary: rather, his poetry delights in the silliness of concrete mundanity....The collection thus begins by launching us into a happily disjointed mind, into images connected as though by sparking, duct-taped wires, buzzing weird electrical fires of thought.--Matrix Magazine A voice all his own. Stuart Ross unleashes his refreshing snark in his latest collection of poems...He runs the gamut from his own brand of absurdist expressionism to fond childhood memories and poetic confessions....Ross wisely and parenthetically writes: (Tension is a good thing sometimes. For example, you should stick it in art.) Stuart Ross loves that tension, fortunately for his readers.--Uptown I personally believe Stuart Ross may be Canada's most important poet...Ross could be called a 'narrative surrealist' but that, like most labels, does not adequately capture the gymnastic feats of construction he employs. At his best Ross combines images and emotions with the same alacrity of a Max Ernst or Salvador Dali. The literal is a sheer curtain that surrealists drape like a fabric or a fold in time. Ross gives a master class in almost every poem in the delicate art of balancing truth from fiction, what we imagine from what we know to be real...For me, there is no poet as entertaining as Stuart Ross and very few as smart. Ross builds a new universe with You Exist. Details Follow. and we get to travel in it like explorers entering a new dimension, luckily it comes with instructions and a guide map for home. Stuart Ross looks at the world through a different lens, how extraordinarily lucky we are that he shares that view with us. --Michael Dennis (blog)

Review 47th Street Abc Of Culture Adoration Of The Moon Autobiography Battle Report Beyond The Demonic Element Blue Eyes The Bridge Brooklyn Heights: 1 Brooklyn Heights: 2 City City Portrait Cityscape Combat Comment Cry Of The Small Rabbits Cummings Curtains Cynthia Days And Nights Death Of A Grandmother Ditty Domestic Matters The End Feast Of The Ram's Horn For Delmore Schwartz For The Yiddish Singers In The Lakewood Hotels My Childhood For Wcw From A Chinese Master From An Autobiography From Martin Buber The Gift Of Remembering: 1 The Gift Of Remembering: 2 The Gift Of Remembering: 3 The Heart History In The Room The Intensity Interlude Italy, 1944 A Jerusalem Notebook: 1 A Jerusalem Notebook: 10 A Jerusalem Notebook: 11 A Jerusalem Notebook: 12 A Jerusalem Notebook: 13 A Jerusalem Notebook: 14 A Jerusalem Notebook: 15 A Jerusalem Notebook: 2. Postcard A Jerusalem Notebook: 3 A Jerusalem Notebook: 4. Tourists A Jerusalem Notebook: 5 A Jerusalem Notebook: 6 A Jerusalem Notebook: 7 A Jerusalem Notebook: 8. For C. R. A Jerusalem Notebook: 9. The Old Jewish Poet Floats ... July The Kingdom Last Things May 14, 1978 A Message From Rabbi Nachman Middle Class Monday Mountain Fire, Thornbush Muse Poem Musical Shuttle National Cold Storage Company News Of The World The Night Nightsounds A Notebook Notes At 46 Observations The Old Nostalgia Past Time Power In America The Prophet Announces The Realization Riding Westward Riverside Drive Saul's Progress Sister The Six Hundred Thousand Letters Spirit Of Rabbi Nachman Summer Sunday Morning The Synagogue On Kane Street The Talker Through The Boroughs Tides Tight Like That To The Teacher Two Cornell Deaths Vacation Poetry The Way Where I Am Now -- Table of Poems from Poem Finder® Product description Book by Shapiro, Harvey From Publishers Weekly This collection, which consists of new verse as well as selections from Shapiro's previous books, spans over 30 years, and reveals his evolution as artist and observer. An American urban poet with an informal style that is direct and often colloquial, he captures the essence of life in anxiety-ridden, overstimulating New York: "If you walk by the river, Manhattan / is like a book, the pages turn, / the words march down those pages. / Look back to the lights along the river. / Wait for the dark, wait for the city to come on, / windows and bridges blazing, / Whatever you needed was there, wasn't it?" With haunting insistence Shapiro, former editor of the New York Times Book Review , explores his ambivalence, pain and fascination regarding his Jewish lineage, childhood, women and marriage, fatherhood, and mortality: "I was conceived on the night / of my sister's funeral. / . . . This is family history. / What is unclear is my father's role. / Was the night of my sister's funeral / a suitable time for making love? / Did they both think that? / Or was my father excited by my mother's grief? / Though I honor my mother and father, / I want to ask a few more questions." He describes domestic life candidly and with considerable humor and humility, but his words are serious and linger. The length of the poems varies; many are spontaneous snippets of thought, others are longer, carefully crafted and, richer in texture and content, offer more of Shapiro's seasoned insight and tenacity of spirit. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Library Journal Meticulous and deceptively simple, Shapiro's poems embody craft and concept. Had William Carlos Williams been Jewish, fought in World War II, and later lived in New York City, he might well have written poems like these. Though Shapiro offers a unique exploration of the American Jewish identity, what stands out in this collection are the love poems: "I believe we came together/ Out of ignorance not love." Shapiro's career in publishing (including editorship of The New York Times Book Review from 1975 to 1983) has overshadowed his poetry, but one comes away from this collection wishing it had inclu

Review "There is a lovely and unexpected alchemy in these verses that veer from the stars to suburbia, from the sublime to sweaty reality, and leave traces of each in the other. Roberts has a powerful range: equally adept at ferocity and fragility, and a host of other apparent opposites, she is a borderless writer and an absolute joy to read." - June Sylvester Saraceno"Suzanne Roberts' poems in Plotting Temporality are songs of the body, the erotic imperative of flesh, the brutal finality of bone. Roberts' poems forcefully invoke "our night, our moon, but never, / never our dawn," their language striving to shape and illuminate our haunted movements--a caress, a spouse's hand pushed away, a figure approaching from the shadows, embraced with fateful longing." --Gaylord Brewer Product Description Suzanne Roberts is the author of three previous books of poetry, Shameless (2007), Nothing to You (2008), and Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel (2011). She is also the author of a memoir, Almost Somewhere: 28 Days on the John Muir Trail (University of Nebraska Press, 2012). She holds a doctorate in literature and the environment from the University of Nevada-Reno and currently teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College in South Lake Tahoe, California. For more information, please visit her website at www.suzanneroberts.org From the Back Cover The poems in Plotting Temporality are songs of the body, the erotic imperative of flesh, the brutal finality of bone. These poems flicker with shadow and light, sometimes igniting into bold vision, sometimes mapping what is missing, drawing new shapes from the natural world, giving the familiar a new dimension, a mystery that compels us to follow. About the Author Suzanne Roberts is the author of the memoir Almost Somewhere: Twenty-Eight Days on the John Muir Trail, as well as three previous collections of poetry: Shameless, Nothing to You, and Three Hours to Burn a Body: Poems on Travel. She teaches at Lake Tahoe Community College and for the low residency MFA in creative writing at Sierra Nevada College.

This new novel extends Koch's achievements in his previous novels and takes the reader to Koch's native Germany. Set in Weimar and Frankfurt in Germany, in the pivotal years 1927 and 1928, the novel is triggered the International Music Exhibition of 1927 "The Summer of Music. The reader is introduced to three main characters: Hanni Geisel, an amateur musician and hostess of star-studded Saturday 'dejeuners'; her lover Erwin Herzberg, the editor of the culture sections of the Frankfurter Zeitung; and Hanni's husband, Dr. Hermann Geisel, a successful lawyer and art collector. They constitute the Weimar triangle of the title. Koch again uses a multi-format narrative technique so highly praised in the German reviews of Recollections, including stories, excerpts from imagined memoirs, invented diaries, letters and even a synopsis of a never-produced operetta about the failed Hitler putsch of 1923, Putsching with Putzi.

In eleven original, surprising and deliciously dark stories, Victoria Redel moves effortlessly between men's and women's perspectives in stories that explore marriage, divorce and parenthood. A newly divorced mother stumbles her way back into single life. A young man and his girlfriend clean out his dead mother's overstuffed home. A woman struggles to hide her affair from a doting husband and inquisitive daughter. A man descends into a drug-fueled dream as he imagines losing his pregnant wife to a historical, nineteenth century figure. Redel indelibly captures the ways we love, the ways we yearn and the ways we sabotage each. Throughout the collection, children struggle to make sense of the adult world's uncertainties as husbands and wives, mothers and fathers, find themselves pressed up against their own limits, "the exaltations and treasons of one's own mothy heart." Redel has again done what Grace Paley said of Redel's first collection, "Only a poet could have written this prose. Only a storyteller could keep a reader turning these pages so greedily."

With a voice that is rooted in the lush, immediate present, Victoria Redel explores the necessity to live and love deeply in her third collection of poems, Woman Without Umbrella. With her fearless and insistent engagement with language, Redel leads us, unprotected and exposed to the elements, through landscapes urban and domestic, contemplative and erotic, as she navigates the self and the world, from love to disaster to "a calm easy everyday" and back to love again.