Part consoling sourcebook, part cultural commentary, and part wry self-help manual, this gloriously uncynical handbook provides advice for creatives struggling in a career world awash in bottom-line thinking. With an appealing blend of sound counsel, good humor, and vivid historical and literary anecdotes, M. Allen Cunningham offers solidarity to any writer or artist working against the grain of the times, and reminds us that obscurity, rather than being cause for shame, is a time-honored condition of the serious, committed artist. Readers will laugh aloud at the e-mails received by Henry David Thoreau's literary agent in response to his "bloated and incoherent" book Walden, and will underline and annotate the margins in such pieces as "In the Absence of Yes," Cunningham's bracing perspective on endless rejection. Hailed by Cynthia Ozick as "ingenious...important...inspiring and inspiriting," this unique handbook is unlike any volume on creativity you have read before. It is packed with insights -- both practical and philosophical -- that will appeal to every creative person you know.

The Honorable Obscurity Handbook: Solidarity & Sound Advice for Writers and Artists (Samizdat Series)

Arts & Photography

Cunningham, M. Allen

Business of Art

Atelier26 Books

Back from a tour of duty in Vietnam, Benny Finn strives to find his bearings amid the everyday life of 1973 New England. At a Benedictine Abbey in rural New Hampshire, Sister Clare, a young novice, confronts the day-to-day realities of a cloistered existence. Linking the stories of Benny and Sister Clare is Isabel Howell, a college student soon to discover that she must chart the course of her own life in a way she could not have imagined. Deeply felt and often luminously moving, this powerful story reveals a writer richly aware of the range of human tragedy and tenderness.

The Beauty of Ordinary Things

Literature & Fiction

Chessman, Harriet Scott

Contemporary

A provocative casebook for our digital times, this book is designed to jumpstart an in-depth dialogue about the historical, cultural, civic, and scientific implications of a mass shift in reading methods. Each chapter is broken down in a visual way through bullet points, bolding, and illustrations combined with descriptive paragraphs that both engage and inform the reader. This small volume weaves together some of the most cogent thought of the past 50 years, urging readers to consider anew the many questions about our "technological revolution" that remain far from settled. The chapters include: “The Technology of Individualism,” “Technology &amp; Ideology,” and “Neuroplasticity.”

The Flickering Page: The Reading Experience in Digital Times (Samizdat Series)

History

Through an extraordinarily powerful mix of poetry and prose, the author shares her experience as the daughter of Holocaust survivors. She recounts her false starts in raising the subject with her father (a survivor of Buchenwald concentration camp), his piecemeal revelations, and their eventual travels together to the sites of the nightmare in Germany. Through her work she evokes, courageously and heart-wrenchingly, her search for identity against the gravitational pull of her parents' experience and the traditional upbringing they've given her. These astonishing pages remind us that history happens at home and that the past is something we all embody, knowingly or not.

Gravity

Rosner, Elizabeth

United States

This masterful and compassionate novel is split into a series of interlinked stories that tell the tale of Hannah Pearl. As Hannah’s memory of the present begins to fade, she increasingly inhabits the world of her ardent and frightened youth in war-torn France and England, while her memories of life in America with her daughter and granddaughters have almost been erased. Throughout the book each character must negotiate the fraught intricacies of memory, geography, and motherhood. The reader will discover and illuminate, with miraculous effect, all the pieces of this intelligent and dream-like puzzle.

Someone Not Really Her Mother

Finalist, PEN/Hemingway Award In this marvelously funny, unsettling, subtle, and moving collection of stories, the characters exist in the thick of everyday experience absent of epiphanies. The people are caught off-guard or cast adrift by personal impulses even while wide awake to their own imperfections. Each voice will win readers over completely and break hearts with each confused and conflicted decision that is made. Every story is beautifully controlled and provocatively alive to its own truth.

People Like You

Malone, Margaret

Literary

This book presents fans of Henry David Thoreau with a marvelous display of his most underappreciated quality: his killer sense of humor. Amid the transcendental musings of his best known works and the nature descriptions in his voluminous journal, Thoreau was constantly tossing off jokes, whipping out witticisms, and making fun of himself and others. Here he is in his own words trying to wrangle a pig, peeing in the woods, losing a tooth, laughing at Emerson shooing away his own cow, describing the slapstick of snowmelt and mud in the Concord streets on the town’s slipperiest spring day, elaborating on his dislike of other men’s bowels, and more. Included in this volume is Thoreau’s posthumously-published lecture, “Getting a Living,” which can (and ought to be) read as a stand-up philosophy routine bristling with one-liners.

Funny-Ass Thoreau (Regeneration Series)

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Painting modern America in saturated colors, this collection of short stories explores the passions and compulsions at the core of our national identity: those qualities that propel us forward or hold us back; that make us strangers to ourselves and others even while we pine for connection; the ways we cope with the inescapable enormity of our nation's geography. A marlin swims circles in a luminous backyard pool; a small-town surgeon broods from the Olympus of his hilltop house, watched all the while by his neighbors below; a knife salesman plies blades of mythic sharpness while crisscrossing a crazed North American landscape like a mad Paul Bunyan; a young man in rural Arkansas nestles into a satellite dish; and a grandfather’s body lies in state amid Annie Oakley’s last buffalo kill, General Patton’s Persian rug, and countless other oddments of a legendary America. Phenomenally imaginative, skewed, and hyperbolical, these stories are honed to cut through the blur of our times.

A Thousand Distant Radios

Skinner, Woody

In this stunning collection, the author offers an exquisite array of poems at once sublime and playful, dedicated to the unearthly wonders of winged creatures. The book is a universal song of praise to the mysteries and intricacies of the animal world that surrounds us, and a wide-awake hymn, by a master lyricist, to the delights and surprises of our common language. The brilliantly vivid, elegant verse is sure to delight and inspire general readers, poetry enthusiasts, and avid birders or naturalists alike.

Bird Book: Poems

Wade, Sidney

Poetry

The author of the much-acclaimed #1 Indie Next Pick The Green Age of Asher Witherow returns with a masterful new work, epic in scope and yet intimate in its emotional power, about a family shaped as much by tumultuous world events as by each of its members' long-kept secrets. Benjamin Lorn, sensitive son of an embittered Civil War veteran, comes of age in the tiny Iowa town of Perpetua where, in a single summer, he mourns the recent loss of his mother, falls in love, and uncovers a shameful family secret that sends him fleeing west. Tormented with this new knowledge, Benjamin seeks transcendence through the telegraph wires that have enchanted him since boyhood. Meanwhile the weight of a dark duty grows more and more pressing. Thus begins Perpetua's Kin, M. Allen Cunningham's enthralling multi-generational mystery, reworking of Hamlet, and profoundly contemporary exploration of the American experience as one family embodies it. Spanning much of North America over more than a century, from the 1820s Midwest through the American south of the Civil War, to World War II San Francisco, Cunningham's novel is a powerful portrait of this nation's violent heritage, our vulnerability to the vastness of our own geography, our chronic restlessness and desire for regeneration through technology, and the impossibility of escaping the history that forms us and, always, demands a reckoning.

Perpetua's Kin

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