A Treatise On Shelling Beans

Our hero and narrator is the aging caretaker of cottages at a summer resort. A mysterious visitor inspires him to share the story of his long life: we witness a happy childhood cut short by the war, his hiding from the Nazis buried in a heap of potatoes, his plodding attempts to play the saxophone, the brutal murder of his family, loves lost but remembered, and footloose travels abroad. Told in the manner of friends and neighbors swapping stories over the mundane task of shelling beans—in the grand oral tradition of Myśliwski’s celebrated Stone Upon Stone—each anecdote, lived experience, and memory accrues cross-stitched layers of meaning. By turns hilarious and poignant, A Treatise on Shelling Beans is an epic recounting of a life that, while universal, is anything but ordinary. From the Trade Paperback edition.

Winner of the PEN Translation Prize A “sweeping . . . irreverent” masterpiece of postwar Polish literature that “chronicles the modernization of Poland and celebrates the persistence of desire” (The New Yorker) Hailed as one of the best ever books in translation, Stone Upon Stone is Wieslaw Mysliwski’s grand epic in the rural tradition—a profound and irreverent stream of memory cutting through the rich and varied terrain of one man’s connection to the land, to his family and community, to women, to tradition, to God, to death, and to what it means to be alive. Wise and impetuous, plainspoken and compassionate, Szymek recalls his youth in their village, his time as a guerrilla soldier, as a wedding official, barber, policeman, lover, drinker, and caretaker for his invalid brother. Filled with interwoven stories and voices, by turns hilarious and moving, Szymek’s narrative exudes the profound wisdom of one who has suffered, yet who loves life to the very core.

Ask children where food comes from, and they’ll probably answer: “the supermarket.” Ask most adults, and their replies may not be much different. Where our foods are raised and what happens to them between farm and supermarket shelf have become mysteries. How did we become so disconnected from the sources of our breads, beef, cheeses, cereal, apples, and countless other foods that nourish us every day? Ann Vileisis’s answer is a sensory-rich journey through the history of making dinner. Kitchen Literacy takes us from an eighteenth-century garden to today’s sleek supermarket aisles, and eventually to farmer’s markets that are now enjoying a resurgence. Vileisis chronicles profound changes in how American cooks have considered their foods over two centuries and delivers a powerful statement: what we don’t know could hurt us. As the distance between farm and table grew, we went from knowing particular places and specific stories behind our foods’ origins to instead relying on advertisers’ claims. The woman who raised, plucked, and cooked her own chicken knew its entire life history while today most of us have no idea whether hormones were fed to our poultry. Industrialized eating is undeniably convenient, but it has also created health and environmental problems, including food-borne pathogens, toxic pesticides, and pollution from factory farms. Though the hidden costs of modern meals can be high, Vileisis shows that greater understanding can lead consumers to healthier and more sustainable choices. Revealing how knowledge of our food has been lost and how it might now be regained, Kitchen Literacy promises to make us think differently about what we eat.

An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations.... It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine--while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils. Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat. In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself. Or was it Jezebel?

In volume 1 of Trafika Europe, Andrew Singer gathers choice offerings from the first year of the quarterly journal of the same name. These fourteen selections—from seven women and seven men, seven poets and seven fiction writers—represent languages across the Continent, from Shetland Scots and Occitan, Latvian and Polish, Armenian, Italian, Hungarian, German, and Slovenian to Faroese and Icelandic. With some of the most accomplished writing in new translation from Europe today, this volume opens a window onto some emerging contours of European identity. Former ASCAP director of photography Mark Chester complements the writing with sumptuous black-and-white photos. The contributors are Vincenzo Bagnoli, Ewa Chrusciel, Christine DeLuca, Mandy Haggith, Stefanie Kremser, Aurélia Lassaque, Wiesław Myśliwski, Jóanes Nielsen, Edvīns Raups, László Sárközi, Marko Sosič, Jón Kalman Stefánsson, Nara Vardanyan, and Māra Zālīte.

"Time travel, UFOs, mysterious planets, stigmata, rock-throwing poltergeists, huge footprints, bizarre rains of fish and frogs-nearly a century after Charles Fort's Book of the Damned was originally published, the strange phenomenon presented in this book remains largely unexplained by modern science. Through painstaking research and a witty, sarcastic style, Fort captures the imagination while exposing the flaws of popular scientific explanations. Virtually all of his material was compiled and documented from reports published in reputable journals, newspapers and periodicals because he was an avid collector. Charles Fort was somewhat of a recluse who spent most of his spare time researching these strange events and collected these reports from publications sent to him from around the globe. This was the first of a series of books he created on unusual and unexplained events and to this day it remains the most popular. If you agree that truth is often stranger than fiction, then this book is for you"--Taken from Good Reads website.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1883.

"Never have disgusting, miserable living conditions been so funny. When someone finally finds a way to send back a report from hell, I hope it will be Lance Pototschnik. Except this guy is going to heaven, for the way he writes." --The Kindle Book Review"Welcome to beautiful Costa Rica! Come and experience our diverse wildlife. Exhume nests of dead baby turtles and stay up all night while mosquitoes elicit blood from your very soul! Indulge in the local cuisine. Eat rice and beans until the malnutrition engenders hallucinations! Travel west to Guanacaste, to the peninsula that pokes into the Pacific like a fang. Visit the remote, cocoa-dust beaches where rare sea turtles crawl from the seething ocean to nest. Here, masochists will enjoy camping beside the water to leave civilization and all its conveniences behind. Burn bucketfuls of used toilet paper, shiver in an infested bed, and wade crocodile-filled rivers every single day!" Lance Pototschnik and his friends must have booked their trip with that agency. Their incredibly affordable "vacation" was meant to be a relaxing time to meditate on the direction of their languid, aimless lives. Instead, they are introduced to hell and the insane diversity of its tortures. Marooned on a remote sea turtle conservancy with a handful of fellow unanchored souls, Pototschnik, in his hilarious debut memoir, ponders who he essentially is, and what he is likely to become. In Pototschnik, those who have fallen prey to the desolation of broken dreams, the young and the listless, finally find a voice with the talent to cast out demons and turn them into laughs. Beneath its shell, this rollicking, episodic story is also a treatise about finding your purpose, realizing your full potential and learning to love your own life. Pototschnik's very personal book happens to be the story we have all been hoping for.