Beyond The Pond

A stunning picture book about the power of imagination, perfect for fans of Extra Yarn and Journey, from debut author-illustrator Joseph Kuefler. Just behind an ordinary house filled with too little fun, Ernest D. decides that today will be the day he explores the depths of his pond. Beyond the pond, he discovers a not-so-ordinary world that will change him forever.

Moving to a Scottish castle allows seventh-grader Callie to escape friendship problems in San Diego, but finding new friends, even in the birding club an old journal inspires her to join, proves challenging.

“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.”–New York Times Book Review "Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." –O, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known. Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.

Across the Pond tells of the changing use of this ocean, from a barrier to a route to riches and a highway for trade. Much is covered - exploration and exploitation; fighting and fishing; luxury cruises on the steamships of the Cunard and Collins lines and always the dangers of the sea. There also slipped the slavers with their cargo of shame. The story of the early aerial pioneers is recounted, there being many contenders for the first aircraft to fly across the Atlantic, such as the flying boats, known as the nancies. This is an ocean that bred some of the world's hardiest mariners, famous men such as Cabot, Hudson and Vespucci but also the nameless thousands who manned the ships, the hard-used mariners from the Chesapeake, the Solway and Seville. Here was bred the down east Yankee, the Nova Scotian bluenose and the Scouser from Liverpool. Across the Pond tells some of their story.

Carlene Rivers is many things. Dutiful, reliable, kind. Lucky? Not so much. At thirty, she’s living a stifling existence in Cleveland, Ohio. Then one day, Carlene buys a raffle ticket. The prize: a pub on the west coast of Ireland. Carlene is stunned when she wins. Everyone else is stunned when she actually goes. As soon as she arrives in Ballybeog, Carlene is smitten not just by the town’s beguiling mix of ancient and modern, but by the welcome she receives. In this small town near Galway Bay, strife is no stranger, strangers are family, and no one is ever too busy for a cup of tea or a pint. And though her new job presents challenges—from a meddling neighbor to the pub’s colorful regulars—there are compensations galore. Like the freedom to sing, joke, and tell stories, and in doing so, find her own voice. And in her flirtation with Ronan McBride, the pub’s charming, reckless former owner, she just may find the freedom to follow where impulse leads and trust her heart—and her luck—for the very first time . . . “Guaranteed to become one of the books on your shelf that you’ll want to read again.” —The Free Lance-Star “A fun, quirky read.” –Publishers Weekly

Based on extended fieldwork conducted between 2007 and 2019, this book aims to answer a simple question: What is the meaning of home for people living in vernacular settlements in rural China? This question is particularly potent since rural China has experienced rapid and fundamental changes in the twenty-first century under the influences of national policies such as "Building a New Socialist Countryside" enacted in 2006 and "Rural Revitalization" announced in 2018. Drawing upon ethnographic fieldwork, building surveys, archival research, and over 600 photographs taken by residents along with their life stories, this book uncovers the meanings of home from rural residents’ perspectives, who belong to a social group that is underrepresented in scholarship and underserved in modern China. In other words, this study empowers rural residents by giving them voice. This book links the concepts of place, home, and tradition into an overarching argument: The meaning of home rests on the ideas of tradition, including identity, consanguinity, collectivity, social relations, land ownership, and rural lifestyle.

The story begins with Gordon and Jane, walking on a corridor, on the astral plane. Their two blue, regal tigers accompany them. The tigers are their spirit guides and guardians. Soon, they find themselves in a series of rooms, which have the internal appearance of a monastery. The rooms are located inside a rock formation. There are no doors or signs of an entrance. Huge pillars, with open spaces between, allow light to enter. They are standing in a large room, with a group of native American tribal elders, who are seated at a large table. Gordon is included in a group of twelve men, who are called the selected. Jane is in a group of twelve women, called the accepted. Each pair of the selected and accepted will have a role to play in the future, involving spiritual awakenings. Born in the same year, all of the selected of that year are male, and their accepted partners are female. On alternate years, it is reversed, with the females being the selected, and males the accepted.

The first novel from Madagascar ever to be translated into English, Naivo’s magisterial Beyond the Rice Fields delves into the upheavals of the nation’s precolonial past through the twin narratives of a slave and his master’s daughter. Fara and her father’s slave, Tsito, have shared a tender intimacy since her father bought the young boy who’d been ripped away from his family after their forest village was destroyed. Now in Sahasoa, amongst the cattle and rice fields, everything is new for Tsito, and Fara at last has a companion to play with. But as Tsito looks forward toward the bright promise of freedom and Fara, backward to a twisted, long-denied family history, a rift opens that a rapidly shifting political and social terrain can only widen. As love and innocence fall away, their world becomes defined by what tyranny and superstition both thrive upon: fear. With captivating lyricism and undeniable urgency, Naivo crafts an unsentimental interrogation of the brutal history of nineteenth-century Madagascar as a land newly exposed to the forces of Christianity and modernity, and preparing for a violent reaction against them. Beyond the Rice Fields is a tour de force about the global history of human bondage and the competing narratives that keep us from recognizing ourselves and each other, our pasts and our destinies.