For Mortal Stakes

Everybody loves a winner, and the Rabbs are major league. Marty is the Red Sox star pitcher, Linda the loving wife. She loves everyone except the blackmailer out to wreck her life. Is Marty throwing fast balls or throwing games? It doesn't take long for Spenser to link Marty's performance with Linda's past...or to find himself trapped between a crazed racketeer and an enforcer toting an M-16. America's favorite pastime has suddenly become a very dangerous sport, and one wrong move means strike three, with Spenser out for good!

Timothy Murphy lives on the Great Plains. He has been a grain and hog farmer and, like Wallace Stevens, an insurance salesman, but the twin joys of his life are poetry and hunting. Murphy's poetry explores faith, family, spirituality, death, farming, friendship, love, and sexuality, yet it is profoundly rooted in place -- the Red River watershed in North Dakota and western Minnesota. He tries to make sense of the wide sweep of the northern plains, to explore how place shapes poetry and how poetry shapes one’s experience of place.

An introduction to hunting including who hunts, how they compare socially and politically with nonhunters, and how they see themselves and are seen by others.

New York Times bestselling author of the Spenser series of crime thrillers - Book 2 in the series - Appie Knoll is the kind of suburb where kids grow up right. But something is wrong. Fourteen-year-old Kevin Bartlett disappears. Everyone thinks he's run away -- until the comic strip ransom note arrives. It doesn't take Spenser long to get the picture -- an affluent family seething with rage, a desperate boy making strange friends...friends like Vic Harroway, body builder. Mr. Muscle is Spenser's only lead and he isn't talking...except with his fists. But when push comes to shove, when a boy's life is on the line, Spenser can speak that language too. "A brillant, and cynical, comic tragedy or tragic comedy of manners. Long may Parker wave." -- Los Angeles Times

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE The #1 bestselling author of Saturday and Atonement brilliantly illuminates the collision of sexual longing, deep-seated fears and romantic fantasy in his unforgettable, emotionally engaging novel. The year is 1962. Florence, the daughter of a successful businessman and an aloof Oxford academic, is a talented violinist. She dreams of a career on the concert stage and of the perfect life she will create with Edward, the earnest young history student she met by chance and who unexpectedly wooed her and won her heart. Edward grew up in the country on the outskirts of Oxford where his father, the headmaster of the local school, struggled to keep the household together and his mother, brain-damaged from an accident, drifted in a world of her own. Edward’s native intelligence, coupled with a longing to experience the excitement and intellectual fervour of the city, had taken him to University College in London. Falling in love with the accomplished, shy and sensitive Florence—and having his affections returned with equal intensity—has utterly changed his life. Their marriage, they believe, will bring them happiness, the confidence and the freedom to fulfill their true destinies. The glowing promise of the future, however, cannot totally mask their worries about the wedding night. Edward, who has had little experience with women, frets about his sexual prowess. Florence’s anxieties run deeper: she is overcome by conflicting emotions and a fear of the moment she will surrender herself. From the precise and intimate depiction of two young lovers eager to rise above the hurts and confusion of the past, to the touching story of how their unexpressed misunderstandings and fears shape the rest of their lives, On Chesil Beach is an extraordinary novel that brilliantly, movingly shows us how the entire course of a life can be changed—by a gesture not made or a word not spoken.

This book, first published in 1994, was the first critical study to appear in English on Nikolai Zabolotsky, one of the great poets of twentieth-century Russia.

What's wrong with our schools? How can they be fixed? Do they need more money? Should we emphasize the basics and cut out «frills» like art classes? Is multiculturalism an important new perspective? Now, Paul F. Cummins, a nationally respected writer and educator, offers his new book, 'For Mortal Stakes'. This is a comprehensive view of education, children and society, unique in its progressive, idealistic views combined with down-to-earth practical solutions, 'For Mortal Stakes' should become a major position paper in the national debate on educational and societal values. This book will offer a rallying point for those who are looking for a reasoned, thoughtful, and compassionate approach to educating our children for the twenty-first century. It should serve as a wake-up call for all who are concerned about what is happening to children in today's society and schools.

A Finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book Prize A new book from a poet whose work is "wild with imagination, unafraid, ambitious, inventive" (Jorie Graham) Located in a menacing, gothic landscape, the poems that comprise A Woman of Property draw formal and imaginative boundaries against boundless mortal threat, but as all borders are vulnerable, this ominous collection ultimately stages an urgent and deeply imperiled boundary dispute where haunting, illusion, the presence of the past, and disembodied voices only further unsettle questions of material and spiritual possession. This is a theatrical book of dilapidated houses and overgrown gardens, of passageways and thresholds, edges, prosceniums, unearthings, and root systems. The unstable property lines here rove from heaven to hell, troubling proportion and upsetting propriety in the name of unfathomable propagation. Are all the gates in this book folly? Are the walls too easily scaled to hold anything back or impose self-confinement? What won't a poem do to get to the other side?