In The Laurels Caught

A major experimentalist digs up her rural roots in this portrait of flowery but never sweet dynamic regionalism.

William Hope Hodgson spent his early life as a cabin boy, before becoming a prolific author. Although best-known nowadays for two novels – The House on the Borderland (1908) and The Night Land (1912) – his short fiction was also extremely popular in its day. Within is 'The House Among The Laurels' which Hodgson wrote in 1910. A deserted mansion in Ireland displays signs of haunting, including what appears to be blood dripping from the ceiling, and several men have been found dead in the house. Is it a prank or a haunting? Carnacki recruits a group of burly local men to investigate, along with several dogs, and they attempt to stay the night within the mansion.

Laurel investigates a cheating scam at her high school.

Offering both subtle and immediate pleasures, Lee Ann Brown’s generous new book extends her unmistakable, original voice, every bit as Southern as it is avant-garde, gracious without being naive. Abounding in a playfulness of style, including songs and ballads, the poems in The Sleep That Changed Everything are by turns funny, serious, insightful and moving. Botanical and scientific language are used here as collage elements to chart cycles of desire and emotional transformation. Brown is committed to Whitman’s idea that we all have many selves; thus her work embraces the immediacy of the New York School, the personal and literary wildness of the Beats, the word play and political astuteness of Language poetry and an eroticism all her own. In poems that are both highly literate and plain-spoken, Brown makes the life of the soul directly available in all its renegade garb.

The 3:15 EXPERIMENT comprises the results of an experiment in which the four authors rose at 3:15 A.M. every day in the month of August from the years 1993-2000 and wrote. Some poems, some prose, some dream-drenched euphoric scrawl, some devine journaling recording the weird magic of that middle hour. "In 1994...I was awake at 3:15 almost every night all August. This writing-by-alarm is one out of a large -- infinite? -- bag of tricks. The self outside the self. To get ourselves to pay attention differently, unawares" -- Jen Hofer. "The book is full of marvelous 'good times' as well -- with language, zones, emotions & political conventions... -- the stuff & dross & excitement of existing experimentally in the minds of four exceptional writers" -- Anne Waldman.

Woman is born free, and everywhere she is in corsets. . . . Lili du Châtelet yearns to know more about her mother, the brilliant French mathematician Emilie. But the shrouded details of Emilie’s unconventional life—and her sudden death—are elusive. Caught between the confines of a convent upbringing and the intrigues of the Versailles court, Lili blossoms under the care of a Parisian salonnière as she absorbs the excitement of the Enlightenment, even as the scandalous shadow of her mother’s past haunts her and puts her on her own path of self-discovery. Laurel Corona’s breathtaking new novel, set on the eve of the French Revolution, vividly illuminates the tensions of the times, and the dangerous dance between the need to conform and the desire to chart one’s own destiny and journey of the heart.

This volume from the two-time National Book Award-finalist offers “splashes of beauty, yes–but also a fountain of shameless knowing and inspired telling” (Cynthia Ozick). This tenth collection of Irving Feldman’s poems extends what readers and critics have long recognized to be a body of work singular in its extravagant wit, powerful storytelling, variety of voices and range of feeling—playful, tender, ardent, biting, enthralled. Here, among the major poems of Beautiful False Things: the stand-up comic Larry Sunrise of “Funny Bones’ duels with death in Florida; in “Oedipus Host,” Oedipus arrives from his millennia-long trek to host a TV talk show; and the plucky, feminist heroine of “Heavenly Muse” visits yet another barely worthy male poet. In the tragicomic title poem, “translation” comes to stand for the dilemmas of expression in a culture that sucks up language and spews it back. The renowned poet J. D. McClatchy called Feldman “our best fabulist, Franz Kafka’s imagination combined with S. J. Perelman’s ear, and everywhere his own buoyant, driving line.” The poems collected here demonstrate why the Guggenheim Fellow and National Book Critics Circle Award-finalist is deserving of such high praise.

This is a novel about a young woman named Albinia Ferrars who marries a widower, Mr. Kendal, and becomes stepmother to his three children. The novel explores the challenges that Albinia faces as she adjusts to her new role as a stepmother, and the relationships between Albinia, Mr. Kendal, and his children. The novel also touches upon themes such as family, love, duty, and societal expectations.