Like John Muir, David Pitt-Brooke stepped out for a walk one morning—a long walk of a thousand kilometres or more through the arid valleys of southern interior British Columbia. He went in search of beauty and lost grace in a landscape that has seen decades of development and upheaval. In Crossing Home Ground he reports back, providing a day-by-day account of his journey’s experiences, from the practical challenges—dealing with blisters, rain and dehydration—to sublime moments of discovery and reconnection with the natural world. Through the course of this journey, Pitt-Brooke’s encounters with the natural world generate starting points for reflections on larger issues: the delicate interconnections of a healthy landscape and, most especially, the increasingly fragile bond between human beings and their home-places. There is no escaping the impact of human beings on the natural world, not even in the most remote countryside, but he finds hope and consolation in surviving pockets of loveliness, the kindness of strangers and the transformative process of the walking itself, a personal pilgrimage across home ground. Crossing Home Ground is a book that, though rooted in one specific place and time, will evoke a universal sense of recognition in a wide variety of readers. It will appeal to hikers, natural-history enthusiasts and anyone who loves the wild countryside and is concerned about the disappearance of Canada’s natural spaces. Pitt-Brooke’s grassland odyssey is sure to become a classic of British Columbia nature writing.

Published to great acclaim in 2006, the hardcover edition of Home Ground: Language for an American Landscape met with outstanding reviews and strong sales, going into three printings. A language-lover's dream, Home Ground revitalized a descriptive language for the American landscape by combining geography, literature, and folklore in one volume. Now in paperback, this visionary reference is available to an entire new segment of readers. Home Ground brings together 45 poets and writers to create more than 850 original definitions for words that describe our lands and waters. The writers draw from careful research and their own distinctive stylistic, personal, and regional diversity to portray in bright, precise prose the striking complexity of the landscapes we inhabit. Home Ground includes 100 black-and-white line drawings by Molly O’Halloran and an introductory essay by Barry Lopez.

Maybe you won't rock a cradle, Muriel. Some women seem to prefer to rock the boat. Eighteen-year-old Muriel Jorgensen lives on one side of Crabapple Creek. Her family's closest friends, the Normans, live on the other. For as long as Muriel can remember, the families' lives have been intertwined, connected by the crossing stones that span the water. But now that Frank Norman—who Muriel is just beginning to think might be more than a friend—has enlisted to fight in World War I and her brother, Ollie, has lied about his age to join him, the future is uncertain. As Muriel tends to things at home with the help of Frank's sister, Emma, she becomes more and more fascinated by the women's suffrage movement, but she is surrounded by people who advise her to keep her opinions to herself. How can she find a way to care for those she loves while still remaining true to who she is? Written in beautifully structured verse, Crossing Stones captures nine months in the lives of two resilient families struggling to stay together and cross carefully, stone by stone, into a changing world.

In Joyce Carol Oates’s story “The Translation,” a traveler to an Eastern European country falls in love with a woman he gets to know through an interpreter. In Lydia Davis’s “French Lesson I: Le Meurtre,” what begins as a lesson in beginner’s French takes a sinister turn. In the essay “On Translating and Being Translated,” Primo Levi addresses the joys and difficulties awaiting the translator. Lynne Sharon Schwartz’s Crossing Borders: Stories and Essays About Translation gathers together thirteen stories and five essays that explore the compromises, misunderstandings, traumas, and reconciliations we act out and embody through the art of translation. Guiding her selection is Schwartz’s marvelous eye for finding hidden gems, bringing together Levi, Davis, and Oates with the likes of Michael Scammell, Harry Mathews, Chana Bloch, and so many other fine and intriguing voices.

House Crossing is a book of 32 poems about where we live or, more properly, dwell, with each poem entitled by a different attribute of domestic architecture as it is commonly known: Cupola, eaves, attic, beams, etc. Such might lend itself to description, but--reminiscent in part of Ronald Johnson's oeuvre (The Foundations, The Spires and The Ramparts)--in the vision of poet and scholar Laurie Patton each component becomes alive to an actuality beyond physical construct: The poetics of how we hold our ground, even if it is in flux--or as she writes, "A river runs... below the house." The instigation for this poetic cycle is Gaston Bachelard's The Poetics of Space, with this collection a homage to that classic phenomenological analysis. As she writes in her introduction, House Crossing arose as "a straightforward observation about the endurance of Bachelard's work: if a poetics is good enough, and I believe Bachelard's is, then it does not only comment on poetry, but can give rise to poetry as well." What Patton gives rise to is in part an opportunity for us each to live more evocatively in our days and nights in each our own place, building a being, as "Noah's ark stands / at the end of our hallway."

Home is a common denominator; no matter how little we know about each other's tribe, we can agree on the instinct for home, in all its brave and bizarre forms. 17 authors of various ethnic origins living in the US contributed memoirs and stories; includes Ishmael Reed, Pico Iver, Naomi Shihab Nye, Lawson Inada, and Sandra Scofield.