"First edition published 1970 by Beacon Press."

In making her selection for Pharos Editions, Dana Spiotta tells us how drawn she was by the work of Raymond Mungo. "[He] writes . . . about his own joy and his own pain, he is particularly good when he describes the land around him and how it feels on his body." Indeed, if Henry David Thoreau had downed a handful of liberty caps before penning Walden it would have read much like Mungo's Total Loss Farm, a rollicking memoir of the late 1960's back–to–the–earth movement. Written in a limber prose style formed by the tempo of the times, Mungo takes us into the cultural tsunami of a failed radical politics as it broke on the shoals of a drug–fueled personal freedom and washed inland across the farmlands of Vermont, leaving a trail of damage and redemption in its wake. Total Loss Farm attracted widespread critical and commercial attention in 1970, when the "back–to–the–land" hippie commune movement first emerged. The book's first section, "Another Week on the Concord and Merrimack Rivers," appeared as the cover article in the May 1970 issue of Atlantic Monthly. The hardcover first edition from Dutton was quickly followed by paperback editions from Bantam, Avon, and Madrona Publishers, keeping the book in print for several decades. Very recently, Dwight Garner in the New York Times Book Review cited Total Loss Farm as "the best and also the loopiest of the commune books."

Widely hailed as one of the finest humorist of the twentieth century, James Thurber looks back at his own life growing up in Columbus, Ohio, with the same humor and sharp wit that defined his famous sketches and writings. In My Life and Hard times, first published in 1933, he recounts the delightful chaos and frustrations of family, boyhood, youth odd dogs, recalcitrant machinery, and the foibles of human nature.

Is being famous the key to living the life of your (tween) dreams? Find out in this modern-day fairy tale from #1 New York Times bestselling author Alyson Noël! Seventh-grade girls like guys who are cool. And Nick Dashaway . . . is not cool. When Nick makes a wish after the epic disaster that was the Greentree Middle School Talent Show, he doesn't actually think it's going to come true. But it does. Soon he has a whole new life--he's rich, he's popular, and girls laugh at all his jokes. He's famous. But when he begins to miss parts of his old life, is it too late to get it back? *** “A Hollywood blockbuster waiting to happen.”—Booklist "Perfect for readers wondering what their dream life would be like."—SLJ

International bestselling author Guy Gavriel Kay's latest work is set in a world evoking early Renaissance Italy and offers an extraordinary cast of characters whose lives come together through destiny, love, and ambition. In a chamber overlooking the nighttime waterways of a maritime city, a man looks back on his youth and the people who shaped his life. Danio Cerra's intelligence won him entry to a renowned school even though he was only the son of a tailor. He took service at the court of a ruling count—and soon learned why that man was known as the Beast. Danio's fate changed the moment he saw and recognized Adria Ripoli as she entered the count's chambers one autumn night—intending to kill. Born to power, Adria had chosen, instead of a life of comfort, one of danger—and freedom. Which is how she encounters Danio in a perilous time and place. Vivid figures share the unfolding story. Among them: a healer determined to defy her expected lot; a charming, frivolous son of immense wealth; a powerful religious leader more decadent than devout; and, affecting all these lives and many more, two larger-than-life mercenary commanders, lifelong adversaries, whose rivalry puts a world in the balance. A Brightness Long Ago offers both compelling drama and deeply moving reflections on the nature of memory, the choices we make in life, and the role played by the turning of Fortune's wheel.

A novel based on the true story of Clara Estby's walk across America with her mother Helga, to save their farm with the ten thousand dollars promised by a New York City publisher-- if they can do it in eight months.