Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party is the 2020 winner of The American Poetry Review/Honickman First Book Prize. This year's judge, Li-Young Lee, says: "Choosing Great Exodus, Great Wall, Great Party, I single out for attention a mind that is not only smart, curious, and original, but one that I feel is genuinely daemonized, "touched," and authentically weird. I choose a voice that is heartbroken, vulnerable, enraged, tender, and hilarious." Book jacket.

This impressive debut has established Hera Lindsay Bird as a good girl with many beneficial thoughts and feelings. With themes as varied as snow and tears, the poems in this collection shine with the fantastic cream of who she is, juxtaposing many classical and modern breezes. Bird turns her prescient eye on love and loss, and what emerges is like a helicopter in fog or a bejewelled Christmas sleigh, gliding triumphantly through the contemporary aesthetic desert. This is at once an intelligent and compelling fantasy of tenderness, heartbreaking and charged with trees without once sacrificing the forest.

Learn why today’s best teachers are leaving—from the teachers themselves More talented teachers are leaving the profession than ever before. Drawing on in-depth interviews, Farber presents an in-the-trenches view of the classroom exodus and how schools can turn the tide, focusing on: Challenges to teacher endurance, including tight budgets, difficult parents, unsafe schools, inadequate pay, and lack of respect Strategies veteran teachers use to make sure the joys of teaching outweigh the frustrations Success stories from individual schools and districts that have found solutions to these challenges Recommendations for creating a school environment that fosters teacher retention

A “gripping, colorful” history of China’s Great Wall that explores the conquests and cataclysms of the empire from 1000 BC to the present day (Publishers Weekly). Over two thousand years old, the Great Wall of China is a symbolic and physical dividing line between the civilized Chinese and the “barbarians” at their borders. Historian Julia Lovell looks behind the intimidating fortification and its mythology to uncover a complex history far more fragmented and less illustrious that its crowds of visitors imagine today. Lovell’s story winds through the lives of the millions of individuals who built and attacked it, and recounts how succeeding dynasties built sections of the wall as defenses against the invading Huns, Mongols, and Turks, and how the Ming dynasty, in its quest to create an empire, joined the regional ramparts to make what the Chinese call the “10,000 Li” or the “long wall.” An epic that reveals the true history of a nation, The Great Wall is “a supremely inviting entrée to the country” and essential reading for anyone who wants to understand China’s past, present, and future (Booklist).

Dominic Meng-Hsuan Yang examines the human exodus from China to Taiwan in 1949, focusing on trauma, memory, and identity.

Rabbi Jamie Korngold has always loved the outdoors, the place where humankind first met with God. Whether it’s mountaineering, running ultramarathons, or just sitting by a stream, she finds her spirituality and Judaism thrive most in the wilderness. In her work as the Adventure Rabbi, leading groups toward spiritual fulfillment in the outdoors, Korngold has uncovered the rich traditions and lessons God taught our ancestors in the wild. In God in the Wilderness Korngold uses rabbinic wisdom and witty insights to guide readers through the Bible, showing people of all faiths that, despite the hectic pace of life today, it is vital for us to reclaim these lessons, awaken our inner spirituality, and find meaning, tranquillity, and purpose in our lives.

A NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE A SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE BESTSELLER In AD 70, when the Second Temple was destroyed, a handful of visionaries saved Judaism by reinventing it, taking what had been a national religion and turning it into an idea. Whenever a Jew studied—wherever he was—he would be in the holy city, and his faith preserved. But in our own time, Zionists have turned the book back into a temple, and unlike an idea, a temple can be destroyed. With exuberance, humor, and real scholarship, Rich Cohen's Israel is Real offers "a serious attempt by a gifted storyteller to enliven and elucidate Jewish religious, cultural, and political history . . . A powerful narrative" (Los Angeles Times).