Jim Neat is an unusual and striking memoir, a coalescing of prose, poetry, found documents and photographs. In it Mary J Oliver uncovers the life of her father (b. 1904) and ranges across the history of England and Canada in the twentieth century. Jim left England in his teens, as a seaman. He travelled to South Africa, stowed away to Australia and eventually landed in Canada just before the Great Depression. Here he met his partner Lizbietta in a bookshop in Toronto, but while he was working as a lumberjack she died in childbirth. Ill and destitute, Jim was declared a vagrant and his baby daughter was sent to an orphanage. Admitted to a mental hospital in Ontario Jim was eventually repatriated to England. Jim met and married Mary's mother during the war before serving in North Africa and Italy. Their marriage was a difficult one and although it endured until Jim died in 1983, his life was dominated by the loss of Lizbietta and their child. Driven by the prospect of a half-sister, and the enigma of a father she didn't really know, Oliver set out to discover the truth behind the family stories and to better understand Jim. Researching, gathering documents, following leads, Oliver follows Jim's story full circle to Canada. She presents the case for the extraordinary life lived by an ostensibly ordinary man, his family and the people who knew him witnesses in his defence. The verdict is this remarkable evocation of a fractured life. I am the amazed reader of Jim Neat . I've read it twice, the second time in one sitting. What an incredible work of love, imagination, respect and repair. I was very touched by Jim's difficult, brave endurance, as he is assailed by every test of harsh reality. Here his poet daughter works the scant yet extraordinary facts, & weaves them into a work that gets to the bones & questions what it is to live. I was touched by the flavour of the particular with which Mary J. Oliver imbues the narrative of Jim Neat, his times, her times, our times. It is an epic and beautiful work, leaving me charmed and haunted. – Sophie Herxheimer It's been some while since I have read a book from cover to cover without being able to put it down. In Mary J. Oliver's Jim Neat , I found myself absorbed to the point of pausing all incoming communications. I followed Jim's story - a narrative that seamlessly glides through episodic instalments, confessional poetry, case history, letters, unsent postcards, diary entries, pioneer archives and judicial injustices that contribute to both the man, and a life that is quite extraordinary. The text flows with the ease of a novel, while all the while one is reading fact after heart-wrenching fact as the most uncanny events push Jim into circumstances that the majority of us would not recover from. His enduring ability to bounce back is staggering, and lies in his passion, honesty, and a belief that 'true love' must be protected at all costs. Buy this book, read it, and you will not be disappointed. If anything, you will be left wanting to know more. – Roz Hopkinson

An all-new Dresden Files story headlines this urban fantasy short story collection starring the Windy City’s favorite wizard. The world of Harry Dresden, Chicago’s only professional wizard, is rife with intrigue—and creatures of all supernatural stripes. And you’ll make their intimate acquaintance as Harry delves into the dark side of truth, justice, and the American way in this must-have short story collection. From the Wild West to the bleachers at Wrigley Field, humans, zombies, incubi, and even fey royalty appear, ready to blur the line between friend and foe. In the never-before-published “Zoo Day,” Harry treads new ground as a dad, while fan-favorite characters Molly Carpenter, his onetime apprentice, White Council Warden Anastasia Luccio, and even Bigfoot stalk through the pages of more classic tales. With twelve stories in all, Brief Cases offers both longtime fans and first-time readers tantalizing glimpses into Harry’s funny, gritty, and unforgettable realm, whetting their appetites for more to come from the wizard with a heart of gold. The collection includes: • “Curses,” from Naked City, edited by Ellen Datlow • “AAAA Wizardry,” from the Dresden Files RPG • “Even Hand,” from Dark and Stormy Knights, edited by P. N. Elrod • “B is for Bigfoot,” from Under My Hat: Tales from the Cauldron, edited by Jonathan Strahan. Republished in Working for Bigfoot. • “I was a Teenage Bigfoot,” from Blood Lite III: Aftertaste, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Republished in Working for Bigfoot. • “Bigfoot on Campus,” from Hex Appeal, edited by P. N. Elrod. Republished in Working for Bigfoot. • “Bombshells,” from Dangerous Women, edited by George R. R. Martin and Gardner Dozois • “Jury Duty,” from Unbound, edited by Shawn Speakman • “Cold Case,” from Shadowed Souls, edited by Jim Butcher and Kerrie Hughes • “Day One,” from Unfettered II, edited by Shawn Speakman • “A Fistful of Warlocks,” from Straight Outta Tombstone, edited by David Boop • “Zoo Day,” a brand-new novella, original to this collection

Jim Harrison's popular novels represent only part of his literary output—he has also been widely acclaimed for the "renegade genius" of his powerful, expressive verse, collected in several books such as The Theory and Practice of Rivers and Other Poems (Clark City Press, 1989). After Ikkyu is the first collection of Harrison's poems that are directly inspired by his many years of Zen practice.

Imagine if you had the exact playbook used by today's top startups to grow a business online. That's what Jim Huffman is giving you with The Growth Marketer's Playbook. In this honest how-to guide, VC advisor & startup founder, Jim Huffman, serves up the exact growth marketing strategies he uses to help companies achieve explosive growth.

Literary novel with a New York setting and a dash of speculative fiction, for fans of Colum McCann, Colm Toibin, and Dana Spiotta. Ghosts of New York is a novel in which the laws of time and space have been subtly suspended. It interweaves four strands: a photographer newly returned to the neighborhood where she grew up, after years spent living overseas; a foundling raised on 14th Street; a graduate student, his romantic partner, and his best friend entangled in a set of relationships with far-reaching personal and political repercussions; and a shopkeeper suffering from first love late in life. Mixing prophecy, history, and a hint of speculative fiction, its stories are bound together even as they are propelled into stranger territory. And undergirding it all is a song, which appears, disappears, and then resurfaces. Ghosts of New York explores complex lives through indelible renderings of settings-a bar, a night market, a recording studio-that alternate between familiar and unsettling. The work of a celebrated novelist and veteran of the art, film, and music scenes in New York and Austin (described as "a rare talent" by the New York Times and "a powerful literary voice" by Jeffrey Eugenides), this novel will immediately absorb readers intrigued by creative people and the places that sustain and challenge them.

“One of the most profound and illuminating studies of this century to have been published in recent decades.”—John Gray, New York Times Book Review Hailed as “a magisterial critique of top-down social planning” by the New York Times, this essential work analyzes disasters from Russia to Tanzania to uncover why states so often fail—sometimes catastrophically—in grand efforts to engineer their society or their environment, and uncovers the conditions common to all such planning disasters. “Beautifully written, this book calls into sharp relief the nature of the world we now inhabit.”—New Yorker “A tour de force.”— Charles Tilly, Columbia University

A killer has an axe to grind in this classic whodunit from the #1 New York Times–bestselling author of The Circular Staircase and mystery-writing pioneer. Crescent Place was once a peaceful country green surrounded by five tasteful suburban houses and populated by polite, responsible citizens. But as the city enveloped it, the residents built a gate to keep the world out. With each passing year, the subdivision grew stranger and stranger—until it began to look like a time capsule of the 1890s. In these houses are a husband and wife who fight constantly, and another couple who hasn’t spoken to each other in two decades. There is a widow in permanent mourning and a daughter whom the newspapers call psychotic. And there is a bedridden old woman who is about to be killed with an axe. When her murder shatters the quiet of the little enclave, the tabloids delight in trumpeting the neighborhood’s peculiarities. But as the search for the killer intensifies, the area’s strangest secrets have yet to be revealed.