What kind of tracks do animals make in our lives? My Friend Flika is a favorite tale of a boy and his horse, and National Velvet remains a favorite about a girl and her horse. Countless stories exist about boys and their dogs even though our faithful friends are never allotted our same number of years. As adults we can consider animals our protectors to bite our enemies, sniff out bombs and cancerous tumors, or help us travel using their eyes. We raise livestock to market as meat. We ride animals in races and rodeos, train them for circuses, and send them into outer space before we are sure we can go. But what effects do they leave on us? Without animals, the people in this collection of stories would have lived different lives. On an Iowa farm, when Lizbet is too old for dolls but too young for boys, her horse Sulie becomes her perfect companion. Lizbet goes to college during the turbulent Sixties where she must search for another place as peaceful as the farm and a friend as devoted as her horse. On another Midwestern farm, Pru watches her children grow up, satisfied they are safe from the violence she saw in New York City. She doesnt realize they are all in danger from her brother-in-law, a returning veteran who claims he can handle their Holstein bull. Jackie loves all kinds of pets like papillons and Jack Russell terriers, but her sister Jeannette demands her complete devotion. A stroke leaves actor/director Caleb Pavlock unable to speak or remember the lies he has told. How long will his current lover care for him when he can only bark like the dogs that he hates? And did Greasy, a Maine coon cat, come to Duff and Jorie at the end of their lives so that they would never be separated?

From her home in New Mexico, Baba continues to navigate the unpredictable currents of old age with her usual ironic sense of humor. She is renting an apartment in a Victorian house where the heating and plumbing challenge her and her landlord.. Her three daughters and her grandchildren live in Oregon, Indiana, and Pennsylvania, so she must tackle airline regulations if she visits. Damp and cold weather set off arthritis in her knees and spine, but she seldom babies herself to get where she is going. When she is not playing bridge or doing crossword puzzles, she contemplates decorated sweatshirts, her pleasures and displeasures gambling in Las Vegas, the laws of physics pertaining to clogged drains, plastic and pills to enhance sexual prowess, meerkats, cell phones, the ignorance of American tourists in the beautiful Alaskan wilderness, zombies and aliens, and teenage ego-centricity. She avoids the health police whenever she can but still manages to give up smoking.

Under the veil of one of the oldest and most tragic myths known to humankind, a king is born. Magnus King, the son of a well-born English woman, continues his family’s aristocratic legacy on the frontier of the American West until the night a deadly shooting changes everything. Young Earl Ransom, a man found long ago on the Cheyenne prairie with no memory of his past or of how his destiny is linked to that of Magnus King, finds his way through a tale as old and tragic as the Greek myth of Oedipus. King of Spades is the final volume of Frederick Manfred’s acclaimed five-volume series, The Buckskin Man Tales. For this Bison Books Classic edition, Joel Johnson provides a new introduction.

In 2006, Julianne Lutz Warren (née Newton) asked readers to rediscover one of history’s most renowned conservationists. Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey was hailed by The New York Times as a “biography of ideas,” making “us feel the loss of what might have followed A Sand County Almanac by showing us in authoritative detail what led up to it.” Warren’s astute narrative quickly became an essential part of the Leopold canon, introducing new readers to the father of wildlife ecology and offering a fresh perspective to even the most seasoned scholars. A decade later, as our very concept of wilderness is changing, Warren frames Leopold’s work in the context of the Anthropocene. With a new preface and foreword by Bill McKibben, the book underscores the ever-growing importance of Leopold’s ideas in an increasingly human-dominated landscape. Drawing on unpublished archives, Warren traces Leopold’s quest to define and preserve land health. Leopold's journey took him from Iowa to Yale to the Southwest to Wisconsin, with fascinating stops along the way to probe the causes of early land settlement failures, contribute to the emerging science of ecology, and craft a new vision for land use. Leopold’s life was dedicated to one fundamental dilemma: how can people live prosperously on the land and keep it healthy, too? For anyone compelled by this question, the Tenth Anniversary Edition of Aldo Leopold’s Odyssey offers insight and inspiration.

'All le Guin's stories are metaphors for the one human story; all her fantastic planets are this one' Margaret Atwood ARMCHAIR TRAVEL FOR THE MIND: It was Sita Dulip who discovered, whilst stuck in an airport, unable to get anywhere, how to change planes - literally. With a kind of a twist and a slipping bend, easier to do than describe, she could go anywhere - be anywhere - because she was already between planes ... and on the way back from her sister's wedding, she missed her plane in Chicago and found herself in Choom. The author, armed with this knowledge and Rornan's invaluable Handy Planetary Guide - although not the Encyclopedia Planeria, as that runs to forty-four volumes - has spent many happy years exploring places as diverse as Islac and the Veksian plane. CHANGING PLANES is an intriguing, enticing mixture of GULLIVER'S TRAVELS and THE HITCH-HIKER'S GUIDE TO THE GALAXY; a cross between Douglas Adams and Alain de Botton: a mix of satire, cynicism and humour by one of the world's best writers.