Charles D'Ambrosio's essay collection Orphans spawned something of a cult following. In the decade since the tiny limited-edition volume sold out its print run, its devotees have pressed it upon their friends, students, and colleagues, only to find themselves begging for their copy's safe return. For anyone familiar with D'Ambrosio's writing, this enthusiasm should come as no surprise. His work is exacting and emotionally generous, often as funny as it is devastating. Loitering gathers those eleven original essays with new and previously uncollected work so that a broader audience might discover one of the world's great living essayists. No matter his subject - Native American whaling, a Pentecostal 'hell house', Mary Kay Letourneau, the work of J. D. Salinger, or, most often, his own family - D'Ambrosio approaches each piece with a singular voice and point of view; each essay, while unique and surprising, is unmistakably his own. Charles D'Ambrosio is the author of two collections of short stories, The Point (a finalist for the Hemingway Foundation/PEN Award) and The Dead Fish Museum (a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award), as well as the essay collection Orphans. His work has appeared frequently in the New Yorker, as well as in Tin House, the Paris Review, Zoetrope All-Story, A Public Space, and Story. D'Ambrosio has been the recipient of the Whiting Writers' Award, an Academy Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, a Lannan Foundation Fellowship, and a USA Rasmuson Fellowship. He lives in Portland, Oregon. '[D'Ambrosio] is one of the strongest, smartest and most literate essayists practicing today.' New York Times 'What I admired most about these essays is the way each one takes its own shape, never conforming to an expected narrative or feeling the need to answer all the questions housed within. D’Ambrosio allows his essays their ambivalence.' Millions 'An exciting essay collection because it takes ideas and heady, essayistic topics—whales, hell houses, the overused, wheezing corpse of J.D. Salinger—and it manages to make something new out of them...Every one is a pleasure, diamond-cut and sharp in its incisive observations on how to be a human.' Flavorwire 'This careful dance of high and low, of timing, circumspection, and room for nuance—and the disarming honesty—make it clear that D'Ambrosio knows how to write a good essay, but what makes the collection great is his vast, almost painfully acute sense of compassion...it delivers that most primal pleasure of reading—the feeling of being understood, of not being alone.' NPR 'This powerful collection highlights D'Ambrosio's ability to mine his personal history for painful truths about the frailty of family and the strange quest to understand oneself, and in turn, be understood.' Publishers Weekly 'Charles D'Ambrosio's essays are excitingly good. They are relevant in the way that makes you read them out loud, to anyone who happens to be around. Absolutely accessible and incredibly intelligent, his work is an astounding relief - as though someone is finally trying to puzzle all the disparate, desperate pieces of the world together again.' Jill Owens, Powell's 'His essays are expansive in scope and in spirit...D'Ambrosio is a writer with an unusual combination of qualities: penetrating, critical powers and a lyrical, almost hypnotic, prose style. He’s an expert a capturing the strangeness of familiar things.' Weekend Australian 'He's funny, insightful, intimate and inquiring.' The Paperback Bookshop ‘This volume of the collected essays and journalism of Charles D'Ambrosio shows what pleasure is to be had when a first-class writer is given their head and space to roam...[D'Ambrosio] is self-conscious in his responses, both intellectual and emotional, so that there is a kind of architectural honesty about his writing. You can see the pulleys and levers and exactly what makes him tick.’ New Zealand Herald

Where does art start or reality end? Happily loitering about London, c. 1949, with the intent of gathering material for her writing, Fleur Talbot finds a job “on the grubby edge of the literary world” at the very peculiar Autobiographical Association. Mad egomaniacs writing their memoirs in advance — or poor fools ensnared by a blackmailer? When the association’s pompous director steals Fleur’s manuscript, fiction begins to appropriate life.

Presenting an original take on women’s safety in the cities of twenty-first century India, Why Loiter? maps the exclusions and negotiations that women from different classes and communities encounter in the nation’s urban public spaces. Basing this book on more than three years of research in Mumbai, Shilpa Phadke, Sameera Khan and Shilpa Ranade argue that though women’s access to urban public space has increased, they still do not have an equal claim to public space in the city. And they raise the question: can women’s access to public space be viewed in isolation from that of other marginal groups? Going beyond the problem of the real and implied risks associated with women’s presence in public, they draw from feminist theory to argue that only by celebrating loitering—a radical act for most Indian women—can a truly equal, global city be created.

The child: The actor's childhood in England.

From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

Author Louisa Oakley Green didn't believe in psychic phenomena when she met her husband Stephen. Now, twenty years later, this self-described "psychic bystander" from New Jersey shares haunting tales from family, friends, and strangers who see life through the veil of clairvoyance and mediumship. In Loitering at the Gate to Eternity, Green chronicles the psychic tales of everyday people, from school teachers and business professionals to blue collar workers, from children to senior citizens, as well as four gifted psychic professionals. Some have had only one psychic experience in their lives while others are guided by them daily. Green offers engrossing insights into the world of clairvoyance, out-of-body experiences, and the peculiar penchant deceased relatives and friends have for sharing burdens and celebrations. Providing credence to the belief that everyone possesses psychic ability, though some seem to have a more natural affinity than others, Loitering at the Gate to Eternity chronicles Green's journey from skeptic to believer through more than one hundred paranormal stories involving her husband, his family, and friends.

This is the first book to challenge the broken-windows theory of crime, which argues that permitting minor misdemeanors, such as loitering and vagrancy, to go unpunished only encourages more serious crime. The theory has revolutionized policing in the United States and abroad, with its emphasis on policies that crack down on disorderly conduct and aggressively enforce misdemeanor laws. The problem, argues Bernard Harcourt, is that although the broken-windows theory has been around for nearly thirty years, it has never been empirically verified. Indeed, existing data suggest that it is false. Conceptually, it rests on unexamined categories of law abiders and disorderly people and of order and disorder, which have no intrinsic reality, independent of the techniques of punishment that we implement in our society. How did the new order-maintenance approach to criminal justice--a theory without solid empirical support, a theory that is conceptually flawed and results in aggressive detentions of tens of thousands of our fellow citizens--come to be one of the leading criminal justice theories embraced by progressive reformers, policymakers, and academics throughout the world? This book explores the reasons why. It also presents a new, more thoughtful vision of criminal justice.