The in-depth story of America's premier artists' residency program, published on its centennial anniversary.

For readers of H Is for Hawk, an intimate memoir of belonging and loss and a mesmerizing travelogue through the landscapes and language of Wales Hiraeth is a Welsh word that's famously hard to translate. Literally, it can mean "long field" but generally translates into English, inadequately, as "homesickness." At heart, hiraeth suggests something like a bone-deep longing for an irretrievable place, person, or time—an acute awareness of the presence of absence. In The Long Field, Pamela Petro braids essential hiraeth stories of Wales with tales from her own life—as an American who found an ancient home in Wales, as a gay woman, as the survivor of a terrible AMTRAK train crash, and as the daughter of a parent with dementia. Through the pull and tangle of these stories and her travels throughout Wales, hiraeth takes on radical new meanings. There is traditional hiraeth of place and home, but also queer hiraeth; and hiraeth triggered by technology, immigration, ecological crises, and our new divisive politics. On this journey, the notion begins to morph from a uniquely Welsh experience to a universal human condition, from deep longing to the creative responses to loss that Petro sees as the genius of Welsh culture. It becomes a tool to understand ourselves in our time. A finalist for the Wales Book of the Year Award and named to the Telegraph's and Financial Times's Top 10 lists for travel writing, The Long Field is an unforgettable exploration of “the hidden contours of the human heart.”

A "novel based on an unexplored slice of World War II history, following a young Jewish girl whose family flees refined and urbane Vienna for safe harbor in the mountains of Bolivia"--

The legendary critic and author of Mystery Train “ingeniously retells the tale of rock and roll” (Publishers Weekly, starred review). Unlike previous versions of rock ’n’ roll history, this book omits almost every iconic performer and ignores the storied events and turning points everyone knows. Instead, in a daring stroke, Greil Marcus selects ten songs and dramatizes how each embodies rock ’n’ roll as a thing in itself, in the story it tells, inhabits, and acts out—a new language, something new under the sun. “Transmission” by Joy Division. “All I Could Do Was Cry” by Etta James and then Beyoncé. “To Know Him Is to Love Him,” first by the Teddy Bears and almost half a century later by Amy Winehouse. In Marcus’s hands these and other songs tell the story of the music, which is, at bottom, the story of the desire for freedom in all its unruly and liberating glory. Slipping the constraints of chronology, Marcus braids together past and present, holding up to the light the ways that these striking songs fall through time and circumstance, gaining momentum and meaning, astonishing us by upending our presumptions and prejudices. This book, by a founder of contemporary rock criticism—and its most gifted and incisive practitioner—is destined to become an enduring classic. “One of the epic figures in rock writing.”—The New York Times Book Review “Marcus is our greatest cultural critic, not only because of what he says but also, as with rock-and-roll itself, how he says it.”—The Washington Post Winner of the Deems Taylor Virgil Thomson Award in Music Criticism, given by the American Society of Composers, Authors & Publishers

A Belletrist Book of the Month, this “exquisite memoir” (Los Angeles Times) is the perfect balm for any reader who has experienced loss. Lipsticks applied, novels read, imperfect cakes baked—such memories are recalled with “crystalline perfection” (J.C. Hallmann, Brooklyn Rail) in Sarah McColl’s breathtaking testimonial to the joy and pain of loving well. When her mother, Allison, was diagnosed with cancer, McColl dropped everything—including her on-the-rocks marriage—to return to the family farmhouse and fix elaborate meals in the hope of nourishing her back to health. In “thoughtful and finely crafted prose” (Martha Anne Toll, NPR.org) McColl reveals Allison to be an extraordinary woman of infinite love for her unruly brood of children. Mining her dual losses “with humor and charm” (Rachel Kong, New York Times Book Review) to confront her identity as a woman, McColl walks lightly in the footsteps of the woman who came before her. “A gorgeous, painful, exhilarating debut” (Kirstin Valdez-Quade), Joy Enough is an essential guide to clinging fast to the joy left behind, for readers of Ann Hood and Jenny Offill.

In Bound for Shady Grove, essayist Steven Harvey celebrates the spirit of the music of his adopted home in the southern Appalachian mountains. There, at the wellspring of mountain music, he took up his guitar and assumed the journey that culminated in this book. Harvey's essays measure out in words the four seasons of a life in music. Springtime pieces describe playing music in the log house of friends born and raised in the mountains or entering a banjo contest and losing with style. There are essays about fiddles and the devil, homemade instruments and homemade weapons, and a trip to England to trace mountain songs back to their elusive sources. As the book progresses into winter, the mood darkens, with pieces exploring the connection between music and resentment, loss, and death. Descriptions of music, hills, and people blend into a rich harmony as Harvey explores where music has taken him--where, in fact, music can take any of us.