The power of words has rarely been given a more compelling demonstration than in the Gettysburg Address. Lincoln was asked to memorialize the gruesome battle. Instead, he gave the whole nation "a new birth of freedom" in the space of a mere 272 words. His entire life and previous training, and his deep political experience went into this, his revolutionary masterpiece. By examining both the address and Lincoln in their historical moment and cultural frame, Wills breathes new life into words we thought we knew, and reveals much about a president so mythologized but often misunderstood. Wills shows how Lincoln came to change the world and to effect an intellectual revolution, how his words had to and did complete the work of the guns, and how Lincoln wove a spell that has not yet been broken.

A Boston Globe Best Poetry Book of 2011 Winner of the 2011 Griffin Poetry Prize Winner of the 2011 Poetry Now Award Seamus Heaney's new collection elicits continuities and solidarities, between husband and wife, child and parent, then and now, inside an intently remembered present—the stepping stones of the day, the weight and heft of what is passed from hand to hand, lifted and lowered. Human Chain also broaches larger questions of transmission, of lifelines to the inherited past. There are newly minted versions of anonymous early Irish lyrics, poems that stand at the crossroads of oral and written, and other "hermit songs" that weigh equally in their balance the craft of scribe and the poet's early calling as scholar. A remarkable sequence entitled "Route 101" plots the descent into the underworld in the Aeneid against single moments in the arc of a life, from a 1950s childhood to the birth of a first grandchild. Other poems display a Virgilian pietas for the dead—friends, neighbors, family—that is yet wholly and movingly vernacular. Human Chain also includes a poetic "herbal" adapted from the Breton poet Guillevic—lyrics as delicate as ferns, which puzzle briefly over the world of things and landscapes that exclude human speech, while affirming the interconnectedness of phenomena, as of a self-sufficiency in which we too are included.

The life narratives in this collection are by ethnically diverse women of energy and ambition—some well known, some forgotten over generations—who confronted barriers of gender, class, race, and sexual difference as they pursued or adapted to adventurous new lives in a rapidly changing America. The engaging selections—from captivity narratives to letters, manifestos, criminal confessions, and childhood sketches—span a hundred years in which women increasingly asserted themselves publicly. Some rose to positions of prominence as writers, activists, and artists; some sought education or wrote to support themselves and their families; some transgressed social norms in search of new possibilities. Each woman's story is strikingly individual, yet the brief narratives in this anthology collectively chart bold new visions of women's agency. "This rich new anthology sets in motion an inter-textual conversation of remarkable vitality that will change the ways we understand gender, class, ethnicity, culture, and nation in nineteenth-century America."—Susanna Egan, author of Mirror-Talk

An easy going drama critic discovers that his kind and gentle aunts have a bizarre habit of poisoning gentlemen callers and burying them in the cellar.

Is Wilhelm Sasnal (born in 1972 in Poland) the best painter to emerge in the twenty-first century? This small volume presents highlights from his early career along with several extraordinary new canvases and a series of 16mm films and video work from the artist's recent travels in the U.S. and Brazil.

Examines the distinct leadership roles of Franklin and Eleanor Roosevelt during the war years and discusses the dynamics of their marriage.