Hopping a freight in the St. Louis rail yards, Ted Conover0́4winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award0́4embarks on his dream trip, traveling the rails with "the knights of the road." Equipped with rummage store clothing, a bedroll, and his notebooks, Conover immerses himself in the peculiar culture of the hobo, where handshakes and intoductions are foreign, but where everyone knows where the Sally (Salvation Army) and the Willy (Goodwill) are. Along the way he encounters unexpected charity (a former cop goes out of his way to offer Conover a dollar) and indignities (what do you do when there are no public bathrooms?) and learns how to survive on the road.But above all, Conover gets to know the men and women who, for one reason or another, live this life. There's Lonny, who accepts that there are some towns he can't enter before dark because he's black, and Pistol Pete, a cowboy who claims his son is a doctor and his daughter a ballerina, and Sheba Sheila Sheils, who's built herself a house out of old tires. By turns resourceful and desperate, generous and mistrusting, independent and communal, philosophical and profoundly cynical, the tramps Conover meets show him a segment of humanity outside society, neither wholly romantic nor wholly tragic, and very much like the rest of us.

This book continues where my first book left off—with forty photographs and stories of people experiencing homelessness. It is a part of my ongoing mission, begun with volume one, to change the general public’s perception of those experiencing homelessness. So often, as I stated in my first book, they are viewed as subhuman creatures, or a lower order of being than human. Through my photographs and stories I am trying to humanize them, to help the general public see that, apart from the unfortunate circumstances in which these people find themselves, they are no different than you and I. I am heartened that, judging from the comments that my first book has received from people around the world, my work seems to be having this effect. All royalties from this book will be given to Home Horizon: Transitional Support Program.

Fire?ies at dawn. . . Winged essences, charred bodies still on ?re. This evocative poetry-essay collection issues a call for a renewed embracement of the readers own expressive self. Weve each a persona to hear --- a voice to resonate through silences of night and the noises of everyday. Life is a mystery hard to crack. We bang it like a door and strum it like a lyre until it opens some new portal through which the voice can authentically sound-out the truths of being human. Thats the happening of this book. Altarpieces have always been artistic creations to conceive lifes sacred space. This book follows that tradition, if rather untraditionally. These pieces speak to hear life on ones own terms; from ones own altar and cathedral. This gathering created a poet-self identity --- called Apokstrophes. The essays join with the poems to conceive poetry and the spiritual quest with a renewed existential-eco-romantic perspective; sounding that quest with both feet grounded on worldly other Planet Earth. The challenge to grasp life at the core is a wrenching-wrestling match with the Other, that ever-present dimension of poetry on lifes path. --- Joining philosophical play with the authenticity of word-pieces as true orients, OKellys book, with many poets helping along the way, has taken up that challenge with unflinching creativity. Want a spiritual adventure? Fly! Take the ride! Oh, the ride! Fins spurred in shivers of hide. Lifes dearness reined in the roll of the tide.

Journalism in the twentieth century was marked by the rise of literary journalism. Sims traces more than a century of its history, examining the cultural connections, competing journalistic schools of thought, and innovative writers that have given literary journalism its power. Seminal exmples of the genre provide ample context and background for the study of this style of journalism.

Drawn from intimate interviews with 14 modern-day "steel rail nomads," One More Train to Ride provides a revealing picture of today's American hobo. Interspersed with their stories are original poems and songs echoing the ancient lyricism and loneliness of life on the road. Their connections with the past make the experiences of these hoboes even more striking, as they ride freight trains and jungle up in hobo camps, light years away from the 21st-century cyberworld -- yet touching the very core of American freedom and individualism. Cliff Williams skillfully elicits details of family background, motives, and clear insights into the daily life and philosophy of the modern hobo. With its evocative link to the past, One More Train to Ride continues a long tradition of books on hobo oral history, including Nels Anderson's The Hobo (1923) and Thomas Minehan's Boy and Girl Tramps of America (1934).

In this stylistically adventurous, brilliantly funny tour de force-the most highly acclaimed debut since Nathan Englander's-Aleksander Hemon writes of love and war, Sarajevo and America, with a skill and imagination that are breathtaking. A love affair is experienced in the blink of an eye as the Archduke Ferdinand watches his wife succumb to an assassin's bullet. An exiled writer, working in a sandwich shop in Chicago, adjusts to the absurdities of his life. Love letters from war torn Sarajevo navigate the art of getting from point A to point B without being shot. With a surefooted sense of detail and life-saving humor, Aleksandar Hemon examines the overwhelming events of history and the effect they have on individual lives. These heartrending stories bear the unmistakable mark of an important new international writer.

Argues that much of what surrounds Americans is depressing, ugly, and unhealthy; and traces America's evolution from a land of village commons to a man-made landscape that ignores nature and human needs.