“Kitty Burns Florey seems to write from a great wellspring of inner calm that derives from a gleeful appreciation of life's smallest details.” —Richard Russo, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls Once wildly popular in grammar schools across the country, sentence diagramming has fallen out of fashion. But are we that much worse for not knowing the word-mapping method? Now, in this illustrated personal history that any language lover will adore, Kitty Burns Florey explores the rise and fall of sentence diagramming, including its invention by a mustachioed man named Brainerd “Brainy” Kellogg and his wealthy accomplice Alonzo Reed ... the inferior “balloon diagram” predecessor ... and what diagrams of sentences by Hemingway, Welty, Proust, Kerouac and other famous writers reveal about them. Florey also offers up her own common-sense approach to learning and using good grammar. And she answers some of literature’s most pressing questions: Was Mark Twain or James Fenimore Cooper a better grammarian? What are the silliest grammar rules? And what’s Gertude Stein got to do with any of it?

A veteran copyeditor studies the practice of diagramming sentences in a charming and funny look back at its odd history, its elegant method, and its rich, ongoing possibilities.

The story of a woman challenged by God.

Hardworking pulp writer by day and steel-masked crimefighter by night, the Silencer fights criminal low-lives and larger-than-life master villains in the streets of Depression era New York City. Together with his beautiful fiancée Constance Allen and pickpocket turned butler Neal Cassidy, Richard Blakemore a.k.a. the Silencer keeps the city safe from those criminals the law cannot catch. This series of high octane adventure stories by two-time Hugo finalist Cora Buhlert is an homage to the heroic pulp crimefighters of the 1930s such as the Shadow, the Spider and Doc Savage as well as the writers who brought them to life. This complete omnibus edition of 112000 words or approximately 375 print pages collects the entire Silencer series.

The complete short fiction of Morley Callaghan appears as he comes into full recognition as one of the singular storytellers of our time. In four volumes, several stories are collected for the first time, two of which--"An Autumn Penitent” and "In His Own Country”--have been out of print for decades.

At St. John's Bread and Life, a soup ktichen in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, over a thousand people line up for food five days a week. In this trenchant and groundbreaking work, author Bill DiFazio breathes life into the stories of the poor who have, in the wake of welfare reform and neoliberal retreats from the caring state, now become a permanent part of our everyday life. No longer is poverty a "war" to be won, as DiFazio laments. In a mixture of storytelling and analysis, DiFazio takes the reader through the years before and after welfare reform to show how poverty has become "ordinary," a fact of life to millions of Americans and to the thousands of social workers, volunteers and everyday citizens who still think poverty ought to be eradicated. Arguing that only a true program of living wages, rather than permanent employment, is the solution to poverty, DiFazio also argues a case for a true poor people's movement that links the interests of all social movements with the interests of ending poverty.

A new selection of stories by Canada's Hemingway, with an afterword by Pulitzer Prize--winner William Kennedy. Morley Callaghan's literary circle included Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Joyce. In a career spanning more than six decades, he published sixteen novels and more than one hundred works of short fiction. Bringing together more than twenty-five stories from five different collections, Ancient Lineage and Other Stories confirms Callaghan's pre-eminent status.