Poetry. In THE MARKET WONDERS, the Market itself becomes a thinking person: lover, parent, poet, philosopher. The first section reads as if the Dow Jones and the Dao De Jing had been playfully conflated; like the latter work, this is a "Book of Changes" and a work of philosophy. The speaker of these poems focuses tightly on the developing consciousness of her infant daughter, and then broadly on world events, in what they call "total awareness, incessant recording." While the timeline of the book's contents almost numbly identifies days by the closing numbers of that day's Dow, the mathematics at play are much wider than market measurements. They include theoretical physics-with the poet insisting the market penetrates all events-and brain physiology, as well as the purpose of poetry itself. Briante pushes the poetic domain beyond the lyric, beyond traditional subjects like nature (although the poet's consciousness omits nothing: cardinals in a tree, for instance), and into enumeration as meditation, money movement as an overarching shared consciousness. Briante turns the expectations of poetry upside down when she explains, "I wish more poets would write about money," and a fairytale narrated in footnotes suddenly has exact measurement thrust into it. By the end of the book, we see how financial theories, rightly or wrongly applied can distort the ordinary acts of living, impoverish entire communities. There is nothing, however, impoverished about THE MARKET WONDERS, a work rich with marvels drawn from our ordinary world. "Across the bottom of our imported flat-screen televisions race the names of the winners and the losers: NFL and NBA scores, Dow Jones Industrial Averages, news on the most recent school shooting or celebrity overdose. Amidst this incessant flagellation of news that is incapable of staying news, Susan Briante has imagined a remarkable poetics for our post-Occupy lives. Intimate yet public, THE MARKET WONDERS creates nothing short of a new linguistic bridge between revelation and awe." Mark Nowak "Poetry's conventions tend to assume that poetry does not need to bother itself with the economic machinations of something like the Dow. These conventions are wrong and Susan Briante's THE MARKET WONDERS proves it. This is poetry that is only the richer for how it weaves the economics that shape our daily lives into it. This is one of the most beautiful and moving books I have read in recent years." Juliana Spahr "An intimate almanac of family life, Susan Briante's newest book also describes the collisions between an I and late capitalism. In this way, the market becomes a throat, a tree, a poet it becomes the inorganic force Briante brushes and glances in her poems: 'Always a story, no matter how avant-garde you live, ' a poet tells the speaker in a dream. THE MARKET WONDERS is a devastating meditation on value and love and economy, a book that asks its readers to pay careful heed of the markets' inescapable trespass into our interior lives. This book is not just stunning, it's also important, a clarion call." Carmen Gimenez Smith"

"Through the rich inner lives of two ordinary, unforgettable women, award-winning Spanish poet Elena Medel brings a half-century of the feminist movement to life, revealing the simmering truth that money is ultimately the limiting factor in most women's lives"--

Sorcerers, Cyclops, Djinnis . . . Magic. Thirteen-year-old Zardi loves to hear stories about fantastical beings long banned from the kingdom of Arribitha. But anyone who is caught whispering of their powers will feel the rage of the sultan—a terrifying tyrant who, even with his eyes closed, can see all. When her own beloved sister is captured by the evil ruler, Zardi knows that she must risk everything to rescue her. Along with Rhidan, who is her best friend, and an unlikely crew of sailors led by the infamous Captain Sinbad, Zardi ventures forth into strange and wondrous territory with a seemingly impossible mission: to bring magic back to Arribitha and defeat the sultan once and for all.

A sparkling and eye-opening history of the Broadway musical that changed the world In the half-century since its premiere, Fiddler on the Roof has had an astonishing global impact. Beloved by audiences the world over, performed from rural high schools to grand state theaters, Fiddler is a supremely potent cultural landmark. In a history as captivating as its subject, award-winning drama critic Alisa Solomon traces how and why the story of Tevye the milkman, the creation of the great Yiddish writer Sholem-Aleichem, was reborn as blockbuster entertainment and a cultural touchstone, not only for Jews and not only in America. It is a story of the theater, following Tevye from his humble appearance on the New York Yiddish stage, through his adoption by leftist dramatists as a symbol of oppression, to his Broadway debut in one of the last big book musicals, and his ultimate destination—a major Hollywood picture. Solomon reveals how the show spoke to the deepest conflicts and desires of its time: the fraying of tradition, generational tension, the loss of roots. Audiences everywhere found in Fiddler immediate resonance and a usable past, whether in Warsaw, where it unlocked the taboo subject of Jewish history, or in Tokyo, where the producer asked how Americans could understand a story that is "so Japanese." Rich, entertaining, and original, Wonder of Wonders reveals the surprising and enduring legacy of a show about tradition that itself became a tradition. Wonder of wonders, miracle of miracles.

#1 New York Times Bestseller A USA Today Bestseller Winner of the Newbery Medal A Caldecott Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Illustrator Honor Book This award-winning modern classic—a must-have for every child’s home library—is an inclusive ode to kindness, empathy, gratitude, and finding joy in unexpected places, and celebrates the special bond between a curious young boy and his loving grandmother. Every Sunday after church, CJ and his grandma ride the bus across town. But today, CJ wonders why they don’t own a car like his friend Colby. Why doesn’t he have an iPod like the boys on the bus? How come they always have to get off in the dirty part of town? Each question is met with an encouraging answer from grandma, who helps him see the beauty—and fun—in their routine and the world around them. This energetic ride through a bustling city highlights the wonderful perspective only grandparent and grandchild can share, and comes to life through Matt de la Peña’s vibrant text and Christian Robinson’s radiant illustrations.

What is Life? Where did it come from? Why does it end?

Economists and theologians usually inhabit different intellectual worlds. Economists investigate the workings of markets and tend to set ethical questions aside. Theologians, anxious to take up concerns raised by market outcomes, often dismiss economics and lose insights into the influence of market incentives on individual behavior. Mary L. Hirschfeld, who was a professor of economics for fifteen years before training as a theologian, seeks to bridge these two fields in this innovative work about economics and the thought of St. Thomas Aquinas. According to Hirschfeld, an economics rooted in Thomistic thought integrates many of the insights of economists with a larger view of the good life, and gives us critical purchase on the ethical shortcomings of modern capitalism. In a Thomistic approach, she writes, ethics and economics cannot be reconciled if we begin with narrow questions about fair wages or the acceptability of usury. Rather, we must begin with an understanding of how economic life serves human happiness. The key point is that material wealth is an instrumental good, valuable only to the extent that it allows people to flourish. Hirschfeld uses that insight to develop an account of a genuinely humane economy in which pragmatic and material concerns matter but the pursuit of wealth for its own sake is not the ultimate goal. The Thomistic economics that Hirschfeld outlines is thus capable of dealing with our culture as it is, while still offering direction about how we might make the economy better serve the human good.