A poor African American boy and his mother experience both discrimination and kindness during a trip to town to see the dentist.

Much the way Donald Hall’s Seasons at Eagle Pond captured New England, Sky Time in Gray’s River captures the essence of the rural Northwest. Although Rober Michael Pyle is a lepidopterist, and southwestern Washington is notable for its lack of butterflies, something about the village of Gray's River spoke to him on a visit thirty years ago. Ever since then he has lived in the village, which was one of the first to be established near the mouth of the Columbia River and which still feels only tenuously connected to the twenty-first century. Sky Time brings Gray's River to life by compressing those thirty years into twelve chapters, following the lives of its people, birds, butterflies - and cats- month by month through the seasons. In showing how the village has changed his life, Pyle illustrates how a special place can change anyone lucky enough to find it and highlights what is being lost in a world of accelerating speed, mobility, and sameness. Above all, Sky Time tells us that you dont have to travel far to see something new every day - if you know how to look.

Simon Gray is the ideal teenager — smart, reliable, hardworking, trustworthy. Or is he? After Simon crashes his car into The Liberty Tree, another portrait starts to emerge. Soon an investigation has begun into computer hacking at Simon’s high school, for it seems tests are being printed out before they are given. Could Simon be involved? Simon, meanwhile, is in a coma — but is this another appearance that may be deceiving? For inside his own head, Simon can walk around and talk to some people. He even seems to be having a curious conversation with a man who was hung for murder 200 years ago, in the branches of the same tree Simon crashed into. What can a 200-year-old murder have to do with Simon’s accident? And how do we know who is really innocent and who is really guilty?

Ernest J. Gaines, the author of many acclaimed works of fiction, including The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and A Gathering of Old Men, was born in 1933 in the small south Louisiana town of Oscar. In his childhood the center of his world was the old slave quarters on the River Lake Plantation, where five generations of his family lived. All of Gaines’s books have been set in this general area of Louisiana, and though none of his work is strictly autobiographical, his writing bears the distinctive stamp of the rural folk culture amid which he was raised. Marcia Gaudet and Carl Wooton’s Porch Talk with Ernest Gaines is a collection of interviews conducted on the porch of Gaines’s home in Lafayette, Louisiana, where he is writer-in-residence at the University of Southwestern Louisiana. Gaines talks about a variety of topics, including the influence of other writers—among them Faulkner, Hemingway, and Mark Twain—on his style and the importance of oral tradition and folk culture to his writing. He discusses the major themes of his work, such as survival with dignity and the search for manhood, and he describes the relationships among the black, Creole, and Cajun communities of south Louisiana and how they have been portrayed in his fiction. Gaines also comments on the craft of writing, his role as a teacher, the film versions of some of his books, his relationships with his agent and editors, and his work in progress. This is the first book-length work on Gaines to be published. It will be of importance to scholars and students of American literature, particularly southern and Afro-American literature, because it gives the reader valuable insights into Gaines’s life and writing. The format and conversational tone of the book will also appeal to the audience drawn to Gaines’s fiction.

Richard Serrano, Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist for the Los Angeles Times, pens a story of two veterans. In the late 1950s, as America prepared for the Civil War centennial, two very old men lay dying. Albert Woolson, 109 years old, slipped in and out of a coma at a Duluth, Minnesota, hospital, his memories as a Yankee drummer boy slowly dimming. Walter Williams, at 117 blind and deaf and bedridden in his daughter's home in Houston, Texas, no longer could tell of his time as a Confederate forage master. The last of the Blue and the Gray were drifting away; an era was ending. Unknown to the public, centennial officials, and the White House too, one of these men was indeed a veteran of that horrible conflict and one according to the best evidence nothing but a fraud. One was a soldier. The other had been living a great, big lie.

Cyber is now recognized as an operational domain, but the theory that should explain it strategically is, for the most part, missing. It is one thing to know how to digitize; it is quite another to understand what digitization means strategically. The author maintains that, although the technical and tactical literature on cyber is abundant, strategic theoretical treatment is poor. He offers four conclusions: (1) cyber power will prove useful as an enabler of joint military operationsl; (2) cyber offense is likely to achieve some success, and the harm we suffer is most unlikely to be close to lethally damaging; (3) cyber power is only information and only one way in which we collect, store, and transmit information; and (4) it is clear enough today that the sky is not falling because of cyber peril. As a constructed environment, cyberspace is very much what we choose to make it.

THE FIRST GRAY MAN NOVEL FROM #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLING AUTHOR MARK GREANEY—Now a Netflix Film Starring Ryan Gosling and Chris Evans “Hard, fast, and unflinching—exactly what a thriller should be.”—Lee Child To those who lurk in the shadows, he’s known as the Gray Man. He is a legend in the covert realm, moving silently from job to job, accomplishing the impossible and then fading away. And he always hits his target. Always. But there are forces more lethal than Gentry in the world. Forces like money. And power. And there are men who hold these as the only currency worth fighting for. And in their eyes, Gentry has just outlived his usefulness. But Court Gentry is going to prove that, for him, there’s no gray area between killing for a living and killing to stay alive....