How much will it cost Fin to keep his promise? During the off-season, professional football player Calder Finnegan returns to Boston to help run his estranged father's pub. Little did he know he'd find the love of his life in the pub's bartender, Mick Sullivan. Fin soon discovers his father has only weeks to live. All his hopes of getting to know the man who always seemed too busy to be a father are dashed. With Mick's help, Fin begins the healing process between father and son and through this some of Mick's wounds are healed as well. When Fin makes a deathbed promise to his father, he'll do anything to keep that promise. Even if it costs him his lover and his career.

In this book—one of the first ecocritical explorations of Irish literature—Alison Lacivita defies the popular view of James Joyce as a thoroughly urban writer by bringing to light his consistent engagement with nature. Using genetic criticism to investigate Joyce’s source texts, notebooks, and proofs, Lacivita shows how Joyce developed ecological themes in Finnegans Wake over successive drafts. Making apparent a love of growing things and a lively connection with the natural world across his texts, Lacivita’s approach reveals Joyce’s keen attention to the Irish landscape, meteorology, urban planning, Dublin’s ecology, the exploitation of nature, and fertility and reproduction. Alison Lacivita unearths a vital quality of Joyce’s work that has largely gone undetected, decisively aligning ecocriticism with both modernism and Irish studies.

“Joyce’s Book of the Dark gives us such a blend of exciting intelligence and impressive erudition that it will surely become established as one of the most fascinating and readable Finnegans Wake studies now available.”—Margot Norris, James Joyce Literary Supplement

Traditional romantic comedies end with a wedding. Not so in Moonshine Promises. Instead, this tale begins with an elopement as teenagers Evan and Mae run off to avoid a shotgun wedding, a decision that initiates decades of marital adventures and misadventures. Narrated from Evan’s perspective, these stories navigate his fears and loves as he makes his bewildered way through life. And it’s about everything furnishing that life—from a teapot cottage in a jelly cupboard to a snow globe containing a horse-drawn sleigh carrying a miniature family through a forest.

Since its publication in 1939, countless would-be readers of "Finnegans Wake" - James Joyce's masterwork, which consumed a third of his life - have given up after a few pages, dismissing it as a "perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first "key" or guide to entering the fascinating, disturbing, marvelously rich world of "Finnegans Wake." The authors break down Joyce's "unintelligible" book page by page, stripping the text of much of its obscurity and serving up thoughtful interpretations via footnotes and bracketed commentary. They outline the book's basic action, and then simplify -- and clarify -- its complex web of images and allusions. "A Skeleton Key to Finnegans Wake" is the latest addition to the "Collected Works of Joseph Campbell" series.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • President Joe Biden, the author of Promise Me, Dad, tells the story of his extraordinary life and career prior to his emergence as Barack Obama’s beloved, influential vice president. “I remain captivated by the possibilities of politics and public service. In fact, I believe that my chosen profession is a noble calling.”—Joe Biden Joe Biden has both witnessed and participated in a momentous epoch of American history. In Promises to Keep, Joe Biden reveals what these experiences taught him about himself, his colleagues, and the institutions of government. With his customary candor and wit, Biden movingly recounts growing up in a staunchly Catholic multigenerational household in Scranton, Pennsylvania, and Wilmington, Delaware; overcoming personal tragedy, life-threatening illness, and career setbacks; his relationships with presidents, with world leaders, and with lawmakers on both sides of the aisle; and his leadership of powerful Senate committees. Through these and other recollections, Biden shows us how the guiding principles he learned early in life—to work to make people’s lives better; to honor family and faith; to value persistence, candor, and honesty—are the foundation on which he has based his life’s work as husband, father, and public servant. Promises to Keep is an intimate series of reflections from a public servant who surmounted numerous challenges to become one of our most effective leaders and who refuses to be cynical about politics. It is also a stirring testament to the promise of the United States. Praise for Promises to Keep “A ripping good read . . . Biden is a master storyteller and has stories worth telling.”—The Christian Science Monitor “A compelling personal story.”—The New York Times “Moving . . . [Biden’s] response to tragedy and near death [is] both admirable and likable.”—Salon

"Most poets define poetry by creating it. Bob Perelman creates it by defining it, and is thus one step ahead of all the other poets under the sun, one step closer to colliding with Zeno's vanishing point, to merging coyote with road runner, to winning the hand."—John Ashbery "Profound, subtle, and wonderfully written—this is a book from which anyone interested in the twentieth century can learn."—Marjorie Perloff