The Coast Starlight: Collected Poems 1976-2006, by Hans Ostrom, is a rich collection of poetry on a broad range of subjects. Some poems are set in and concern Ostrom's native region, the High Sierra of California; others are set in Sweden, Russia, Italy, Spain, and Germany. "Emily Dickinson and Elvis Presley in Heaven," an award-winning, much republished poem, was featured in the "Poet's Choice" column in the Washington Post as well as in the popular anthology Kiss Off: Poems to Set You Free. Hans Ostrom was born and grew up in a small town in California's High Sierra. Ostrom attended high school and community college in the Central Valley of California before enrolling at the University of California, Davis, where he earned a B.A., an M.A., and a Ph.D. in literature. There he studied writing with the Pulitzer-Prize-winning poet Karl Shapiro. Ostrom's poems have been appearing in journals, magazines, and anthologies for three decades, and they have won several prizes. Currently professor of English at the University of Puget Sound, Ostrom has taught at Gutenberg University in Mainz, Germany, and he was a Fulbright Senior Lecturer at Uppsala University in Sweden. He has also worked as a journalist, an editor, and a laborer. Ostrom has written, co-written, edited, and co-edited numerous works, including Three To Get Ready (a novel), Subjects Apprehended: Poems, Langston Hughes: A Study of the Short Fiction, A Langston Hughes Encyclopedia, Lives and Moments: An Introduction to Short Fiction, Metro: Journeys in Writing Creatively (written with Wendy Bishop and Katharine Haake), and the five-volume Greenwood Encyclopedia of African American Literature (edited with J. David Macey). Ostrom lives in the South Puget Sound region with his wife and son. "Reading Hans Ostrom's poems the second time, one wants to read them a third time and more. This is the test of poetry, after which no other test applies. It is not only the memorability of the voice in its quiet assurance but the introduction of a new experience that make the reader want to return and to see and hear again. The range is geographically immense but the persona remains intact and rooted in its time and place, the poet of Scandinavian descent in the new American west. At home in nature and at home among handicrafts, at home in the academy and in far-flung places: one has an image of a Paul Bunyan-and Rilke Here is genuine American poetry at its best." Karl Shapiro (1913-2000), winner of the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry

Four modern families aboard a passenger train hurtle into the night. One hundred and seventy years earlier their forebearers make their way in a young nation built on grand promises. Each family follows their own path, only to find that their destinies are linked inextricably, the culmination of five generations of shared history. Jonathan Evison’s Small World is a novel that speaks to the present moment, a grand adventure that explores the American experiment in its most human and intimate aspects, a novel that asks whether America has made good on those early promises. Humming with heart and adventure, and love and hope and ideas, Small World delivers the thrill of great storytelling straight through to its deeply satisfying conclusion.

The Hazel Wood meets The Astonishing Color of After in this dreamy, atmospheric novel that follows sixteen-year-old Eli as she tries to remember what truly happened the night her mother disappeared off a frozen fjord in Norway under the Northern Lights. Never whistle at the Northern Lights, the legend goes, or they'll sweep down from the sky and carry you away. Sixteen-year-old Eline Davis knows it's true. She was there ten years ago, on a frozen fjord in Svalbard, Norway, the night her mother whistled at the lights and then vanished. Now, Eli lives an ordinary life with her dad on Cape Cod. But when the Northern Lights are visible over the Cape for just one night, she can't resist the possibility of seeing her mother again. So she whistles--and it works. Her mother appears, with snowy hair, frosty fingertips and a hazy story of where she's been all these years. And she doesn't return alone. Along with Eli's mother's reappearance come strange, impossible things. Narwhals swimming in Cape Cod Bay, meteorites landing in Eli's yard, and three shadowy princesses with ominous messages. It's all too much, too fast, and Eli pushes her mother away. She disappears again--but this time, she leaves behind a note that will send Eli on a journey across continents, to the northern tip of the world: Find me where I left you.

The "Capitol Corridor" is the name of the Amtrak passenger train route between California's capital, Sacramento, and San Jose, the state's first capital upon admission to the Union in 1850. The scenery between these two areas highlights vastly different land uses; examples include an industrialized shoreline covered with a forest of petroleum refineries, urban areas transitioning from industrial to residential use, and a wildlife refuge disturbed only by the passage of trains. The Capitol Corridor is now an integral part of the transportation scene in Northern California. Since 1991, its equipment and infrastructure have evolved to keep pace with technology as well as the area's dynamic economic and social environment.

In this fun cozy mystery, two sisters, one a homicide detective, the other an erotic romance writer, travel aboard Amtrak's scenic Coast Starlight from Los Angeles to Seattle when a famous movie star on the train is murdered. Then, to make matters worse, a forest fire in Oregon stops the train dead in its tracks with the killer still onboard. With a cast of characters who seem to have a motive for murder, will two detectives be able to figure out the killer's ingenious plot in time before someone else ends up dead?

Travel from Los Angeles to Seattle aboard Amtrak's Coast Starlight. This rail adventure includes tours of rugged coastline, California and Oregon farmlands, Napa Valley wine country, and a stop at William Randolph Hearst's famous "ranch house" with its 130 rooms.