Innovative poetry that combines lyricism, narrative, and biography

For seven months, Manny Howard—a lifelong urbanite—woke up every morning and ventured into his eight-hundred-square-foot backyard to maintain the first farm in Flatbush, Brooklyn, in generations. His goal was simple: to subsist on what he could produce on this farm, and only this farm, for at least a month. The project came at a time in Manny’s life when he most needed it—even if his family, and especially his wife, seemingly did not. But a farmer’s life, he discovered—after a string of catastrophes, including a tornado, countless animal deaths (natural, accidental, and inflicted), and even a severed finger—is not an easy one. And it can be just as hard on those he shares it with. Manny’s James Beard Foundation Award–winning New York magazine cover story—the impetus for this project—began as an assessment of the locavore movement. We now think more about what we eat than ever before, buying organic for our health and local for the environment, often making those decisions into political statements in the process. My Empire of Dirt is a ground-level examination—trenchant, touching, and outrageous—of the cultural reflex to control one of the most elemental aspects of our lives: feeding ourselves. Unlike most foodies with a farm fetish, Manny didn’t put on overalls with much of a philosophy in mind, save a healthy dose of skepticism about some of the more doctrinaire tendencies of locavores. He did not set out to grow all of his own food because he thought it was the right thing to do or because he thought the rest of us should do the same. Rather, he did it because he was just crazy enough to want to find out how hard it would actually be to take on a challenge based on a radical interpretation of a trendy (if well-meaning) idea and see if he could rise to the occasion. A chronicle of the experiment that took slow-food to the extreme, My Empire of Dirt tells the story of one man’s struggle against environmental, familial, and agricultural chaos, and in the process asks us to consider what it really takes (and what it really means) to produce our own food. It’s one thing to know the farmer, it turns out—it’s another thing entirely to be the farmer. For most of us, farming is about food. For the farmer, and his family, it’s about work.

A Native American spiritual elder shares many of his experiences of sacred Shoshoni and Lakota rituals, including piercing and buffalo-skull dragging and the Sundance, the rigorous four-day spiritual awakening.

A peerless expert, hidden in the city, yet didn't want to be forced into marriage by the CEO of an ice mountain beauty. From then on, his luck with the flowers never stopped ...

The star crime-solving pair of Dr. Jake Rosen, world-famous pathologist, and top litigator Manny Manfreda, return in a gripping new thriller. New York City is on high alert for a serial killer—a strange kind of thief who stalks his victims for the purpose of extracting a vial of blood, earning him the tabloid nickname “the Vampire.” As the attacks escalate to torture and then to murder, Jake and Manny begin to suspect there is a connection between the killer’s seemingly random victims. But how do they link it to a case that Manny’s been working for a kid whose high school prank-gone-wrong has earned him the moniker the Preppy Terrorist? They soon discover that their case is a tragic tale of corruption interlaced with cover-ups, conspiracies, death squads, and dictators who committed crimes that to this day go unpunished.

In the year he spent teaching at Borrego Pass, a remote Navajo community in northwest New Mexico, Kurt Caswell found himself shunned as persona non grata. His cultural missteps, status as an interloper, and white skin earned him no respect in the classroom or the community—those on the reservation assumed he would come and go like so many teachers had before. But as Caswell attempts to bridge the gap between himself and those who surround him, he finds his calling as a teacher and develops a love for the rich landscape of New Mexico, and manages a hard-won truce between his failings and successes.

M. Anthony Phillips presents the debut of his hot new Private Detective series. Vietnam veteran Sam Phillips follows in the footsteps of his father into the world of private investigations. It’s the end of the Vietnam War in 1976 during the Fall of Siagon and a battle-worn Sam has just taken over his father’s company after his death. With his office above a seedy bar off Hollywood and Vine, Sam and his new assistant Constance Turner go weeks before they land their first case. With the help of his troubled friend Armstrong Jones—fresh out of prison for nearly killing two men, they are paid by an old friend Michelle Yamada of protecting her little brother Ken, a Yakuza gang member being hunted by a rival gang, the Yokohama Black Rebels who killed their father—a crime boss. Chasing Ken is the notorious boss Hiroshi Ito, a sadistic killer like no other who has killed nearly all the Yakuza bosses in Little Tokyo. In the meantime Sam finds out he’s the father of a five-year-old Amerasian kid from Vietnam—dropped off at his doorstep in the middle of the afternoon. In protecting Ken, people close to Sam are getting killed off, including detective friends who are trying to capture Hiroshi for murder. When things start to not add up about Ken, Sam and Armstrong begin to wonder if they’re being played the fool. With the body count adding up and Hiroshi getting closer to his target, Sam and Armstrong must go on the offensive before it’s too late.