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Weekend Walks in Brooklyn: 22 Self-Guided Walking Tours from Greenpoint to Coney Island
by Robert J. Regalbuto / Local Interest PB - $16.95
Weekend Walks in Brooklyn is an invitation to explore many Brooklyn neighborhoods, from trendy DUMBO to Coney Island, from the Hasidic enclaves of Williamsburg to the scenic Narrows of Bay Ridge, and from Brooklyn Heights promenade to the tree-lined streets of Park Slope. Each of this book’s twenty-two self-guided walking tours begins near a subway station and features step-by-step directions, a detailed map, as well as factual and fascinating vignettes about points of interest along the way. Whether your interest is Brooklyn history and lore, sports, architecture, ethnic foods, or famous Brooklynites, this guide will lead you not only to familiar favorites such, but also to refreshing discoveries.
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Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life
by Winifred Gallagher / Psychology HC - $25.95 - 10%
“As the 19th-century philosopher William James wisely understood, what you selectively notice and attend to is what makes up your experience. It is your life! Winifred Gallagher gets it. She has written a provocative, illuminating, and captivating book on the power and importance of attention in multiple domains of life – relationships, work, leisure, health. What makes some people happier, healthier, more fulfilled, more creative, or more engaged than others? Because of what they pay attention to.”
—Sonja Lyubomirsky, author of The How of Happiness
“Many will benefit from this thoughtful book. Among other 21st century challenges, the increasing velocity of communication threatens to drive us into a permanent sea- storm of distraction. Thank you, Winifred Gallagher, for bringing our attention back to the essential matter of attention.”
—David Shenk, author, Data Smog and The Forgetting
“This wonderful and inspiring book asks readers to remember something so simple and yet so little appreciated—what you focus upon profoundly affects your quality of life. I can’t think anyone who wouldn’t benefit from the message contained herein. It’s a powerful and much needed prescription for these tumultuous times.”
—Sarah Susanka, author of The Not So Big Life and The Not So Big House series
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This Is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, about Living a Compassionate Life
by David Foster Wallace / Essays HC - $14.99 - 10%
Only once did David Foster Wallace give a public talk on his views on life, during a commencement address given in 2005 at Kenyon College. The speech is reprinted for the first time in book form in THIS IS WATER. How does one keep from going through their comfortable, prosperous adult life unconsciously? How do we get ourselves out of the foreground of our thoughts and achieve compassion? The speech captures Wallace’s electric intellect as well as his grace in attention to others. After his death, it became a treasured piece of writing reprinted in The Wall Street Journal and the London Times, commented on endlessly in blogs, and emailed from friend to friend.
Writing with his one-of-a-kind blend of causal humor, exacting intellect, and practical philosophy, David Foster Wallace probes the challenges of daily living and offers advice that renews us with every reading.
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Can Poetry Save the Earth?: A Field Guide to Nature Poems
by Mr. John Felstiner / Poetry HC - $35.00 - 10%
Poems vivifying nature have gripped people for centuries. From Biblical times to the present day, poetry has continuously drawn us to the natural world. In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state. And, as we take heed, we may well become better stewards of the earth.
In forty brief and lucid chapters, Felstiner presents those voices that have most strongly spoken to and for the natural world. Poets—from the Romantics through Whitman and Dickinson to Elizabeth Bishop and Gary Snyder—have helped us envision such details as ocean winds eroding and rebuilding dunes in the same breath, wild deer freezing in our presence, and a person carving initials on a still-living stranded whale.
Sixty color and black-and-white images, many seen for the first time, bear
out visually the environmental imagination this book discovers—a poetic legacy more vital now than ever.
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What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going
by Damion Searls / Fiction PB - $12.95
In his debut collection, Damion Searls gives us five extraordinary tales of the life of the mind in America today. “56 Water Street” and “Goldenchain” follow writers whose projects only lead them deeper into the labyrinth of modern relationships and friendships. The nasty office satire “The Cubicles” and the atmospheric “A Guide to San Francisco” take place in the sun and fog of West Coast dreams. In the final story, “Dialogue Between the Two Chief World Systems,” a Hungarian beauty creates a scholarly conundrum with surprising parallels to the book as a whole.
Set amidst Ethiopian healing scrolls and sponges of the Adriatic and the guy who invented flashing the temperature on bank clocks, What We Were Doing and Where We Were Going plays in the intersection of knowledge and life in contemporary America. Searls’s flights of fancy and painterly eye for detail introduce a range of intelligent characters feeling their way toward complex moral and personal truths.