Events

From one of our most celebrated contemporary poets--long-listed for the National Book Award and a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and England's T.S. Eliot Prize--comes Jane Hirshfield's Ledger, her most important work yet. From its already much-quoted opening lines of despair and defiance ("Let them not say: we did not see it. / We saw."), Hirshfield's poems inscribe a registry, both personal and communal, of our present-day predicaments, and call us to action.

Literature is long. Comics are short.

Is Proust getting you down? Do you find The Unbearable Lightness of Being simply unbearable? Is The Inferno your own private hell? Do you long to be conversant about classics like Moby Dick and Madame Bovary?

Humans, unlike other animals that are drawn to water, are not natural-born swimmers. We must be taught. Our evolutionary ancestors learned for survival; now in the twenty-first century we swim in freezing Arctic waters and piranha-infested rivers to test our limits. Swimming is an introspective and silent sport in a chaotic and noisy age; it's therapeutic for both the mind and body; and it's an adventurous way to get from point A to point B. It's also one route to that elusive, ecstatic state of flow.

Mercy is hard in a place like this . . .

It's February 1976, and Odessa, Texas, stands on the cusp of the next great oil boom. While the town's men embrace the coming prosperity, its women intimately know and fear the violence that always seems to follow.

After her parents' bitter divorce, family vacations to the Big Island in Hawaii ceased. But across the miles, eighteen-year-old Tegan Rossi remains connected to local Kai Kapule, her best friend from childhood. Now, Tegan finds herself alone and confused about how she got to the Big Island. With no wallet, no cell phone, purse, or plane ticket, Tegan struggles to piece together what happened. She must have come to surprise-visit Kai. Right? As the teens grow even closer, Tegan pushes aside her worries and gets swept away in the vacation of her dreams.

Blindsided by her mother's sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan. Her mail consists of wedding invitations and final notices from debt collectors. A former child golf prodigy, she now waits tables in Harvard Square and rents a tiny, moldy room at the side of a garage where she works on the novel she's been writing for six years.

Independent Bookstore Day (IBD) is a celebration of books, readers and indie bookselling that started in California in 2014; it is modeled after the extremely successful Record Store Day. To show their support for indies and help drive customers into stores on IBD, publishers produce exclusive, limited-edition books and literary art pieces that are only available at participating bookstores on Bookstore Day. You can’t get them before. You can’t get them online, and you most certainly can’t get them at Target.

Cat and Dog live with their human in a suburban house with a big backyard. Sure, they fight like.... well, cats and dogs, but they're used to one another. Dog--a different dog--lives a happy only child life in the city with his dad. He has the bed to himself, he never has to share his toys, and that's the way he likes it. So what happens when the Dog's dad and Cat and Dog's mom move in together? Well, it's chaotic. There's not enough room on the bed, for starters.