Featured Selections

Harborless

by Cindy Hunter Morgan
Poetry
Wayne State University Press
Paperback, 80 pages
$16.99

This is a collection of poems informed by Great Lakes shipwrecks, part history and part reinvention. The poems explore tragic wrecks in rivers and lakes, finding and forming artistic meaning from destruction and death. Each poem begins in a real, historical moment that Cindy Hunter Morgan transforms into an imagined truth. The imaginative element is essential to this work as it provides a previously unseen glimpse into the lives affected by shipwrecks. The poems in Harborless confront the mysteries surrounding the objects that cover the floor of the Great Lakes by both deepening our understanding of the unknown and teaching great empathy for a life most of us will never know.

A Really Big Lunch: The Roving Gourmand on Food and Life

by Jim Harrison
Memoirs
Grove Press
Hardcover, 272 pages
$26.00

Last March, on the one-year anniversary of Jim Harrison’s death, Grove Press released this collection of his meditations on food and wine. We have always held Harrison as one of our own who lived much of his life just down the lake on Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, so we have always loved and forgiven him. This time, too! For starters, “gourmand” is probably not a fitting description of him with its hint of effete and polished snobbery. He is rather, if anything, a boisterous and blasphemous snob but, again, a lovable and forgivable one. Take the title story of the collection – A Really Big Lunch - it's the rollicking tale of an 11-hour, 37-course lunch prepared by French chef Marc Meneau in a sprawling country house in Burgundy. The menu was taken from 18th and 19th century cookbooks and included calf brain tart, hare cooked in port wine inside a calf’s bladder and testicles in a pool of tarragon butter. “Je ne me pique que de goût...”  Look it up!

 American Nations: A History of the Eleven Rival Regional Cultures of North America

by Colin Woodward
History
Penguin Books
Paperback, 384 pages
$17.00

E Pluribus Unum. Oh, really? Colin Woodard would have it be e pluribus pluribus!  Woodard writes that we are, in fact, citizens of eleven different nations-states each with its unique culture derived from its own colonial origins and regional history. These cultures, in turn, drive our political behaviors and attitudes on everything from social issues to fundamental precepts of government. Here in the Northwoods we find ourselves to be residents of Yankeedom encompassing New England and the Great Lakes states. We tend to highly value the common good, favor reasonable government regulation and strongly support high quality public education among other things. Well, some of us maybe. A fascinating and original take on our current political dilemma.

The Hearts of Men

by Nickolas Butler
General Fiction
Ecco Press
Hardcover, 400 pages
$26.99

The New York Times refers to this as a "gut punch of a novel" and we agree! This tale unfolds over three generations at a Boy Scout camp in Wisconsin, and explores what it means to be a good man in a changing America. Beginning in 1962, we meet our protagonist, Nelson Doughty. Nelson survives bullying, a trying relationship with his only friend Jonathan, the Vietnam War, and so much more. This is a panoramic novel about the slippery definitions of good and evil, family and fidelity, the challenges and rewards of lifelong friendships, the bounds of morality—and redemption. Get your signed copy on the 25th!

We Could've Been Happy Here

by Keith Lesmeister
Short Stories
MG Press
Paperback
$15.00

In his first collection of short fiction, Keith Lesmeister plows out a distinctive vision of the contemporary Midwest. A recovering addict chases down a herd of runaway cows. A middle-aged couple rediscovers their love for one another through the unlikely circumstance of robbing a bank. The daughter of a deployed soldier wages a bloody war on the rabbits ravaging her family’s farm. This collection illuminates how we are shaped and buoyed by our intimate connections with others — both those close to us, and those we hardly know.

Hawk

by Jennifer Dance
Middle Readers
Dundurn
Paperback, 264 pages
$12.99

Hawk, a First Nations teen from northern Alberta, is a cross-country runner who aims to win gold in an upcoming competition between all the schools in Fort McMurray. But when Hawk discovers he has leukemia, his identity as a star athlete is stripped away along with his muscles and energy. When he finds an osprey, “a fish hawk,” mired in a pond of toxic residue from the oil sands industry, he sees his life-or-death struggle echoed by the young bird. Hawk sees parallels with his own fragile life, and wants to forge a new identity — one that involves standing up for the voiceless creatures that share his world. But he needs to survive long enough to do it.

A Sugar Creek Chronicle: Observing Climate Change from a Midwestern Woodland

by Cornelia F. Mutel
Reflections on Nature
University of Iowa Press
Paperback, 240 pages
$16.00

There’s more to climate change than the melting of polar ice. Cornelia Mutel finds and reports its evidence from her own patch of woodland in northern Iowa. In a gentle and sincere series of essays moving through the seasons, Mutel relates her childhood ramblings in rural Wisconsin, her academic life in science, and her days and nights teaching nature to her grandchildren on the homestead she and her husband have created and observed over decades. At the heart of the book is her case against climate change denial and apathy in a tone perhaps less intense and martial than some others in the genre, but no less compelling.

Journey: The Most Famous Wolf in the West

by Emma Bland Smith, illustrations by Robin James
Childrens
Little Big Foot
Paperback, 32 pages
$17.99

This beautiful picture book follows the journey of a young gray wolf who garnered nationwide attention when he became the first wild wolf in California in almost a century. Using facts recorded by Fish & Wildlife scientists, author Emma Bland Smith imagines the wolf's experiences in close detail as he makes an epic 2,000-mile trek over three years time. The wolf's story is interwoven with the perspective of a young girl who follows his trek through the media. As she learns more about wolves and their relationships with humans, she becomes determined to find a way to keep him safe by making him a wolf that is "too famous to harm."

Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness

by Michael P. Branch
Reflections on Nature
Roost Books
Paperback, 320 pages
$16.95

Ho hum! This could be just another account of a family homesteading in the high desert, Alaska, the coast of Belize or wherever. But, wait a minute! Branch brings this experience to life with his keen, unerring perspective and his raucous and galloping prose. From the building of the dream house to the verging pubescence to his two daughters, the story is as Gary Snyder has written “interesting, lively, non-theoretical, and hopeful.” Branch has a prolific oeuvre consisting of more than 200 essays, articles, and reviews in literature and the environment. This book brings it all together.

Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History

by Dan Flores
Nonfiction
Basic Books
Hardcover, 288 pages
$27.50

Forget the cartoon “Beep! Beep!” of Wily Coyote! This totemic animal – loved or hated and feared – has been given an honored place in the literary history of species. The name derives from Aztec coyotl of a millennium ago and in this country is typically pronounced KAI-yote in the west (and often by those who tend to despise the critter) or kai-YO-tee mostly in the east (and often among those who favor the critter). The story follows the trail from Native American mythology through unrelenting 19th and 20th century eradication efforts to the growing presence of coyotes in urban America. A beautifully written and complete biography of a species.

The High Mountains of Portugal

by Yann Martel
General Fiction
Spiegel & Grau
Paperback, 368 pages
$16.00

Sorrow connects this novel’s three main story lines, which follow three grieving men. Martel, who won the Man Booker Prize in 2002 for his novel Life of Pi, opens with the story of Tomás in early-1900s Lisbon: Reeling from a series of deaths in quick succession, he sets out across Portugal in search of a priest’s lost relic.

Difficult Women

by Roxane Gay
Short Stories & Anthologies
Grove Press
Hardcover, 272 pages
$25.00

Roxane Gay, author of the best-selling Bad Feminist has returned with a collection of stories of rare force and beauty, of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. These stories feature women from many different backgrounds; lives of privilege, poverty, and everywhere in between, young and old, married, in a relationship, or single, these women are all haunted by something or someone. Many have suffered severe and traumatic experiences and all of the stories are told with a raw and brutal honesty. These are not your "typical" love stories but there is still love in its many different forms.

Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair

by Pablo Neruda
Poetry
Penguin Books
Paperback, 64 pages
$11.95

Over the holidays we saw the new film, Neruda, by Chilean director Pablo Larrain. We enjoyed it very much (and likewise loved his other current release, Jackie). But, it was Larrain’s periodic calling-up of Poema No. 20 in Neruda that took us back to our first reading of this little book in the mid-1960’s. We were twenty years old then – about the same age as Neruda when he wrote these love poems – and we were smitten. They are sometimes dismissed as sentimental, but they capture like few others the sweet and desperate passion of young love. Sentimental or not this remains the best-selling poetry book in the Spanish language ever – more than 20 million copies!

The North Water

by Ian McGuire
General Fiction
Henry Holt & Co.
Hardcover, 272 pages
$27.00

With Melville, Conrad and Patrick O’Brien, this book takes its place in the dark pantheon of maritime classics. It’s the 1850’s and the Yorkshire whaler, Volunteer, sets out for the north in search of the diminishing whale pods. Among those aboard is an opium-addicted surgeon, a veteran of the British Raj, Patrick Sumner; and, a vile and vicious harpooner, Henry Drax. Sumner, though flawed, is mostly good. Drax, with no redeeming quality is deeply bad. Their struggle is all male – no feminism here! – and is as violent and brutal as anything in the genre. Long-listed for the Man Booker Prize.

History of Wolves

by Emily Fridlund
General Fiction
Atlantic Monthly Press
Hardcover, 288 pages
$25.00

This debut novel began as a short story that won the 2013 McGinnis-Ritchie Award for Fiction. Set in our own Northwoods, History of Wolves weaves a haunting fabric from several threads from the life of the adolescent narrator, Linda. She lives in the remnants of a failed commune in the forest and is an outsider at home with her aging hippie parents. She links-up with a more conventional family that has moved in across the lake, but things bit-by-bit grow peculiar. At school she is an outsider as well and a creepy thread also emerge there. The voice and writing are compelling and this is unlikely to be a one-hit wonder for Ms. Fridlund.

The Nix

by Nathan Hill
General Fiction
Knopf
Hardcover, 640 pages
$27.95

Described by the New York Times as the “love child of Thomas Pynchon and David Foster Wallace,” and by a reviewer for NPR as “a vicious, sprawling satire with a very human heart,” the sheer scope, power and human and relational insight of The Nix, Nathan Hill’s stunning debut novel, defies our ability to do it justice in this brief paragraph. The backdrop includes Norway in the 1940’s; a boomer’s coming of age in the 1950’s and her inadvertent and ultimately life-changing entanglement in the 1968 Chicago protests; and contemporary American life with its menu of interesting characters illustrating many of our most challenging social issues. It is in one light a sweeping media and political satire, in another a heart-wrenching mother-son psychodrama. And yet it is so much more. Hill demonstrates through his deftly woven narrative how pivotal shifts in our lives result most often not from any calamitous act or decision, but rather from the collective impacts of so many seemingly minor decision-points along the way. We all know what it’s like to wake up one day and wonder how we got to where we are in life. In The Nix, Hill brilliantly shares one perspective on how this can happen. Well worth the read!

Escape Clause

by John Sanford
Midwest Mystery
G.P. Putnam's Sons
Hardcover, 400 pages
$29.00

Well, Virgil Flowers is back! That’s good news for many readers of the Minnesota-based mystery writer John Sandford. Here he swims naked in a swimming pool; two rare tigers disappear from the Minneapolis Zoo; immigrant workers get ripped-off; and, an animal rights activists gets vicious. Surrounding all this are the girlfriend, her sister, a sort-of priest and a band of some kind of Middle-Eastern brothers. Not much here but pure entertainment, but hey!

An Otis Christmas

by Loren Long
Childrens
Philomel Books
Hardcover, 40 pages
$17.99

It's Christmas Eve on the farm where Otis and all of his friends live. Otis loves his life on the farm and can't wait for what he's sure will be the best Christmas ever. The farmer has given Otis his first real Christmas present--a shiny new horn! But when one of the animals on the farm is in trouble and the snow is proving to be a problem, it's up to Otis to save the holiday. A warm, feel-good Christmas story featuring everyone's favorite tractor, Otis, the friend you can always count on.

To the Bright Edge of the World

by Eowyn Ivey
General Fiction
Little, Brown, & Company
Hardcover, 342 pages
$26.00

Set again in the Alaskan landscape that she bought to stunningly vivid life in The Snow Child, Eowyn Ivey's new novel is a breathtaking story of discovery and adventure, set at the end of the nineteenth century, and of a marriage tested by a closely held secret. A story shot through with a darker but potent strand of the magic that illuminated The Snow Child, this new novel from Pulitzer Prize finalist Eowyn Ivey singles her out as a major literary talent.

Old Goriot (Pere Goriot)

by Honore de Balzac
General Fiction
Neeland Media
Paperback, 162 pages
$13.00

Balzac! Who reads Balzac anymore? We wondered that ourselves and so we thought we’d give it a try. We were not disappointed. Old Goriot is a part of Balzac’s Comedie Humain and first appeared in serial form in 1834 under the title Studies of Nineteenth Century Manners. He chronicles the lives of Parisian men and women who lived through the French Revolution, the times of Napoleon, and the France of the Restoration. He defines his characters in their surroundings in mid-19^th Century Paris – their architecture and floor plans, their furniture décor, diet and clothing – not merely as description, but as an extension of personality and the shaping of character. The story is tense and riveting and not without humor. “All is true,” he writes early on (oddly enough in English!), “so true that everyone can recognize the elements of the tragedy in his own household, in his own heart perhaps.”

Swing Time

by Zadie Smith
General Fiction
Penguin Press
Hardcover, 464 pages
$27.00

They meet in a ballet class, two little brown girls who look as if they could have been cut from “one piece of tan material.” One is an immensely talented dancer the other brilliant and ambitious, but flat-footed. They bond and grow together in a narrative reminiscent of Elena Ferrante. One stays on the straight and narrow and becomes worldly and “successful” and deeply engaged in West Africa. The other, wild and erratic, becomes a West End dancer. Though their direct relationship ends, the experience of growing up together informs the remainder of the story. Smith has previously written from the third person point-of-view, but here the story is told in the first-person voice of one of the girls. Not surprisingly, Smith weaves a narrative with threads of racism, sexism and class. The Los Angeles Times calls the book “a multilayered tour de force.”

Light Years

by James Salter
General Fiction
Vintage Press
Paperback, 320 pages
$16.00

If you want to read some good writing, try James Salter who passed away last year at 90 years of age. Richard Ford says, “It is an article of faith among readers of fiction that James Salter writes American sentences better than anybody writing today.”  Light Years, published in 1975, is the story of Viri and Nedra Berland and their life as a couple from the early 60’s to late 70’s. He is an architect who commutes daily to Manhattan from the suburbs. She is a housewife and mother who shops and entertains. The novel serves as something of an anatomy of the American family of the time – the marriage, the children, the friends, the adulteries, and the unfulfilled longings. Salter conveys the sense of depth and peril that lies even in shallow waters. An earlier novel A Sport and a Pastime, set in Paris and a small town in southern France, is also brilliant if a bit sexually explicit for some.