In effect the personal notebook of a distinguished and highly individualistic novelist and writer, this is an eclectic collection of more than 1,000 short quotations that have struck a chord with the author in the course of her life and work. Drawing on the works of writers and commentators from many eras, this beautifully designed book displays not only its author's wide reading, but also great sensibility, profound good sense, and fine, if understated, wit. A writer's book for anyone who wishes to live a fulfilling life.

Jay, the restless wanderer, rocks the lives of two strangers by introducing them to the strange world he has stumbled across-the streets of Melbourne. Rick, the bookworm, is torn away from his mundane academic life. Johnny, the paranoid poet, is released from his small-town worries. When they hit the streets together, twisted tales rise from the gutters. The bathing man. The cardboard preacher. The mute who isn't a mute. The trio cast aside everything they know, embarking on a journey to meet the city's neglected souls. There's a Tale to This City is an offbeat portrait of Melbourne that combines poetry, narrative prose and toilet paper diary entries, recollecting the strange experiences of three writers, who came together to learn the art of listening.

A selection of favorite quotes that the celebrated literary critic has collected over the decades. From Dwight Garner, the New York Times book critic, comes a rollicking, irreverent, scabrous, amazingly alive selection of unforgettable moments from forty years of wide and deep reading. Garner’s Quotations is like no commonplace book you’ll ever read. If you’ve ever wondered what’s really going on in the world of letters today, this book will make you sit up and take notice. Unputdownable!

Many of us assume that our creative process is beyond our ability to influence, and pay attention to it only when it isn't working properly. For the most part, we go about our daily tasks and everything just "works." Until it doesn't. Adding to this lack of understanding is the rapidly accelerating pace of work. Each day we are face escalating expectations and a continual squeeze to do more with less. We are asked to produce an ever-increasing amount of brilliance in an ever-shrinking amount of time. There is an unspoken (or spoken!) expectation that we'll be accessible 24/7, and as a result we frequently feel like we're "always on." Now business creativity expert Todd Henry explains how to unleash your creative potential. Whether you're a creative by trade or an "accidental creative," this book will help you quickly and effectively integrate new ideas into your daily life.

In this debut collection, award-winning poet and baker Kate Lebo redefines everything we thought we knew about pie. An eclectic mix of prose poems, fantasy zodiac, and humor, A Commonplace Book of Pie explores the tension between the container and the contained while considering the real and imagined relationships between pie and those who love it. Expanding on Lebo's successful chapbook of the same name, this volume includes new poems as well as more than two dozen Americana-themed illustrations by artist Jessica Lynn Bonin. Bonin's art adds a sense of nostalgia alongside Lebo's modern style, and together with the text, puts pie and the art of baking in a fresh, contemporary context. Kate Lebo makes poems and pies in Seattle. Her writing has appeared in Best New Poets, Gastronomica, and Poetry Northwest. When Kate is not creating poems, she is hosting her semi-secret pie social, Pie Stand, around the US, teaching creative writing at the University of Washington and Richard Hugo House, and pie-making at Pie School, her cliche-busting pastry academy. Jessica Lynn Bonin is an illustrator and mixed-media artist whose work adds a modern twist to familiar images of American culture. Bonin's murals are displayed in New York,Oregon and Washington state. She lives and works in a former hardware store and lumberyard in Edison, Washington.

A repository for a personal collection of quotations, scraps, pensées, and poems, this compilation offers keen insight into the influences and inspirations of a writer, namely Elizabeth Smither. There are no platitudes or sententious maxims here; instead, these sometimes pensive sometimes screamingly funny quotations range from Queer Eye for the Straight Guy to Elizabeth Bennet, from Charles Simic to Montaigne, and from Monty Python to Henry James. Witty and intriguing, this record also demonstrates the results of the creative process by including Smither's own work.

The Enneagram—a universal symbol of human purpose and possibility—is an excellent tool for doing the hardest part of consciousness work: realizing, owning, and accepting your strengths and weaknesses. In this comprehensive handbook, Beatrice Chestnut, PhD, traces the development of the personality as it relates to the nine types of the Enneagram, the three different subtype forms each type can take, and the path each of us can take toward liberation. With her guidance, readers will learn to observe themselves, face their fears and disowned Shadow aspects, and work to manifest their highest potential.

Christina McPhee's 'commonplace book' draws from a palimpsest of handwritten notes, lists, quotations, bibliographic fragments, and sketches, from an artist whose voracious reading practice is a direct feed into her life and art - all set to a visual and textual design-as-score, as prominent writers on painting, media arts, performance, video installation and poetics engage with her 'open-work' practice. Christina McPhee's images move from within a matrix of abstraction, shadowing figures and contingent effects. The tactics of living are in subterfuge, like the dazzle ships of camouflage in war. This 'commonplace book' develops a view of recent work in collaged paintings, drawings, photomontage and video installation, around themes of environmental transformation and 'post-natural' community. The book includes conversations, essays, interviews and notes by Ina Blom, Phil King, James MacDevitt, Donata Marletta, Melissa Potter, Judith Rodenbeck, Esztar Timár, and Frazer Ward. "McPhee's drawing, extended to and infiltrated with digital video, seems to outline a different and stranger project: that of creating as yet unknown material composites by aligning the rapid time-processing of our nervous systems with the emergent natures at actual sites of energy production or extraction." Ina Blom Christina McPhee's work is in museum collections, including the Whitney Museum of American Art, New York, the International Center for Photography, New York, the Kemper Museum of Contemporary Art, Kansas City, Thresholds New Media Collection, Scotland, and elsewhere. Her work has shown in solo exhibitions at American Unversity Museum, Washington, DC; Bildmuseet, Umea, Sweden, and in group exhibitions including documenta 12 and Bucharest Biennial 3. She lives and works in California, and you can see more of her work at: http: //www.christinamcphee.net/.

A groundbreaking translation of the epic work of one of the great minds of the nineteenth century Giacomo Leopardi was the greatest Italian poet of the nineteenth century and was recognized by readers from Nietzsche to Beckett as one of the towering literary figures in Italian history. To many, he is the finest Italian poet after Dante. (Jonathan Galassi's translation of Leopardi's Canti was published by FSG in 2010.) He was also a prodigious scholar of classical literature and philosophy, and a voracious reader in numerous ancient and modern languages. For most of his writing career, he kept an immense notebook, known as the Zibaldone, or "hodge-podge," as Harold Bloom has called it, in which Leopardi put down his original, wide-ranging, radically modern responses to his reading. His comments about religion, philosophy, language, history, anthropology, astronomy, literature, poetry, and love are unprecedented in their brilliance and suggestiveness, and the Zibaldone, which was only published at the turn of the twentieth century, has been recognized as one of the foundational books of modern culture. Its 4,500-plus pages have never been fully translated into English until now, when a team under the auspices of Michael Caesar and Franco D'Intino of the Leopardi Centre in Birmingham, England, have spent years producing a lively, accurate version. This essential book will change our understanding of nineteenth-century culture. This is an extraordinary, epochal publication.