Just outside of Santa Fe, in the land of The Milagro Beanfield War, a group of pilgrims converge on the edge of a canyon for a last chance at life.

For more than a century, Ghost Ranch has attracted people of enormous energy and creativity to the high desert of northern New Mexico. Occupying twenty-two thousand acres of the Piedra Lumbre basin, this fabled place was the love of artist Georgia O’Keeffe’s life, and her depictions of the landscape catapulted Ghost Ranch to international recognition. Building on the history of the Abiquiu region that she told in Valley of Shining Stone, Ghost Ranch historian Lesley Poling-Kempes now unfolds the story of this celebrated retreat. She traces its transformation from el Rancho de los Brujos, a hideout for legendary outlaws, to a renowned cultural mecca and one of the Southwest’s premier conference centers. First a dude ranch, Ghost Ranch became a magical sanctuary where the veil between heaven and earth seemed almost transparent. Focusing on those who visited from the 1920s and ’30s until the 1990s, Poling-Kempes tells how O’Keeffe and others—from Boston Brahmin Carol Bishop Stanley to paleontologist Edwin H. Colbert, Los Alamos physicists to movie stars—created a unique community that evolved into the institution that is Ghost Ranch today. For this book, Poling-Kempes has drawn on information not available when Valley of Shining Stone was written. The biography of Juan de Dios Gallegos has been enhanced and definitively corrected. The Robert Wood Johnson (of Johnson & Johnson) years at Ghost Ranch are recounted with reminiscences from family members. And the memories of David McAlpin Jr. shed light on how the Princeton circle that included the Packs, the Johnson brothers, the Rockefellers, and the McAlpins ended up as summer neighbors on the high desert of New Mexico. After Arthur Pack’s gift of the ranch to the Presbyterian Church in 1955, Ghost Ranch became a spiritual home for thousands of people still awestruck by the landscape that O’Keeffe so lovingly committed to canvas; yet the care taken to protect Ghost Ranch’s land and character has preserved its sense of intimacy. By relating its remarkable story, Poling-Kempes invites all visitors to better appreciate its place as an honored wilderness—and to help safeguard its future.

Ladies of the Canyons is the true story of remarkable women who left the security and comforts of genteel Victorian society and journeyed to the American Southwest in search of a wider view of themselves and their world. Educated, restless, and inquisitive, Natalie Curtis, Carol Stanley, Alice Klauber, and Mary Cabot Wheelwright were plucky, intrepid women whose lives were transformed in the first decades of the twentieth century by the people and the landscape of the American Southwest. Part of an influential circle of women that included Louisa Wade Wetherill, Alice Corbin Henderson, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Mary Austin, and Willa Cather, these ladies imagined and created a new home territory, a new society, and a new identity for themselves and for the women who would follow them. Their adventures were shared with the likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Robert Henri, Edgar Hewett and Charles Lummis, Chief Tawakwaptiwa of the Hopi, and Hostiin Klah of the Navajo. Their journeys took them to Monument Valley and Rainbow Bridge, into Canyon de Chelly, and across the high mesas of the Hopi, down through the Grand Canyon, and over the red desert of the Four Corners, to the pueblos along the Rio Grande and the villages in the mountains between Santa Fe and Taos. Although their stories converge in the outback of the American Southwest, the saga of Ladies of the Canyons is also the tale of Boston’s Brahmins, the Greenwich Village avant-garde, the birth of American modern art, and Santa Fe’s art and literary colony. Ladies of the Canyons is the story of New Women stepping boldly into the New World of inconspicuous success, ambitious failure, and the personal challenges experienced by women and men during the emergence of the Modern Age.

Blending myth with interviews and first-person narrative, California-based writer Amarnath Ravva's American Canyon uses prose, documentary footage and still photos to recount the fragmented and ever-evolving story of one person's apprehension of the ghosts of history. Written from a series of video notes taken over a period of ten years, this narrative of a son's love for his mother and the ritual he performs for her takes us from California to Rameswaram, the southern tip of the Indian peninsula. It is a meditation on the moments in history that placed him in front of a small bright fire, a lament for the continual loss of those who, by remembering, let us know who we are. Ravva's American Canyon has been described by poet and author Kevin Killian as "a complex reworking of memoir form, using the tools of poetry remelted, as in Vulcan's forge, to slash away at the ghosts and ghouls of conventional prose usage. The new journalism, Ravva-style, stimulates the nerve endings with its alternately lush and spare renditions of some spectacular settings..." Ravva has given readings and performed at LACMA, Machine Project, the MAK Center at the Schindler House, New Langton Arts, the Hammer Museum, USC, Pomona, CalArts and the Sorbonne.

"There's the Grand Canyon as seen from one of the rims. Spectacular. Awe-inspiring. Dramatic. And there's the Grand Canyon below the rims, a very different place steeped in wilderness, bus-sized boulders, tumbling streams, knee-shredding switchbacks, solitude, and the cataract-punctuated Colorado River. The trails in Grand Canyon National Park attract more than 80,000 permitted overnight backpackers annually, as well as an untold number of day hikers and mule riders. Join author Seth Muller on a grand adventure, searching for the Grand Canyon's soul along miles of canyon trails. Muller profiles rangers, artists, volunteers, hikers, ultra-marathoners, mule skinners, and others who regularly experience the inner canyon, presenting the Corridor Trails in intimate, creative prose that will carry the reader into the depths of the canyon and back out again"--P. 4 of cover.

A revelatory, fly-on-the-wall collection of photographs and stories documenting Eddie Van Halen at work in his famed but seldom seen 5150 studio, from the 2004 reunion with Sammy Hagar through the 2007 reunion with David Lee Roth. “When kids ask me how it feels to be a rock star, I say, ‘I’m not a rock star. I’m not in it for the fame, I’m in it because I like to play.’” Eddie Van Halen A fortuitous call from a stranger in the middle of the night led to a once-in-a-lifetime assignment. The stranger was Eddie Van Halen. The assignment, as Eddie related it, was to “capture the truth. Show people how hard I work, because that’s the truth.” Having no idea where this would lead or in what form it might be shared, Andrew Bennett spent portions of the next two years relentlessly documenting everything that occurred inside Eddie’s sanctuary: from rehearsals, recording sessions, and revealing conversations, to vicious arguments, a brotherly brawl, and a wild heist attempt in the middle of the night. Bennett memorialized every square foot of that sacred space, every piece of equipment, and every guitar—including Eddie’s beloved Frankenstrat. Featuring more than two hundred photographs, and accompanied by intimate reflections on what the author witnessed, Eruption in the Canyon presents an incomparable portrait of one of the most revered artists in history.

Classic meets contemporary in James Richardson’s ninth collection. Writers from Bashō to Hardy, from Merwin to Porchia, inspire meditations on everything from artichokes to cosmology that somehow morph into fables of limitation and desire. This “new poetry made the old way” takes seriously the task of lightening and illuminating our experience, and especially, of distilling it. As Richardson writes, “The road not taken also would have gotten me home.” More than sixty poems of ten lines or fewer, and two sequences of Richardson’s trademark aphorisms and “ten-second essays,” are set alongside surging lyric meditations and odes. For Now celebrates nows of every length, from the sweep of cosmic evolution, to the span of a life, to the glint of dew on a cold shovel.

The inspiration for the Netflix film Rez Ball—produced by Lebron James The moving story of a Navajo high school basketball team, its members struggling with the everyday challenges of high school, adolescence, and family, and the great and unique obstacles facing Native Americans living on reservations. Deep in the heart of northern Arizona, in a small and isolated patch of the vast 17.5-million-acre Navajo reservation, sits Chinle High School. Here, basketball is passion, passed from grandparent to parent to child. Rez Ball is a sport for winters where dark and cold descend fast and there is little else to do but roam mesa tops, work, and wonder what the future holds. The town has 4,500 residents and the high school arena seats 7,000. Fans drive thirty, fifty, even eighty miles to see the fast-paced and highly competitive matchups that are more than just games to players and fans. Celebrated Times journalist Michael Powell brings us a narrative of triumph and hardship, a moving story about a basketball team on a Navajo reservation that shows how important sports can be to youths in struggling communities, and the transcendent magic and painful realities that confront Native Americans living on reservations. This book details his season-long immersion in the team, town, and culture, in which there were exhilarating wins, crushing losses, and conversations on long bus rides across the desert about dreams of leaving home and the fear of the same.

"Focusing on the saddening, maddening example of Glen Canyon, Jared Farmer traces the history of exploration and development in the Four Corners region, discusses the role of tourism in changing the face of the West, and shows how the "invention" of Lake Powell has served multiple needs. He also seeks to identify the point at which change becomes loss: How do people deal with losing places they love? How are we to remember or restore lost places?"--BOOK JACKET.