Based on the James Beard Award–winning blog The One-Block Diet, this all-in-one home gardening, do-it-yourself guide and cookbook shows you how to transform a backyard or garden into a self-sufficient locavore’s paradise. When Margo True and her fellow staffers at Northern California–based Sunset magazine walked around the grounds of their Menlo Park office, they saw more than just a lawn and some gardens. Instead, they saw a fresh, bountiful food source, the makings for intrepid edible projects, and a series of seasonal feasts—all just waiting to happen. The One-Block Feast is the story of how True and her team took an inspired idea and transformed it into an ambitious commitment: to create four feasts over the course of a year, using only what could be grown or raised in their backyard-sized plot. She candidly shares the group’s many successes and often humorous setbacks as they try their hands at chicken farming, cheese making, olive pressing, home brewing, bee keeping, winemaking, and more. Grouped into gardening, project, and recipe guides for each season, The One-Block Feast is a complete resource for planning an eco-friendly kitchen garden; making your own pantry staples for year-round cooking and gifts; raising bees, chickens, and even a cow; and creating made-from-scratch meals from ingredients you’ve grown yourself. Chapters are organized by season, each featuring a planting plan and crop-by-crop instructions, an account of how that season’s projects played out for the Sunset team, and a multicourse dinner menu composed of imaginative, appealing, and ultra-resourceful vegetarian recipes, such as: Butternut Squash Gnocchi with Chard and Sage Brown Butter • Egg and Gouda Crepes • Whole Wheat Pizzas with Roasted Vegetables and Homemade Cheeses • Fresh Corn Soup with Zucchini Blossoms • Braised Winter Greens with Preserved Lemons and Red Chile • Summer Lemongrass Custards • Honey Ice Cream Generously illustrated and easy to follow, this ultimate resource for today’s urban homesteader will inspire you to take “eating local” to a whole new level.

With the warmth and humor we've come to know, the creator and host of A Prairie Home Companion shares his own remarkable story. In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio. Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures. PHC lasted forty-two years, 1,557 shows, and enjoyed the freedom to do as it pleased for three or four million listeners every Saturday at 5 p.m. Central. He got to sing with Emmylou Harris and Renée Fleming and once sang two songs to the U.S. Supreme Court. He played a private eye and a cowboy, gave the news from his hometown, Lake Wobegon, and met Somali cabdrivers who’d learned English from listening to the show. He wrote bestselling novels, won a Grammy and a National Humanities Medal, and made a movie with Robert Altman with an alarming amount of improvisation. He says, “I was unemployable and managed to invent work for myself that I loved all my life, and on top of that I married well. That’s the secret, work and love. And I chose the right ancestors, impoverished Scots and Yorkshire farmers, good workers. I’m heading for eighty, and I still get up to write before dawn every day.”

NEW YORK TIMES BEST SELLER • From the best-selling author of The Smitten Kitchen Cookbook—this everyday cookbook is “filled with fun and easy ... recipes that will have you actually looking forward to hitting the kitchen at the end of a long work day” (Bustle). A happy discovery in the kitchen has the ability to completely change the course of your day. Whether we’re cooking for ourselves, for a date night in, for a Sunday supper with friends, or for family on a busy weeknight, we all want recipes that are unfussy to make with triumphant results. Deb Perelman, award-winning blogger, thinks that cooking should be an escape from drudgery. Smitten Kitchen Every Day: Triumphant and Unfussy New Favorites presents more than one hundred impossible-to-resist recipes—almost all of them brand-new, plus a few favorites from her website—that will make you want to stop what you’re doing right now and cook. These are real recipes for real people—people with busy lives who don’t want to sacrifice flavor or quality to eat meals they’re really excited about. You’ll want to put these recipes in your Forever Files: Sticky Toffee Waffles (sticky toffee pudding you can eat for breakfast), Everything Drop Biscuits with Cream Cheese, and Magical Two-Ingredient Oat Brittle (a happy accident). There’s a (hopelessly, unapologetically inauthentic) Kale Caesar with Broken Eggs and Crushed Croutons, a Mango Apple Ceviche with Sunflower Seeds, and a Grandma-Style Chicken Noodle Soup that fixes everything. You can make Leek, Feta, and Greens Spiral Pie, crunchy Brussels and Three Cheese Pasta Bake that tastes better with brussels sprouts than without, Beefsteak Skirt Steak Salad, and Bacony Baked Pintos with the Works (as in, giant bowls of beans that you can dip into like nachos). And, of course, no meal is complete without cake (and cookies and pies and puddings): Chocolate Peanut Butter Icebox Cake (the icebox cake to end all icebox cakes), Pretzel Linzers with Salted Caramel, Strawberry Cloud Cookies, Bake Sale Winning-est Gooey Oat Bars, as well as the ultimate Party Cake Builder—four one-bowl cakes for all occasions with mix-and-match frostings (bonus: less time spent doing dishes means everybody wins). Written with Deb’s trademark humor and gorgeously illustrated with her own photographs, Smitten Kitchen Every Day is filled with what are sure to be your new favorite things to cook. Look for Deb Perelman’s latest cookbook, Smitten Kitchen Keepers!

One of the earliest great stories of English literature after ?Beowulf?, ?Sir Gawain? is the strange tale of a green knight on a green horse, who rudely interrupts King Arthur's Round Table festivities one Yuletide, challenging the knights to a wager. Simon Armitrage, one of Britain's leading poets, has produced an inventive and groundbreaking translation that " helps] liberate ?Gawain ?from academia" (?Sunday Telegraph?).

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the governor of Maryland, the “compassionate” (People), “startling” (Baltimore Sun), “moving” (Chicago Tribune) true story of two kids with the same name: One went on to be a Rhodes Scholar, decorated combat veteran, White House Fellow, and business leader. The other is serving a life sentence in prison. The chilling truth is that his story could have been mine. The tragedy is that my story could have been his. In December 2000, the Baltimore Sun ran a small piece about Wes Moore, a local student who had just received a Rhodes Scholarship. The same paper also ran a series of articles about four young men who had allegedly killed a police officer in a spectacularly botched armed robbery. The police were still hunting for two of the suspects who had gone on the lam, a pair of brothers. One was named Wes Moore. Wes just couldn’t shake off the unsettling coincidence, or the inkling that the two shared much more than space in the same newspaper. After following the story of the robbery, the manhunt, and the trial to its conclusion, he wrote a letter to the other Wes, now a convicted murderer serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole. His letter tentatively asked the questions that had been haunting him: Who are you? How did this happen? That letter led to a correspondence and relationship that have lasted for several years. Over dozens of letters and prison visits, Wes discovered that the other Wes had had a life not unlike his own: Both had had difficult childhoods, both were fatherless; they’d hung out on similar corners with similar crews, and both had run into trouble with the police. At each stage of their young lives they had come across similar moments of decision, yet their choices would lead them to astonishingly different destinies. Told in alternating dramatic narratives that take readers from heart-wrenching losses to moments of surprising redemption, The Other Wes Moore tells the story of a generation of boys trying to find their way in a hostile world.

A classic work of American literature that has not stopped changing minds and lives since it burst onto the literary scene, The Things They Carried is a ground-breaking meditation on war, memory, imagination, and the redemptive power of storytelling. The Things They Carried depicts the men of Alpha Company: Jimmy Cross, Henry Dobbins, Rat Kiley, Mitchell Sanders, Norman Bowker, Kiowa, and the character Tim O’Brien, who has survived his tour in Vietnam to become a father and writer at the age of forty-three. Taught everywhere—from high school classrooms to graduate seminars in creative writing—it has become required reading for any American and continues to challenge readers in their perceptions of fact and fiction, war and peace, courage and fear and longing. The Things They Carried won France's prestigious Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger and the Chicago Tribune Heartland Prize; it was also a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

The classic children's story about a young boy, his toy castle, and a magical adventure that reveals the true meaning of courage When his beloved caretaker Mrs. Phillips tells him she's leaving, William is devastated. Not even her farewell gift of a model medieval castle helps him feel better—though he has to admit it's fascinating. From the working drawbridge and portcullis to the fully-furnished rooms, it's perfect in every detail. It almost seems magical. And when William looks at the silver knight, the tiny figure comes to life in his hand—and tells him a tale of a wicked sorcerer, a vicious dragon, and a kingdom in need of a hero. Hoping the castle's magic will help him find a way to make his friend stay, William embarks on a daring quest with Sir Simon, the Silver Knight—but he will have to face his own doubts and regrets if he's going to succeed. William's story continues in The Battle for the Castle, available as a redesigned companion edition. An IRA-CBC Children's Choice A California Young Reader Medal Winner A Dorothy Canfield Fisher Children's Book Award Winner Nominated for 23 State Book Awards