Mist Upon the Pond is a collection of the author's favorite poems, some published, many unpublished, but all aimed squarely at the heartstrings, the bootstraps or the funny bone. As the author says, ". . . the form ever-changing, like the mist upon the pond . . ." A variety of poetic forms and styles, from humorous haiku to heart-wrenching historical narratives, is in this collection. The author's love of the natural world and her passion for history perme-ate many of the offerings, as does her deep, abiding faith in God and love of family. There are light-hearted children's poems and tongue-in-cheek glimpses of sports. Mist Upon the Pond is a collection of eighty-five poems written by the author over the last six years. They are presented here to enter-tain, encourage, amuse, inspire, give comfort and provoke thought. A lifelong resident of Mechanicville, New York, Sandra E. McBride is the mother of six grown children and grandmother of sixteen. She and her hus-band, Tom, reside on the farm that has been in the McBride family for nearly a century. Her childhood dream of becoming a creative writer was put on hold while she reared her fam-ily. Then, at age 55, she enrolled in a writing course at the Institute of Children's Literature and began to pursue that dream in earnest. "You're never too old to chase the dream," she says. Her poetry has appeared in five June Cotner anthologies, in Once Upon a Time, NEWN, Mail Call Journal and online at historyonline.net and Magic Lark Journal. She has published several short stories, and has won numerous awards for her writing. In April 2004, she was honored by her hometown library as their featured poet for National Poetry Month.

One of the astonishing aspects of Oliver's work is the consistency of tone over this long period. What changes is an increased focus on nature and an increased precision with language that has made her one of our very best poets. --Stephen Dobyns, New York Times Book Review Mary Oliver has published fifteen volumes of poetry and five books of prose in the span of four decades, but she rarely performs her poetry in live readings. Now, with the arrival of At Blackwater Pond, Mary Oliver has given her audience what they've longed to hear: the poet's voice reading her own work. In this beautifully produced compact disc, Mary Oliver has recorded forty of her favorite poems, nearly spanning the length of her career, from Dream Work through her newest volume, New and Selected Poems, Volume Two. The package is shrink-wrapped so that the elegant clothbound audiobook can takes its place on the poetry shelf. It also includes a fifteen-page booklet with an original essay, "Performance Note," photos of the author at Blackwater Pond, and a full listing of the poems and their sources.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/DIAMONSTEIN-SPIELVOGEL AWARD • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The Washington Post, NPR, Time, San Francisco Chronicle, Esquire, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, Town & Country, The Rumpus, Electric Lit, Thrillist, BookPage • “[A] worship song to writers and readers.”—Oprah Daily For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

“The Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage,” writes the author in his Foreword, a marriage that is threatened early on by the temptations of infidelity (“Snowing in Greenwich Village”) and that ends in a midlife divorce (“Here Come the Maples”). “They also illumine a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared.” That all blessings are mixed and fleeting does not make them less real, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. “A tribe segregated in a valley develops an accent, then a dialect, and then a language all its own; so does a couple. Let this collection preserve one particular dead tongue, no easier to parse than Latin.”

At the close of Flame in the Mist, to end a bloodbath between the Black Clan and imperial soldiers, Ōkami allows himself to be taken prisoner by Prince Raiden, Mariko’s betrothed. For someone who doesn’t believe in heroes, it’s a surprising choice: to trade his life for the lives of his friends and the one he loves. For he will surely be killed when he arrives in the Imperial City. But he decides if his life is the cost of love, it may not be too high a price after all.

"Bill Hart recounts his memories of life on the Godard family farm in North Granby, Connecticut during the1920s and 1930s, his teen years in West Hartford and his service in the Army Air Corps during WWII. His memories became fodder for a Granby Drummer column, "Memory Lane," from 2001 to July of 2009. He also authors articles describing historic events, places and people in Connecticut's Farmington River Valley and the lower Pioneer Valley of Massachusetts, which are also published in Southwoods Magazine."--