Mark Doty's prose has been hailed as "tempered and tough, sorrowing and serene" (The New York Times Book Review) and "achingly beautiful" (The Boston Globe). In Still Life with Oysters and Lemon he offers a stunning exploration of our attachment to ordinary things-how we invest objects with human store, and why.

One single moment changes everythingIn one breath, you can have it allA split-second later, it can all disappearVanished foreverThat was meI had it allThen in a cruel twist of fate, it was taken from meA beautiful life gone in a flashBut he was thereHe was there to pick me up when I fellTo protect meMy savior. My rock. He was just a strangerJust a selfless stranger with a face I'll never forgetCan't forgetWon't forgetAnd like everything else, he just disappearedAs if he never existed I have to find himI need to find him He has to know that he saved meHe has to know that in that one fleeting moment, he was all I could see

Four gorgeous brothers, one small town, and the women who drive them wild.Presley McDaniel lives her life from moment to moment.Making permanent decisions means obligation, and that would force her to stop being the family disappointment. Waitress, fitness instructor, dog walker ... you name the hourly job and she's probably held the position.But when her grandmother can no longer run her book shop in Fawn Hill, a town so small it barely has its own zip code, Presley steps up to help.The move from bustling city to green pastures may be exactly what she needs to sort out her life. But she didn't ask for that happy ending to include a gorgeous veterinarian with an all-American smile and a penchant for snuggling puppies. The good doctor is reliable, responsible, and just the kind of man Presley has always avoided.Love and commitment are predictable.So why, the moment she lays eyes on him, are they all she wants?Keaton Nash has never questioned his steady path.His brothers may tease him about settling into his father's passed-down role of small town veterinarian, but Keaton has never minded his rural roots. And after tragedy struck two years ago, he has a duty as the eldest Nash man to look after his family.What he doesn't need is the sexy, flighty stranger who shows up in town and gets his broken heart beating again. Presley McDaniel is a distraction, a red-headed temptation that is the definition of a bad idea.He's barely recovered from the love who left him to chase bigger dreams, and this woman is bound to do the same.Except for the first time ever, he wants to abandon stability.She makes him want to be reckless.

Winner of the 2014 CLASS Reunion Kudos Book Award, fiction category. After the tragic death of Butch Browning’s wife, Jenny, four families begin to realize how precious—and fleeting—their time together is. Each is at a different stage in life: Butch is facing single parenthood. The O’Reillys are expecting their first child. The Andersons are approaching an empty nest, and the Buckleys are so focused on providing their children with everything that they’ve forgotten what they truly need. With just eighteen summers before their children are grown, how do they make the most of that time when life so often gets in the way? As summer flies by, each of these parents must learn about guilt and grace . . . and when to hold on to their kids and when to let go.

In 1956 Harry Belafonte’s Calypso became the first LP to sell more than a million copies. For a few fleeting months, calypso music was the top-selling genre in the US—it even threatened to supplant rock and roll. Stolen Time provides a vivid cultural history of this moment and outlines a new framework—black fad performance—for understanding race, performance, and mass culture in the twentieth century United States. Vogel situates the calypso craze within a cycle of cultural appropriation, including the ragtime craze of 1890s and the Negro vogue of the 1920s, that encapsulates the culture of the Jim Crow era. He follows the fad as it moves defiantly away from any attempt at authenticity and shamelessly embraces calypso kitsch. Although white calypso performers were indeed complicit in a kind of imperialist theft of Trinidadian music and dance, Vogel argues, black calypso craze performers enacted a different, and subtly subversive, kind of theft. They appropriated not Caribbean culture itself, but the US version of it—and in so doing, they mocked American notions of racial authenticity. From musical recordings, nightclub acts, and television broadcasts to Broadway musicals, film, and modern dance, he shows how performers seized the ephemeral opportunities of the fad to comment on black cultural history and even question the meaning of race itself.