Living the dream of the endless vacation “Anyone who has ever dreamed of leaving the city and taking their lives back to nature (and who hasn't?) will find much to contemplate in this warm and hilarious tale of rural misadventure and small town quirk, even if they have never chased a goat in a bathing suit or called 911 because there were cows in the road. Stimson's voice is endearing: both in its self-deprecation and its rapture, as she sings an only slightly conflicted love song to Vermont.” —Pam Houston, author of Contents May Have Shifted “Taking a plunge that wimpier sorts (i.e. most of us) only fantasize about, Ellen Stimson and her family packed up their house in St. Louis and threw themselves into a wildly different life in small-town Vermont. Armed with the passion-and haplessness-of wide-eyed newcomers they rescue goats and adopt chickens, do battle with skunks and bats and falling ice, and, most disastrously, buy a black hole of a general store. Through it all they manage to retain their love for their adopted home as well as one another. This is a tale to which all the cliché words absolutely apply: hilarious, heartwarming, rollicking, and, most of all, rich in the real stuff of life.” —Julia Reed, author of But Mama Always Put Vodka in Her Sangria!

Fiction. In a text that doubles back on itself, revising and reinventing its own trajectory several times over, THE MUDDY SEASON is an excavation into narrative form and political oppression. Set in the steaming jungle of a colonial dystopia somewhere in the developing world, THE MUDDY SEASON depicts the struggle of an indigenous village to maintain its freedom and dignity in the face of the repressive policies of a racialized bureaucratic state. The villagers alternately press back and stand by as armed forces arrive to impose their tyrannical will: removing newborn babies from their mothers for indoctrination in the capital. Against the backdrop of poverty and overt political conflict, Matthew Raymond presents us with the complex inner struggle of the government agent tasked with overseeing the removal of the infants. As he carries out his duty on behalf of the state, the agent finds himself caught between bureaucratic obligation and his own burgeoning desires. At once enthralling and unflinching, brutal and impassioned, THE MUDDY SEASON is a sophisticated, narratively complex story that is as alluring as it is dark. "'Pulling her blue and wet from her mother and saying quietly, Life is suffering, the midwife smacked her'- and, thus, the reader finds herself thrust into the damp murk of afterbirth and the muddy season: into an absolutely captivating story that is as unflinching as it is bewitching. Told in four parts, THE MUDDY SEASON is a sophisticated, scorching story whose narrative choreography unfurls in an electrifying dance between soldiers and villagers, a girl and an agent. With a literary nod to the great innovative novelists Julio Cortázar and John Fowles, Raymond upends conventional fiction, while maintaining the brutal realism of the world's bureaucracies and oppressions. Analogous to the two central characters in section IV, in which one character leads and the other trails 'into the dark of the jungle beyond, ' when this author beckons, I too must follow." —Simone Muench "Matthew Raymond's THE MUDDY SEASON is a beguiling and prismatic gem of short fiction, yet bursting with a novel's share of action, drama, pathos, and idea. In it, Raymond has precision-extracted the best of Cormac McCarthy and Graham Greene and injected the resulting mixture into a universe out of Kafka. Painterly, structurally inventive and darkly moving." —Adrian Van Young

It's mud season, but there's more than mud in the middle of the road: There are pigs, hens, sheep, and bulls in the way. That won't do. For a car to get through, somebody's gotta shoo! But who? Plourde's trademark style blends alliteration and rhyme into an elegantly simple mix that children-and adults-enjoy reading aloud.

Originally published: Woodstock, Vermont: The Countryman Press, 2013.

Describes the squishy sensations associated with playing in the mud.

Benjamin January made his debut in bestselling author Barbara Hambly's A Free Man of Color, a haunting mélange of history and mystery. Now he returns in another novel of greed, madness, and murder amid the dark shadows and dazzling society of old New Orleans, named a Notable Book of the Year by the New York Times. The summer of 1833 has been one of brazen heat and brutal pestilence, as the city is stalked by Bronze John—the popular name for the deadly yellow fever epidemic that tests the healing skills of doctor and voodoo alike. Even as Benjamin January tends the dying at Charity Hospital during the steaming nights, he continues his work as a music teacher during the day. When he is asked to pass a message from a runaway slave to the servant of one of his students, January finds himself swept into a tempest of lies, greed, and murder that rivals the storms battering New Orleans. And to find the truth he must risk his freedom...and his very life.

Illustrations and rhymes celebrate what makes each season special, from baby chicks in the spring through a snowman in the winter.

As winter melts into spring, the frozen earth turns into magnificent mud.

The animals of Mud Flat celebrate the coming of spring in their own ways.

"How one woman's dream of moving to Vermont--raising children, chickens, and sheep & running the old country store--pretty much led to one calamity after another"--Jacket.