Why the modern world forgot how to sleep Why is sleep frustrating for so many people? Why do we spend so much time and money managing and medicating it, and training ourselves and our children to do it correctly? In Wild Nights, Benjamin Reiss finds answers in sleep's hidden history -- one that leads to our present, sleep-obsessed society, its tacitly accepted rules, and their troubling consequences. Today we define a good night's sleep very narrowly: eight hours in one shot, sealed off in private bedrooms, children apart from parents. But for most of human history, practically no one slept this way. Tracing sleep's transformation since the dawn of the industrial age, Reiss weaves together insights from literature, social and medical history, and cutting-edge science to show how and why we have tried and failed to tame sleep. In lyrical prose, he leads readers from bedrooms and laboratories to factories and battlefields to Henry David Thoreau's famous cabin at Walden Pond, telling the stories of troubled sleepers, hibernating peasants, sleepwalking preachers, cave-dwelling sleep researchers, slaves who led nighttime uprisings, rebellious workers, spectacularly frazzled parents, and utopian dreamers. We are hardly the first people, Reiss makes clear, to chafe against our modern rules for sleeping. A stirring testament to sleep's diversity, Wild Nights offers a profound reminder that in the vulnerability of slumber we can find our shared humanity. By peeling back the covers of history, Reiss recaptures sleep's mystery and grandeur and offers hope to weary readers: as sleep was transformed once before, so too can it change today.

'Raw, elemental and beautiful.' Telegraph 'This is quite simply the best book about motherhood I have ever read.' - Eleanor Mills in the Sunday Times Mother to five children, Clover Stroud has navigated family life across two decades, both losing and finding herself. In her touching, provocative and profoundly insightful book, she captures a sense of what motherhood really feels like - how intense, sensuous, joyful, boring, profound and dark it can be. My Wild and Sleepless Nights examines what it means to be a mother, and reveals with unflinching honesty the many conflicting emotions that this entails- the joy and the wonder, the loneliness and despair. MORE PRAISE FOR CLOVER STROUD- 'Clover's expertise is writing about family life in a way that feels both new and entirely familiar' - Pandora Sykes 'As tender, blazing, funny and unflinching as the love it describes. I want to give this triumphant book to every mother I know' - Rachel Joyce 'Stroud is always willing to rip open her very soul in order to reveal the truth about her life - and every time a woman tells the truth like this, it sets another woman free' - Elizabeth Gilbert 'I read in one greedy gulp and am still slightly reeling. Extraordinary writing... For mothers and those even vaguely interested in family dynamics it is fascinating' - Alexandra Heminsley Charting the course of one year, the first in her youngest child's life, Clover searches for answers to questions that many of us would be too afraid to admit to - not only about motherhood, but also about female sexuality and identity. Her story will speak to all mothers, and anyone about to embark on that journey.

I had not gone anywhere, while still being at the same corner of the great boulevard observing life in its colors, its good or annoying notes, and its rhythm. I’m still in the same convoy of the living and the dead, looking at me and observing you at the same time, without any of us perceiving each other in this dull tumult that engorges us and hypnotizes us. I greet you all, and I come back with the same smile and another bunch of poems that is none other than notes of joy, sorrow, and love that sound and resound in our daily life. In any case, these notes do not rhyme with your taste or please your whim. I apologize because I did not invent them, as they fall naturally within the scope of my poetic contemplation. They come to me, and it is my duty to host them and distribute them all, in their folly and naive naturalism. As always I do not force you, but I invite you to read this book and find the notes that resemble you or remind you of a life, living experience, even a friend or forgotten memories.

"The book gives adults ideas for activities to get kids outside after the sun goes down, from night hikes to trapping moths. It’s also a fascinating meditation on humans’ relationship with darkness.”—Outside "A fun, inventive adventure guide about helping children explore nature after dark . . . Its activities are a great excuse to turn off the television, set down smartphones, and explore the rich, mysterious world just beyond the back door."—Foreword Reviews The go-to guide for exploring nature at night, whether on summer holidays, weekends away or even back garden adventures! Foreword by Chris Packham, author, naturalist, and BBC presenter Learn how to call for owls, walk like a fox and expand your sensory perceptions. Wild Nights Out is a wonderful new hands-on guide for those who wish to take kids (of all ages) outdoors for fun, thrilling nighttime nature adventures. Parents, grandparents, teachers and nature educators alike will discover a wealth of unique activities to explore the natural world from dusk till dawn. Alongside games, walks and exercises to expand our senses, storyteller and outdoor educator Chris Salisbury will bring this unexplored nocturnal dimension to life with lore about badgers, bats and minibeasts as well as tales of the constellations and planets to share around the campfire. In Wild Nights Out you can expect to find: 25 fun and informative games and activities Practical information on how to conduct night walks safely Animal facts and stargazing stories Beautiful black-and-white illustrations throughout Nature has so much to offer at night, so let Wild Nights Out be your guide to the dark. It will boost the resilience and self-confidence of children and adults, and instill a lifelong love of having fun in the outdoors when the sun goes down.

(Lone Wolf, Book 1) Agent Sherri Walker needs a change of scenery. Her former lover nearly tanked her career, forcing her to take a leave of absence. A few drinks and a one-night stand with a sinfully hot stranger look like a great way to take her mind off her troubles, until that stranger’s past lands her in a new world of danger. Asher Hughes left his outlaw pack but couldn’t ditch the bad blood. A lone wolf who’s always refused to bond, Ash is left wanting more after one night with a beautiful, spirited human. Worse, it puts Sherri in the crosshairs of an old pack enemy, and the only way to save her is to claim her as his own. (keywords: free ebook, freebie, free romantic suspense shifters)

New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates’ imaginative look at the last days of five giants of American literature, now available in a deluxe paperback edition in Ecco’s The Art of the Story Series. Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, Samuel Clemens (“Mark Twain”), Henry James, Ernest Hemingway—Joyce Carol Oates evokes each of these American literary icons in this work of prose fiction, poignantly and audaciously reinventing the climactic events of their lives. In subtly nuanced language suggestive of each of these writers, Oates explores the mysterious regions of the unknowable self that is “genius.” Darkly hilarious, brilliant, and brazen, Wild Nights! is an original and haunting work of the imagination.

Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare’s Sonnets, she serves as an incomparable guide, considering both stylistic and imaginative features of the poems. In selecting these poems for commentary Vendler chooses to exhibit many aspects of Dickinson’s work as a poet, “from her first-person poems to the poems of grand abstraction, from her ecstatic verses to her unparalleled depictions of emotional numbness, from her comic anecdotes to her painful poems of aftermath.” Included here are many expected favorites as well as more complex and less often anthologized poems. Taken together, Vendler’s selection reveals Emily Dickinson’s development as a poet, her astonishing range, and her revelation of what Wordsworth called “the history and science of feeling.” In accompanying commentaries Vendler offers a deeper acquaintance with Dickinson the writer, “the inventive conceiver and linguistic shaper of her perennial themes.” All of Dickinson’s preoccupations—death, religion, love, the natural world, the nature of thought—are explored here in detail, but Vendler always takes care to emphasize the poet’s startling imagination and the ingenuity of her linguistic invention. Whether exploring less familiar poems or favorites we thought we knew, Vendler reveals Dickinson as “a master” of a revolutionary verse-language of immediacy and power. Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries will be an indispensable reference work for students of Dickinson and readers of lyric poetry.

Returning to his New Hampshire home after a traumatic tour of duty in Iraq, young Army sniper Warren Harlan Pease experiences a religious transformation that enables his better understanding and appreciation for those he fought.

One of the foremost critics in contemporary American letters, Christopher Benfey has long been known for his brilliant and incisive essays. Appearing in such publications as the New York Review of Books, the New Republic, and the Times Literary Supplement, Benfey's writings have helped us reimagine the American literary canon. In American Audacity, Benfey gathers his finest writings on eminent American authors (including Emerson, Dickinson, Whitman, Millay, Faulkner, Frost, and Welty), bringing to his subjects---as the New York Times Book Review has said of his earlier work---"a scholar's thoroughness, a critic's astuteness and a storyteller's sense of drama." Although Benfey's interests range from art to literature to social history, this collection focuses on particular American writers and the various ways in which an American identity and culture inform their work. Broken into three sections, "Northerners,""Southerners," and "The Union Reconsidered," American Audacity explores a variety of canonical works, old (Emerson, Dickinson, Millay, Whitman), modern (Faulkner, Dos Passos), and more contemporary (Gary Snyder, E. L. Doctorow). Christopher Benfey is the author of numerous highly regarded books, including Emily Dickinson: Lives of a Poet; The Double Life of Stephen Crane; Degas in New Orleans: Encounters in the Creole World of Kate Chopin and George Washington Cable; and, most recently, The Great Wave: Gilded Age Misfits, Japanese Eccentrics, and the Opening of Old Japan. Benfey's poems have appeared in the Paris Review, Pequod, and Ploughshares. He has held fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the American Council of Learned Societies. Currently he is Mellon Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College. "In its vigorous and original criticism of American writers, Christopher Benfey's American Audacity displays its own audacities on every page." ---William H. Pritchard