In the early 1970's Jim Lawrence unplugged from his well-fed, well-bred urban background, rejected the main staves of the American dream and wandered into the wilderness of adventure in search of a meaningful life. Callused Hands Hungry Heart is a journey across the working landscape of the country, from logging forests in the great Northwest, to commercial fishing and relentless hours in fish canneries; from life in a remote Aleutian island to hopping freights across the country. This book celebrates the romance, adventure, pitfalls and perseverance of a life on the bumpy road less traveled.

"Generous and entertaining." -Publishers Weekly (starred review) Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay From the #1 New York Times bestselling author and columnist comes a "fiercely funny, powerfully smart, and remarkably brave" (Cheryl Strayed) collection of heartwarming personal essays "as wonderful as her fiction" (Mindy Kaling) that "will enthusiastically reach out to readers and swiftly draw them close" (Publishers Weekly , starred review). Jennifer Weiner is many things: a bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and an "unlikely feminist enforcer" (The New Yorker ). She's also a mom, a daughter, and a sister, a clumsy yogini, and a reality-TV devotee. In this "unflinching look at her own experiences" (Entertainment Weekly ), Jennifer fashions tales of modern-day womanhood as uproariously funny and moving as the best of Nora Ephron and Tina Fey. No subject is off-limits in these intimate and honest essays: sex, weight, envy, money, her mother's coming out of the closet, her estranged father's death. From lonely adolescence to hearing her six-year-old daughter say the F word-fat-for the first time, Jen dives into the heart of female experience, with the wit and candor that have endeared her to fans all over the world.

Of all American poets Field, it seems to me, best understood the heart of a child. Other sweet singers have given us the homely life of the Western cabin, the unexpected tenderness of the mountaineer, the loyalty and quaint devotion of the negro servant, but to Field alone, and in preëminent degree, was given that keen insight into child nature, that compassion for its faults, that sympathy with its sorrows and that delight in its joyous innocence which will endear him to his race as long as our language is read. His poems too always kindle afresh that spark of child-life which still lies smouldering in the hearts of us all, no matter how poor and sorrowful our beginnings. As we read, how the old memories come back to us! Old hopes, rosy with the expectation of the indefinite and unknowable. Old misgivings and fears; old rompings and holidays and precious idle hours. We know them all, and we know how true they are. We remember in our own case the very hour and day, and how it all happened and why, and what came of it,—joys and sorrows as real as our keenest experiences since.

Most Christians work outside the church, so for many--if not most--of us, daily labor seems divorced from Christian beliefs and ethics. Work is an inevitable factor of human existence, and yet we do not have appropriate theological resources to help us reflect on its nature and meaning in light of Christian understanding and contemporary American culture. How can we as Christians understand our work as a dimension of our faith?

Sometimes, the greatest treasures that life has to offer go unnoticed behind the frantic pace of modern society. What if the people, places and things we have categorized in our lives as no more than average turned out to be something quite extraordinary? Discovering Joye is the amazing discovery of Joye Kanelakos’s life’s work in poetry. It was at her deathbed where Kanelakos told her children about a hidden box that held the secrets to her creative passion—a compilation of poems that had gone unnoticed… until now. Bestselling author, Jim Stovall takes us behind the facades that shroud our everyday lives and helps us to see the masterpieces that lie beneath the people, places and things we thought we knew.

From the author of the "flawless" (The New York Times Book Review) classic Bastard Out of Carolina comes Cavedweller, once again demonstrating Allison's umatched strengths as a storyteller. Reading "like a thematic sequel" (The New Yorker) to her first novel, Cavedweller tackles questions of forgiveness, mother-daughter bonds, and the strength of the human spirit. When Delia Byrd packs up her old Datsun and her daughter Cissy and gets on the Santa Monica Freeway heading south and east, she is leaving everything she has known for ten years: the tinsel glitter of the rock 'n' roll world; her dreams of singing and songwriting; and a life lived on credit cards and whiskey with a man who made promises he couldn't keep. Delia Byrd is going back to Cayro, Georgia, to reclaim her life--and the two daughters she left behind...Told in the incantatory voice of one of America's most eloquent storytellers, Cavedweller is a sweeping novel of the human spirit, the lost and hidden recesses of the heart, and the place where violence and redemption intersect.

On the eve of their Silver Anniversary, Mary Gooch is waiting for her husband Jimmy -- still every inch the handsome star athlete he was in high school -- to come home. As night turns to day, it becomes frighteningly clear to Mary that he is gone. Through the years, disappointment and worry have brought Mary's life to a standstill, and she has let her universe shrink to the well-worn path from the bedroom to the refrigerator. But her husband's disappearance startles her out of her inertia, and she begins a desperate search. For the first time in her life, she boards a plane and flies across the country to find her lost husband. So used to hiding from the world, Mary finds that in the bright sun and broad vistas of California, she is forced to look up from the pavement. And what she finds fills her with inner strength she's never felt before. Through it all, Mary not only finds kindred spirits, but reunites with a more intimate stranger no longer sequestered by fear and habit: herself.