A memoir of spiritualism and self-discovery from the acclaimed, award-winning author At fifty, Alix Kates Shulman, author of the celebrated feminist novel, Memoirs of an Ex-Prom Queen, left a city life dense with political activism, family and literary community, and went to live alone on an island off the coast of Maine. On a windswept beach, in a cabin with no plumbing, power, or telephone, she found that she was learning to live all over again....

""Woodsqueer" is sometimes used to describe the mindset of a person who has taken to the wild for an extended period of time. Gretchen Legler is no stranger to life away from the rapid-fire pace of the twenty-first century, which can often lead to a kind of stir-craziness. Woodsqueer chronicles her experiences not just making a living but making a life-in this case, an agrarian one more in tune with the earth on eighty acres in backwoods Maine. Building...

The Little Locksmith begins in 1895 when a specialist straps five-year-old Katharine, then suffering from spinal tuberculosis, to a board with halters and pulleys in a failed attempt to prevent her being a "hunchback." Her mother says that she should be thankful that her parents are able to have her cared for by a famous surgeon; otherwise, she would grow up to be like the "little locksmith," who does jobs at their home; he has a "strange, awful peak...

"A young writer travels to Maine to tell the unusual story of America's longest-running camp devoted to mysticism and the world beyond. They believed they would live forever. So begins Mira Ptacin's haunting account of the women of Camp Etna--an otherworldly community in the woods of Maine that has, since 1876, played host to generations of Spiritualists and mediums dedicated to preserving the links between the mortal realm and the afterlife. Beginning...

En octubre de 1947, Grace Holland atraviesa dos sequías simultáneas. Un verano extremadamente caluroso y seco ha convertido el estado de Maine en un polvorín. Grace y su esposo Gene han perdido el amor y ya casi no se hablan. Con cinco meses de embarazo y cuidando a dos niños pequeños, la vida de Grace se resume nada más a la soledad y sus labores domésticas. Una noche se despierta y descubre que los incendios arrasan la costa y se acercan...

A New York Times Notable Book: A moving glimpse of a life shrewdly examined Extra Innings follows a year in the life of Doris Grumbach, beginning with the release of her previous memoir and journal, Coming into the End Zone, and revealing that the devoted essayist, novelist, and critic possesses as keen an eye in her seventies as she did when she wrote The Spoil of Flowers thirty years earlier.   Grumbach details each passing month and the trials...

A literary master looks ahead to her eighties As her eightieth birthday approaches, Doris Grumbach does not feel melancholy or saddened by the upcoming event, despite the loss of friends such as Kay Boyle and Dorothy Day-instead she takes it as an opportunity both to look backward and to grow. In this, her summer of unexpected content, Grumbach weaves the elegiac and the practical into a delightful tapestry of experience.   She looks deep into her...

"A biography of Margaret Chase Smith, part of the She Persisted chapter book series"--

Merle's Door was a sensation because Ted Kerasote writes so beautifully about his dog and his dog's love of the land. In Adventures wtih Ari, Kathryn Miles takes a step back from the wild places Kerasote describes. When she adopts Ari, an exotic Jindo dog, the two of them begin to explore the outdoors together. A dog sees the world quite differently from a person. For starters, he or she is much closer to the ground-to what we've been trying to preserve...

"Long before the Lost Kitchen became a worldwide dining destination, with every seating filled the day the reservation book opens each spring, Erin French was a girl roaming barefoot on a twenty-five-acre farm, a teenager falling in love with food while working the line at her dad's diner, and a young woman finding her calling as a professional chef at her tiny restaurant tucked into a nineteenth-century mill. This singular memoir ... invites readers...