A semifictional novel incorporating terrorism, war, murder, financial collapse, and political intrigue that test one man's personal principles to the limit. The first major novel in a generation based upon behavioral science and the first ever from the rapidly developing biobehavioral orientation. Entertaining and enlightening reading for the intellectually curious desirous of understanding the how on both a societal and a personal level.

Based on the true story of a mixed-race French teenager who came to Boston in the '70s and never left, How to be a Homeless Frenchman tells a tale of two countries, France and the United States, bound together in weird and wonderful ways by war, music, and the love of good cheese. In this comedic fable, Bertrand leaves France to escape the difficult legacy of a schizophrenic mother who was orphaned by the Nazis. But what starts out as a summer semester living rent free in Wellesley turns into a series of increasingly odd and funny adventures that finds him squatting in the Coolidge Corner Movie Theater, and then living in a tool shed in Dorchester. "If your happiness is costly, then you paid too much," his mother used to say. How to be a Homeless Frenchman is an exploration of just how much happiness can be found in the ordinary joys of being alive on a sunny day.

Rome: 96 AD. When the body of Sextus Verpa, a notorious senatorial informer and libertine, is found stabbed to death in his bedroom, suspicion falls on his household slaves--a potential death sentence for them all. The emperor Domitian orders Vice Prefect Pliny to investigate. However, the Roman Games have just begun and for the next fifteen days the law courts are in recess. If Pliny can't identify the murderer in that time, Verpa's entire slave household will be burned alive in the arena. Plinius teams up with Martial, a starving author of bawdy verses and hanger-on to the city's glitterati. Pooling their talents, they unravel a plot that involves Christian "atheists," worshipers of Isis, sleek courtiers, a vengeful concubine, a child bride, and a paranoid emperor.

This wonderfully rich anthology uses the soul-shaping power of story, speech, and song to help Americans realize more deeply--and appreciate more fully--who they are as citizens of the United States.

At once inspiring and thought provoking, What So Proudly We Hail features dozens of selections on American identity, character, and civic life by our country's greatest writers and leaders--from Mark Twain to John Updike, from George Washington to Theodore Roosevelt, from Willa Cather to Flannery O'Connor, from Benjamin Franklin to Martin Luther King Jr., from Francis Scott Key to Irving Berlin.

Developing robust American citizens involves educating the heart as well as the mind. It is not enough to understand our nation's lofty principles or know our history; thoughtful and engaged citizens require cultivated moral imaginations and fitting sentiments and attitudes--matters both displayed in and nurtured by our great works of imaginative literature and rhetoric.

Featuring the editors' insightful and instructive commentary, What So Proudly We Hail illuminates our national identity, the American creed, the American character, and the virtues and aspirations of active citizenship. This marvelous book will not only be a fixture on bedside tables; it will also spark conversations in homes, schools, colleges, and reading groups everywhere.

An art history graduate student stumbles upon the love of her life and a long-lost manuscript at a medieval monastery outside Orvieto in Umbria. The manuscript records the memories of a monk, Brother Matteo, who in 1263--as a thirteen-year-old foundling, with his Master, his Lady, and his "brother," the gentle giant Giorgio--became part of an unofficial investigation into the newly reported miracle in the ancient town of Bolsena. According to the report, when Father Peter of Bohemia said the words of consecration ("This is My Body") at a pilgrims' mass, the communion host bled Christ's blood onto the altar cloth. In the course of their investigation, Matteo and his family are drawn into the political turmoil of the times, and Matteo learns that this world is, after all, a vale of tears--but also a place of miracles.

Traffic Stop contains some of Heller's best poems written from the 1970s to 2009. Themes include being an assertive nontraditional woman, having close relationships, teaching college English and women's studies, loving nature, traveling, being involved in the anti-Vietnam War movement, mourning her father's death, being an artist/entertainer/writer, and experiencing folk music at different stages of her life. Some poems concern Chicago and the University of Chicago.

A new chapbook of poems, about which the poet Timothy Donnelly says: "Like a steampunk great-grandniece of Lorine Niedecker, Stephanie Anderson has cobbled together a quirky, hardscrabble, and defiantly pre-digital idiolect in The Nightyard. Scrupulously crafted and a little austere in temperament, Anderson's poems read, in part, like studies of the Protestant work ethic run amok, trusting in hard facts and practical tips to tame a mind 'too bound to reverie.' Anderson offsets the smothered music of 'a barrel organ being-quelched' with the racket that emerges when 'all the tiny pianos begin to tilt off the shelves,' correcting the rage for order with a dose of human chaos. The poems in The Nightyard are wise, tireless, uncommonly passionate, and truly hard-won. Trust in them."

The Puppet is an English translation from Arabic by William Maynard Hutchins of a tragic novel--about the rise and fall of political power in an oasis in Libya--by the award-winning Arabic-language author Ibrahim al-Koni, a native of Libya and a citizen of Switzerland, who is also a Tuareg and draws heavily on Tuareg mythology in his novels. The hero discovers to his dismay that the people he most despises are responsible for his rise to power.

The story of a woman's struggle against her mother and God for acceptance and peace, with traditional and contemporary midrashim on the narrative of the "wife of Lot" woven into the story.

Stories of a wide variety of ordinary people and mystics working to make sense of their lives in rural South Carolina.