Sheds

Howard Mansfield

Photographs by Joanna Eldredge Morrissey

“Sheds are buildings where utility and beauty are one: woodsheds and barns, boathouses and bob houses, covered bridges and summer cabins. Sheds, in addition to holding old tools and broken chairs, hold a few hints about living well.” 

Howard Mansfield draws on material from his recent book Dwelling in Possibility while exploring different types of sheds found around New England and beyond. Sheds shows the connection between the design of these structures and their roles in our lives. Read more/Buy

Rust Belt Boy

Stories of an American Childhood

Paul Hertneky

“The inside truth of a life, or a culture–of anything–cannot be tricked together. It has to grow from what’s been bred in the bone and tested in the day’s real living. Paul Hertneky’s RUST BELT BOY has the savor of that living. It is a rueful, bittersweet expression of loss and a brave reenactment of memory.”
— Sven Birkerts, author of THE GUTENBERG ELEGIES and THE OTHER WALK.

In Paul Hertneky’s RUST BELT BOY: Stories of an American Childhood  the author counts himself among the millions of Baby Boomers who fled the industrial north upon fulfilling their parents’ dreams of a college education, leaving behind a rich cultural legacy that has all but disappeared. Read more/Buy

Watching Great Meadow

Gordon Russell

“Gordon Russell’s Watching Great Meadow is an eloquent, moving account of the astounding integrity and beauty of an ecological community’s adaptation in the wake of unprecedented transformation. This journal is a gift.”    – Lisa Brooks, author of The Common Pot: The Recovery of Native Space in the Northeast

Conservationist Gordon Russell shares his observations and insights surrounding the 100-acre wetlands that are his backyard. Watching Great Meadow (April 2016, $24.95, Paperback/Gatefold) is a delightful celebration of nature as well as a cautionary tale. Read more/Buy

Notes from Old Lyme

Life on the Marsh and other Essays 

Sydney Williams

“Step into the calm water of common sense. The essays of Sydney Williams are deep and clear—cool enough to refresh and warm enough for comfort. One essay is about frogs who turn up in Sydney’s swimming pool. Read Notes from Old Lyme and you’ll see why even the frogs are attracted.” —P. J. O’Rourke

After forty-seven years on Wall Street, Williams writes from home about what truly matters. Notes from Old Lyme (May 2016, $22.50, Paperback/Gatefold) reflects on the precious moments of life spent in contemplation, away from the hustle and bustle of the everyday grind. Read more/Buy

Devil’s Paintbrush

Poems

Desirée Alvarez

The winner of the 2015 May Sarton New Hampshire Poetry Prize!

“These poems often shot shivers up my spine. Some made me cry. This is a book I’ll want to read over and over.” – Judge Mekeel Mcbride

Desirée Alvarez is a visual poet who weaves history and the actual with the miraculous and mythic to form magical-realist compositions addressing human interaction with the natural world. Devil’s Paintbrush (March 2016, $16.95, Paperback) is Alvarez’s first full length book of poems. Read more/Buy

You Were That White Bird

Shelley Girdner

“All love is really crumbs / to be scattered and retrieved.”

Shelley Girdner’s first full-length poetry collection, YOU WERE THAT WHITE BIRD: Poems (April 5, 2016  $16.50, trade paper), looks at the lifespan of a relationship – from the beginning of love until its end, and how different it can look with time and distance. Read more/Buy

Now The Day is Over

My Five Years at South Kent School

Paul Matthews

Noted painter Paul Matthews looks back on his preparatory school years at the South Kent School in Connecticut. Read More/Buy

Available Light

Philip Booth and the Gift of Place

Jeanne Braham

“Being a poet is not a career. It’s a life.” – Philip Booth

Poet Philip Booth (1925-2007) wrote ten books of poetry, studied with Robert Frost, and won fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts. Although critics loved his spare, emotionally intelligent, quintessentially New England writing style, Booth never attracted the wide readership enjoyed by contemporaries like Maxine Kumin and Robert Lowell.

Author Jeanne Braham hopes to ignite new interest in Booth’s poetry, and how he spent a lifetime looking into “how words see.” While writing the first book about Booth’s life, AVAILABLE LIGHT: Philip Booth and the Gift of Place (December 1, 2015 | $23.95 trade paper | Bauhan Publishing), she dug through his papers at Dartmouth’s Rauner Special Collections Library and the Castine Historical Society in his longtime home of Castine, Maine. She reread all Booth’s poetry and prose writing, and interviewed his family, friends, former students, and fellow poets. Read more/Buy

Where Have All The Animals Gone

My Travels with Karl Ammann

Dale Peterson

Over the last fifteen years, Dale Peterson has collaborated with photographer Karl Ammann to produce three books about apes, elephants, and giraffes. For this book, Peterson accompanied the iconoclastic Swiss photographer through Africa and Southeast Asia, serving as his Boswell and discovering along the way magnificent splendor, unexpected humor, and tragic loss. Where Have All the Animals Gone? includes photos and an afterword by Ammann, who has lived for decades in Kenya with his wife, two adopted chimpanzees, and a home-raised cheetah.

“This book is about traveling through a vanishing world, saying good-bye to biodiversity, watching as the human presence mushrooms and pushes the planet’s wild animals and wild habitats away and over the edge,” writes Ammann in the book’s afterword. “It’s not the end of the world. It is the end of the wild.” Read more/Buy

Words from the Wild

Favorite columns from A Yankee Notebook 

Willem Lange

Emmy award-winning storyteller and beloved host of NHPTV’s Windows to the Wild, Willem Lange, presents a new collection of favorite tales from the wilds of New England and beyond. Willem Lange holds the mantra, “do something each week you’ve never done before.” He shares with us some of his best experiences connecting with fascinating new people, places, and to the wild itself. Words from the Wild inspires us to get out there and live. Read more/Buy