The Education of a Yankee

An American Memoir

by Judson D. Hale

Written with a delightful sense of irony and a profound tenderness, The Education of a Yankee is an engaging memoir that skillfully reveals the grand, eccentric, and occasionally tragic history of a very unconventional family. Judson Hale was born into Boston’s very proper Brahmin world, the son of a wealthy father who loved sailing and horseback riding and a beautiful, talented mother who loved opera and sang professionally. But readers expecting a conventional account of New England privilege will be delightfully surprised. The fate of Hale’s older brother, Drake, led his parents to embark on a dramatic, extravagant, and visionary undertaking . . . Read more/Buy

The Tortoise Diaries

Daily Meditations for Creativity and Slowing Down
Christian McEwen, Illustrated by Laetitia Bermejo

A mini treasure-house of poems and quotations, centered on creativity and slowing down

We called him tortoise because he taught us. —Lewis Carroll

A daily reader of prayer and meditation in serving the practice of lectio divina or “divine reading” based on the twelve chapters of Christian McEwen’s 2011 book called World Enough & Time: On Creativity and Slowing Down. Focusing in turn on different subjects, each month introduces a new subject ranging from “the art of slowing down,” considering good company and conversation, investigating “child time,” to the joys and relaxation to be found in walking. Read more/Buy

World Enough & Time Audiobook

Christian McEwen

Christian McEwen’s classic book is now available as an audiobook —read by McEwen herself!

The human mind, writes Christian McEwen, is “fed and nourished by every sight and smell and sound that we encounter, from the movement of the clouds to the shrill of the birds outside our morning window.”

Listen as she  quotes widely from literary and spiritual thinkers to explore the fruits of life lived slowly, deliberately, and with mindfulness.

This audio format is a USB card that plugs into your computer and can be loaded into whatever audio program you use. To buy . . .

Stonlea

A Timeworn Gilded Age Survivor Transformed

by Peter W. and Victoria Chave Clement

Stonlea: A Timeworn Gilded Age Survivor Transformed documents the painstaking steps involved in the preservation and renovation of an 1891 Peabody & Stearns summer house. The book describes the renovators’ techniques and specifically addresses the renovation of the fabric of the building, including the various energy-conservation strategies and mechanical systems employed, as well as the whys and wherefores of the design. It is intended to serve as a model and inspiration for similar undertakings, regardless of size.

As Polly Guth, Stonlea’s owner says: “There’s much to tell you. The book is about how the house was lived in when it was designed, and how the design has been altered over time, to fit each generation’s “modern-day” use. . . . Why did I preserve and restore this large ark of a house? I think that it is a matter of stewardship.   Read more/Buy

Claremont Boy

My New Hampshire Roots and the Gift of Memory

by Joseph D. Steinfield

In Claremont Boy, Joe Steinfield shares humorous, insightful, and often poignant recollections spanning more than half a century, recalling his New Hampshire childhood as well as his personal and professional adventures over the years. In this collection of short pieces, readers will meet immigrant grandparents and other relatives, influential public school teachers, personalities as diverse as Julia Child, a Hebrew-speaking Muslim from the Northern Caucasus Republic of Adygeya, Ozzy Osbourne, and a P.L.O. leader from Jericho in the West Bank.

“Joe Steinfield magically paints pictures of an earlier, simpler time, unforgettable images of people struggling for and achieving their various American dreams. He will carry you away with his tales, which all give eternal lessons in human nature.”   Read more/Buy

Twine

Poems

by David Koehn

The 2013 May Sarton New Hampshire Prize Winner for Poetry

David Koehn’s imagination, rambunctious and abundant, keeps its footing: a sense of balance like his description of fishing: “Feeling the weight . . . of the measurement of air.” That sense of weight and air, rhythm and fact, the ethereal and the brutal, animates images like boxers of the bare-fist era: “Hippo-bellied/And bitter, bulbous in their bestiary masks.” An original and distinctively musical poet.  —Robert Pinsky

DAVID KOEHN has been published in a wide range of journals including The Bitter Oleander, Chain, Diner, Artful Dodge, Painted Bride, Poems and Plays, . . . . Read more/Buy

Raking the Winter Leaves

New and Selected Poems

By Gary Margolis

Award-winning poet Gary Margolis gathers four books of poetry in Raking the Winter Leaves: New and Selected Poems, including a selection of poems from his new collection, The Other Flag. These poems speak from the heart of New England and our nation, from the worldly places and habitats, stripped by war and the heated climate of politics. They speak in a style familiar to his readers of almost fifty years with thoughtful feeling, humor, curiosity and the surprises . . . . Read more/Buy

Dwelling in Possibility

Searching for the Soul of Shelter

by Howard Mansfield

What qualities are missing in our homes? How can we regain them?
The mystery that attracts Howard Mansfield’s attention is that some houses have life—are home, are dwellings, and others aren’t. Dwelling, he says, is an old-fashioned word that we’ve misplaced. When we live heart and soul, we dwell. Read More/Buy

The Next Hunger

Poems by Kimberly Cloutier Green

The title of this lovely and masterful collection, The Next Hunger, refers to the spiritual hunger that grows out of a “world of craving.” The lyric forms of these poems shift and change as the poet traces the links between the beautiful and tragic, the grace-filled and desolate, in all our daily devotions—the apprehension of Mystery in every worldly thing leading, finally, to self-forgetfulness. Read more/buy

Like a Bird Flying Home

Poetry and Letters to his Daughter from New Hampshire

by Walter Clark, Edited by Francelia Mason Clark and Alison Clark

“Plows to the left and plows to the right! Tired men sipping coffee in the cabs of their pickups, state plows with eight tons of sand on board, men making the best of their snowblowers, old women crossing the road to church wrapped in white clouds like Venus calling on Aeneas.”

These are the voices of the late Walter Clark, serious prose writer of both close descriptions and idiosyncratic depictions of landscape he loved.

Read more / buy