Ex-urbanite Tom Parker's award-winning weekly newspaper column, The Way Home, explores the natural world and rural Kansas and his place in it-an evolving process involving hit bugs, prescient store clerks, daredevil rodents, divine beetles, malevolent weather, failed quests, and the tribulations of living in a century-old house. Along the way he explains the true nature of women, the character of the months, and how sometimes not finding a sought-after bird can be better than finding it. Besides learning to see the little things of this world, readers follow Parker down the dark road into depression, and beyond.

In "Dispatches from the Front" we have a unique and special conduit from ten American wars. In the correspondents' words ring the passion and drama of war from the American Revolution to the Persian Gulf. The work of Thomas Paine, Stephen Crane, Ernest Hemingway, Edward R. Murrow, and more than 60 other correspondents tells of America's wars as they happened, on the battlefield and on the home front. 66 photos.

These readings provide an overview of Indiana history based upon primary and secondary acounts of significant events and personalities. This treasure trove includes work by George Rogers Clark, Emma Lou Thornbrough, George Ade, Dan Wakefield, and many more.

This is a biography of a great nineteenth-century American statesman and U.S. Senator.

"You ought to see Livy & me, now-a-days—you never saw such a serenely satisfied couple of doves in all your life. I spent Jan 1, 2, 3 & 5 there, & left at 8 last night. With my vile temper & variable moods, it seems an incomprehensible miracle that we two have been right together in the same house half the time for a year & a half, & yet have never had a cross word, or a lover's 'tiff,' or a pouting spell, or a misunderstanding, or the faintest shadow of a jealous suspicion. Now isn't that absolutely wonderful? Could I have had such an experience with any other girl on earth? I am perfectly certain I could not. . . . We are to be married on Feb. 2d." So begins Volume 4 of the letters, with Samuel Clemens anticipating his wedding to Olivia L. Langdon. The 338 letters in this volume document the first two years of a loving marriage that would last more than thirty years. They recount, in Clemens's own inimitable voice, a tumultuous time: a growing international fame, the birth of a sickly first child, and the near-fatal illness of his wife. At the beginning of 1870, fresh from the success of The Innocents Abroad, Clemens is on "the long agony" of a lecture tour and planning to settle in Buffalo as editor of the Express. By the end of 1871, he has moved to Hartford and is again on tour, anticipating the publication of Roughing It and the birth of his second child. The intervening letters show Clemens bursting with literary ideas, business schemes, and inventions, and they show him erupting with frustration, anger, and grief, but more often with dazzling humor and surprising self-revelation. In addition to Roughing It, Clemens wrote some enduringly popular short pieces during this period, but he saved some of his best writing for private letters, many of which are published here for the first time.

"I love these poems." —Joe Dunthorne, author of Submarine Funny, surprising and lyrical, these poems range from the deserts of the Southwest to the abysses of Facebook. From online dating to beauty pageants, Greek mythology to road trips, Leigh Stein gives us resilient young women in longing and in love. Post-confessional—like Sylvia Plath raised on MTV, or Anne Sexton on Twitter—the poems seduce with a narrative hook or startle with a pop culture reference, all the while wrestling fresh meaning out of our fantasy-saturated modern lives. Leigh Stein’s first novel, The Fallback Plan, was hailed as “beautiful, funny, thrilling, and true” by Gary Shteyngart (Super Sad True Love Story). A former New Yorker staffer and frequent contributor to its “Book Bench” blog, Stein is also the author of the poetry chapbook How to Mend a Broken Heart with Vengeance, and is the winner of the Amy Award from Poets & Writers magazine. She lives in Brooklyn.