By the middle of the nineteenth century, the New England port of New Bedford was among the five richest cities in America. Its wealth was derived from a single source – whale oil, the "fossil fuel" of the early Industrial Revolution, providing light and lubrication to the burgeoning economy of young America. The New Bedford whaling fleet was the most numerous, adventurous, and far-ranging in the world, setting off on voyages that often lasted for three or four years and extended as far as the Antarctic and Siberia.
When the whalemen were not engaged in hunting whales or routine maintenance, some of their time was spent carving materials harvested from the whales themselves: the teeth and bones of sperm whales, baleen from right and bowhead whales, and walrus tusks acquired by barter from Native people in the Arctic. The resulting practical and decorative objects, often intricately carved and carefully crafted, would provide mementos and treasured souvenirs for loved ones back home, at voyage end. The range of the work is extraordinary – not simply the decorated sperm whale teeth that the word "scrimshaw" ordinarily brings to mind, but also crimpers and canes, umbrellas and swifts. Anything that could be made of ivory and bone was considered fair game.
The collection at the New Bedford Whaling Museum is the largest, most varied, and most representative in the world. And in this book, with the subject's leading expert, curator Stuart M. Frank as your guide, you will be introduced to every possible permutation of these whalemen's fancies. The 700 detailed and dramatic photographs are stunning, the captions revealing, and the stories behind the objects themselves compelling. If the arts of the sea and the sailor hold any interest, this comprehensive survey from the best collection in existence will keep you enthralled and is surely destined to be considered the last word on the subject for decades to come.

Dr. Stuart M. Frank is Senior Curator at the New Bedford Whaling Museum, Executive Director Emeritus of the Kendall Whaling Museum, and Founder/Director of the Scrim­shaw Forensics Laboratory®. A native of New York City, he was educated at Wesleyan, Yale, and Brown, and is the author of books on maritime songs as well as on scrimshaw and the art of whaling. With his wife, Dr. Mary Malloy, he has performed concert tours on four continents, presenting traditional sailors' songs and ballads excavated from shipboard manuscripts in the New Bedford Whaling Museum collection.

In this, Ernest Hebert's most autobiographical novel to date, Jack Landry, haunted by dreams of a tragedy that occurred centuries before he was born, is introduced as a promising high school baseball player from the mill town of Keene, New Hampshire. A young boy when the novel opens in July 1953, Jack and his best friend, Elphege Beaupre, devise a motto to live by: Never back down, never instigate. It's a rule of stubborn passivity Jack will follow to the end of his days.

Unconsciously burdened by his French-Canadian heritage, hemmed in by his working-class parents' submission to authority, the church, and a life of hard work, young Jack still has big dreams. Yet his warring values and desires lead to two mistakes in his youth that will color the rest of his days. The first causes great harm to his first and only love, a half-Cajun Gulf Coast girl (and the boss's daughter). In a world where one is asked to take responsibilities for actions but perhaps not suffer the consequences, Jack punishes himself. Following the tenets of Catholicism, he embarks on a lifelong penance to atone for his sin. The subsequent renunciation of his dreams appears to be Jack's second mistake. But is it?

Hebert is a master storyteller who, in addition to creating memorable characters and gripping narratives, does not shy away from the big questions. In Never Back Down, he raises more than a few: At what price, success? Is redemption possible? Can one live by a motto? What does it mean to take responsibility? The portrait Hebert gives us of Jack Landry's life of menial labor, joie de vivre, and a love that just won't die not only raises these questions but answers them as well.

Ernest Hebert lives in New Hampshire and teaches writing at Dartmouth College. His novels in­clude The Old American and the acclaimed six-volume Darby series.

"Ernie Hebert's novels don't just capture New England; they've become a part of it."
—Jodi Picoult

"One of New England's best writers."  
—Yankee Magazine

"He writes with a grace, precision, and humor that makes one feel he will do for the hinterlands what John Updike did for the suburbs."
—New York Times

Nominated for the National Book Award in 1952, Naomi Replansky's first book Ring Song dazzled critics with its candor and freshness of language. Here at long last is the new and collected work of a lifetime by a writer hailed as "one of the most brilliant American poets" by George Oppen. Replansky is a poet whose verse combines the compression of Emily Dickinson, the passion of Anna Akhmatova, and the music of W.H. Auden. These poems, which Marie Ponsot calls "sixty years of a free woman's song," are Replansky's hymns to the struggle for justice and equality and to the enduring beauty of life in our dangerous world.

Advance praise for the Collected Poems:
 
"Naomi Replansky's poetry rings with reality and wisdom, and it is always song. Her observant, political wit and gravity are as piercing and as necessary now as ever – and I would say more so . . . her voice and her way of reading are among the very best we have."
—Jean Valentine
 
"Naomi Replansky is a major American poet, long overdue for acclaim. She writes skillfully, both in and out of strict form, crafting lines carefully, with concision and rare intensity. Her poems are the real thing; her collected work of a lifetime deserves the widest possible hearing."
—X. J. Kennedy
 
"Here in a book, the work of a life. All the poet Naomi Replansky is here: the dry, quiet voice, the incantatory and familiar rhythms that are never quite what you think they are, the wit, the touch of comfort, and the tongue-lash, the modesty that entirely frees her from trend, and the audacity – above all the audacity, the risk-taking, the nerve of the woman! These poems bear honest witness to what it was to be alive, really alive, in the twentieth century, and I turn to them again and again for courage to face the dark opening of the twenty-first."
—Ursula Le Guin

"The free and savvy poems of Naomi Replansky soar, in a speech that urgently affirms a strength we've almost forgotten we have. Clear as water and as necessary, they quicken our solitary selves. The light pulse of their instantly shared energy shows us each other and joins us in our eagerness to speak out as they do, against confusion. They are bold and embolden us. We hear the true polis alive under the dirty air of truthless ping and we participate in its power. To participate in power is freedom, Cicero says. These poems, proposing sixty years of a free woman's song, wake us up to it. Their cadences and claims uncover the given world and make us think. We do so willingly because the beat they keep is the rhythm of the heart."
—Marie Ponsot

What strikes a reader first encountering Don Share's work is the electric energy of his lines, their contemporary music and movement. Reading Wishbone, Share's third book, is akin to picking up the one clear station still transmitting, the frenetic static of the world replaced by a strong signal broadcast. Share's poems are contrapuntal ripostes to the Babel of the present, a voice not above the noise, but speaking from its midst in a self-possessed language that muscles a new way into meaning. The poems take place in America's backyards and byways, intensive care rooms and airports, haunted by fathers and Fathers, informed by philosophy, the Judeo-Christian tradition, and pop culture. One finds the poet there too, less his portrait than a self-deprecating likeness in the crowd (the Renaissance master in the corner of the canvas) decrying and defending, his "umbrella out and Cubs cap on . . . curiously Odyssean in the Loop," and always at the ready.

Don Share is senior editor of Poetry magazine in Chicago. His books in­clude Squandermania (Salt Publishing, 2007), Union (Zoo Press, 2002), and Seneca in English (Penguin Classics, 1998). His critical edition of Basil Bunting's poems is forthcoming from Faber and Faber, as well as Bunting's Persia from Flood Editions. His translations of Miguel Hernández, collected in I Have Lots of Heart (Bloodaxe Books, 1997), were awarded the Times Literary Supplement Translation Prize, the Premio Valle Inclán, and the P.E.N./New England "Discovery" Award.

Praise for Don Share

"Don Share's work is compressed as a haiku, intent as a tanka, witty as a sonnet, witless as a song, relentless as an exposé, patter without pretension . . . his elegant poetry, exposed as a haiku, expansive as a renga, boisterous as a bridge, happy as Delmore Schwartz with Lou Reed and vice versa, vivacious as the living day . . . built out of attention, music and sight."    
—David Shapiro

"The poet's awareness of how daily life refuses to cohere into a consoling pattern is beautifully mirrored by his conviction that language itself signals a fall from grace and unity and emotional wholeness."   
—Tom Sleigh

"Share is one of the more gifted craftsmen we have writing in America today."
—Erin Belieu, Boston Review

"[Don Share] is sage and deeply hilarious."   
—Ed Park

"Few poets manage such dexterous and fresh music."   
—Alice Fulton

Arthur Ransome is best known for the twelve immortal "Swallows and Amazons" books he wrote on his return from Russia in 1928. From his prose he appears a genial and gentle Englishman, who, like his protagonists, pursued benign maritime adventures. Nothing could be further from the truth. By the time he wrote his masterpieces, the most interesting episodes of his life were well behind him. For Ransome led a double, and often tortured, life. Before his fame as an author, he was notorious for very different reasons: between 1917 and 1924, he was the Russian correspondent for the Daily News and the Manchester Guardian, and his sympathy for the Bolshevik regime gave him unparalleled access to its leaders, policies, politics, and plots. He was also the lover, and later the husband, of Evgenia Shelepina, Trotsky's private secretary, as well as friends with Karl Radek, the Bolshevik's Chief of Propaganda, and Felix Dzerzhinsky, founder of the secret police. In denying the horrors that followed the Revolution, and in considering Stalin a latter-day Cromwell, he was the bane of the British establishment. Yet his contacts earned him not only the admiration of liberals, both in the U.K. and the U.S., but a place in the British Secret Intelligence Service.In this biography, Chambers traces Ransome's life back to his earliest childhood, his struggles as a hack writer, and his flight from a disastrous marriage, then on to the decade he spent in Russia during that country's violent, formative years, ostensibly as a journalist, but more accurately as a spy (albeit a sympathetic one). The book's genius lies in Chambers's complete understanding of the Revolution's complexity, the rise and fall of the factions, the extreme personalities who guided it and were often sacrificed to it. He explores the tensions Ransome always felt between his allegiance to England's decencies and the egalitarian Bolshevik vision, between competing romantic attachments, between the Lake Country he loved and always considered home and the lure of the Russian steppes to which he repeatedly returned. What emerges is not only history, recorded by someone who was there to witness it, but also the story of an immensely troubled and conflicted human being not entirely at home in either culture or country.Roland Chambers is a biographer and children's book author and 2009 winner of the Biographers' Club Best First Biography Prize. He divides his time between London and Connecticut. Praise for The Last Englishman

"In this fascinating and thoroughly researched book, Roland Chambers gives us the materials that we need to understand this elusive, adventurous, enigmatic man...." -- The Times (UK), Stella Rimington, former director-general of MI5"Chambers's triumph is to chronicle the crucial period of physical, emotional and intellectual exile through which Arthur Ransome finally came home."
-- The Guardian

"This sturdy biography contains some surprises for those readers who know Ransome (1884-1967) as the author of the Swallows and Amazons series of children's books."
-- Booklist

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The Forty Days of Musa Dagh is Franz Werfel's masterpiece that brought him international acclaim in 1933, drawing the world's attention to the Armenian genocide. This is the story of how the people of several Armenian villages in the mountains along the coast of present-day Turkey and Syria chose not to obey the deportation order of the Turkish government. Instead, they fortified a plateau on the slopes of Musa Dagh—Mount Moses—and repelled Turkish soldiers and military police during the summer of 1915 while holding out hope for the warships of the Allies to save them.





The original English translation by Geoffrey Dunlop has been revised and expanded by translator James Reidel and scholar Violet Lutz. The Dunlop translation, had excised approximately 25% of the original two-volume text to accommodate the Book-of-the-Month club and to streamline the novel for film adaptation. The restoration of these passages and their new translation gives a fuller picture of the extensive inner lives of the characters, especially the hero Gabriel Bagradian, his wife Juliette, their son Stephan—and Iskuhi Tomasian, the damaged, nineteen-year-old Armenian woman whom the older Bagradian loves. What is more apparent now is the personal story that Werfel tells, informed by events and people in his own life, a device he often used in his other novels as well, in which the author, his wife Alma, his stepdaughter Manon Gropius, and others in his circle are reinvented. Reidel has also revised the existing translation to free Werfel's stronger usages from Dunlop's softening of meaning, his effective censoring of the novel in order to fit the mores and commercial contingencies of the mid-1930s.




In bringing The Forty Days of Musa Dagh back into print and revising the English translation, we aim to make this new Verba Mundi edition more faithful to the book Thomas Mann read "with pleasure and profit" in German.




"In every sense a true and thrilling novel… It tells a story which it is almost one's duty as an intelligent human being to read. And one's duty here becomes one's pleasure also."

—New York Times Book Review

"Forty Days will invade your senses and keep the blood pounding. Once read, it will never be forgotten."

—New York Times




"Werfel's book… did more than the efforts of any diplomat, journalist, or historian to encourage speech about the unspeakable. It arrives today—when Syria and Congo are killing fields—as a timely reminder that savagery thrives in silence."


—The Barnes and Noble Review




"A crackling read. Symphonic in its handling of profound themes, respectful of its most vacillating characters, Werfel's novel is a grand and satisfying story about the necessities and difficulties of leadership."

—Booklist

Back when we were both very young, Godine had the honor of publishing the first two poetry books of Mark Doty, who has since gone on to considerable and deserved fame and fortune, winning the National Book Award for Poetry in 2008, as well as honors from the National Book Critics Circle, the LA Times Book Prize, a Whiting Award, and (as the first American in its history) the T.S.Eliot Prize. Here, reset and containing almost two dozen poems that appeared in small magazines but have never before been collected, are the complete texts of Turtle, Swan and Bethlehem in Broad Daylight to which Doty has contributed a new introduction. Essentially a new book, and important both for its history and its new inclusions.

"A new book of poems – or of anything – by Mark Doty is good news in a dark time. The precision, daring, scope, elegance of his compassion and the language in which he embodies it are a reassuring pleasure."
—W.S.Merwin

"If it were mine to invent the poet to complete the century of William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, I would create Mark Doty just as he is, a maker of big, risky, fearless poems in which ordinary human experience becomes music."
—Philip Levine

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              In February 1940 Franz Werfel began work on an "intricate little tale of a marriage," which, he warned his publisher, was quite a departure from his best-selling fiction of the 1930s. This new short novel was to be a tragicomic tale of contemporary history, a glimpse into a world that was soon to become inhospitable and uninhabitable.




Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand is, in many ways, a prequel to what is known as Holocaust literature. It is about a long suppressed love triangle between Leonidas Tachezy, a high-level Austrian career bureaucrat, his younger, trophy wife Amelie, and a Jewish woman from his past, Vera Wormser, with whom he'd fallen in love when she was fourteen. After his marriage, Leonidas encounters Vera in a German university town where she is studying philosophy. He makes a promise that implies marriage, but drops out of her life entirely to return to a comfortable existence until one day when a letter arrives, addressed with Vera's unmistakable handwriting in pale blue ink. Like Humbert Humbert in Lolita, Leonidas explains his "crime" against Vera to an imaginary courtroom in a way that anticipates Nabokov. The evasions and self-deceptions of Werfel's characters, the various Austrian types—both Jewish and non-Jewish—and the pervading breathless air of anti-Semitism capture interwar Austria in its poignant eleventh hour of toleration, the heart of Werfel's subject in this twisted love story.




Prior to the current NEA-award-winning translation, Pale Blue Ink in a Lady's Hand was the only Werfel novel never before published in book form in English translation. Available now to a new generation of readers in America, this translation of Werfel's novella powerfully suggests that Werfel still belongs in the same company as his contemporaries Mann, Kafka, Canetti, Musil, and other Central Europeans whose works have a permanent place in the world canon.
"A remarkable, and devastating, work."
—Booklist