The artist guides our eye to the clutter of the room

and the quality of light on the apples, and we wonder. She

attunes our ear to the scratch of the pen hurrying to write

the most earnest supplications before self-consciousness

takes over. Surely the fact that I worry means something.

Surely my room of so many days holds stories worth

setting down. Consequence is an act of imagination.

Everyone wants to imagine a consequential life. (from In My Room)

A heron slips along the shoreline as if on rice paper. A

great angler, he will place a reflective object on the water's

surface-a pin oak leaf, for example-and watch for a fish

to investigate. The heron's patience, driven by necessity,

far outstrips mine. Fifteen minutes in and I lower the

binoculars to look for other birds. Meanwhile, the green

heron waits, motionless, seemingly dispassionate, until a

fish is in range and he strikes. Is it hyperbole to compare

the jolt to lightning? His long neck shooting out and

snapping back, he breaks the water's surface like a diver

with barely a ripple and comes back with the catch. He is

fed because he waited, quiet and watchful. (from Green Heron)

The desire for safety; the relentless pursuit of creating an impenetrable refuge; the constant worry about looming threats that might lurk just around the next corner: follow Franz Kafka into a treacherous labyrinth full of dangers both real and imagined.

A new translation of Kafka's Der Bau, in a Fomite German-English dual language edition.

Jacob Luria is asked by his good friend, Mary Daly, to spy on her husband, whom she has long suspected of infidelity. Obsessed by his love for her, by his hope that her marriage will finally fail, Luria is troubled in this assignment by the all-but-certain prospect of his own abasement and pain. Ghost Story is a novel about truth and deception, hope and despair, and the strange, often inexorable, ways we are haunted by those we love.

In 1990s Los Angeles, composer and professor Simon Grafton uncovers a lost manuscript that suggests unknown links between two composers he idolizes, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky, a find that could make his career-if his obsession doesn't destroy him and his family first. Interwoven into the story is the sometimes-tortured friendship between Schoenberg and Stravinsky, as it unfolds in Berlin, Vienna, Paris, through the war years, and then in Los Angeles during Hollywood's Golden Era, when modern music's dissonant experiments outraged the public before entering the mainstream, used and abused by Hollywood. Music is at the heart of the novel, and our ways of breaking convention while trying to hold on those we love.

The three sections of World Headquarters resonate with and reinforce the interconnectedness among the local and universal, the personal and political, the human and non-human worlds. Poems comprising Part II, ad-Dawha, were begun while Peter Fortunato lived in Doha, the capital of Qatar. During the rapid modernization of that desert emirate, Fortunato taught four years at the newly opened Weill Cornell Medicine. But where exactly is the world's headquarters-these poems dance across the horizons of the mind, unlimited in its essence, particular in its myriad expressions.

Fugitive Dreams is a slightly fictionalized literary memoir illustrating a sweeping 50 years of life under occupation through personal stories. Born in Palestine 'on the wrong side of the border, ' Sameer finds his way to America to rebuild his life. His immigrant experience in post-9/11 America is laced to the ongoing conflict at home with the common threads of school shootings, police violence, human rights abuses, activism, and walls. For the sake of his daughter, he decides he must do something.

Nowhere Land: Journeys Through a Broken Nation, chronicles Ron Jacobs' journeys from New England to Oregon, Texas to Minnesota and beyond, examining the US as it struggles to remember and redefine itself on its way toward an uncertain future.

tells ]a ]story ]of ]love ]enduring ]beyond ]mortality, ]a ]tribute ]to ]the ]beauty ]of ]nature, ]friendship, ]and ]language, ]the ]limits ]of ]ingenuity ]in ]a ]world ]of ]loss, ]conflict ]and ]greed.

Herbals, both ancient and modern, transmit knowledge about nature's powers. Both plants and stones can heal, preserve, and kill, but sometimes their language is arcane, or ambiguous. Thus, herbals and lapidaries are often illustrated, as is this combined one, which has 53 full-color illustrations by Marco Vacchetti. Erbario lapidario is intended to bring comfort, pleasure, and enlightenment to those who peruse it.

The capricious world of relationships is something everyone has navigated, often wishing for a magic spell to release them from its hold. In The Spellbook of Fruit and Flowers, Christine Butterworth-McDermott delves into these dark partnerings, using the symbolism of the natural world, particularly plants and their taxonomy, as metaphor. With references to myth and legend, science and history, these poems trace the dangers that arise from seduction, betrayal, and the need to find pulp over pit. Here, snakes slither, pomegranates are bitten, and forests burn. Yet, there is also a determination to embrace the resilience of flesh and spirit. Tethered birds are freed, dahlias mean to survive, and restorative limes are offered. While never shying away from trauma, and its effects, Butterworth-McDermott always encourages the reader to blink at the new leaf, the green wood /visible beneath the bark of the vine. While the world may be full of poison, the poems here are a salve.

Yahia Lababidi's work is characterized by a contemplative tone in line with Rumi, whom he often quotes. Lababidi is a Muslim voice for peace, celebrating the wisdom in ancient traditions and pointing out the ridiculous in the rush and cynicism of contemporary life. Drawn to the mystic tradition, he often refers to the virtues and fruits of silence, and writes that his aphorisms 'respect the wisdom of silence by disturbing it, briefly.' Perhaps an age as thoughtless and noisy as our own requires a whole book full of them.

-Plough magazine

We are at the beginning of the possibilitarian takeover of society. we herewith dispose of the incompetent ruling class by underthrowing it from the toes up, & we immediately implement the 1000 alternatives to the destructive habits of capitalism.

Politics must abandon its traditional war & weapons preoccupations & make the severe health issues of our one and only Mother Earth and her earthlings its primary concern.

The term possibilitarian approximates the word Möglichkeitsmensch in Robert Musil's novel, The Man Without Qualities, & has been widely used in Bread & Puppet productions.

The characters in And No Net Ensnares Me suffer the many predations of Israeli occupation against its Palestinian population: They're displaced, imprisoned, held in administrative detention, tortured, besieged and fragmented by walls, barriers and military checkpoints.

Yet not all Palestinians are in solidarity against these practices. Some find it more profitable to cooperate, often surreptitiously. Who is friend, and who is foe? This is the world Rana Shubair's book explores as a Gazan community prepares for the Great March of Return border protests.

Two plays about Palestine. THE RETURN, was performed in Hebrew in Israel and was performed at Mosaic Theater in Washington DC in June 2017. The second, THE MULBERRY TREE, is unperformed, though is being considered by HaKamri Theater in Tel Aviv. Both plays were originally written in English.

At nine years old, on her first visit to a museum, Emily fell in love with Breakfast, a painting by Henri Matisse. Now a single mother, she lives in the world of art and can barely find time for her two daughters, much less for Mark, the man she loves. Her days are a jumble-she's lost the thread of her life-but a contest at the museum where she's the registrar gives her hope-the chance to see Breakfast again. Matisse's words and paintings permeate her days and nights, and glancing at a note card of the painting she loves, she sees something she's never seen before. The Art of Her Life shows the power of art to transform an ordinary life.