Gioia joins W. H. Auden, Randall Jarrell, and D. H. Lawrence in embracing criticism that is insightfully intellectual and surprisingly personal . . . Always a canny discussant of contemporary poetics, Gioia again provides vital guidance for evaluating poetry that will appeal to tenured professors and armchair aficionados alike.
―Booklist

Few critics write more engagingly and perceptively about poetry than Dana Gioia . . .
―Michael Dirda, Washington Post

Dana Gioia, one of America's leading poet-critics, explains why poetry exists and why we need it in this sparkling collection of essays.

More personal than any of Gioia's earlier works, Poetry as Enchantment reflects a lifetime of thought and experience. Gioia, the author of Can Poetry Matter?, talks about poetry in a radically different way than it is currently being taught or discussed. In the title essay, he explains that poetry is speech raised to the level of song, and though poetry may often be misunderstood as intellectual, it moves us the way music does. Poetry charms its readers, creating a heightened experience of attention. It addresses readers in the fullness of their humanity, simultaneously speaking to the mind, emotions, imagination, memory, and physical senses. Without academic jargon, Poetry as Enchantment relates literature to the questions of life.

Looking at opera from the standpoint of its texts, as only a gifted poet and librettist can do, Dana Gioia examines why a surprisingly small number of operas have attained a secure place in the repertory. His insight into the workings of this uniquely lyrical fusion of the arts makes Weep, Shudder, Die not only a definitive assessment of the importance of poetry to the operatic undertaking, but a gift to opera lovers everywhere. Read...Reflect...Delight!
--Ted Libbey, author of The NPR Listener's Encyclopedia of Classical Music

Weep, Shudder, Die should be read by anyone who enjoys opera, or who cares about its place in today's world. Dana Gioia explores, with imagination and insight, the relationship between the libretto and the music. I learned a great deal in reading it, and at the same time enjoyed the experience immensely.
--Henry Fogel, Former President, Chicago Symphony Orchestra and League of American Orchestras

A unique book about opera--personal, impassioned, and provocative.

Weep, Shudder, Die explores opera from the perspective by which the art was originally created, as the most intense form of poetic drama. The great operas have an essential connection to poetry, song, and the primal power of the human voice. The aim of opera is irrational enchantment, the unleashing of emotions and visionary imagination.

Gioia rejects the conventional view of opera which assumes that great operas can be built on execrable texts. He insists that in opera, words matter. Operas begin as words; strong words inspire composers, weak words burden them. Ultimately, singers embody the words to give the music a human form for the audience.

Weep, Shudder, Die is a poet's book about opera. To some, that statement will suggest writing that is airy, impressionistic, and unreliable, but a poet also brings a practical sense of how words animate opera, lend life to imaginary characters, and give human shape to music. Written from a lifelong devotion to the art, Gioia's book is for anyone who has wept in the dark of an opera house.

A masterful work, catapulting the reader through the intricate history of Outermark with a sense of immersion that is rare in contemporary fiction. Full of quiet grace, breathtaking moments of violence, splendor, and all manners of beauty, this novel is an indelible achievement--and not to be missed.
--Nathan Harris, author of The Sweetness of Water

Engrossing . . . [a] moving tale of ritual and survival.
--Wall Street Journal

Outermark is a haunting and bittersweet story about the power of the places that shape us from Jason Brown, winner of the Maine Book Award, a pure and accomplished talent (New York Times).

The tiny, fictional island of Outermark sits thirty miles off the coast in the waters between Maine and Nova Scotia. When Corson Wills, one of the last people to have lived on the island, is asked to recount its history, he begins by describing it as a rock in the ocean where no one lives anymore. Corson's tale, and those of his ancestors who also lived there, ferry the reader between the 1980s, when lobster fishing is the only remaining industry, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, days of great sailing ships to the East Indies but also of conflicts between the earliest Native residents and newly arrived colonial settlers.

During Corson's boyhood, life on the island becomes increasingly tenuous as the lobster stocks decline and debt and hard feelings abound. Some of the islanders have started to run drugs, and many others have abandoned their homes to move to the mainland. Tensions between neighbors reach a tipping point the night of a catastrophic house fire. Residents of Outermark suffer the loss of livelihood and community that many in small towns have experienced in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. As the stories in Outermark reveal, as impossible as life was on the island, life off of it never feels quite right for those who had no choice but to leave it behind.

Who sets language policy today? Who made whom the grammar doctor? Lacking the equivalent of l'Académie française, we English speakers must find our own way looking for guidance or vindication in source after source. McGuffey's Readers introduced nineteenth-century students to correct English. Strunk and White's Elements of Style and William Safire's column, On Language, provide help on diction and syntax to contemporary writers and speakers. Sister Miriam Joseph's book, The Trivium: The Liberal Arts of Logic, Grammar, and Rhetoric, invites the reader into a deeper understanding--one that includes rules, definitions, and guidelines, but whose ultimate end is to transform the reader into a liberal artist.

A liberal artist seeks the perfection of the human faculties. The liberal artist begins with the language arts, the trivium, which is the basis of all learning because it teaches the tools for reading, writing, speaking, and listening. Thinking underlies all these activities. Many readers will recognize elements of this book: parts of speech, syntax, propositions, syllogisms, enthymemes, logical fallacies, scientific method, figures of speech, rhetorical technique, and poetics. The Trivium, however, presents these elements within a philosophy of language that connects thought, expression, and reality.

Trivium means the crossroads where the three branches of language meet. In the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, students studied and mastered this integrated view of language. Regrettably, modern language teaching keeps the parts without the vision of the whole. Inspired by the possibility of helping students acquire mastery over the tools of learning Sister Miriam Joseph and other teachers at Saint Mary's College designed and taught a course on the trivium for all first year students. The Trivium resulted from that noble endeavor.

The liberal artist travels in good company. Sister Miriam Joseph frequently cites passages from William Shakespeare, John Milton, Plato, the Bible, Homer, and other great writers. The Paul Dry Books edition of The Trivium provides new graphics and notes to make the book accessible to today's readers. Sister Miriam Joseph told her first audience that the function of the trivium is the training of the mind for the study of matter and spirit, which constitute the sum of reality. The fruit of education is culture, which Mathew Arnold defined as 'the knowledge of ourselves and the world.' May this noble endeavor lead many to that end.

Is the trivium, then, a sufficient education for life? Properly taught, I believe that it should be.--Dorothy L. Sayers

The Trivium is a highly recommended and welcome contribution to any serious and dedicated writer's reference collection.--Midwest Book Review

In forty short and charming chapters, a former great books teacher from New York City adapts to his new role on a small Southern farm by observing the natural world and drawing connections to his reading life.

Erudite and engaging.--Booklist

In late middle-age, Harry Kavros and his wife, Peri, pack up all the household belongings that will fit into their car and leave Manhattan, bound for their new home on a twenty-two-acre patch of pine-filled land in Hillsborough, North Carolina. As Mr. Kavros spends long hours clearing the acreage, not for farming but for sightlines, he muses about the land, the exhausting work it requires, and the rewards the effort offers. Every task he undertakes prompts him to recall and meditate over scenes from his reading life. From the great Greek epics to the writings of Frederick Law Olmstead on landscape, to Thoreau, to modern poets, to a veritable treasury of references, for the author life in the country is also life in among his reading.

Witty and perceptive, Observations of an Accidental Farmer--and a Mindful Reader is about cultivation, of one's land and one's life.

Seasoned with a dash of [Su's] meticulously crafted poetry and even a recipe, this collection celebrates words, culture, food, and the human act of making that binds them all together. A literary gourmand's delight.
--Kirkus Reviews

Su's soulful reflections call attention to the complex connections between place, cuisine, literature, and taste, and revealing interviews with Su . . . open a window onto her creative process . . . This provides much to savor.
--Publishers Weekly

In this enchanting collection of essays and interviews, poet Adrienne Su reflects on her journey as a creative writer and avid home cook, beginning at a neighbor's dinner table in 1980s Atlanta--lingering over poems, poets, and connections between food and literature--and ending in her 2023 kitchen in central Pennsylvania.

In Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet, Adrienne Su contemplates her own use of food as a recurring metaphor, influential teachers and peers, the push and pull between cooking and writing, changing expectations around English usage, and craft questions such as: Why does some subject matter refuse to cooperate in the creative process, even when it appears close to home? How does one write a good poem about being happy? Why write in rhyme when it's time-consuming and mostly out of style? What is a poem's responsibility to the literal truth?

Su's essays are driven by the tensions between worlds that overlap and collide: social conventions of the northern and southern United States; notions of what's American and what's Asian American; the demands of the page and the demands of the home; the solitariness of writing and the meaningful connection a poem can create between writer and reader. In interviews, often with fellow poets, she discusses a range of topics, from her early days in the Nuyorican poetry-slam scene to the solace of poetry and cooking during Covid-19 lockdown.

While Su's previous books are all collections of poetry, she has been publishing individual essays for many years. Hot, Sour, Salty, Sweet gathers the best of them into one volume for the first time.

To Turn the Soul collects fourteen essays (three by Eva Brann) inspired by the life and thought of philosopher Jacob Klein. The contributors have been animated by Klein's legacy--whether because they knew him, studied at St. John's College, the institution he shaped, or found his writings a rich stimulus for thought and exploration. While the majority of the essays are based primarily on the study of Klein's writings, they all take up an inquiry inspired by an encounter with his work. Their goal is to deepen or expand Klein's thought by exploring its consequences, or traveling down avenues of investigation that Klein himself pursued and in some cases even initiated. The essays are offered in the hope that they inspire others to read Klein's writings and think for themselves about the matters he takes up in them.

Move over, Onegin--we've a new Eugene for the ages. In Michael Weingrad's wildly charming and profound telling, young Eugene Nadelman's adolescence in 1980s Philadelphia unfolds in iambic tetrameter, with each crush and clash and heartache feeling as epic as they do for the young and the hopeful. If you've ever spun the bottle or leered furtively at someone across the dancefloor, you'll find yourself transformed by Weingrad's wit, wonder, and heart, and, like young Eugene himself, grow wiser.
--Liel Leibovitz, editor at large, Tablet Magazine

[A] wistful and emotionally resonant novel that finds true poetry in teenage life.
--Foreword Reviews

Weingrad is a true talent, and this book is a joy.
--Jewish Journal

Full of humor, pathos, and pop cultural references, Eugene Nadelman is a tale of young love and American manners in the era of Ronald Reagan and MTV--written in the witty sonnet form of Alexander Pushkin's Eugene Onegin.

It's 1982, and teenaged Eugene attends his cousin's bar mitzvah in suburban Philadelphia. There he meets a kindred spirit in the savvy, sensitive Abigail. But when Eugene's best friend also becomes smitten with Abby, a tragic rivalry ensues and, just as in the Pushkin poem, one character kills another in a duel. (Well, in a Dungeons & Dragons game, in this case.)

Eugene and Abby's romance deepens against a backdrop of '80s music, fashion, and VHS rentals--with serious world events like AIDS and the Cold War hovering overhead. But when Eugene leaves for sleepaway camp and Abby for Europe, temptations abound, and one question becomes paramount: can their love survive a summer separation?

A granular, meditative, and beautiful portrait of a fascinating life.
--Booklist

Put this beautiful book on your shelf between Frank Conroy's Stop-Time and Tobias Wolff's This Boy's Life.
--William Giraldi, author of The Hero's Body

Of all the memoirs and autobiographies I've ever read--literary or otherwise--Dark-Land is among the very best . . . [A] genuinely astonishing achievement.
--John Wilson, The Washington Examiner

Named BOOK OF THE YEAR by First Things magazine

This powerful memoir from poet Kevin Hart traces his difficult childhood as a backward boy in a poor part of London, a disorienting move to tropical Australia, and the secrets he and his family kept from one another.

Dark-Land is Kevin Hart's searing, yet at times hilarious, narrative of his first thirteen years. It is a story of survival and transformation, of deception and recovery, and it passes from a frightening childhood in the East-End of London to a new and bewildering life in sub-tropical Australia. Throughout, Hart draws on John Bunyan's evocation of Dark-Land in Pilgrim's Progress, the place Valiant-for-Truth leaves in order to seek the Celestial City. But Dark-Land is no allegory. We see Hart's hidden inner life, his family's penchant for keeping secrets, and their illusions about the nature of their shared past. We see Hart grow from being the despair of his teachers in a rough primary school to experiencing a conversion in a math class in Brisbane, Australia, which turned him into a Christian, a poet, and an academic.

Written in elegant, lucid prose, without a trace of sentimentality, Dark-Land is a memoir of a working-class childhood, a narrative of a migrant, and the story of a convert to Christianity.

Offshore there was a family--
a manatee, a mummatee,
and Grace, their little girlatee.

Girlatee is the story of a young manatee who becomes separated from her parents by a reckless man on a speedboat. She beaches on hot sand, and at first the people on the beach take selfies instead of helping her. When a kind beachgoer calls for assistance, two officers of the Game and Wildlife Department come and help the girlatee back into the ocean, where she is reunited with her parents. With beautiful rhymes and enchanting illustrations, Girlatee reminds us of the importance of family bonds and caring for others in distress.

For ages 2-6. Full page black and white illustrations throughout.

This book is a manifestation of Perry Link's deep love for the Chinese people, their humor, struggles, and courage. Anaconda in the Chandelier is packed with a deep understanding of China, astute observations of Chinese society, and unrelenting criticism of the Communist Party, all stemming from Link's devotion to one thing: truth. If you want to understand why the West got China wrong and how to get it right in the ongoing rivalry between democracy and autocracy, you need to read it.
--Li Yuan, The New York Times

The Anaconda in the Chandelier is a work of well-crafted essays that go down easy on first reading, then beguile us into protracted contemplation of the deep structure of contemporary China and the modern world.
--Modern Chinese Literature & Culture

These acerbic essays, collected from Perry Link's decades-long career as a noted Sinologist, reveal the depth of his attachment to China and his willingness to squarely face unpleasant truths about the many ways in which ordinary Chinese people have suffered from the self-serving, erratic, and often disastrous leadership of the Communist Party of China.

Link's essays touch on politics, society, economy, literature, and art, but their primary focus is on the thoughts, feelings, and values of Chinese people. He lays out his values as he explains how, like many of his Chinese friends, he began with a naïve attraction to socialist ideals only to eventually feel disgust at the cynical betrayal of not only those ideals but even garden-variety ethics. His writing probes the ways comrades in the ruling regime have ruthlessly clung to and pursued the one value whose pre-eminence has never been in question: political power.

The Anaconda in the Chandelier includes essays on Link's day job interests in Chinese literature, popular culture, and language teaching at Princeton University. He also offers intellectual tribute to his teachers--both classroom teachers and several whose writing taught him how to see beneath the surfaces of things.

Joe Sachs is a national treasure. His brilliant translations from the Greek, spanning works from Homer to Aristotle, have long enriched scholars and students alike. He crowns those achievements with this exquisite rendering of two of Plato's most beautiful dialogues, with an introduction that evidences his deft ability to drill down to 'the thing itself.'
--Thomas Sheehan, Professor Emeritus of Religious Studies, Stanford University

The Phaedrus and Symposium are Plato's two dialogues
about Eros--that is, desirous longing. In these new translations by
former St. John's College tutor Joe Sachs, the reader imaginatively becomes a
member, if a silent one, of the conversations Socrates has with his companions.

While both dialogues are about love, they differ in intriguing
and important ways. The conversation of the Phaedrus takes place in the
countryside and that of the Symposium in Athens. In the Phaedrus only
Socrates and Phaedrus are present; in the Symposium many participate in
the drinking party. But in both, Socrates presents singularly abiding images:
The winged horses and chariot in the Phaedrus; the ladder of love in the
Symposium. These compelling images attract and move the reader to ask
questions of the dialogues, which in their unique ways seem to reply.

The interplay of the two texts may spark an unfolding in the reader's thinking
about love, but for the dialectical motion that must
occur between the speeches and between the lines of Plato's texts, the reader
must do the work, provoked, invited, and assisted by what they contain. The context for our thinking includes in
one case the subject of tragedy and comedy, in the other the nature of rhetoric
and writing, but it is philosophy, and not poetry or politics, that persistently
claims the center of attention. The dialogues themselves seem as different as
night from day, as urbane wit from rustic charm--but do they point to opposing
or converging attitudes toward erotic love?

Among the finest poets of his generation.
--Richard Wilbur, two-time winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry

Like Frost before him, Brock has the power to make earthbound words take flight.
--Boris Dralyuk, author of My Hollywood and Other Poems

The title of Geoffrey Brock's third poetry collection, After, works in two ways. Many of the poems were written after, and in response to, the death of Brock's father, who was also a poet. And many are in some way after--as in, in the manner of--other poems or works of art. Such texts, often called versions or imitations, have long been seen as, in Samuel Johnson's words, a kind of middle composition between translation and original design.

Brock has been writing and translating poems for forty years, and for most of his career those two activities proceeded along parallel but distinct tracks. In recent years, however, he has been increasingly drawn to that middle space where the tracks converge. For Brock, it's a conversational space, in which he listens to the call of earlier works and offers responses from his own life: by turns bleak and beautiful, poignant and funny, sorrowful and accepting. Poets owe debts to other poets as surely as each of us does to those who raised us, and After is a partial account of such personal and poetic inheritances.

Award-winning poet and Oxford Professor of Poetry, A. E. Stallings has marshaled poetry, personal letters, paintings, a dubiously translated 1801 firman, newspaper clippings, parliamentary proceedings, a Greek political campaign, and other lore in this deliciously detailed and gossipy history of the Parthenon (AKA, Elgin) Marbles. Her narrative encompasses the removal of the Marbles from the Athenian Acropolis, their various misadventures before and after installation in the British Museum, from shipwreck to boxing matches, and the debate over their future and possible reunion in Greece.

Bringing fresh air to a stale debate, Frieze Frame explores the effect the Marbles have had on poets, writers, painters, actors, architects, and vice versa--how poets and painters, for instance, have framed the Marbles' place in art and culture. The poets Keats, Byron, and Cavafy, as well as an aristocrat who loses his nose and his fortune, a bad painter who commits suicide, and a general who takes his cat into battle, are among the cast of characters. In the author's own words, I am, to a certain extent, as interested in the strange stories and people surrounding the stones as the controversy [of their removal] and their fate. Key for Stallings is the creative world of the Marbles, the ways that they appear in nineteenth (and twentieth) century writing and art, race theory and beyond, and the influence they have exerted in our society: cultural figures, maybe even characters, in their own right.

If you like Hank, you'll like Wilder Good, too.--John R. Erickson, author of Hank the Cowdog

Meet 12-year-old Wilder Good, who lives with his parents and little sister, Molly, in a small town in southern Colorado. When he's lucky, he gets to go hunting with Gale Loving, a 72-year-old elder at the church the Goods attend, and a good friend and mentor to Wilder. They make sort of an odd pair, an old man and a boy, but they fit together pretty well in the outdoors. (Though sometimes Wilder still can't help but wonder what kind of a name Gale is for a grown man.)

Wilder plays basketball, is active in his 4-H club, likes to read--his hero is Teddy Roosevelt--and does all the things that seventh-graders do. (He has a secret girlfriend, too.) He's a Dallas Cowboys fan. But mostly he loves the outdoors, hunting in the Colorado Rockies with Gale or his dad, or at his grandfather's Texas ranch.

Wilder is on the threshold between being a kid and beginning to grow up, and he's trying his best to figure out just what it means to join that grownup world. There's a lot to learn, and he's grateful to have rock-steady Gale to guide him.

In The Elk Hunt, Wilder accompanies Gale into the mountains in search of his first elk. It's a special day for Wilder in many ways--the biggest game he's ever hunted, and the first chance to use his grandfather's Winchester .270. He's determined to succeed with high marks.

Hunting elk is an exciting and demanding pursuit, but even after Wilder and Gale are headed home, there's still danger to face--that's when nature decides to really test Wilder's resolve.

S. J. Dahlstrom lives and writes in west Texas. He has numerous magazine credits for his writing and photography. The Adventures of Wilder Good is his first series. His writing draws on his experiences as a cowboy, husband, father, and founder of a boys' ranch.

In this deeply felt and well-researched meditation, Kalkavage finds the special bond that exists between the world and the power of music.
--Booklist

Many people write about the meaning of music, but few can do it as well as Peter Kalkavage does in this marvelous, winsome, and often hauntingly beautiful book. He takes us on a deep dive into the philosophical dimensions of music, through a series of connected essays that demonstrate again and again the ways in which music is intimately connected to the most important questions we wrestle with, about the nature of time, space, and the human condition. It is a book of great learning, but one also brimming over with enthusiasm and love for its subject, a combination that readers will find irresistible.
--Dr. Wilfred M. McClay, Professor of History, Hillsdale College

Music and the Idea of a World explores
the bond between music and world by reflecting on great musical compositions
and works by great thinkers from antiquity to the present. World, here, has
several meanings. It is the natural world or cosmos, the inner world of feeling
and thought, world history, and the world of tones (the musical universe). The
book is intended for philosophic-minded readers who are fascinated by music and
music lovers who enjoy thinking about the philosophic questions that music
raises.

The seven-chapter journey begins with a contrast
between the cosmologies of Plato and Schopenhauer (followed by a discussion of Palestrina's
music and the world of the Bible). It then proceeds to chapters on music and nature
in Victor Zuckerkandl's Sound and Symbol, a love song from Bach's St.
Matthew Passion, a love song from Mozart's Magic Flute, Wagner's Tristan
and Isolde in relation to Schopenhauer's cosmology of the will, twelve-tone
music as the image of totalitarianism in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus,
and the world of the inner life in Francis Poulenc's Dialogues of the Carmelites.

Although he was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature four times, Stefan Żeromski's work is not as widely known outside Poland as it should be. Thus this elegant translation is most welcome . . . A beautiful, prescient story.
--Celia Jeffries, author of Blue Desert

This novel was written more than 100 years ago, but its focus on economic inequality makes it abundantly relevant to today's world . . . Powerful, moving, kaleidoscopic.
--Times Literary Supplement

Beautifully translated from the Polish by Stephanie Kraft, this new edition includes an Introduction by Jennifer Croft and Boris Dralyuk.

Tomasz Judym was born in a slum in Warsaw. Against all odds, he has become a doctor, and he finds that his driving motivation to treat disadvantaged people like those he grew up with is at odds with the expectations of his peers. He sees the unhealthy working and living conditions of the working class in twentieth-century Poland wearing on those around him, even as he strives to help them. As he battles alone to do the kind of work that boards of health and other agencies do today, Dr. Judym wrestles inwardly with feelings of inferiority and revulsion caused by his difficult childhood. His mission takes him out of the city and into the countryside, bringing him into conflict with his other desires, and the love that he feels for a sympathetic woman whose background differs fundamentally from his own.

The Homeless combines concrete detail about social issues--the urgent need for public hygiene and access to medical treatment, the effects of industrialization on health and the landscape, and the disinterest that people in power have in the disadvantaged--with beautiful, artistic passages of prose that sensitively probe the characters' inner lives. The title comes not from the obvious reference to the impoverished people Dr. Judym concerns himself with, but from the unmoored status of the protagonist, the woman he loves, a mysterious engineer friend of his, his brother, and many others who find themselves rootless--emotionally and physically alienated by class divides and the social upheaval of industrialization. The Homeless is a portrait of the time and place it was written--Poland on the precipice of the twentieth century--that speaks to our current time and place.

A virtuosic, witty, charming translation of the greatest epic ever written about mice, with wonderful illustrations by Grant Silverstein. Stallings' elegant rhyming couplets are the perfect choice to honor the mousy Muse.--Emily Wilson, Professor of Classics, University of Pennsylvania

Stallings' translation of this ancient epic is a delight: charming, witty, and vividly alive, with buoyant rhymes and eye-catching illustrations. I suspect this will become a beloved addition in many home libraries.--Madeline Miller, bestselling author of Circe

From the award-winning poet and translator A. E. Stallings comes a lively new edition of the ancient Greek fable The Battle between the Frogs and the Mice. Originally attributed to Homer, but now thought to have been composed centuries later by an unknown author, The Battle is the tale of a mouse named Crumbsnatcher who is killed by the careless frog King Pufferthroat, sparking a war between the two species. This dark but delightful parable about the foolishness of war is illustrated throughout in striking drawings by Grant Silverstein.

The clever introduction is written from the point of view of a mouse who argues that perhaps the unknown author of the fable is not a human after all: Who better than a mouse, then, to compose our diminutive, though not ridiculous, epic, a mouse born and bred in a library, living off lamp oil, ink, and the occasional nibble of a papyrus, constantly perched on the shoulder of some scholar or scholiast of Homer, perhaps occasionally whispering in his ear? Mouse, we may remember, is only one letter away from Muse.

This amazing story is marvelously well told, in an exuberant, racing style that makes it impossible to lay the book aside once the first page is read.--San Francisco Chronicle

Ill Met By Moonlight is the gripping account of the audacious World War II abduction of a German general from the island of Crete. British special forces officers W. Stanley Moss and Patrick Leigh Fermor, together with a small band of Cretan partisans, kidnapped the general, then evaded numerous German checkpoints and patrols for nearly three weeks as they maneuvered across the mountainous island to a rendezvous with the boat that finally whisked them away to Allied headquarters in Cairo.

It was a mad adventure, and it came off. Moss recorded the whole escapade in a diary, which survives as a thrilling account of one of the most reckless and dramatic actions of the war.--Patrick Leigh Fermor

A twin masterpiece of action and narrative.--Spectator

[An] exciting account of a feat which demanded an extreme of daring and determination.--London Times

The 2011 Paul Dry Books edition includes an Afterword by Patrick Leigh Fermor.

W. Stanley Moss was a World War II hero and later a best-selling author. He traveled extensively after the war, notably to Antarctica with a British Antarctic Expedition. Eventually he settled in Kingston, Jamaica. Paul Dry Books also publishes A War of Shadows, Moss's sequel to Ill Met By Moonlight--a rousing account of his World War II adventures as an agent in Crete, Macedonia, and the Siamese jungle.

Part detective story, part social commentary, part intellectual autobiography, part philosophical analysis, this is a jury book unlike any other.--Anthony Kronman, Sterling Professor of Law and former dean, Yale Law School

[Norma Thompson] teaches us, brilliantly and painlessly, why judging, as opposed to simply knowing, is an essential part of a responsible human existence, recounting the trials and crimes and moral dilemmas of antiquity and classical tradition in a stunningly original reading.--Abraham D. Sofaer, senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and former United States district judge

In 2001, Norma Thompson served on the jury in a murder trial in New Haven, Connecticut. In Unreasonable Doubt, Thompson dramatically depicts the jury's deliberations, which ended in a deadlock. As foreperson, she pondered the behavior of some of her fellow jurors that led to the trial's termination in a hung jury. Blending personal memoir, social analysis, and literary criticism, she addresses the evasion of judgment she witnessed during deliberations and relates that evasion to contemporary political, social, and legal affairs. She then assembles an imaginary jury of Alexis de Tocqueville, Plato, and Jane Austen, among others, to show how the writings of these authors can help model responsible habits of deliberation.

Norma Thompson is senior lecturer in humanities and associate director of the Whitney Humanities Center at Yale University. She is the author most recently of The Ship of State: Statecraft and Politics from Ancient Greece to Democratic America.