Barbara Newhall Follett

Escape into the wild from the comfort of your own home this winter, with a dazzling lost classic of nature writing... Eepersip is a girl with the wild in her heart. She does not want to live locked up behind the walls of a house. So she runs away - first to the Meadow, then to the Sea, and finally to the Mountain. Her heartbroken parents follow their daughter, trying to bring her home safe, but Eepersip has other ideas... Republished by Penguin with a new introduction and hand-inked illustrations by beloved artist Jackie Morris, The House Without Windows is a timeless fable about wildness, freedom and the redemptive power of the natural world. 'I can safely promise joy to any reader of The House Without Windows. Perfection' Eleanor Farjeon, winner of the Carnegie Medal and The Hans Christian Andersen Award 'Gloriously illuminated by Jackie Morris's moving art, this is a work of strange power for our own bewildered times' Nick Drake 'A classic, as miraculous and awe-inspiring as the author' Xinran, author of The Good Women of China

A Fictional Romantic Novel: Lost Island is a romantic novel about escaping from New York City and into a voyage on a schooner toward the unknown sea. Jane Carey, who is the protagonist, finds love, a deserted island, and struggles with civilization, and yet on her mind is always the iridescent merry nature. Lost Island is undoubtedly Follett's masterpiece in which she develops her themes of love, escape, nature worship, and takes the reader on a romantic adventure into her world.

By the age of 14, Barbara Newhall Follett had published two books with Knopf, including 1927's enchanting "The House Without Windows." Soon after her world turned upside down when her father left home. This long book, compiled and edited by her half-nephew, tells the story of Barbara's extraordinary life through her letters, poems, and prose.

A young woman chafing at the confines of marriage confronts the high cost of craving freedom and adventure in a memoir that "pushes literary boundaries" (The Atlantic) At twenty-five, as her wedding date approached, Laura Smith began to feel trapped. Not by her fiancé, who shared her appetite for adventure, but by the unsettling idea that it was hard to be at once married and free. Laura wanted her life to be different. She wanted her marriage to be different. And she found in the strangely captivating story of another restless young woman determined to live without constraints both an enticement and a challenge. Barbara Newhall Follett was a free-spirited trailblazer who published her first novel at 11, enlisted as a deck hand on a boat bound for the south China seas at 15 and was one of the first women to hike the Appalachian trail. Then in December 1939, when she was not much older than Laura, she walked out of her apartment on a quiet tree-lined street in Brookline, leaving behind a fraying marriage, and vanished without a trace. Obsessed by her story, Laura set off to find out what had happened. The Art of Vanishing is a riveting mystery and a piercing exploration of marriage and convention that asks deep and uncomfortable questions: Why do we give up on our childhood dreams? Is marriage a golden noose? Must we find ourselves in the same row houses with Pottery Barn lamps telling our kids to behave? Searingly honest and written with a raw intensity, it will challenge you to rethink your most intimate decisions and may just upend your life.

A Times Best Book of 2019. 'Paver is one of Britain's modern greats. This sinister, gothic chiller shows why' BIG ISSUE, Books of the Year 2019. "Something has been let loose..." In Edwardian Suffolk, a manor house stands alone in a lost corner of the Fens: a glinting wilderness of water whose whispering reeds guard ancient secrets. Maud is a lonely child growing up without a mother, ruled by her repressive father. When he finds a painted medieval devil in a graveyard, unhallowed forces are awakened. Maud's battle has begun. She must survive a world haunted by witchcraft, the age-old legends of her beloved fen – and the even more nightmarish demons of her father's past. Spanning five centuries, Wakenhyrst is a darkly gothic thriller about murderous obsession and one girl's longing to fly free by the bestselling author of Dark Matter and Thin Air. Wakenhyrst is an outstanding new piece of story-telling, a tale of mystery and imagination laced with terror. It is a masterwork in the modern gothic tradition that ranges from Mary Shelley and Bram Stoker to Neil Gaiman and Sarah Perry.

A young girl named Eepersip lives with her parents in a cottage, but she feels trapped within its confines, so she leaves civilization and seeks a free and carefree life in nature. After leaving her parents, she founds a home in the outdoors, rejecting both the society of adults and the comforts of civilization; she initially is content to live in the meadow, but she grows restless and seeks a new place to live in both the sea and the mountain. In time, she reaches a higher form of life. Follett started writing the novel in 1923 at the age of 9, but the first draft was lost in a house fire, which led her to rewrite the entire work. It was eventually published to critical success in 1927, when she was just 12 years old. This book is part of the Standard Ebooks project, which produces free public domain ebooks.

Ann Hulbert’s in-depth exploration of the lives of sixteen extraordinary children over the course of the past century casts new light on America’s current obsession with early achievement. The figures she profiles include math genius Norbert Wiener, founder of cybernetics; two girls whose fiction and poetry stirred debate in the 1920s; the movie superstar Shirley Temple; the African-American pianist and composer Philippa Schuyler; the chess champion Bobby Fischer; computer pioneers and “prodigious savants” with autism; and musical prodigies, present and past. Hulbert probes the changing roles of parents and teachers as well as of psychologists and a curious press. Above all, she delves into the feelings of the prodigies themselves, whose stories so intriguingly raise hopes about untapped human potential and questions about how best to nurture it.

"Like Bastard Out of Carolina, ffitch's electrifying debut novel is a paean to independence and a protest against the materialism of our age." —O: The Oprah Magazine "Delightfully raucous." —Sam Sacks, The Wall Street Journal Helen arrives in Appalachian Ohio full of love and her boyfriend’s ideas for living off the land. Too soon, with winter coming, he calls it quits. Helped by Rudy—her government-questioning, wisdom-spouting, seasonal-affective-disordered boss—and a neighbor couple, Helen makes it to spring. Those neighbors, Karen and Lily, are awaiting the arrival of their first child, a boy, which means their time at the Women’s Land Trust must end. So Helen invites the new family to throw in with her—they’ll split the work and the food, build a house, and make a life that sustains them, if barely, for years. Then young Perley decides he wants to go to school. And Rudy sets up a fruit-tree nursery on the pipeline easement edging their land. The outside world is brought clamoring into their makeshift family. Set in a region known for its independent spirit, Stay and Fight shakes up what it means to be a family, to live well, to make peace with nature and make deals with the system. It is a protest novel that challenges our notions of effective action. It is a family novel that refuses to limit the term. And it is a marvel of storytelling that both breaks with tradition and celebrates it. Best of all, it is full of flawed, cantankerous, flesh-and-blood characters who remind us that conflict isn't the end of love, but the real beginning. Absorbingly spun, perfectly voiced, and disruptively political, Madeline ffitch's Stay and Fight forces us to reimagine an Appalachia—and an America—we think we know. And it takes us, laughing and fighting, into a new understanding of what it means to love and to be free.

Poetry. HISTORY OF GONE is a collection of poems inspired by the life and unsolved disappearance of Barbara Newhall Follett, a once-famous child prodigy writer of the early 20th century. In the introduction, Schmeidler writes, "She's a woman we've never heard of destined to be the Next Great American Writer," who, by the age of 14 has published two books to glowing reviews. After a series of life-altering events (her father leaves; she and her mother set sail on an open-ended sea voyage; she falls in love), what begins as promise turns to uncertainty. "Because it's the Depression and she needs money. Because she's a woman. Because she's a writer. Because her editor father is no longer guiding her work into the hands of publishers. Because she falls in love. Because she travels, this time to Europe, this time with a man. Because she marries. Because she wants more, and also nothing more, than to be outside. Because all writing is in sand." All that is known of what happens is that one December night in 1939, after arguing with her husband, she leaves the house with a notebook and $30. She is never seen or heard from again. She is 25. "A daring conceptual feat of reanimated biography, HISTORY OF GONE arrives in its forms of oblique memorial drenched in lyric imagination: 'Everywhere you look there's a finger bone of some gone woman.' Schmeidler's rich lexicons frame intimate interior geographies--swoop and silhouette, beatitude and gingerbread, planets and wolfhounds--all the while replaying the 'stolen reel' of a forgotten life. As the lavish particulars unfold--a mouthbrooder, an anhinga, a purse dehisced--these poems invite charged questions about autonomy, creativity, and self-effacement: 'What kind of play is she in, 'finished by a death' or 'ended by a marriage'?' A cautionary tale of the erasures of domesticity, a vocational fable, an inside-out bildungsroman, this book envisions the prismatic possibilities when the self makes a 'clean sneak,' and the result is nothing short of levitation." --BK Fischer

A tiny American town's plans for radical self-government overlooked one hairy detail: no one told the bears. Once upon a time, a group of libertarians got together and hatched the Free Town Project, a plan to take over an American town and completely eliminate its government. In 2004, they set their sights on Grafton, NH, a barely populated settlement with one paved road. When they descended on Grafton, public funding for pretty much everything shrank: the fire department, the library, the schoolhouse. State and federal laws became meek suggestions, scarcely heard in the town's thick wilderness. The anything-goes atmosphere soon caught the attention of Grafton's neighbors: the bears. Freedom-loving citizens ignored hunting laws and regulations on food disposal. They built a tent city in an effort to get off the grid. The bears smelled food and opportunity. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear is the sometimes funny, sometimes terrifying tale of what happens when a government disappears into the woods. Complete with gunplay, adventure, and backstabbing politicians, this is the ultimate story of a quintessential American experiment -- to live free or die, perhaps from a bear.