Muddy Matterhorn

Heather McHugh’s first book in a decade, Muddy Matterhorn, reclaims the mix of high and low that is her sensibility’s signature, in matters practical and philosophical, semantic and stylistic, mortal and transitory, amorous and political, hilarious and heartbreaking. With fierce attacks on technology and social structures, McHugh finds a way to enjoy and empathize with humanity on her own terms. Ever the outsider, McHugh combines a strong sense of self with a determination to love people and the worlds they build without losing her biting criticism or witty rejection of societal norms and expectations. She is both pragmatic and theorizing, esoteric and identifiable. The joy and anger in these poems join to form an empowered and impassioned declaration of self in a chaotic time.

Intense, powerful, and compelling, Matterhorn is an epic war novel in the tradition of Norman Mailer’s The Naked and the Dead and James Jones’s The Thin Red Line. It is the timeless story of a young Marine lieutenant, Waino Mellas, and his comrades in Bravo Company, who are dropped into the mountain jungle of Vietnam as boys and forced to fight their way into manhood. Standing in their way are not merely the North Vietnamese but also monsoon rain and mud, leeches and tigers, disease and malnutrition. Almost as daunting, it turns out, are the obstacles they discover between each other: racial tension, competing ambitions, and duplicitous superior officers. But when the company finds itself surrounded and outnumbered by a massive enemy regiment, the Marines are thrust into the raw and all-consuming terror of combat. The experience will change them forever. Written by a highly decorated Marine veteran over the course of thirty years, Matterhorn is a spellbinding and unforgettable novel that brings to life an entire world—both its horrors and its thrills—and seems destined to become a classic of combat literature.

This book presents the stories of the first six generations of the Richardson branch of the author's family in North America. The story begins in 1774 when John Richardson travels from Yorkshire, England to what became Sackville, New Brunswick, Canada. Settling on land originally homesteaded by politically displaced Acadians, John and two subsequent generations of Christopher's spend their lives farming in Sackville. In 1883, Robert Hay, John's great grandson, moves his family from their farm in Sackville to a homestead 3 miles east of Custer City, South Dakota in the heart of the Black Hills. While failing in its goal of saving Robert's wife Annie from Tuberculosis, it brought our family to the American West. After his death in 1897, three of Robert's sons, Fred, Bob, and Will, joined forces to create the Richardson Brothers Ranch in the Big Muddy Valley in what is now Sheridan County, Montana.

In the world of literary journals and little magazines, the Carolina Quarterly is one of the oldest and most prestigious in the South. Founded in 1948 at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, the magazine has published many luminaries of modern and contemporary literature, including Robert Morgan, Evie Shockley, Joyce Carol Oates, Doris Betts, and others. This anthology gathers some of the best work from the last three-quarters of a century, along with an informative essay about the journal's history and impact. The volume reminds us of the ways small literary journals reflect the voices of their region and changed the literary landscape. This work reaches beyond the imagined boundaries of a single university or single state. Thus the anthology also celebrates a form—the student-run literary journal—that has shaped the regional and national conversation and reflects the astounding accomplishment of the Carolina Quarterly over the past seventy-five years.

A renowned poet's artful collection is a striking body of work.

Copper Canyon Press celebrates its first 50 years of poetry publishing in anticipation of the next 50 years. Poetry is vital to language and living. This anthology celebrates 50 years of Copper Canyon Press publications, one extraordinary poem at a time. Since its founding, Copper Canyon has been entirely dedicated to publishing poetry books; here Editor in Chief Michael Wiegers invites press staff and board—past and present—to help curate a retrospective. The result is a collection of beloved poems from books spanning half a century: representing Pulitzer Prize-winning books, debut collections, works in translation, and rare books from Copper Canyon’s early days. This book is a tribute to Copper Canyon poets and readers everywhere, because, as Gregory Orr writes, “Certain poems / In an uncertain world— / The ones we cling to: // They bring us back.”

“A precisely crafted and bracingly honest” memoir of war and its aftershocks from the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn (The Atlantic). In 1968, at the age of twenty-three, Karl Marlantes was dropped into the highland jungle of Vietnam, an inexperienced lieutenant in command of forty Marines who would live or die by his decisions. In his thirteen-month tour he saw intense combat, killing the enemy and watching friends die. Marlantes survived, but like many of his brothers in arms, he has spent the last forty years dealing with his experiences. In What It Is Like to Go to War, Marlantes takes a candid look at these experiences and critically examines how we might better prepare young soldiers for war. In the past, warriors were prepared for battle by ritual, religion, and literature—which also helped bring them home. While contemplating ancient works from Homer to the Mahabharata, Marlantes writes of the daily contradictions modern warriors are subject to, of being haunted by the face of a young North Vietnamese soldier he killed at close quarters, and of how he finally found a way to make peace with his past. Through it all, he demonstrates just how poorly prepared our nineteen-year-old warriors are for the psychological and spiritual aspects of the journey. In this memoir, the New York Times–bestselling author of Matterhorn offers “a well-crafted and forcefully argued work that contains fresh and important insights into what it’s like to be in a war and what it does to the human psyche” (The Washington Post).