Songs Upon The Rivers

"Legal deposit, 4th quarter 2016"--Title page verso.

"Legal deposit, 4th quarter 2016"--Title page verso.

In A Gathering of Rivers, Lucy Eldersveld Murphy traces the histories of Indian, multiracial, and mining communities in the western Great Lakes region during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. For a century the Winnebagos (Ho-Chunks),øMesquakies (Fox), and Sauks successfully confronted waves of French and British immigration by diversifying their economies and commercializing lead mining. Focusing on personal stories and detailed community histories, Murphy charts the changed economic forces at work in the region, connecting them to shifts in gender roles and intercultural relationships. She argues that French, British, and Native peoples forged cooperative social and economic bonds expressed partly by mixed-race marriages and the emergence of multiethnic communities at Green Bay and Prairie du Chien. Significantly, Native peoples in the western Great Lakes region were able to adapt successfully to the new frontier market economy until their lead mining operations became the envy of outsiders in the 1820s.

River of Tears is the first ethnography of Brazilian country music, one of the most popular genres in Brazil yet least-known outside it. Beginning in the mid-1980s, commercial musical duos practicing música sertaneja reached beyond their home in Brazil’s central-southern region to become national bestsellers. Rodeo events revolving around country music came to rival soccer matches in attendance. A revival of folkloric rural music called música caipira, heralded as música sertaneja’s ancestor, also took shape. And all the while, large numbers of Brazilians in the central-south were moving to cities, using music to support the claim that their Brazil was first and foremost a rural nation. Since 1998, Alexander Sebastian Dent has analyzed rural music in the state of São Paulo, interviewing and spending time with listeners, musicians, songwriters, journalists, record-company owners, and radio hosts. Dent not only describes the production and reception of this music, he also explains why the genre experienced such tremendous growth as Brazil transitioned from an era of dictatorship to a period of intense neoliberal reform. Dent argues that rural genres reflect a widespread anxiety that change has been too radical and has come too fast. In defining their music as rural, Brazil’s country musicians—whose work circulates largely in cities—are criticizing an increasingly inescapable urban life characterized by suppressed emotions and an inattentiveness to the past. Their performances evoke a river of tears flowing through a landscape of loss—of love, of life in the countryside, and of man’s connections to the natural world.

A TIME 100 Must-Read Book of 2021 A New York Times Best Science Fiction and Fantasy Book of 2021 The Stonewall Book Award winner of 2022 Named a Best Book of 2021 by NPR, The New York Public Library, Publishers Weekly and more! A triumphant, genre-bending breakout novel from one of the boldest new voices in contemporary fiction. Vern—seven months pregnant and desperate to escape the strict religious compound where she was raised—flees for the shelter of the woods. There, she gives birth to twins, and plans to raise them far from the influence of the outside world. But even in the forest, Vern is a hunted woman. Forced to fight back against the community that refuses to let her go, she unleashes incredible brutality far beyond what a person should be capable of, her body wracked by inexplicable and uncanny changes. To understand her metamorphosis and to protect her small family, Vern has to face the past, and more troublingly, the future—outside the woods. Finding the truth will mean uncovering the secrets of the compound she fled but also the violent history in America that produced it. Rivers Solomon’s Sorrowland is a genre-bending work of Gothic fiction. Here, monsters aren’t just individuals, but entire nations. It is a searing, seminal book that marks the arrival of a bold, unignorable voice in American fiction.

In this hilarious modern spoof of a favorite holiday song, the trip to Grandfather's house is no peaceful sleigh ride!

More than 80 poems by 50 American and British masters celebrate real and metaphorical journeys. Poems by Whitman, Byron, Millay, Sandburg, Langston Hughes, Emily Dickinson, Robert Frost, Shelley, Tennyson, Yeats, many others.