Hardscrabble books

The time is ten thousand years ago and the place is the shores of Lake Champlain, a land inhabited by Abenaki communities who hunt, gather, and follow the cycles of their unspoiled natural world in relative harmony. Joseph Bruchac uses this setting not just to spin a compelling adventure yarn but also to re-create the cultural, social, and spiritual systems of these pre-contact Native Americans. In this third novel of his trilogy about the "people of the dawnland," the lake they call Petonbowk - "the waters between" Vermont's Green Mountains and New York's Adirondacks - holds both sustenance and danger, and Young Hunter is called upon to confront a dual menace. A "deepseer" or shaman, he must use his full powers first to comprehend the threats and then to defeat them. The lake, it seems, holds a huge water-snake monster that makes it impossible to reap the waters' bountiful harvest of fish and game. And, worse, a tortured outcast, Watches Darkness, has turned against his tribe and is using his deepseer's knowledge to perpetrate horrible acts of senseless evil: he destroys whole villages out of sheer malevolence; he literally eats his victims' hearts to absorb their powers; he kills his own grandmother without remorse.

Principal of small town school is involved in a love affair and a township election.

The title story of the collection was also made into a feature film starring Rip Torn and Michael J. Fox. These stories continue Mosher's career-long exploration of Kingdom County, Vermont. Within the borders of his fictional kingdom, the Providence Journal has noted, Mosher has created mountains and rivers, timber forests and crossroads villages, history and language. And he has peopled the landscape with some of the truest, most memorable characters in contemporary literature.

"Three Vermont women enroll in a nature writing class, only to find themselves drawn into a plot to commit an act of destruction in the name of the environment." "Though Lauren Blackwood, Marianna Finch, and Rachel Katz each claim an interest in "nature," the notebooks they keep for their class reveal their very different attitudes about the natural world. For Lauren, a farmer and breeder of llamas, nature is a powerful if unpredictable partner; for Marianna, a real estate agent, it is an aesthetic experience; and for Rachel, an extreme sports enthusiast, it is a cause and a commitment." "In a narrative tour de force, the story unfolds in the form of entries from these nature notebooks. In separate accounts, each woman describes the events leading up to an act of sabotage on Mount Mansfield. Each version reveals new perspectives, new layers of deception, and new insights into the mysterious, charismatic Kyle Hess, a well-known nature writer and activist from California whose role in this act of eco-terrorism is gradually revealed."--BOOK JACKET.

Roxana Robinson's great gift for the telling detail and strong sense of the emotional shoals lurking just beneath even the calmest surface have inspired comparisons to John Cheever, Henry James, and Edith Wharton. In this new paperback edition of her first novel, we meet Laura, a 29-year-old wife, mother, sister, friend, lover, and erstwhile photographer whose life is painfully out of focus. A month's vacation on the Maine coast with her son, her lover, Ward, and her sister's family is supposed to be an idyllic period of sustenance and calm, but for Laura, who believes that "entropy governed the world, the universe, and the dinner hour," it turns into the ultimate test of her ability to trust herself and others.

Contains: New England Works / Edith Wharton -- The Lamp of Psyche (1895) -- The Angel at the Grave (1901) -- The Pretext (1908) -- Xingu (1911) -- [Ethan Frome]( The Triumph of Night (1914) -- Bewitched (1925) -- All Souls' (1937).

When three fortyish couples lease a ramshackle farmhouse in the Berkshires for the summer, they think they've found their Utopia. For their children, the farm is a welcome escape from city dangers and disarray, and for the adults, a reprieve from psychic clocks ticking inexorably toward middle age. There's Chad, the high-rolling writer, and his wife Leslie, for whom perfection is the minimum acceptable standard. Advertising executive Calvin is going to write that novel at last, while his therapist wife Jane has arranged a sabbatical to take stock of her life. Professor-cum-scriptwriter Zack is also reevaluating his future as wife Polly tries to figure out if she even has one. . For a while the promise of renewal seems within reach. The children, teetering on the brink of adolescence, exult in their freedom, while the adults explore the gifts of time and tranquillity. But as the summer drones on the veneer wears thin, and the couples begin to flounder in the miasma of tired, careworn marriages, pangs of only middling professional success, and demands of children whose need for love seems more a distraction than a joy. It is through the children, however, with their own games, secrets, rivalries, and loyalties, that the adults come to see the frail but undeniable connections spun by love, family, and friendship. With multiple narrative perspectives, poignant insights, and sometimes painful honesty, Kit Reed creates a story of individuals confronting the insubstantiality of their dreams and discovering - and surviving - their own flawed humanity.