Counterpoint: 634 books

A novel of crime and passion in post-Civil War Maryland, based on a true story, from a “wonderfully talented” author (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times). Winner of the Michael Shaara Prize for Excellence in Civil War Fiction Based on true events from the author’s family history,...

“Short stories and some short novels are close to poetry-with the fewest words they capture the essence of a situation, of a human being. It’s like trying to pin down the eternal moment.” -Gina BerriaultGina Berriault was one of the great, rare masters of short fiction. With commendable restraint...

In 1951, just days before her scheduled lobotomy after years in a mental hospital, New Zealand author Janet Frame’s first collection of short stories unexpectedly won the Hubert Church Memorial Award, one of the country’s most prestigious honors. The procedure was cancelled, and Frame would go...

The renowned American poet and translator collects 150 poems—from across the globe and many eras—that demonstrate our changing relationship with nature. In News of the Universe, Robert Bly has assembled a uniquely cross-cultural anthology of poems that, taken together, illuminate his vision...

In Unsuspecting Souls, Barry Sanders examines modern society’s indifference to the individual. Beginning with the Industrial Revolution, when care for human beings began to disappear slowly, and ending with the modern era, when societal events require less person-to-person interaction and introduce...

“A clarion call to summon the moral courage to ‘rage against the dying’ of the Earth . . . impassioned and well-reasoned.” —Kirkus Reviews Even as seas rise against the shores, another great tide is beginning to rise—a tide of outrage against the pillage of the planet, a tide of...

In this “strange hybrid of travelogue and natural science” the award-winning author explores extinction with “solid research . . . and truly poetic prose” (New York Times Review of Books).   Award-winning author, poet, and scholar Melanie Challenger saw a link between her own estrangement...

“A powder-keg disguised as a domestic drama that detonates every one of our expectations of what it means to be a family.” —San Diego CityBeat Every Kind of Wanting explores the complex intersection of three unique families and their bustling efforts to have a Community Baby. Miguel could...

In Appetites, Caroline Knapp confronts Freud’s famous question, “What do women want?” and boldly reframes it, asking instead: How does a woman know, and then honor, what it is she wants in a culture bent on shaping, defining, and controlling her desires? Knapp, best-selling author of Drinking: A...

"Fast claiming his place as one of the country’s finest natural history writers, Pyle takes to the hills in search of Bigfoot in this absorbing, classily written field report. Pyle makes all the right connections. Best of all, he loves a good mystery and is smart enough, open and radical enough,...

A memoir of youth and travel through post-WWII Europe from the Pulitzer Prize- and National Book Award-winning poet of Migrations. In 1948, both the European continent and a young poet named William Stanley Merwin were embarking on periods of profound change. Twenty-one, newly married and just...

"M.F.K Fisher’s latest excursion into the art or science of gastronomy is more an anthology of the finest writing on the subject than strictly a text of her own composition . . . A royal feast, indeed!" —The New York Times Betty Fussell—winner of the James Beard Foundation’s...

The acclaimed debut novel, a classic of war literature, by one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century. In this “darkly romantic . . . beautifully composed . . . brilliant war novel” (Chicago Tribune) by “the contemporary writer most admired and envied by other writers”...

"Stern but compassionate, author Wendell Berry raises broader issues that environmentalists rarely focus on . . . In one sense Berry is the voice of a rural agrarian tradition that stretches from rural Kentucky back to the origins of human civilization. But his insights are universal because...