Filled with scores of family and found photos and journal entries, this book will appeal to family historians, scrapbookers, diarists, and anyone interested in the power of family and memory. A book that contemplates families, especially the relationship between mother and daughter, Half in Shade is an ideal Mother's Day gift. The book will appeal to people diagnosed with cancer and those who know someone affected by cancer. Speculating on the unknown in each photograph, this book actively engages the reader in a balancing act of fact and fiction, inspiring them to do the same with their own photo albums. Course adoption: creative nonfiction, autobiography/memoir, health journalism.

Invigorating creative nonfiction-short, but never slight- gathered by the co-editor of In Short and In Brief. In the years since the perennially popular In Short and In Brief were published, readers have come to delight in the deft focus of the succinct piece we now call The Short. Extending this trend, Short Takes presents over seventy-five writers whose range and style demonstrate the myriad ways we humans have of telling our truths. Themes develop and speak to or collide with one another: musings about parents, childhood, sports, weather, war, solitude, nature, loss-and, of course, love. The stellar roster of contributors includes well-known writers-Verlyn Klinkenborg, Jo Ann Beard, David Sedaris, Dorothy Allison, Salman Rushdie, and Terry Tempest Williams-along with Michael Perry, Mark Spragg, Jane Brox, and others whose literary stars are clearly rising. Each short-whether a few paragraphs or reaching 2,000 words, and reflecting almost every way nonfiction can be written-invites us to experience the power of the small to move, persuade, and change us.

What Persists contains eighteen of the nearly fifty essays on poetry that Judith Kitchen published in The Georgia Review over a twenty-five-year span. Coming at the genre from every possible angle, this celebrated critic discusses work by older and younger poets, most American but some foreign, and many of whom were not yet part of the contemporary canon. Her essays reveal a cultural history from the dismantling of the Berlin Wall, through 9/11 and the Iraq War, and move into today's political climate. They chronicle personal interests while they also make note of what was happening in contemporary poetry by revealing overall changes of taste, both in content and in the use of craft. Over time, they fashion a comprehensive overview of the contemporary literary scene. At its best, What Persists shows what a wide range of poetry is being written-by women, men, poets who celebrate their ethnicity, poets who show a fierce individualism, poets whose careers have soared, promising poets whose work has all but disappeared.

"The Circus Train" is an essay of novella length-something for which we have no term. But nevertheless it is meant to stand on its own. Even with the two additional companion essays, The Circus Train is a short book. Its intention is to explore, to argue, and to contemplate. Confronting memory and mortality, Judith Kitchen finds abundance in her own front yard.