Lost Sheep recounts the author's journey from the "real" world of 1970s America to the rollicking, freedom-loving, outlaw world of Aspen. Blending personal narrative, local history, dramatic interlude, and cultural analysis, the story begins as a literal journey but quickly evolves into the memoir of an entire town-a time and place many consider to be Aspen's "Golden Age," when artists, eccentrics, and outlaws took over the city and transformed it into an alpine bohemia. The noteworthy cast of characters-famous, infamous, and unknown-includes Claudine Longet, Jack Nicholson, Dr. Hunter S. Thompson, Steve Martin, and Ted Bundy. The local residents are even more colorful, from a woman who feeds her dog nothing but vegetables to a bookstore owner who believes in "psychic surgeries," while everywhere art is being made-and a good deal of hay.

Now writers or would-be writers can read the most provocative and the most useful lectures on life and craft presented at such select conferences as Bread Loaf, the Wesleyan Writers' Conference, and the Napa Valley Writers' Conference. In these addresses, Ellen Bryant Voigt, X. J. Kennedy, Francine Prose, and Marvin Bell, among others, give intimate accounts of the struggle to create something worthy of being published and read.

Sixteen lectures, among the best delivered to small passionate audiences at the many writers' conferences held each year, are now for the first time available to a broader audience.
In "Writing It Down for James," the second in the Writers on Life and Craft series, Pattiann Rogers uses science as a jumping-off point for spirituality; Stephen Corey finds imperfect translation to be a rich language of its own when it occurs in his infant daughter-to-be's Korean adoption papers; and other writers tell about learning to read, loving to travel, and writing one's own story.

Killer Verse: Poems of Murder and Mayhem is a spine-tingling collection of terrifically creepy poems about the deadly art of murder.

The villains and victims who populate these pages range from Cain and Abel and Bluebeard and his wives to Lizzie Borden, Jack the Ripper, and Mafia hit men. The literary forms they inhabit are just as varied, from the colorful melodramas of old Scottish ballads to the hard-boiled poetry of twentieth-century noir, from lighthearted comic riffs to profound poetic musings on murder.

Robert Browning, Thomas Hardy, W. H. Auden, Stevie Smith, Mark Doty, Frank Bidart, Toi Derricotte, Lynn Emanuel, and Cornelius Eady are only a few of the many poets, old and new, whose work is captured in this heart-stopping—and criminally entertaining—collection.