"Midnights is both a comedy of errors and an affectionate portrait of small-town police, those beleaguered souls charged with the task of keeping their neighbors in line....A reminder that those assigned to protect are often vulnerable and quietly heroic."-Time Funny, touching, revealing, here is the view from a rookie cop's patrol car, during midnight shifts, in a (mostly) peaceful town. With a rich cast of characters, this is a classic memoir of the fear, surprises, excitement, embarrassment that comes with a protecting and serving a small community. "When I was twenty-three years old, five months out of college, with a degree in music, and without any idea of what to do with myself, I took a job as a policeman in Wellfleet, Massachusetts," so writes Alec Wilkinson. "Music, huh?" the police chief said during the job interview. "That'll be a big help." Wilkinson's main qualification was familiarity with the town of 2,000 people from summers there growing up. Committing himself to a year wearing a uniform and carrying a gun, and with no training, Wilkinson was sent out to keep the peace, hoping nothing would happen. There are high-speed chases and stopping drunk drivers, one of whom tries to set Wilkinson's hair on fire. There are domestic squabbles. "The first six months were murder for me," Wilkinson's partner confides on his first night. "After that, when I found out the people I thought were my friends weren't really my friends, I felt better off." There is an attempted bank robbery. The teller convinces the robber that his haul ($300) is too much to carry around in cash. The robber is still listening to investment options when the police arrive. Throughout there are conversations with his eight fellow officers who Wilkinson comes to respect and admire. "Nobody ever calls you when they're behaving themselves," one admits. "As a rule, you always get called when people are at their worst. It's sad. It depresses me." The job is often thankless. "Right now I work on the police force," another officer says, "my wife stamps cans in the supermarket, and she makes more money than I do." This is experiential journalism at its most poignant and entertaining-and it launched the career of Alec Wilkinson: writer, interviewer, essayist, and author. This is for any reader looking for insight into the real lives of police officers, outside of large cities, across America. It is also for anyone looking for a marvelously engaging read. Midnights is part of Godine's Nonpareil imprint: celebrating the joy of discovery with books bound to be classics.

Howard "Stretch" Johnson, a charismatic Harlemite who graduated from Cotton Club dancer to Communist Party youth leader, once claimed that in late 1930s New York "75% of black cultural figures had Party membership or maintained regular meaningful contact with the Party." He stretched the truth, but barely. In a broad-ranging, revisionary account of the extensive relationship between African-American literary culture and Communism in the 1920s and 1930s, William J. Maxwell uncovers both black literature's debt to Communism and Communism's debt to black literature -- reciprocal obligations first incurred during the Harlem Renaissance.

Juxtaposing well-known and newly rediscovered works by Claude McKay, Andy Razaf, Mike Gold, Langston Hughes, Louise Thompson, Richard Wright, Zora Neale Hurston, and Nelson Algren, Maxwell maintains that the "Old," Soviet-allied Left promoted a spectrum of exchanges between black and white authors, genres, theories, and cultural institutions. Channels opened between radical Harlem and Bolshevik Moscow, between the New Negro renaissance and proletarian literature. Claude McKay's 1922-23 pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, for example, usually recalled as a lighthearted adventure in radical tourism, actually jumpstarted the Comintern's controversial nation-centered program for Afro America. Breaking from studies governed by Cold War investments and pivoting on the Great Depression, Maxwell argues that Communism's rare sustenance for African-American initiative -- not a seduction of Depression-scarred innocents -- brought scores of literary "New Negroes" to the Old Left.

Discover this extraordinary and beautiful novel from one of America's greatest novelists. In rural Illinois two tenant farmers share much, finally too much, until jealously leads to murder and suicide. A tenuous friendship between lonely teenagers - the narrator, whose mother has died young, and Cletus Smith, the troubled witness to his parent's misery - is shattered. After the murder and upheavals that follow, the boys never speak again. Fifty years on, the narrator attempts a reconstruction of those devastating events and the atonement of a lifetime's regret. **One of the BBC's 100 Novels That Shaped Our World**

From the American Book Award-winning author of Ancestors and Time Will Darken comes a masterful collection of stories, spanning more than 50 years--a tour of a world that engages readers entirely, and whose characters command the deepest loyalty and tenderness.

Public companies acquire most of their outside capital from debt fi nancing and, more specifi cally, leveraged finance--an asset class that falls somewhere between traditional fixed income and stocks. While this type of debt fi nancing carries significant risk to both investors and companies, the potential returns make leveraged finance a cornerstone of the modern financial markets.

"Leveraged Financial Markets" is a gathering of the most astute and informed minds in the business. The powerhouse editorial team of William F. Maxwell and Mark R. Shenkman have handselected contributions from the top practitioners and thinkers working in leveraged finance today.

The result is an authoritative guidebook that provides you with what you need to navigate the highyield market in the integrated global economy. Packed with a wealth of analytical models illustrating the realities of distress probabilities and losses in default, "Leveraged Financial Markets" gives you all the insight and strategies you need to: Use the Sharpe ratio to measure the return versus risk for high-yield debt Develop and oversee a portfolio of high-yield bonds Value individual high-yield issuances

It also updates you on changes in the high-yield bond market and features in-depth coverage of numerous debt vehicles leveraged in the market today, including collateralized debt obligations (CDOs), credit derivative swaps (CDSs), collateralized loan obligations (CLOs), and leveraged loans.

"Leveraged Financial Markets" is your blueprint to becoming a virtuoso of this resilient and popular asset class.

Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. McKay's first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Migrating to New York, he reinvigorated the English sonnet and helped spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die." After coming under scrutiny for his communism, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for twelve years and returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union. By then, McKay's pristine "violent sonnets" were giving way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism.

McKay's verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.