At the age of five, Michael Ryan was molested by a neighbor. Nearly 40 years later, he found himself methodically preparing to seduce a girl who was barely more than a child. As Ryan describes his free fall into sexual obsession, he creates an autobiography that is at once harrowing and redemptive, heartbreaking and profoundly moral. "By turns repelling and seductive . . . absorbing and disquieting." —The New York Times Book Review.

Baby B is an embryo—one of four that have been implanted into Michael Ryan's wife, Doreen. Their story is told from the rarely voiced perspective of the hoping-to-be father. As they face the prospect of failure one day and of quadruplets another, the couple must endure an emotional roller coaster of fear, exhaustion, and self-doubt. With candor and humor, Ryan chronicles an adventure and a love story: a strange and awe-inspiring medical process that, if everything goes just right, results in human life.

Originally published as an essay in The New Yorker.

“[In] preliterate societies, even those as late as ancient Greece and Anglo-Saxon England, the poet is the ideologue, historian, theologian, philosopher, TV, newspaper, Internet, and megamultiplex cinema rolled into one”—so begins Michael Ryan’s lively description of the cultural context of ancient poetry, in pointed contrast to that of poetry now. Informed by his own experience as a poet and writer, A Difficult Grace examines the lives and works of Dickinson, Yeats, Pound, Eliot, Williams, Whitman, Frost, Bishop, and Stevens (as well as other poets and writers before and since), deftly combining literary history, critical writing by the writers themselves, and Ryan's expert understanding of their work. The result is a collection of powerfully argued essays written in a style easily accessible to a wide range of readers. Attending to the difficult graces of form, structure, rhythm, and technique, Ryan illuminates the unifying subject of his book: the vocation of the poet and the writer in the contemporary world. This is an essential book for both writers and readers.

Sarah Ruhl is a mother of three and one of America’s best-known playwrights. She has written a stunningly original book of essays whose concerns range from the most minimal and personal subjects to the most encompassing matters of art and culture. The titles themselves speak to the volume’s uniqueness: “On lice,” “On sleeping in the theater,” “On motherhood and stools (the furniture kind),” “Greek masks and Bell’s palsy.” 100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write is a book in which chimpanzees, Chekhov, and child care are equally at home. A vibrant, provocative examination of the possibilities of the theater, it is also a map to a very particular artistic sensibility, and an unexpected guide for anyone who has chosen an artist’s life.

Over the course of fifteen years, Mary Ruefle delivered a lecture every six months to a group of poetry graduate students. Collected here for the first time, these lectures include "Poetry and the Moon," "Someone Reading a Book Is a Sign of Order in the World," and "Lectures I Will Never Give." Intellectually virtuosic, instructive, and experiential, Madness, Rack, and Honey resists definition, demanding instead an utter—and utterly pleasurable—immersion. Finalist for the 2012 National Book Critics Circle Award.

Fans of Lydia Davis and Miranda July will delight in this short prose from a beloved and cutting-edge poet. Here are thirty stories that deliver the soft touch and the sucker punch with stunning aplomb. Ducks, physicists, detectives, and The New York Times all make appearances.

An early collection by Ruefle.

Mary Ruefle is an observer who seeks to bring sense and order to her world. This is a world that can span continents and centuries, but in each, the poem is defined by where she is at that moment. Many of the poems in Apparition Hill were written in or about China, and Ruefle brings an eye for the universal to what she finds in the exotic, as she transcends both time and geography.

"I read Mary Ruefle. I frown. Look out the window. Read more Ruefle. Rub my eyes. Stare into space. More Ruefle. There is an emerald in the dark storage compartment. I blink. Breathe. Back to the poem. Life has deepened." —Mark Halliday

Tristimania is Mary Ruefle’s eighth book of poems.

Selectively painting over much of a forgotten nineteenth-century book, Ruefle’s ninth publication brings new meaning to an old story. What remains visible is delicate poetry: artfully rendered, haunted by its former self, yet completely new. A high-quality replica of the original aged, delicate book in which Ruefle “erased” the text, this book will appeal to fans of poetry as well as visual art.