The ceremony of the old giving way to the new, the young breaking away from what is old, may well be the one constant in the ceaseless flux of American life. Fire Sermon reenacts this ceremony in the entangled lives of three young people and one old man. A chance meeting on the highway links a hippie couple to the eastward journey of an old man and a boy. For the boy it is a daily drama testing and questioning his allegiance. To which world does he belong? To the familiar ties and affections of the old or the disturbing and alluring charms of the new?

Wright Morris was the poet laureate of Middle America. An icon of the 1940s, he died in 1998. Honored many times for his literary work, Morris twice received the prestigious American Book Award for The Field of Vision (1957) and Plains Song (1981), and pioneered the "photo-text." But Morris also created memorable images capturing the soul and mystique of the Midwest.

Morris's images are the expression of his life-long quest to discover a vernacular and imagined America. His images brilliantly subvert such "clichéd" motifs as grain elevators, Model T Fords, a farmer's cutlery set, or dusty badlands. Here, for the first time, the full emotional impact of his extraordinarily beautiful photographs—as forceful as his more celebrated writing—has been given free reign.

Although Tom Scanlon would just as soon spend it alone, his ninetieth birthday becomes the occasion for a family gathering in the Midwestern town of Lone Tree. The unlikely celebrants take this opportunity to reconceive their visions of past, future, and family in their own grotesque and ultimately liberating ways. Ceremony in Lone Tree is a spare and beautiful work by one of America's great postwar authors.

"When Warren Howe, middle-aged TV script writer, receives an invitation to the funeral of Monsieur Dulac, he attempts to round up all the people who were guests with him three decades ago in Riva, Dulac's castle in the Austrian Alps. Neither Uncle Fremont, who 'invented the dust bowl' nor an old college friend cares to re-experience the good old days. But Sol Spiegel, a junk collector who salvages the past, is eager to return. To escape a world firmly anchored in space and bound to clock time, to re-experience the unbelievable, they go back to Riva—an imaginative creation fixed in neither time nor space, but like its master, both in and out of the world." —Saturday Review of Literature

"Wright Morris has an uncommon facility for constantly shifting from past to present without confusion or annoyance to the reader. In Cause for Wonder the time shifts are faster than in The Field of Vision—and all to good purpose. They make of this novel a ghost story that needs no bed sheets and white-paint props, though a few are used." —Newsweek

Floyd Warner, eighty-two, has driven from California to his childhood home in Nebraska in his antique Maxwell coupe. There he confronts the smoldering remains of his late sister's house and the realization that he is now completely alone. As though in a trance, he sets out once again, this time to find his first adult home, a dusty sheep farm in the southwest, preparing to meet the fate that ultimately awaits him. Of such deceptively simple ingredients is this brilliant portrait of the last hours of an old man's life composed. Floyd Warner, who first appeared in Fire Sermon, is perhaps the ultimate characterization in the career of a writer who has been called "quite simply the best novelist now writing in America" (John W. Aldridge).

"Throughout Bendable Siege, virtually every line has the taut ripple of its own ongoing lyricism. One might miss a word here or there but only at one's risk. We're immediately in the realm of the irreducible." —Gustaf Sobin.

"In this abundant space and isolation, the energy lords extract their bounty of natural resources, and the curators of mass destruction once mined their egregious weapons and reckless acts. It is a land of absolutes, of passion and indifference, lush textures and inscrutable tensions. Here violence can push beauty to the edge of a razor blade . . ."

Thus Ellen Meloy describes a corner of desert hard by the San Juan River in southeastern Utah, a place long forsaken as implausible and impassable, of little use or value—a place that she calls home. Despite twenty years of carefully nurtured intimacy with this red-rock landscape, Meloy finds herself, one sunbaked morning, staring down at a dead lizard floating in her coffee and feeling suddenly unmoored. What follows is a quest that is both physical and spiritual, a search for home.

A striking combination of the spiritual and political, Money Money Money | Water Water Water explores the enormous impact that widespread environmental destruction makes on our way of life. With prophetic disquietude, Jane Mead's inquiry into the interconnectedness of our choices exposes our existence as paradox. Her poems beseech us to consider the consequences of our collective actions on the planet.

In House of Poured-Out Waters, Jane Mead's substantial new collection, she continues to grapple with a world both personal and cultural. Poised in the slender moment between too early and too late, between the difficult past and the unimaginable future, Mead's poems remind us that the old debates about fate and free will, nature and nurture, are also matters of personal urgency. More than anything, it is her spiritual dimension that offers Mead a way into the future—but that way must be paved, image by image, with the world before her. Simultaneously conversational and lyrical, these fearless poems extend the possibilities of narrative verse.