As bombs fell on London almost nightly from the autumn of 1940 through the summer of 1941, the lives of ordinary people were altered beyond recognition. A reclusive Oxford lecturer found himself speaking, not about Renaissance literature to a roomful of students but about Christian doctrine into a BBC microphone. A writer of popular fiction found herself exploring not the intricacies of the whodunit but the mysteries of suffering and grace. An erudite poet and literary critic found himself patrolling the dark streets and piecing together images of fire and redemption. C. S. Lewis, Dorothy L. Sayers, and T. S. Eliot became something they had not been before the war: bearers of a terrible, yet triumphant, message that people could not expect to be spared from pain and suffering, but they would be redeemed through pain and suffering.

Drawing on C. S. Lewis’s essays, sermons, and fiction, The Lion’s Country offers a comprehensive exploration of Lewis’s understanding of reality—important, Charlie W. Starr argues, to more fully understand Lewis’s writing but also to challenge and inform our own thought about what constitutes the Real.

Slip-cased Lisa’s Legacy Trilogy containing all three cloth editions.

Prelude is a collection of the early comic strips that bring Lisa and Les together and takes fans from the early days of their deep friendship through the birth of Lisa’s baby and the baby’s adoption.

To be published simultaneously with Prelude, The Last Leaf is the sequel after Lisa’s death from breast cancer in Lisa’s Story: The Other Shoe. The Last Leaf recounts how Les and family cope with Lisa’s death and continue their lives. Creator Tom Batiuk brings Lisa back in Les’s imagination, and she helps him work out difficulties and decisions in his life and in the life of their daughter Summer. Fans will recognize Batiuk’s gentle mix of humor and more serious real-life themes that heighten the reader s interest.

In 1999, Lisa Moore, one of Funky’s friends and a main character, discovered she had breast cancer. Batiuk, unsure about dealing with such a serious subject on the funny pages, decided to go ahead with the story line. He approached the topic with the idea that mixing humor with serious and real themes heightens the reader’s interest. Lisa and husband Les faced the same physical, psychological, and social issues as anyone else dealing with the disease.

“Tight and purposeful as a fable, The List of Dangers gives us sorrows and warnings from a world imbalanced by beasts and little beauties. The images are precise as a child’s playroom—keyholes, miniature candelabra, the ‘trebly notes’ of wrens and gypsies— but perilous in their tender transformations. Maggie Smith’s rich lyric gifts produce here a poetry of balancing composure in the face of peril and pretty chance.” —David Baker, author of Midwest Eclogue

Some of the world’s greatest literature is devoted to expressing the joys and sorrows humans experience as they grow old. New opportunities and challenges appear: retirement, a special closeness with the family, failing health, the recognition of personal mortality, prejudice against the elderly, and grief over the losses of loved ones and places. This collection of more than 60 short stories, poems, and plays addresses these issues primarily through the works of modern American writers, including Bernard Malamud, Eudora Welty, Saul Bellow, Edward Albee, Robert Frost, Denise Levertov, William Carlos Williams, Ernest Hemingway, Alice Walker, Kurt Vonnegut, and others. The selections represent the experience of aging from the perspective of persons of diverse color, ethnicity, and background, and are complemented by illustrator Elizabeth Layton’s wry and perceptive prints.

“Mira Rosenthal’s The Local World incorporates deeply lived experience and mystery in a fluent shape-shifting that can take you anywhere— and bring you back, changed. The poems are beautifully crafted narratives of loss, travel, and salvage. There is a damaged family at the heart of these poems, an abandoned farm, and many rooms, parks, and train cars in far places. Yet, like all really good poems, Rosenthal’s language consistently rises above its cries to wonder and beauty. What a joy to find this stunning first book to award the Stan and Tom Wick Poetry Prize.” —Maggie Anderson, Judge

“Traveling from her pastoral America to Neruda’s Chile and the Ireland of St. Kevin, Elizabeth Breese sings the lonely-wild lyric of ditch flowers and raw honey, tornados and radios, broken birds and sailors lost at sea. Her ars poetica: ‘little bee hand in pocket editions, the rough- / cut paper combs, dancing for the things it loves.’” —Harryette Mullen

Long Road to Liberty traces the men’s immigrant roots and their involvement in events leading up to the war, including breaking up the last slave auction in St. Louis and efforts to keep Missouri in the Union, and continues with their army lives as the state’s first volunteers. It details the 15th’s actions in crucial battles in Tennessee and Georgia: their desperate stand at Stones River and near annihilation at Chickamauga; their charge without orders up Missionary Ridge; the campaign for Atlanta; and their role at Spring Hill and the killing field a day later at Franklin, Tennessee.

“Lou Suarez’s poems are about what we can and can’t see. Watch, look, see—usually these verbs are the pivots of his poems. Even our inner lives are visible here; the imagination makes voyeurs of us all. But what we see by means of these carefully made poems is not something like knowledge, but something both stranger and more familiar; a map of our puzzlement and wonder.” —William Mathews