This paperback edition of Stephanie Pearl-McPhee's popular Free-Range Knitter: The Yarn Harlot Writes Again reminds us of the joy we felt upon first encountering her hilarious and poignant collection of essays surrounding her favorite topics: knitting, knitters and what happens when you get those two things anywhere near ordinary people. For the 60 million knitters in America, Stephanie Pearl-McPhee (a.k.a. the Yarn Harlot) shares stories of knitting horrors and triumphs, knitting successes and defeats, but, mostly, stories about the human condition that ring true for everyone — especially if you happen to have a rather large amount of yarn in your house. Funny, unique and gleeful in her obsession, Pearl-McPhee speaks to knitters of all skill levels in this delightful celebration of craft and creativity.

Consisting of over twenty years of letters, essays, reflections, and interviews, this collection provides unique depiction of an author who embodies a consummate passion for writing.

The twenty-first century has been dominated by two major global crises: a scarcity of food and fuel. Both have had detrimental effects on the environment and both are at the root of the fragile health of the global economy. Combining the best of the critically acclaimed Fuelling the Future and Feeding the Future, this timely and provocative collection of essays from leading thinkers such as Thomas Homer-Dixon, Gordon Laird, Jeremy Rifkin, Frances Moore Lappe, and Anna Lappe offers valuable strategies to combat global famine and fast-food fat; business models for sustainable food production and power sources; and descriptions of emerging technologies and sciences.

World War II veteran Hank Dunfield is about to turn one hundred years old. The staff at Ponderosa Pine Lodge have recruited Sarah, a young nursing student, to keep Hank safe, comfortable, and in the building while they plan a grand centenarian celebration. There's one problem: Hank doesn't want to live that long. Seemingly opposites, Hank and Sarah kindle a deep friendship. Sarah fears the future with multiple sclerosis will be even more isolated, difficult, and painful than the isolated, difficult, and painful present. Hank, a tail gunner during the Second World War, opens his heart to share the deep knowledge of fear, luck, and flying into battle he learned over his. combat missions. Sarah and Hank find strength in each other as they face their deepest fears. Based on interviews with veterans in Alberta seniors' homes and the skilled nurses who care for them, Flight Risk is the story of finding exactly who you need when you least expect it. An empathetic exploration of grief, friendship, and hope, this play asks what we lose when we ignore the knowledge of our elderly, challenges the way that we think about aging and death, and inspires a brighter, more compassionate future.

Through a collection of intimate reflections (on art, punctuation, eyeglasses, color, dreams, celebrity, corpses, porn, and translation) and assignments that encourage pleasure, attentiveness, and acts of playful making, poet, artist, critic, novelist, and performer Wayne Koestenbaum enacts twenty-six ecstatic collisions between his mind and the world. A subway passenger's leather bracelet prompts musings on the German word for "stranger." Montaigne leads to the memory of a fourth-grade friend's stinky feet. Koestenbaum dreams about a handjob from John Ashbery, swims next to Nicole Kidman, reclaims Robert Rauschenberg's squeegee, and apotheosizes Marguerite Duras as a destroyer of sentences. He directly proposes assignments to listeners: "Buy a one-dollar cactus, and start anthropomorphizing it. Call it Sabrina." "Describe an ungenerous or unkind act you have committed." "Find in every orgasm an encyclopedic richness... Reimagine doing the laundry as having an orgasm, and reinterpret orgasm as not a tiny experience, temporally limited, occurring in a single human body, but as an experience that somehow touches on all of human history. "Figure It Out is both a guidebook for, and the embodiment of, the practices of pleasure, attentiveness, art, and play from "one of the most original and relentlessly obsessed cultural spies writing today" (John Waters).

Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers but also a brilliant and singular essayist. Arranged into four sections - In the World, In the Audience, On the Bookshelf, and Feel Free - this new collection poses questions we immediately recognize. What is The Social Network - and Facebook itself - really about? "It's a cruel portrait of us: 500 million sentient people entrapped in the recent careless thoughts of a Harvard sophomore." Why do we love libraries? "Well-run libraries are filled with people because what a good library offers cannot be easily found elsewhere: an indoor public space in which you do not have to buy anything in order to stay." What will we tell our granddaughters about our collective failure to address global warming? "So I might say to her, look: the thing you have to appreciate is that we'd just been through a century of relativism and deconstruction, in which we were informed that most of our fondest-held principles were either uncertain or simple wishful thinking, and in many areas of our lives we had already been asked to accept that nothing is essential and everything changes - and this had taken the fight out of us somewhat." Gathering in one place for the first time previously unpublished work, as well as already classic essays, such as, "Joy," and, "Find Your Beach," Feel Free offers a survey of important recent events in culture and politics as well as Smith's own life. Equally at home in the world of good books and bad politics, Brooklyn-born rappers and the work of Swiss novelists, she is by turns wry, heartfelt, indignant, and incisive - and never any less than perfect company. This is literary journalism at its zenith.

Farm workers are the faceless multitudes driving agriculture production. Many workers--men, women, and children--are injured and even killed at work. In nine essays, contributors to Farm Workers in Western Canada look at the origin, work conditions, and precarious lives of farm workers in terms of larger historical forces such as colonialism, land rights, and racism. They also examine how the rights and privileges of farm workers, including seasonal and temporary foreign workers, conflict with those of their employers, and reveal the barriers many face by being excluded from most statutory employment laws, sometimes in violation of the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms. Scholars in the disciplines of sociology, Canadian history, law, and rural and labour studies, as well as policy makers, farmers, farm workers, and activists will benefit from reading Farm Workers in Western Canada.

In this volume of incisive assays, Ward Churchill looks at representations of American Indians in literature and film, delineating a history of cultural progaganda that has served to support the continued colonization of Native America. Literature and art crafted by the dominant culture are an insidious political force, disinforming people who might otherwise develop a clearer understanding of indigenous struggles for jestice and freedom. This book is offered to counter that deception, and to move people to take action on issues confronting American Indians today.

The craft of craft, the art of craft - here in Canada we're just starting to really talk about these things. In March 1999, Jean Johnson, who runs Toronto's Craft Studio at Harbourfront Centre, organized a wildly successful symposium on the state of craft in Canada. Curators, writers, critics, academics and craftspeople spoke about all aspects of craft: history, practice, theory, criticism. Taken together, these papers create a clear picture of the vibrant crafts scene in Canada. The symposium was a groundbreaking event, a first in Canada, offering to the crafts community a new depth of consideration. The book, too, is a Canadian first, and it will allow a dialogue about the academic side of the craft movement to continue. Each of the book's three sections, History, Theory and Critical Writing, contains a keynote paper and essays by experts in each field, including Mark Kingwell writing 'On Style,' Blake Gopnik on 'Reviewing Craft Exhibitions for the Art Pages,' and Robin Metcalfe addressing 'Teacup Readings: Contextualizing Craft in the Art Gallery.'