Books published by Houghton Mifflin

Extending the principles of the famed Peterson Identification System to the man-made world, A Field Guide to Airplanes will enable you to identify virtually any plane in North America, in the air or on the ground. This fully revised and updated third edition features more than 400 aircraft, including 75 new planes that incorporate the latest advances in general aviation, military aircraft, commercial airliners, business jets, and helicopters. Beautiful and accurate illustrations include arrows and detailed drawings to help pinpoint the differences between similar models. Clear, succinct descriptions of each plane include statistical information, history, and a list of important field marks that distinguish one plane from another. For serious enthusiasts and amateurs alike, this is the only true field guide to airplanes.

In a recent double fiction issue, The New Yorker devoted the entire back page to a single poem, "The Clerk's Tale," by Spencer Reece. The poet who drew such unusual attention has a surprising background: for many years he has worked for Brooks Brothers, a fact that lends particular nuance to the title of his collection. The Clerk's Tale pays homage not only to Chaucer but to the clerks' brotherhood of service in the mall, where "the light is bright and artificial, / yet not dissimilar to that found in a Gothic cathedral." The fifty poems in The Clerk's Tale are exquisitely restrained, shot through with a longing for permanence, from the quasi-monastic life of two salesmen at Brooks Brothers to the poignant lingering light of a Miami dusk to the weight of geography on an empty Minnesota farm. Gluck describes them as having "an effect I have never quite seen before, half cocktail party, half passion play . . . We do not expect virtuosity as the outward form of soul-making, nor do we associate generosity and humanity with such sophistication of means, such polished intelligence . . . Much life has gone into the making of this art, much patient craft."

Fun Cakes for Every Boy and GirlPhoto of Every RecipeKids will love the 20 cakes here. There are pretty cakes, including the Butterfly Cake and the Rainbow Angel Cake; sporty cakes like the Soccer Ball Cake and the Roller Coaster Cake; and ones that are just plain fun, such as the Monster Cake or the Gum Ball Machine Cake. Whatever type of cake your kid likes, you'll be celebration ready with this great collection of recipes!

In lush, glowing prose, Louise Hawes's historical novel draws readers into the life and art of sixteenth-century Bologna with a compelling account of Lavinia Fontana, arguably the most famous female painter of the Italian Renaissance. Here readers will find a coming-of-age story filled with quest, complication, and catastrophe as well as miracles and hope. Although the novel is set four hundred years ago, the hard choices it involves speak to all times, all places, and are sure to tap into readers' own conflicts between head and heart, real life and dreams.

Discusses how to write fiction, exploring point of view, dialogue, endings, and revision.

One of America's foremost literary critics presents twenty-eight essays on American and European writers, including Joyce, Flaubert, Fitzgerald, Melville, Dostoevsky, and Faulkner.

Meet Gossie, a small yellow gosling who loves to wear bright red bootsevery day. One morning Gossie cant find her beloved boots. She looks everywhere for them: under the bed, over the wall, even in the barn. Preschoolers will enjoy helping Gossie find her red boots and delight in where Gossie finally finds them.

"It's Jones's age-defying distinction to have mobilized a moral intelligence that's sufficiently vast to contain multitudes."-Washington Post Book World Imaginary Logic is a brilliantly expansive, deeply meditative, and at times wildly imaginative collection of poems that combines Rodney Jones's distinctive storytelling ability, sharp social intelligence, and keen powers of observation in a book that is wistful, satiric, audacious, and remorseless. "The Art of Heaven" opens with a parody of Dante and a down-home, twisted humor that Jones's readers have come to rely on: "In the middle of my life I came to a dark wood, / the smell of barbecue, kids running in the yards. / Not deep depression. This nice hell of suburbs. / Speed bumps. The way things aren't quite paradise." Jones, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, is one of America's "best, most generous, and most brilliantly readable poets" (Poetry). Imaginary Logic is the most eloquent expression yet of his rigorous mind, scrupulous eye, and capacious heart. "[Jones'] poems are a work of hands, and hands-on. His rich lyric sentences register experience at the full and thus at its high moment of complexity. Like most of the important poets, he's a lapsed pastoralist attempting to restore-no, save-the fallen."-Stanley Plumly

The Common Man, Maurice Manning's fourth collection, is a series of ballad-like narratives, set down in loose, unrhymed iambic tetrameter, that honors the strange beauty of the Kentucky mountain country he knew as a child, as well as the idiosyncratic adventures and personalities of the oldtimers who were his neighbors, friends, and family. Playing off the book's title, Manning demonstrates that no one is common or simple. Instead, he creates a detailed, complex, and poignant portrait?by turns serious and hilarious, philosophical and speculative, but ultimately tragic?of a fast-disappearing aspect of American culture. The Common Man's accessibility and its enthusiastic and sincere charms make it the perfect antidote to the glib ironies that characterize much contemporary American verse. It will also help to strengthen Manning's reputation as one of his generation's most important and original voices.

"An extraordinary exploration and meditation . . . [Bass] transports us along on this wonder-filled tour, full of hardness and hope, into an otherworldly place that mirrors our own." --National Geographic TravelerBlack rhinos are not actually black. They are, however, giant animals with tiny eyes, feet the diameter of laundry baskets, and horns that are prized for both their aesthetic and medicinal qualities. Until recently, these creatures were perched on the edge of extinction, their numbers dwindling as they succumbed to poachers and the ravages of civil war. Now their numbers are rising, thanks to a groundbreaking new conservation method from the Save the Rhino Trust: make sure that rhinos are worth more alive than dead.Rick Bass, who has long worn the uneasy mantle of both activist and hunter, traveled to Namibia to find black rhinos. The tale of his journey provides a deeper understanding of these amazing animals and of just what needs to be done to protect them."Bass provides a singularly thoughtful portrait of a unique animal, and a meditation on mankind's relationship to both it and the natural world as a whole." --Minneapolis Star Tribune

?The place to go if you're really interested in this version of the quest for creating Artificial Intelligence (AI).??Seattle Times For centuries, people have dreamed of creating a machine that thinks like a human. Scientists have made progress: computers can now beat chess grandmasters and help prevent terrorist attacks. Yet we still await a machine that exhibits the rich complexity of human thought?one that doesn't just crunch numbers, or take us to a relevant Web page, but understands us and gives us what we need. With the creation of Watson, IBM's Jeopardy! playing computer, we are one step closer to that goal. But how did we get here? In Final Jeopardy, Stephen Baker traces the arc of Watson's ?life,? from its birth in the IBM labs to its big night on the podium. We meet Hollywood moguls and Jeopardy! masters, genius computer programmers and ambitious scientists, including Watson's eccentric creator, David Ferrucci. We see how a new generation of Watsons could transform medicine, the law, marketing, even science itself, as machines process huge amounts of data at lightning speed, answer our questions, and possibly come up with new hypotheses. As fast and fun as the game itself, Final Jeopardy shows how smart machines will fit into our world?and how they'll disrupt it. ?Like Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine, Baker's book finds us at the dawn of a singularity. It's an excellent case study, and does good double duty as a Philip K. Dick scenario, too.??Kirkus Reviews ?Baker's narrative is both charming and terrifying . . . an entertaining romp through the field of artificial intelligence?and a sobering glimpse of things to come.??Publishers Weekly, starred review

Sarah promised Marjorie when they were five years old that they would be best friends forever. But that was before seventh grade, when everything changed everything except Marjorie. While Sarah wants to meet new people and try new things, Marjorie still likes doing the same things they always did. It seems the more time the two girls spend together, the more time Sarah wants to spend apart. How did a promise that was so easy to make become so hard to keep?With beautifully drawn characters and vivid details, this incisive novel portrays middle school in all its complexity both the promise of what is to come and the pain of what must be left behind."

Big Audrey is a girl . . . with cat's whiskers . . . and sort of cat's eyes. But, is there an other cat-whiskered, sort of cat-eyed girl?Big Audrey waves goodbye to her friends Iggy and Neddie, Seamus, and Crazy Wig, in Los Angeles and hitches a ride with bongo-playing-while-driving Marlon Brando across the country to Poughkeepsie, New York, city of mystery. She finds she has questions needing answers-and a bit of inter-plane-of-existence traveling to do.Big Audrey and her telepathic friend Molly zigzag off on an incredibly strange and kooky adventure, and solve the mystery of the cat-whiskered doppelganger.

Three guys from the Briar Academy fencing team went up to the cliff that night for a hazing ritual but only two came back alive. Now Luke s best friend, Hayden, is in jail and the pressure is on Luke to report what he saw. But what did he see? An accident or a murder? Luke has always followed Hayden s lead, but this is one decision he ll be forced to make on his own. And to do it, he must face the truth about his friendship with Hayden and his own painful past.

Claire Louise Corbett and her Confederate family flee their home as Union soldiers shell their town of Vicksburg, Mississippi. They venture out from the safety of a cave only three times a day, when the Union army takes their meals at eight in the morning, noon, and eight at night. Although many of the townspeople suffer from a lack of food, the Corbetts receive extra rations from Claire Louise's brother, Landon, a doctor with the Union army. When Claire Louise discovers her brother tending to a Confederate soldier who is responsible for Robert E. Lee's "lost order" (causing the South to lose the Battle of Antietam), she is forced to make a difficult choice between family and friends.Award-winning historical novelist Ann Rinaldi paints a story of family, courage, and secrets during the forty-seven-day siege of Vicksburg, a battle that has sometimes been ignored in history because it ended the same day as the Battle of Gettysburg.

Meredith Willis is suspicious of Adrien, the new guy next door. When she dares to sneak a look into the windows of his house, she sees something in the cellar that makes her believe that Adrien might be more than just a creep?he may be an actual monster.But her sister, Heather, doesn't share Meredith's repulsion. Heather believes Adrien is the only guy who really understands her. In fact, she may be falling in love with him. When Adrien and Heather are cast as the leads in the school production of Romeo and Juliet, to Heather, it feels like fate. To Meredith, it feels like a bad omen. But if she tries to tear the couple apart, she could end up in the last place she'd ever want to be: the cellar. Can Meredith convince her sister that she's dating the living dead before it's too late for both of them?

Recklessness and rigor, in equal measure, mark the stirring poetics of Andrew Hudgins in this fine new book. Hudgins can wrestle a rhyme scheme into submission with one hand tied behind his back and can penetrate the black heart of history with a single, subtly rendered detail. He laughs with Democritus and weeps with Heraclitus and, line by distillate line, contrives a tonic antidote to the acetone / of American inattention. Linda Gregerson

On a summer vacation to Mexico, popularity-obsessed Kat ends up on a teen adventure tour where she meets Nando, a young Mayan guide (who happens to be quite a cutie). As they travel to different Mayan ruins each day, Nando tells Kat his original legend of Muluc, a girl who lived in the time of the ancient Maya. The dangerous, dramatic world in which Muluc lived is as full of rivalry, betrayal, and sacrifice as Kat s world at middle school. And as she makes new friends and discovers treasures in Mexico, Kat begins to question her values and those of her friends back at home."