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The 50th anniversary edition of this classic work on the art of Northwest Coast Indians now offers color illustrations for a new generation of readers along with reflections from contemporary Northwest Coast artists about the impact of this book. The masterworks of Northwest Coast Native artists are admired today as among the great achievements of the world’s artists. The painted and carved wooden screens, chests and boxes, rattles, crest hats, and other artworks display the complex and sophisticated northern Northwest Coast style of art that is the visual language used to illustrate inherited crests and tell family stories. In the 1950s Bill Holm, a graduate student of Dr. Erna Gunther, f...
A Midwesterner contemplates the view of America from a remote Icelandic village: “A pleasure to read and ponder.” —Booklist (starred review) A Minnesotan of Icelandic ancestry, Bill Holm had traveled all over the world, gathering material for a number of rich and memorable books. Then he decided to journey to the land his family had long ago left behind for the United States, and moved into a town with one general store in a nation of a few hundred thousand people. This book recounts his time at Brimnes, his fisherman’s cottage on the shore of a creek in northern Iceland. There, he embarks on a very different life in a very different world, and from thousands of miles away, considers the fate of America—“my home, my citizenship, my burden”—in these provocative, compelling essays. “A master storyteller.” —Los Angeles Times “Bill Holm’s life in [this] place of spare beauty will make readers wish they had a Brimnes where they could restore their souls.” —Pioneer Press (St. Paul)
Arranged by letter of the alphabet, with at least one entry per letter, these short pieces capture the variety of daily life in contemporary China. Topics include dumpling making, bound feet, Chinglish, night soil, and banking.
The author of the beloved Coming Home Crazy returns to his hometown and investigates - through the lens of small-town life - what community means to us and the rigid definitions we give to "success" and "failure". Growing up, Bill Holm could define failure easily; it was "to die in Minneota". But when he returned to his hometown ("a very small dot on the ghost of an ocean of grass") twenty years later - jobless, broke, and divorced - he began to uncover its lost histories and to discover more of himself and of our time. By stepping out of the mainstream into what others regard as a backwater, Holm began to question the pace of our culture and how, in the rush to get ahead, we've lost our roots. Whether tracking the forbidden recipes of Holm's parents or spilling the beans on the scandalous affair of Hester and Art, The Heart Can Be Filled Anywhere on Earth celebrates the connections between us that we both fear and desire. By finding that which is meaningful in the seemingly insignificant, Holm delights us with stories of his town and of our need to belong.
Studies the significance of islands and discusses whether they encourage eccentricity and grandeur in human beings.
A collection of poems by Bill Holm that explore the waywardness and promise of humanity.
“The ground bass is failure; America is the key signature; Pauline Bardal is the lyrical tune that sings at the center; Minneota, Minnesota, is the staff on which the tunes are written.” So begins the masterful title piece from Bill Holm’s first book of essays, The Music of Failure. This collection introduced to many the singular vision and voice of literary giant Bill Holm, a writer who had traveled well and widely but came back to his hometown of Minneota—the town of his immigrant Icelandic ancestors—as, in his words, “for all practical purposes a failure.” What emerges from these pages, and from Holm’s cherished writings over the next two and a half decades, is anything bu...
FACES OF CHRISTMAS PAST is an engaging, middle-aged look at the perils of Christmas, our own self-imposed burdens of ritual duty (like the newsy Christmas Xerox), and the more unsettling fact that successive Christmases, more even than New Year's, mark the passing of our life from childhood to death. "Old Christmas card photos show us how we've aged," says author Bill Holm, "reminding us that, though time may curve in Einstein's physics, in our small life it is a straight line to white hair and bifocals."
Throughout his life and in his writing, Bill Holm was a humanist whose obsessions included mortality and eternity. He paid special attention to the notion of cycles, patterns, movements, and processes, and many of his most moving poems are dedicated to the friends and family he helped through the last stages of their lives. Collecting the best and most recent poems from Holm's oeuvre, The Chain Letter of the Soul paints a portrait of a man of great heart, broad vision, and startling prescience. Here, fans remember many of their favorites, and new readers discover an enduring voice of American literature through such poems as "Kafka Only Imagined It," "The Dead Get By with Everything," "My Old Friend AT&T Writes Me a Personal Letter," and "Lemon Pie." In these poems, the personal, vulnerable side of a great public figure is revealed.