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Japan itself is the comic hero of this sweet and funny, sad and inspiring novel. Gaby Stanton, an American professor living in Japan, has lost her job teaching English at Shizuyama University. (No one will tell her exactly why.) Alex Thorn, an American psychologist, is mourning his son, a Shizuyama exchange student who was killed in an accident. (No one will tell him exactly how.) Alex has come to this utterly foreign place to find the truth, and now Gaby is serving as his translator and guide. The key to mastering Japanese, she keeps telling him, is understanding what's not being said. And in this "deft and delightful" (Karen Joy Fowler) novel, the unsaid truths about everything from work and love to illness and death cast a deafening silence-and tower in the background like Mount Fuji itself.
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An inside look at the movement to make English the only official language in local communities around the US.
Poetry. "PORTABLE PLANET is a marvelous book. I've been following Shaffer's work for years and he is on a definitive upward spiral"-Jim Harrison. "Graced by the best from the past, the poet wanders. His poems will take you to places you need to visit"-Steve Sanfield. "Eric Paul Shaffer's poems carry us ever inward and out, where particular stones sprout wings, where solid ground is shaken by the nimble fingers of small gods, and the normal everyday ways of life stay blessedly themselves. These poems are portable, they're the exact same size as the hip pocket of your mind"-John Kain.
Lucy Fooshee lives a charmed life--a local beauty queen who snared farmer Bob and became his beautiful young bride. But when sexy Billy Lee lopes into town, Lucy embarks on a scandalous affair, triggering a series of events which force the town to reveal its bigotry--and compels Lucy to confront the true meaning of happiness, sexuality, and freedom.
Poetry. "How wonderful to discover these lost works in the last leavings of the Twentieth Century. May their author continue to sweep the kitchens, the courtyards, the shrine halls of his always surprising mind. May we continue to share such delightful detritus. And may it continue to amount to nothing much at all. Thanks for the broom"--Bill Porter. "In LIVING IN THE MONASTERY, WORKING IN THE KITCHEN, Eric Paul Shaffer employs this discerning curmudgeon's voice with ironic understanding for those who may wish to pursue enlightenment but who must also work to live.... Companion volume to Shaffer's PORTABLE PLANET, this new book reveals Shih-te giving Eastern teachings an irreverent twist even as he disarms us with his struggle to attain a sense of purpose, place, and identity"--Cheri Crenshaw, Small Press Review.
A Million-Dollar Bill surveys our lives in America up close and personal from the first young summer taste in “Watermelon Seeds” to the hopeful hand-made creation of legal tender to purchase the necessities and accessories of the American Dream in the title poem. Quirky, original, and astute, this expansive and engaging poetry collection by Eric Paul Shaffer entertains even as each poem presses readers to pause and think for a moment. From love to death to parking the car, from rain to ice to sky to falling stars, the little insights that grow large in language are here for the reading. Best of all, with A Million-Dollar Bill, you can keep the change.
This collection of papers on functional syntax shows the development of a specific stream of functional linguistics initiated by Susumu Kuno of Harvard University. Inspired by Prague School linguists such as Jan Firbas and Vilém Mathesius, Kuno developed a more comprehensive and theory-oriented approach and linked it with the American formalist approach of generative grammar. His approach is thus a unique combination of functionalism and formalism that constantly urges the promotion of interactions between these two major trends in linguistics. The papers in this collection coherently deal with functional aspects of linguistics from a wide variety of perspectives such as theoretical, applicational, experimental and diachronic aspects, incorporating the functional concept advocated by Kuno.
A USA TODAY best-selling book “Fast-paced and chilling...a brilliant mystery about lies, shame, and secrets.” —Apple Books If you don’t confront your past...it might confront you first. Dr. Gregory Weber appears to have an enviable life. He's a renowned clinical psychologist residing in an elegant home in Cambridge, Massachusetts, with his wife, Liv, and their two kids. But Gregory feels increasingly disconnected. His marriage is strained, his children are distant, and he can’t stop fixating on an unforgivable mistake he made when he was seventeen. Something no one else knows about. So when an unscheduled client named Mira starts to appear in his office every Wednesday at 1 p.m. wi...
Green Leaves: Selected & New Poems collects work from Eric Paul Shaffer's seven volumes and thirty-five years of publication. On voyages around the Pacific Rim, from California to Okinawa to Hawai'i, Shaffer's sharp eye for natural and human detail delights and illuminates. A charter member of the "Clear Pool School," Shaffer writes direct, profound, and often funny poems celebrating the American vernacular and encouraging a broader sense of the human, humane, ecological, and planetary. Lāhaina Noon Today, I'm a shadowless man. The sun calls me into the street, and I walk alone into the light of noon. The moment has come. I stand quietly on Front Street balancing the sun on my head. My shadow crawls in my ear to hide in the small, dark world of my skull. The sun illuminates the shadow in my skin, and I shine like a second moon, reflecting all the light I cannot contain.