Omaha Custom List: Short Bits: Poetry, Essays, and Short Stories 10/2025Like this list

19 items

• How to Fly (in Ten Thousand Easy Lessons)

  Poetry

  Kingsolver, Barbara,

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  In her second poetry collection, Barbara Kingsolver offers reflections on the practical, the spiritual, and the wild. She begins with "how to" poems addressing everyday matters such as being hopeful, married, divorced; shearing a sheep; praying to…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Thousand Mornings

  [Poems]

  Oliver, Mary, 1935-2019

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  In A THOUSAND MORNINGS, Mary Oliver returns to the imagery that has come to define her life's work, transporting us to the marshland and coastline of her beloved home, Provincetown, Massachusetts. In these pages, Oliver shares the wonder of dawn,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Behind You Is the Sea

  a Novel

  Darraj, Susan Muaddi,

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  A new novel that gives voice to the diverse residents of a Palestinian American community in Baltimore--from young activists in conflict with their traditional parents to the poor who clean for the rich--shows lives which intersect across divides of…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Address Unknown

  a Novel

  Taylor, Kathrine Kressmann,

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  ... a series of letters between Max, a Jewish art dealer in San Francisco, and Martin, his friend and former business partner, who has returned to Germany in 1932, just as Hitler is coming to power.

• Bite by Bite

  Nourishments & Jamborees

  Nezhukumatathil, Aimee,

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  In Bite by Bite, poet and essayist Aimee Nezhukumatathil explores the way food and drink evoke our associations and remembrances--a subtext or layering, a flavor tinged with joy, shame, exuberance, grief, desire, or nostalgia. Nezhukmatathil…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Keeping An Eye Open

  Essays on Art

  Barnes, Julian,

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  An extraordinary collection--hawk-eyed and understanding--from the Booker Prize-winning, best-selling author of The Sense of an Ending and Levels of Life. As Julian Barnes explains: "Flaubert believed that...great paintings required no words of…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Bad Indians Book Club

  Reading at the Edge of a Thousand Worlds

  Krawec, Patty/ El Akkad, Omar (FRW)

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  In this powerful reframing of the stories that make us, Anishinaabe writer Patty Krawec leads us into the borderlands of history, science, memoir, and fiction to ask: What worlds do books written by marginalized people describe and invite us to…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Century of Poetry

  100 Poems for Searching the Heart

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  All good poetry has the power to transport and transform us, to inspire and challenge us, to comfort and heal us, and to hold up a mirror to the world around us. In A Century of Poetry, Rowan Williams invites you to reflect with him on 100 poems…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• You Are Here

  Poetry in the Natural World

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  "For many years, "nature poetry" has evoked images of Romantic poets standing on mountain tops. But our poetic landscape has changed dramatically, and so has our planet. Edited and introduced by the twenty-fourth Poet Laureate of the United States,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Prelude to Bruise

  Jones, Saeed,

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  Prelude to Bruise is a song from a tightrope, balancing ecstatic existence and the chaos that always threatens to engulf a life on the margins. How do we reckon our past without being ravaged by it? How do we use people, their bodies, to express…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Poetry Is Not a Luxury

  Poems for All Seasons

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  From the creator of the beloved @PoetryIsNotaLuxury Instagram account, a gorgeously wrought poetry anthology that is a gift and a guide for readers through every season of life"--Inspired by writer and philosopher Audre Lorde's famous claim: "Poetry…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

  in Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

  Saunders, George, 1958-

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  In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, George Saunders guides the reader through seven classic Russian short stories he's been teaching for twenty years as a professor in the prestigious Syracuse University graduate MFA creative writing program. Paired…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The History of Sound

  Stories

  Shattuck, Ben, 1984-

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  A stunning collection of interconnected stories, set mostly in New England, exploring how the past is often misunderstood and how history, family, heartache, and desire can echo over centuries. In twelve luminous stories set across three centuries,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Normal Rules Don't Apply

  Stories

  Atkinson, Kate,

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  A dazzling collection of eleven interconnected stories from the bestselling, award-winning author of Shrines of Gaiety and Life After Life, with everything that readers love about her novels--the inventiveness, the verbal felicity, the sharp…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Unaccustomed Earth

  Lahiri, Jhumpa

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  Knopf Canada is proud to welcome this bestselling, Pulitzer Prize--winning author with eight dazzling stories that take us from Cambridge and Seattle to India and Thailand as they explore the secrets at the heart of family life. In the stunning…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Smoke Gets in Your Eyes

  and Other Lessons From the Crematory

  Doughty, Caitlin,

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  The blogger behind the popular Web series Ask a Mortician describes her experiences working at a crematory, including how she sometimes got ashes on her clothes and how she cared for bodies of all shapes and sizes.

• How Far the Light Reaches

  a Life in Ten Sea Creatures

  Imbler, Sabrina,

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  In their shimmering, otherworldly debut, Sabrina Imbler profiles ten of the ocean's strangest creatures, drawing astonishing connections between their lives and ours and illuminating wondrous models of survival, adaptation, identity, sex, and care…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• Telltale Hearts

  a Public Health Doctor, His Patients, and the Power of Story

  Schillinger, Dean-David,

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  For over four decades, Dr. Dean-David Schillinger has been a witness to the evolution of public health in America. From his days as a young, bright eyed resident to the Chief of Internal Medicine at one of the country's largest public hospitals,…Read moreRead more of this annotation

• The Small and the Mighty

  Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History, From the Founding to the Civil Rights Movement / Sharon McMahon

  McMahon, Sharon,

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  From America's favorite government teacher, a heartfelt, inspiring portrait of twelve ordinary Americans whose courage formed the character of our country. In The Small and the Mighty, Sharon McMahon proves that the most remarkable Americans are…Read moreRead more of this annotation