When seventeen-year-old T. J. Parsell held up the local Photo Mat with a toy gun, he was sentenced to four and a half to fifteen years in prison. The first night of his term, four older inmates drugged Parsell and took turns raping him. When they were through, they flipped a coin to decide who would "own" him. Forced to remain silent about his rape by a convict code among inmates (one in which informers are murdered), Parsell's experience that first night haunted him throughout the rest of his sentence. In an effort to silence the guilt and pain of its victims, the issue of prisoner rape is a story that has not been told. For the first time Parsell, one of America's leading spokespeople for prison reform, shares the story of his coming of age behind bars. He gives voice to countless others who have been exposed to an incarceration system that turns a blind eye to the abuse of the prisoners in its charge. Since life behind bars is so often exploited by television and movie re-enactments, the real story has yet to be told. Fish is the first breakout story to do that.

As the old axiom goes: "Give a man a fish and he eats for a day. Teach a man to fish and he eats for a lifetime." But teach a woman to fish, and everyone eats for a lifetime. In this firsthand account, Ritu Sharma shares how women can, and are, overcoming the forces that keep them in poverty. She chronicles her travels through four countries—Sri Lanka, Burkina Faso, Honduras, and Nicaragua—and the intimate interactions she had with the women living there. Sharma's story not only details her experiences, but also looks at the broader systems that prevent women from leaving poverty behind. From lack of property rights and government corruption to the scarcity of basic infrastructure like roads, these women are restricted by the external limitations placed upon them. Sharma draws from her experiences to frame a larger exploration of how Americans can be instrumental in helping women break free of restrictive systems and begin to facilitate women's upward mobility. Written in her engaging personal voice, Teach a Woman to Fish provides an insider's look at women in poverty, how Washington works, and how change really happens—from the United States to the rest of the world.

Tom Mann is an American original. Growing up in Depression-era Alabama, for him fishing was more than a recreational activity-it was a way of putting dinner on the table. Following his father's simple advice, "to catch fish, you have to find fish," six-year-old Tom came up with an innovative way of finding the drop-offs in a creek where fish seek refuge from predators. As a young teenager, he began to design and craft special lures, always with an eye toward tricking the freshwater dean of the deep-the largemouth bass. Tom's innate talent in outsmarting the competition above and below the waterline quickly took him from local hero to three-time world bass fishing champion to living legend. He also tapped into his skill for designing lures, building a multi-million-dollar enterprise that has sold over one billion lures to date in major sporting goods and fishing retailers around the world, all with his smiling face on the packages. Yet despite the prestige and fame of a forty-year career, he still resides where it all began-deep in the heart of the South. Filled with touching childhood stories and hilarious down-home fisherman's lore, "Think Like a Fish reveals how Mann quite literally learned to "think like a fish." He explains the technique and mindset that enable him to lure a fish from thirty yards away into a circle the size of a hula hoop; how he "trains" bass to jump right into his boat; and how he purportedly managed to lure a shark to shore with rod and reel. But in addition to the fishing techniques and words of wisdom, Mann explores the path that got him where he is today-a poignant story of determination, Southern grit, and good-ole-boy charm. Full of gentle humor andwit, this book brings to life the allure of the South and one of its favorite pastimes.

When his attempts to get to know his dying father fail, William Bloom makes up stories that recreate his father's life in heroic proportions.

At the heart of Joshua Weiner’s new book is an extended poem with a bold political dimension and great intellectual ambition. It fuses the poet’s point of view with Walt Whitman’s to narrate a decentered time-traveling collage about Rock Creek, a tributary of the Potomac that runs through Washington, DC. For Weiner, Rock Creek is the location of myriad kinds of movement, streaming, and joining: personal enterprise and financial capital; national politics, murder, sex, and homelessness; the Civil War and collective history; music, spiritual awakening, personal memory, and pastoral vision. The questions that arise from the opening foundational poem inform the others in the collection, which range widely from the dramatic arrival of an uncanny charismatic totem that titles the volume to intimate reflections on family, illness, and dream visions. The virtues of Weiner’s earlier books—discursive intelligence, formal control, an eccentric and intriguing ear, and a wide-ranging curiosity matched to variety of feeling—are all present here. But in The Figure of a Man Being Swallowed by a Fish, Weiner has discovered a new poetic idiom, one that is stripped down, rhythmically jagged, and comprehensively philosophical about human limits.