Spanning forty years and two continents, Lost Birds weaves a tale of Irene Matas and her friends, who arrive as children in Chicago after the Second World War and begin to puzzle out what it means to be American. These interconnected stories follow the residents on Talman Street who fled the Soviet takeover of their country. While the parents, sick with nostalgia and grief for their lost homeland, cling to their old ways, their conflicted children are torn between allegiance to their parents and the bright appeal of America. As Irene and her restless friends come of age in the sixties, they begin to grow beyond their close but insular neighborhood, but still feel drawn to their past. When after many years, the impossible happens—the Iron Curtain finally falls—some return to visit relatives only to find their country ravaged by the Soviets. Irene returns to find something she never expected.

Lost Birds

Literature & Fiction

Putrius, Birute

Genre Fiction

Birchwood Press

In 1902 Lithuania, a group of rebels armed with books triumphs against the mighty Russian Empire. Part folktale, part thriller, THE LAST BOOK SMUGGLER tells the story of Ada and her grandfather Viktoras, an old book smuggler tired of his forty-year battle to keep his language alive despite the attempts of the Russian Empire to destroy it. Into their world steps Jonas, a young man in love with Ada and ready to join the underground book smugglers. But there is a traitor in their midst who must stop them or lose everything. Based on the author's grandfather, who was a book smuggler, the novel deftly captures the politics and dangers of the times while bringing to life an engaging and quirky family, with an element of the supernatural.

The Last Book Smuggler

Parenting & Relationships

Marriage for Love: A Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Woman's Fight for Justice

How did a penniless nineteenth-century farm woman with an alcoholic husband, seven children, and little education, living in a rural backwater of the tsarist Russian empire far from any centers of culture manage to become the initiator of literary prose fiction in the Lithuanian language and write six volumes of stories, plays, and letters? Not only that, but she also distinguished herself as a feminist activist against patriarchy, especially the centuries-long tradition of arranged marriages. During the First World War she traveled the United States for five years, giving speeches from Chicago to New Hampshire for the cause of relieving the famine and suffering of her war-torn country.

Žemaitė'

Literary

Filled with Americana that is folksy, funny, and at times heartbreaking, Barefoot Missouri Days is filled with a sense of wonder and a wry wit as Baylis Glascock explains his bafflement with all things sexual and his equal confusion over racial, ethnic, and economic disparity, realities that he treats with sensitivity. 
Filmmaker and editor, Glascock recalls, with vivid and almost cinematic clarity, the years of his childhood on the small family farm near Hannibal, Missouri, where Mark Twain lived and wrote. Recounting the awe of nature, the joy of mischief, the pain of humiliation, and the strength of family bonds, Baylis brings small-town life into sharp and endearing focus.\nOf his childhood and teen years in the post-World War II era of the Midwest, Baylis says it best himself: "This small farm in the center of the continent was the center of my father's world, as it had been for his father and grandfather. Land that had succored generations of my family. Land they had served, as it had served them. Clearing, planting, harvesting, fertilizing, always demanding toil. In good times, the land gave bountifully. A place to live in communion with nature. This communion, the very ground of their being. Understood deeply, but they had no words for it. As if, like the true name of God, it could not be spoken."

Barefoot Missouri Days

Biographies & Memoirs

Glascock, Baylis

Regional U.S.

All Charlotte Deerborn wanted was a nice Thanksgiving dinner with family and friends. Too bad for her no one else wanted to be there. By the time the turkey is carved, old grievances, bad behavior and crass remarks have transformed her dinner party into a disaster. And then a werewolf shows up to do some carving of its own. Wolf at the Door is a fast-paced, absurdist take on modern creature horror, levering humor and action to highlight how one family comes to grips with what really matters in life.

Wolf at the Door

McKay, Mr. Joel

Humor & Satire

The illuminated landscapes and still lives of the visionary painter Maxwell Gordon (1910-1983) were much celebrated in New York throughout the 1940s and 1950s (by Dore Ashton among others), exhibited at prestigious venues such as The Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Corcoran Gallery in Washington and the Israel Museum in Jerusalem. Then, in 1962, Gordon vanished from the art world map, and until now has remained largely invisible. More than a quarter-century after his death, Farewell the Tranquil Mind: The Art of Maxwell Gordon brings together the most extensive available record of his work, beginning with the whimsical expressionism of his early years, the social realism of his middle years and the hauntingly primitive dream-world of his final decades in Mexico and Israel. Gorgeously produced with over 100 full-color reproductions and a lengthy biographical essay by Wall Street Journal columnist Bret Stephens, Farewell the Tranquil Mind is a landmark tribute to an unsung genius of twentieth-century American art.

Farewell the Tranquil Mind: The Art of Maxwell Gordon

Arts & Photography

Stephens, Bret

Individual Artists

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Birchwood Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Birchwood Press

See the best price to sell, buy or rent books by the Birchwood Press publisher. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Lost Birds

The Last Book Smuggler

Marriage for Love: A Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Woman's Fight for Justice

Marriage for Love: A Nineteenth-Century Lithuanian Woman's Fight for Justice

Barefoot Missouri Days

Wolf at the Door

Farewell the Tranquil Mind: The Art of Maxwell Gordon