Mailbox Monday #237

Mailbox Monday (click the icon to check out the new blog) has gone on tour since Marcia at To Be Continued, formerly The Printed Page passed the torch.  September’s host is Notorious Spinks Talks.

The meme allows bloggers to share what books they receive in the mail or through other means over the past week.

Just be warned that these posts can increase your TBR piles and wish lists.

Here’s what I received:

1.  Renascence & Other Poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay for $1 from the library sale.

Treasury of 23 works by American poet renowned for the lyric beauty of her early works. In addition to the title poem, this collection includes “Interim,” “Sorrow,” “Ashes of Life,” “Three Songs of Shattering,” “The Dream,” “When the Year Grows Old,” and others, including 6 sonnets. Alphabetical lists of titles and first lines.

2.  Poetic Meter & Poetic Form by Paul Fussell for 50 cents from the library sale.

The title of this book may suggest that it is designed as a latter-day Gradus ad Parnassum to teach aspiring writers to produce passable verses. It is not. It is intended to help aspiring readers deepen their sensitivity to the rhythmical and formal properties of poetry and thus heighten their pleasure and illumination as an appropriately skilled audience of an exacting art.

3. Silence by Becca Fitzpatrick for $1 from the library sale.

Nora Grey can’t remember the past five months of her life. After the initial shock of waking up in a cemetery and being told that she has been inexplicably missing for weeks, she tries to get her life back on track. So she goes to school, hangs with her best friend, Vee, and dodges her mom’s creepy new boyfriend.

But there is this voice in the back of her head, an idea that she can almost reach out and touch. Visions of angel wings and unearthly creatures that have nothing to do with the life she knows. And an unshakable feeling that a part of her is missing.

Then Nora crosses paths with a sexy stranger, with whom she feels a mesmerizing connection. He seems to hold all the answers…and her heart. Every minute she spends with him feels more and more intense until she realizes she could be falling in love. Again.

4.  His Majesty’s Hope by Susan Elia Macneal for 50 cents from the library sale.

World War II has finally come home to Britain, but it takes more than nightly air raids to rattle intrepid spy and expert code breaker Maggie Hope. After serving as a secret agent to protect Princess Elizabeth at Windsor Castle, Maggie is now an elite member of the Special Operations Executive—a black ops organization designed to aid the British effort abroad—and her first assignment sends her straight into Nazi-controlled Berlin, the very heart of the German war machine. Relying on her quick wit and keen instincts, Maggie infiltrates the highest level of Berlin society, gathering information to pass on to London headquarters. But the secrets she unveils will expose a darker, more dangerous side of the war—and of her own past.

5.  Wish You Were Here by Stewart O’Nan for 50 cents from the library sale.

Award-winning writer Stewart O’Nan has been acclaimed by critics as one of the most accomplished novelists writing today. Now comes his finest and most complete novel to date. A year after the death of her husband, Henry, Emily Maxwell gathers her family by Lake Chautauqua in western New York for what will be a last vacation at their summer cottage. Joining is her sister-in-law, who silently mourns the sale of the lake house, and a long-lost love. Emily’s firebrand daughter, a recovering alcoholic recently separated from her husband, brings her children from Detroit. Emily’s son, who has quit his job and mortgaged his future to pursue his art, comes accompanied by his children and his wife, who is secretly heartened to be visiting the house for the last time. Memories of past summers resurface, old rivalries flare up, and love is rekindled and born anew, resulting in a timeless novel drawn, as the best writing often is, from the ebbs and flow of daily life.

What did you receive?