If you live in New England, you know that cold weather is creeping in on us—and that means it's time to curl up with a good book under a warm blanket! This month, we're happy to present to you our most ambitious project ever . . .

As you'll see below, Tom Fitzgerald plunks Ben Franklin smack in the middle of contemporary America in his novel Poor Richard's Lament. The results are amazing.

If you could invite any historical figure to visit us in our time, who would it be (and why)?

Please share your thoughts with us (long or short) on our Facebook page or through email.

A Most Timely Tale

Poor Richard's Lament is "not only a grand and gorgeous novel, it is also, as Fitzgerald's Franklin might put it, a most timely one." So says Michael Zuckerman in his equally timely Foreword. We are more than a little excited to be able to present this "tour de force" to the world.

"A re-imagining of Benjamin Franklin you will not soon forget..." says Walter Isaacson, author of Benjamin Franklin: An American Life, and Steve Jobs. But this is also more than a re-imagining of Franklin. It is a re-imagining of America itself. Where did the cultural legacy of Ben Franklin go wrong? We come to understand this, even as Franklin himself comes to self-realization in this book, during his "celestial trial" and during his dramatic reintroduction into 21st-century America. At the end, a better country emerges.

November Special: Poor Richard's Lament is on sale for $20 (regular $30)!

Tom Fitzgerald talks about the origins of Poor Richard's Lament and tells us a few things we didn't know about Benjamin Franklin.

Hobblebush is best known for its poetry titles and non-fiction titles. We don't normally publish fiction. So why did we bust out of our box and publish Poor Richards Lament?

Perhaps because it's a once-in-a-lifetime kind of book. Maybe because of the soaring poetry of its language. Maybe because of the Perry-Mason-like pleasure of its celestial courtroom scenes, where in the middle of amazing rhetorical flights, we hear belches and farts and guffaws and then, just when Ben is most put on the spot, all hell breaks loose—flashes of psychedelic light, crashing thunder and the most amazing visions. Later the reader is dumped onto the street with Ben, who has dismounted his Segway named Sloan to save the soul of a depressed homeless veteran, and he does it with aplomb.

This book was born to be a movie, and we hope it one day becomes one. The burden of all it's cinematic technique is to drive home to America a lesson in compassion she desperately needs. But what a delightful way to get there! You will search a long time before you find another book with so much going on at once.

So we are very glad we busted out. It has been the most challenging, but also the most rewarding book we have ever done.

—Sid Hall

When dogs love things, their options for expressing themselves are limited. Sure, they can wag their tails, they can look like they're smiling, but how else can they say, "I love this!?" 

Holly has broken new ground in the field of doggy communications. Here she is expressing her love for all things—books, family, food, sleep—without even moving an inch.