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A woman reflects on her working-class roots, her unsuitable exes, and her accidental road to happiness in a memoir of "many delights" (Atlanta Journal Constitution).
A misfit in Spooner, Wisconsin, with its farms, bars, and strip joints, Debra Monroe leaves to earn a degree, then another, and another, and builds a career-if only because her plans to be a midwestern housewife continually get scuttled. Fearless but naive, she vaults over class barriers...
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The questions that drive Priscilla Long's Fire and Stone are the questions asked by the painter Paul Gauguin in the title of his 1897 painting: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going? These questions look beyond everyday trivialities to ponder the essence of our origins.
Using her own story as a touchstone, Long explores our human roots and how they shape who we are today. Her personal history encompasses childhood as an identical...
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"At the Dreamland, women and girls flicker from the shadows to take their proper place in the spotlight. In this lyrical collection, Sonja Livingston weaves together strands of research and imagination to conjure figures from history, literature, legend and personal memory. The result is a series of essays that highlight lives as varied, troubled, and spirited as America itself. Harnessing the power of language, the award-winning essayist breathes...
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Sarah Gorham recounts her childhood education as a rebellious, insecure, angry girl shipped overseas to a tiny international school perched on a mountain shelf in Bernese-Oberland, Switzerland. There, boot camp style, she experienced deprivation, acute embarrassment, and keen educational guidance, all in the name of growing up. The Swiss landscape influenced her with its paradoxes: unforgiving slopes and peaks; government-controlled hills and valleysso,...
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Brian Doyle himself explains it best: "A few years ago I was moaning to my wry gentle dad that basketball, which seems to me inarguably the most graceful and generous and swift and fluid and ferociously-competitive-without-being-sociopathic of sports, has not produced rafts of good books, like baseball and golf and cricket and surfing have . . . Where are the great basketball novels to rival The Natural and the glorious Mark Harris baseball quartet...
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With Let Us Build Us a City Tracy Daugherty considers the principles of literary art in a series of essays that focus on the nature of artistic vision and the creative individual's relationship to the world. The book reads like a master class on writing as practice, while performing a deep reading of art and life and looking to discern why liberal education matters so much to our society.
At its core, Let Us Build Us a City is a work of cultural...
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This collection of more than twenty-five essays, both meditative and formally inventive, considers all kinds of subjects: everyday objects such as keys and hats, plus concepts of time and place; the memoir; writing; the essay itself; and Michael Martone's friendship with the writers David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Kurt Vonnegut. Throughout the essays, Martone's style expands with the incorporation of new technological platforms. Several...
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In Exploded View "graphic" essays play with the conventions of telling a life story and with how illustration and text work together in print. As with a graphic novel, the story is not only in the text but also in how that text interacts with the images that accompany it.
Diagrams were an important part of Dustin Parsons's childhood. Parsons's father was an oilfield mechanic, and in his spare time he was also a woodworker, an automotive mechanic,...
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Oysters are a narrative food: in each shuck and slurp, an eater tastes the place where the animal was raised. But that's just the beginning. André Joseph Gallant uses the bivalve as a jumping off point to tell the story of a changing southeastern coast, the bounty within its waters, and what the future may hold for the area and its fishers. With A High Low Tide he places Georgia, as well as the South, in the national conversation about aquaculture,...
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Learning from Thoreau is an intimate intellectual walk with America's most edgy and original environmentalist. The thrust of the book consists not in learning "about" Thoreau from an intermediary but, as the title suggests, in learning "from" Thoreau along with the author-whose lifelong engagement with this "genius of the natural world" leads him to examine the process of learning from an admired model.
Using both images and text, Andrew Menard...
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Pandora's Garden profiles invasive or unwanted species in the natural world and examines how our treatment of these creatures sometimes parallels in surprising ways how we treat each other. Part essay, part nature writing, part narrative nonfiction, the chapters in Pandora's Garden are like the biospheres of the globe; as the successive chapters unfold, they blend together like ecotones, creating a microcosm of the world in which we sustain nonhuman...
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In February 2010, with the help of a friend who works as a photographer with a National Geographic-sponsored cruise line, Justin Gardiner boarded a ship bound for Antarctica. A stowaway of sorts, Gardiner used his experiences on this voyage as the narrative backdrop for Beneath the Shadow, a compelling firsthand account that breathes new life into the nineteenth-century journals of Antarctic explorers such as Captain Robert Falcon Scott, Sir Ernest...
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"In her debut collection, Made Holy, Emily Arnason Casey explores loss, longing, and the ever-shifting lens of time. Memory and the art of noticing form the basis of these lyric essays that meditate on family, addiction, motherhood, and home. Shifting nimbly between time and place--from the lakes of her childhood in Minnesota to the landscape of her adult life in Vermont--Casey returns to certain memories as though worrying a stone in search of answers....
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Cecile Pineda-award-winning novelist, memoirist, theater director, performer, activist-felt rootlessness throughout much of her life. Her father was an undocumented Mexican immigrant; her mother a French-speaking immigrant from Switzerland. Pineda, born in New York City, felt culturally disconnected from both of her parents, while also ill at ease in U.S. culture. In her life, we see the strange intersection of immigrant politics, troubles with ethnic...
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In My Last Eight Thousand Days, Gutkind turns his notepad and tape recorder inward, using his skills as an immersion journalist to perform a deep dive on himself. Here, he offers a memoir of his life as a journalist, editor, husband, father, and Pittsburgh native, not only recounting his many triumphs, but also exposing his missteps and challenges. The overarching concern that frames these brave, often confessional stories, is his obsession and fascination...
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"In the linked essays that make up her debut collection, This Is One Way to Dance, Sejal Shah explores culture, language, family, and place. Throughout the collection, Shah reflects on what it means to make oneself visible and legible through writing in a country that struggles with race and maps her identity as an American, South Asian American, writer of color, and feminist. This Is One Way to Dance draws on Shah's ongoing interests in ethnicity...
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They called him "pale faced or mixed race." They called him "light, bright, almost white." But, most of the time his family called him "high yella." Steve Majors was the white passing, youngest son growing up in an all-Black family that struggled with poverty, abuse, and generational trauma. High Yella is the poignant account of how he tried to leave his troubled childhood and family behind to create a new identity, only to discover he ultimately,...
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"They called him "pale-faced or mixed race." They called him "light, bright, almost white." But most of the time his family called him "high yella." Steve Majors was the light-skinned youngest son who stood out from the rest of his all Black family. High Yella: A Modern Family Memoir is the poignant account of how he left his family behind in search of a new identity in a world that saw him as white. Eventually he must reconcile his own search for...
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With Mountain Madness, Clinton Crockett Peters chronicles his travels and personal transformation from a West Texas evangelical to mountain guide-addict to humbled humanist after a near-fatal injury in Japan's Chichibu Mountains. From 2007 to 2010, Peters lived in Kosuge Village (population nine hundred), nestled in central Japan's peaks, where he was the only foreigner in the rugged town. Using these three years as a frame, this essay collection...
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