Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
For her collection Lost Wax, Jericho Parms borrows her title from a casting method used by sculptors. As such, these eighteen essays, centered on art and memory, offer an investigation into form and content and the language of innocence, experience, and loss. Four sections (each borrowing names from the sculptures of Degas, Bernini, and Rodin) frame a series of meditations that consider the boundaries of the discernible world and the extremes of the...
Author
Language
English
Description
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 valleys-so,...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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,...
Author
Language
English
Description
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,...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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,...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
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...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A move at age ten from a Detroit suburb to Chattanooga in 1984 thrusts Anjali Enjeti into what feels like a new world replete with Confederate flags, Bible verses, and whiteness. It is here that she learns how to get her bearings as a mixed-race brown girl in the Deep South and begins to understand how identity can inspire, inform, and shape a commitment to activism. Her own evolution is a bumpy one, and along the way Enjeti, racially targeted as...
Author
Language
English
Description
At age fifty, when many hope to slow down, and what's left, as the poet Kobayashi Issa once wrote, is "clear profit," John Griswold was starting over, again, in a position he had worked decades to achieve. His family moved down the Mississippi Valley, expecting to create a good life with new friends.
What they found instead was a society "organized tightly by race, church attendance, and family name," which in its corruption, laissez-faire corporatism,...