Part memoir and part urban social history, Pieces from Life's Crazy Quilt is an African American woman's personal account of her life during a racially turbulent period in a northern American city. Raised in a black neighborhood in urban Detroit, Marvin V. Arnett begins her book with her birth during the Great Depression, and ends with the infamous Detroit race riot of 1943. Arnett's close observations and attention to the details of her neighborhood and the complex adult relationships around her make this an understated yet powerful story of witness. Like the idiosyncratic pieces of a...

Tamsen Donner. For most the name conjures the ill-fated Donner party trapped in the snows of the Sierra Nevada Mountains in 1846-47. Others might know Tamsen as the stoic pioneer woman who saw her children to safety but stayed with her dying husband at the cost of her own life. For Gabrielle Burton, Tamsen's story, fascinating in its own right, had long seemed something more: the story of a woman's life writ large, one whose impossible balancing of self, motherhood, and marriage spoke to Burton's own experience.

This book tells of Burton's search to solve the mystery of...

Although Yellowstone is our oldest, most iconic, and most popular national park, it is perhaps, in W. D. Wetherell's words, America s least-known best-known place. Wetherell, arriving at the park on the eve of his fifty-fifth birthday, feels the need to examine where life s mileage has brought him. In the encounter that follows, a writer entering late middle age confronts not only a magnificent corner of the vast American landscape but also the American experience itself.Detailed in the wise, humorous, and lyrical language that has long distinguished W. D. Wetherell s award-winning fiction,...

Just Breathe Normally opens with a traumatic accident. Shattered perceptions and shards of narrative recount the events, from wreck through recovery and beyond. In lyric prose, the stories spiral back through generations to touch on questions of mortality and family, immigration and migration, legacies intended or inflicted.In the wake of her near-fatal cycling collision, Peggy Shumaker searches for meaning within extremity. Through a long convalescence, she reevaluates her family s past, treating us to a meditation on the meaning of justice and the role of love in the grueling process...