"What do you do for a living?" the podiatrist (or the photographer or the woman in the train station) asks, and Joan Connor answers, "I'm a writer," waiting with a cringe for the inevitable rejoinder: "Oh, boy, do I have a story for you " How such offerings, not stories but small reports from the thick of life, become rich reflections on the nature of waiting and writing, language and love, memory and hope, is the mystery of this award-winning collection of essays. Traveling between the poles of Ohio and Vermont, childhood and motherhood, Connor writes of a peripatetic family whose oddities...
"What do you do for a living?" the podiatrist (or the photographer or the woman in the train station) asks, and Joan Connor answers, "I'm a writer," w...
In the center of the rural boomtown of Soda Springs, Idaho, stands the historic Enders Hotel, Cafe, and Bar, a three-story brick building that has been many things to many people. But to one family who bought it as an attempt to renew themselves it was home, a place they desperately tried to hold on to and yet, after seventeen years of living there, the very place from which they wanted to escape.Growing up under its leaking roof, Brandon R. Schrand watched a cast of broken characters pass through the hotel doors an alcoholic artist, a forgotten boxing champ, an ex-con, a homeless family and...
In the center of the rural boomtown of Soda Springs, Idaho, stands the historic Enders Hotel, Cafe, and Bar, a three-story brick building that has bee...
Although finding a way to feel at home in the world is ultimately the life s work of us all, rarely has the search ranged as far or found as precise and moving an expression as it does in An Inside Passage. Winner of the 2008 River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize, Kurt Caswell s narrative chronicleshis travels in the rugged mountain forests of Japan s Shiretoko National Park, on a vision quest in Death Valley, and to the sacred waters of the Ganges River. Whether contemplating a great blue heron as it rests riverside at the onset of a storm, reflecting on a beloved student s untimely...
Although finding a way to feel at home in the world is ultimately the life s work of us all, rarely has the search ranged as far or found as precise a...
This is Hannah, Lynne Hugo introduces her chocolate Labrador retriever to an aged woman in a wheelchair at the Golden View Nursing Home. Would you like to pat her? I don t know, the woman responds warily. Dogs are complicated. So, of course, is life, especially as the years accumulate and the body declines. In fact, it is precisely the most painful complications that Hugo hopes to ease with Hannah, her exuberant therapy dog. Where the Trail Grows Faint is the story of Hugo s experiences with Hannah and the elderly patients they visit. In return for their visits, Hugo...
This is Hannah, Lynne Hugo introduces her chocolate Labrador retriever to an aged woman in a wheelchair at the Golden View Nursing Home. Would you lik...
Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus chronicles the story of an American family against the backdrop of one of the civil rights movement s lesser-known stories. In January 1957, Joseph Spagna and five other young men waited to board a city bus called the Sunnyland in Tallahassee, Florida. Their plan was simple but dangerous: ride the bus together three blacks and three whites get arrested, and take their case to the U.S. Supreme Court. Fifty years later Ana Maria Spagna sets off on a journey to understand what happened and why.Spagna travels from her remote mountain home in the Pacific...
Test Ride on the Sunnyland Bus chronicles the story of an American family against the backdrop of one of the civil rights movement s lesser-kno...
Bullet-shattered glass clatters onto his baby bed; he wakes and cries out into darkness. Does he remember this? Or remember being told? Regardless, he feels it, and will feel it again, bomb bay wind buffeting his eighteen-year-old body a mile above an old volcano s jagged debris, and yet again, staring at photos of Korean orphans, huddled homeless in a blizzard after a bombing in which, at twenty-five, he d refused an order to join. It is through such prisms of the past that Ralph Salisbury s life unfolds, a life that, eighty years in the making, is also the life of the twentieth century....
Bullet-shattered glass clatters onto his baby bed; he wakes and cries out into darkness. Does he remember this? Or remember being told? Regardless,...
John W. Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied in Miami, and were working for a year in Romania when they set off with friends to hike into the Carpathian Mountains. In an instant their life together was shattered. Katie became separated from the group. When Evans finally found her, he could only watch helplessly as she was mauled to death by a brown bear.
In such a love story, such a life story, how could a person ever move forward? That is the question Evans, traumatized and...
John W. Evans was twenty-nine years old and his wife, Katie, was thirty. They had met in the Peace Corps in Bangladesh, taught in Chicago, studied ...
2017 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Finalist
The autobiographical essays in The Girls in My Town create an unforgettable portrait of a family in Los Angeles. Reaching back to her grandmother's childhood and navigating through her own girlhood and on to the present, Angela Morales contemplates moments of loss and longing, truth and beauty, motherhood and daughterhood. She writes about her parents' appliance store and how she escaped from it, the bowling alley that provided refuge, and the strange and beautiful things she sees while...
2017 PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Finalist
The autobiographical essays in The Girls in My Town<...
Knowing next to nothing about fishing, Rosemary McGuire signed on to the crew of the Arctic Storm in Homer, Alaska, looking for money and experience. Cold, hard work and starkly sexist harassment were what she found. Here is her story of life on a fishing boat as the only woman crew member. Both an adult coming-of-age tale and a candid look at the Alaskan fishing industry, this is the story of a woman in a man's world. Anyone who has ever longed to sail in heavy seas will relish her account of working in an ancient profession that has changed remarkably little over the course of...
Knowing next to nothing about fishing, Rosemary McGuire signed on to the crew of the Arctic Storm in Homer, Alaska, looking for money and ...
A book about ownership. It begins with an essay about being given a man's furniture while he's on trial for murder and follows with essays that question corporeal, familial, and intellectual forms of ownership. Mining her own life and those of others, Sarah Viren considers the contingencies of ownership alongside the realities of loss in this debut essay collection.
A book about ownership. It begins with an essay about being given a man's furniture while he's on trial for murder and follows with essays that questi...
