Kategoria BISAC: Fiction >> Biographical

A Bicycle Without A Chain is the story of David Kingsley's ill-fated pursuit of the American dream. As he powerfully pedals up Mount Success, chasing after athletic fame and material prosperity, the chain suddenly snaps. Denied a place in society that he once imagined was easily attainable, Kingsley suddenly finds his life path unexpectedly circuitous. Over the course of several years he surrenders his veil of invincibility, a foolish posturing that had stripped him of his humanity. He manages to come to terms with his vulnerability as he seeks to understand the complicated nature of evil....

In the winter of 1836, a young journalist named Charles Dickens held an infant in his arms. Only eight months of age, Ruby Spriggs was living under the most deplorable conditions that existed in London. Crushing poverty seemed her only future.

Through the intervention of kind patrons, the child blossoms into a young woman instilled with a love of learning and books. But the forces that Dickens...

The Memoirs of a Polar Bear has in spades what Rivka Galchen hailed in the New Yorker as -Yoko Tawada's magnificent strangeness---Tawada is an author like no other. Three generations (grandmother, mother, son) of polar bears are famous as both circus performers and writers in East Germany: they are polar bears who move in human society, stars of the ring and of the literary world. In chapter one, the grandmother matriarch in the Soviet Union accidentally writes a bestselling autobiography. In chapter two, Tosca, her daughter (born in Canada, where her mother had...

Born attached at the chest, Chang and Eng were considered a marvel, an act of God. By any standard, theirs is a history of epic variety and drama. Mark Slouka recounts their tumultuous story, from the docks of Vietnam to American fame, with intimacy and compassion.

A Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, and Dallas Morning News Best Book of the Year.

Almost-spinster schoolteacher Rosette Cordelia Ramsdell married Otis Churchill on a Michigan farm in 1857. Her real-life journal recounts two years of homesteading, history hints at the next six decades, and the novel explores the truth. We meet Rosette in 1888 as she revises the wedding-day page of her journal. In lush detail, in the voices of Rosette and others, the novel traces how we both choose and suffer our destiny, how hopes come to naught and sometimes rise from the wreckage.

In a style reminiscent of Willa Cather, in a family saga...

Abbe Rolnick--teller of tales, celebrant of life, world traveler--offers visions from the heart in this collection of short stories and essays. Explorations of whimsy and wisdom take the reader from the basement of a young girl learning about the Holocaust via a repairman, to a literal and psychological deep dive in the Caribbean, to the humble truths of a dung beetle in Africa, and all points in between. The author's keen perception and compassion light the way.