Catalog Search Results

Joyride is a magic carpet ride through Orlean's life and career, where every day is an opportunity for discovery and every moment holds the potential for wonder. Throughout her storied career, her curiosity draws her to explore the most ordinary and extraordinary of places, from going deep inside the head of a regular ten-year-old boy for a legendary profile ("The American Man Age Ten") to reporting on a woman who owns twenty-seven tigers, from capturing...

"Appalachia-a distinctly American landscape, dense with forests and small churches, rich in history and misunderstandings-has been the great setting for Jayne Anne Phillips's work. She grew up in the small town of Buckhannon, West Virginia and has always kept it close, even as she and her boundless imagination have traveled. In these essays, Phillips brings us into her childhood and family, most movingly her mother. She recreates the place she calls...

"On her second birthday in 1967, Bernice McFadden died in a car crash near Detroit, only to be resuscitated after her mother pulled her from the flaming wreckage. Firstborn Girls traces her remarkable life from that moment up to the publication of her first novel, Sugar. Growing up in 1980s Brooklyn, Bernice finds solace in books, summer trips to Barbados, and boarding school to escape her alcoholic father. Discovering the works of Alice Walker and...

A memoir that examines rural poverty and the lingering strains of racism in the South by the author of Salvage the bones.

One of Publishers Weekly’s Best Books of 2019 
A journey through the many ways to live an artistic life—from the flashy and famous to the quiet and steady—full of unexpected insights about creativity and contentment, from the author of The Good Girl’s Guide to Getting Lost.
Rachel Friedman was a serious violist as a kid. She quit music in college but never stopped...

The groundbreaking biography of one of the world's best-loved and bestselling authors

Who was the real Georgette Heyer?

Georgette Heyer famously said, "I am to be found in my work."

Who was this amazing writer who was so secretive about her personal life that she never gave an interview? Where did she get her ideas? Were there real-life models for her ultra-manly heroes, independent-minded heroines,

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"As a young woman, Elvira left California to work as a cigarette girl in glamorous late-1920s Tijuana, where an ambiguous relationship with a wealthy white man taught her life lessons about power, sex, and opportunity. As Moraga charts her mother's journey--from impressionable young girl to battle-tested matriarch to, later on, an old woman suffering under the yoke of Alzheimer's--she traces her own self-discovery of her gender-queer body and Lesbian...

"Donna Freitas has lived two lives. In one life, she is a well-published author and respected scholar who has traveled around the country speaking about Title IX, consent, religion, and sex on college campuses. In the other, she is a victim, a woman who suffered and suffers still because she was stalked by her graduate professor for more than two years. [...] In Consent: A Memoir of Unwanted Attention, Donna Freitas delivers a forensic examination...

"Jacqueline Woodson, one of today's finest writers, tells the moving story of her childhood in mesmerizing verse. Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and...

How do you tell a story? Before Toni Morrison was a Pulitzer Prize winner and Nobel Prize-winning author, she was Chloe Ardelia Wofford, a little girl in Ohio who was both the only Black child in her first-grade classroom and the only student who was able to read. This is the true story of how that young girl learned from her upbringing, surrounded herself with stories, and made a tremendous impact on the world. Toni Morrison's pen was her sword,...