Washoe County Library System

"When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier. As a lifelong O'Hara fan who grew up amid his bohemian cohort in the East Village, Calhoun thought the project would be easy, even fun, but the deeper she dove, the more she had to face not...

"The acclaimed literary essayist T Kira Madden's raw and redemptive debut is a memoir about coming of age as a queer, biracial teenager within the fierce contradictions of Boca Raton, Florida, a place where cult-like privilege, shocking social and racial disparities, rampant white-collar crime, and powerfully destructive standards of beauty hide in plain sight. As a child in Florida, T Kira Madden lived a life of extravagance--from her exclusive private...

The actress reveals her struggle growing up as a gay woman in a strict Catholic family until the age of eighteen, when her father discovered the truth about her sexuality and revealed that he too was gay, leading them to live their double lives together without their family's knowledge.

Named for two literary characters ("Alice" from Lewis Carroll and "Ozma" from L. Frank Baum), the author is the daughter of a Philadelphia-area elementary school librarian. Father and daughter embarked on a streak of reading-out-loud sessions every night before bed as Ozma was growing up--a "streak" that would continue for eight years straight.

Lisa's father, Steve Jobs, was a mythical figure rarely present in her life. As she grew older, he ushered her into a new world of mansions, vacations, and private schools. But he could also be cold, critical, and unpredictable. When her relationship with her mother grew strained in high school, Lisa moved in with her father, hoping he'd become the parent she'd always wanted him to be.

"An exquisitely rendered portrait of a unique father-daughter relationship and a moving memoir of family and identity. Growing up on the Upper West Side of New York City in the 1970s, in an apartment filled with dazzling literary and artistic characters, Priscilla Gilman worshiped her brilliant, adoring, and mercurial father, the writer, theater critic, and Yale School of Drama professor Richard Gilman. But when Priscilla was ten years old, her mother,...

Eleanor Roosevelt's loveless marriage with FDR was no secret, and she had a cold relationship with most of her family, as well. Yet she was a warm person, beloved by friends, and her humanitarian work still influences the world today. Burns shows how Eleanor was shaped by her father Elliott, a lost spirit with a bittersweet story. Brother to Theodore Roosevelt, Elliot would eventually succumb to alcoholism and would be exiled to the Virginia countryside....

"Truly the voice of a generation, George Carlin gave the world some of the most hysterical and iconic comedy routines of the last fifty years. From the "Seven Dirty Words" to "A Place for My Stuff," to "Religion is Bullshit," he perfected the art of making audiences double over with laughter while simultaneously making people wake up to the realities (and insanities) of life in the twentieth century. Few people glimpsed the inner life of this beloved...

A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own livesand see clearly the people we love most. Katharine Smyth was a student at Oxford when she first read Virginia Woolfs modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his deatha calamity that claimed her favorite personshe returned to that beloved novel as a way of wrestling...