Washoe County Library System

In the tradition of Mary Karr's "The Liars' Club" and Rick Bragg's "All Over But the Shouting," Jeannette Walls has written a stunning and life-affirming memoir about surviving a willfully impoverished, eccentric and severely misguided family. The child of an alcoholic father and an eccentric artist mother discusses her family's nomadic upbringing, during which she and her siblings fended for themselves while their parents outmaneuvered bill collectors...

As further evidence of his family's bad fortune which they attribute to a curse on a distant relative, Stanley Yelnats is sent to a hellish correctional camp in the Texas desert where he finds his first real friend, a treasure, and a new sense of himself. "Stanley Yelnats’s family has a history of bad luck, so he isn’t too surprised when a miscarriage of justice sends him to a boys’ juvenile detention center, Camp Green Lake. But there is no...

A deejay who finds himself penniless is plucked from disaster by a homeless history professor, who lives in a fantasy world full of castles, Red Knights and damsels in distress. Together they begin a modern quest for redemption and the Holy Grail.

We avert our eyes when we meet them on the street: homeless mentally ill people with their hand-scrawled signs, shopping carts, and cardboard boxes. Because of the fear and revulsion they arouse in us, or the guilty relief we feel at our own relative good fortune, we fail to see—no, insistently deny—any human connection with them. Still, we're curious: How do these people end up on the street and how do they survive the stress and privations...

While setting up a homeless shelter at the church, Sebastian and his friends, Corrie and David, solve the mystery of a dead man found in an abandoned inn.

Six imaginative schoolmates embark on a game in which they pretend to be gypsies, but when one of the boys runs away and takes up with a group of homeless people, the game threatens to become all too real.

"When Chet the dog, "the most lovable narrator in all of crime fiction" (Boston Globe), and his human partner, PI Bernie Little, are approached by a down-and-out older man with a cardboard sign at an exit ramp, Bernie is shocked to discover the man is a former teammate from his high school baseball team. Chet and Bernie take Rocket out for a good meal, and later, Bernie investigates Rocket's past, trying to figure out what exactly went wrong. Then,...

A homeless bear living in a city has a hard time getting by, but when a little girl makes friends with him, his life becomes brighter.

On a bike outing to the abandoned houses by the old cement mill, Delsie and her friend Todd discover one of the houses is not empty--and a ghost dog haunts the area.