Washoe County Library System

"H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means-now-to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the...

The story of growing old in another age. The time is the early 1910s, the protagonist a grandmother. She complains her children treat her like a child, taking her for walks and car rides to keep her healthy, activities she hates. One can only speculate how grandma would view the modern practice of sending aging relatives to old people's homes. The shadow of age -- My mother's home -- The conventions of age -- Other people's medicine -- The compensation...

Nim Rusoe is a young girl who inhabits an isolated island with her scientist father and communicates, via e-mail, with the reclusive author of the novel she has been reading. Nim's existence mirrors that of her favorite literary character, Alex Rover, the world's greatest adventurer. But Alexandra, the author of the Rover books, leads a reclusive life in the big city. When Nim's father goes missing from the island, Nim gets Alexandra to come to her...

"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...

Offers an account of the first fourteen years of the author's life in poems, telling of her time spent between her mother's native Cuba and her home in Los Angeles, until the revolution in Cuba dramatically alters relations between the two countries she loves.

"This book is about Zelda Popkin who lived and wrote through all the great changes of American Jewish women's lives in the 20th century: the reaction against religious tradition, women's emancipation, struggles against antisemitism, the impact of the Holocaust and the creation of Israel, and the upsurge of Jewish identity in the 1960s"-- "Zelda Popkin’s adventurous life could have made her the protagonist of one of her own novels. In his brilliant...

An intimate exploration of the life, craft, and legacy of one of the most revered and influential writers, an artist who continues to inspire fans and creatives to cultivate practices of deep attention, rigorous interrogation and beautiful style. Joan Didion was a writer's writer; not only a groundbreaking journalist, essayist, novelist and screenwriter, but a keen observer who honed her sights on life's telling details. Her insights continue to influence...

"Lydia Maria Child (1802-1880) was for a time one of America's most beloved authors, known for household manuals and children's poems, including the immortal "Over the River and Through the Wood." But in 1833, having converted to the abolitionist cause, Child published An Appeal in Favor of that Class of Americans Called Africans, the first book-length condemnation of slavery printed in the United States. Child's book created an immediate uproar and...

A compendium of biographical and historical anecdotes, recipes, activities, and crafts from the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her nine Little House books.