Washoe County Library System

"A heart stopping memoir of a wrenching Appalachian girlhood and a multilayered portrait of a misrepresented people, from Rona Jaffe Writer's Award winner Shawna Kay Rodenberg. When Shawna Kay Rodenberg was four, her father, fresh from a ruinous tour in Vietnam, spirited her family from their home in the hills of Eastern Kentucky to Minnesota, renouncing all of their earthly possessions to live in the Body, an off-the-grid End Times religious community....

A lifelong worrier, Philpott always kept an eye out for danger, a habit that only intensified when she became a parent. But she looked on the bright side, too, believing that as long as she cared enough, she could keep her loved ones safe. Then, in the dark of one quiet, pre-dawn morning, she woke abruptly to a terrible sound-and found her teenage son unconscious on the floor. In the aftermath of a crisis that darkened her signature sunny spirit,...

"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...

"Aurelia, Aurelia begins on a boat. The author, sixteen years old, is traveling to Europe at an age when one can 'try on personae like dresses.' She has the confidence of a teenager cultivating her earliest obsessions--Woolf, Durrell, Bergman--sure of her maturity, sure of the life that awaits her. Soon she finds herself in a Greece far drearier than the Greece of fantasy, 'climbing up and down the steep paths every morning with the real old women,...

Celebrating her fortieth birthday, Laura Fraser confronts the trajectory of her life. Divorced and childless in her thirties, she found solace in the wanderlust that had always directed her heart, but now she wonders if her passion for travel (and for short-lived romantic rendezvous) has deprived her of what she secretly wants most: a husband, a family, a home. How to reconcile what seem to be two opposite desires: for adventure, great food, and new...

"A memoir of motorcycles and muscles, of obsession and grief, and of a young man who learned how to stay alive through literature. At just forty-seven years old, William Giraldi's father was killed in a horrific motorcycle crash while racing on a country road. This tragedy, which forever altered the young Giraldi and devastated his family, provides the pulse for The Hero's Body. In the tradition of Andre Dubus III's Townie, this is a deep-seeing investigation...

"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Last Castle and The Girls of Atomic City comes the fascinating story of America's national day of thanks and of the tenacious and inspiring Sarah Josepha Hale, a nineteenth-century woman who made establishing this holiday her life's mission-one brought to fruition by the wise support of Abraham Lincoln"--

In her critically acclaimed first book, Johnnys Girl, Kim Rich presented the story of her unconventional childhood as the daughter of an Alaskan mobster and a troubled showgirl. This new memoir picks up where Johnnys Girl left off, retelling the story of the authors nearly lifelong pursuit to live what she thought to be “a normal life.” Rich tugs at your heartstrings as you follow her journey toward normalcy, from her teen years, freshly orphaned,...

With more than fifty-five plays to his credit—including the 1979 Pulitzer Prize–winning Buried Child—an Oscar nod for his portrayal of Chuck Yeager in The Right Stuff, and an onscreen persona that’s been aptly summed up as “Gary Cooper in denim,” Sam Shepard’s impact on American theater and film ranks with the greatest playwrights and actors of the past half-century. Despite these accomplishments and more—six collections of prose,...

""As the case with her fiction, Berlin's pieces here are as faceted as the brightest diamond." --Kristin Iversen, NYLON NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW EDITORS' CHOICE. Named a Fall Read by Buzzfeed, Vulture, Newsday and HuffPost A compilation of sketches, photographs, and letters, Welcome Home is an essential nonfiction companion to the stories by Lucia Berlin Before Lucia Berlin died, she was working on a book of previously unpublished autobiographical...