Bøger i American Lives serien

The Distance Between is a nuanced exploration of and reckoning with absent fathers, fatherhood, addiction, adolescent rage, white male privilege, and the author's own toxic masculinity.

The Virgin of Prince Street chronicles Sonja Livingston's quest to explore devotion and spirituality in her life. Meditations on quirky rituals and fading traditions thoughtfully and dynamically interrogate traditional elements of sacramental devotion, especially as they relate to shifting concepts of religion, relationships, and the sacred.

Offers a transnational and feminist perspective of a contemporary, "glocalized," American life. Xu Xi's quirky, darkly comic, and obsessively personal essays emerge from her diverse professional career as a writer, business executive, entrepreneur, and educator.

Lee Martin tells us in his memoir, “I was never meant to come along. My parents married late. My father was thirty-eight, my mother forty-one. When he found out she was pregnant, he asked the doctor, ‘Can you get rid of it?’” From such an inauspicious beginning, Martin began collecting impressions that, through the tincture of time and the magic of his narrative gift, have become the finely wrought pieces of Such a Life.   Whether recounting the observations of a solemn child, understood only much later, or exploring the intricacies of neighborhood politics at middle age, Martin offers us a richly detailed, highly personal view that effortlessly expands to illuminate our world.   At a tender age Martin moved to a new level of complexity, of negotiating silences and sadness, when his father lost both of his hands in a farming accident. His stories of youth (from a first kiss to a first hangover) and his reflections on age (as a vegan recalling the farm food of his childhood or as a writer contemplating the manual labor of his father and grandfather) bear witness to the observant child he was and the insightful and irresistible storyteller he’s become. His meditations on family form a highly evocative portrait of the relationships at the heart of our lives.

""Insouciant"and "irreverent"are the sort of words that come up in reviews of Dinty W. Moore's books and, invariably, "hilarious".Between Panic and Desire, named after two towns in Pennsylvania, finds Moore at the top of his astutely funny form.

Today, in a world dominated by agribusiness, less than 1% of Americans claim farm-related occupations. What has been lost is something that Evelyn I. Funda experienced firsthand when, in 2001, her parents sold the last parcel of the farm they had worked since 1957. Against that landscape of loss, Funda explores her family's three-generation farming experience in southern Idaho.

This mature, exquisite collection of personal essays by Hilary Masters offers a rare pleasure. Here are meditations and reflections distilled in fine prose from a long and varied life - musings that, in the distinguished tradition of essays carried on since the days of Montaigne, articulate the piquant insights of the writer's experience.

What forges the unique human personality? In Island in the City Micah McCrary, taking his genetic inheritance as immutable, considers the role geography has played in shaping who he is. McCrary considers three places he has called home (Normal, Illinois; Chicago; and Prague) and reflects on how these surroundings have shaped him.

 After contracting polio as a child, Sandra Gail Lambert progressed from braces and crutches to a manual wheelchair to a power wheelchair—but loneliness has remained a constant, from the wild claustrophobia of a child in body casts to just yesterday, trapped at home, gasping from pain. A Certain Loneliness is a meditative and engaging memoir-in-essays that explores the intersection of disability, queerness, and female desire with frankness and humor.Lambert presents the adventures of flourishing within a world of uncertain tomorrows: kayaking alone through swamps with alligators; negotiating planes, trains, and ski lifts; scoring free drugs from dangerous men; getting trapped in a too-deep snow drift without crutches. A Certain Loneliness is literature of the body, palpable and present, in which Lambert’s lifelong struggle with isolation and independence—complete with tiresome frustrations, slapstick moments, and grand triumphs—are wound up in the long history of humanity’s relationship to the natural world.Sandra Gail Lambert is a writer of both fiction and memoir. She is the author of The River’s Memory. She was awarded an NEA fellowship based on an excerpt from A Certain Loneliness.

Clear-sighted, darkly comic, and tender, The Twenty-Seventh Letter of the Alphabet is about a daughter's struggle to face the Medusa of generational trauma without turning to stone. Kim Adrian tries to make peace with a troubled past by cataloguing memories, anecdotes, and bits of family lore in the form of a glossary.

A piecing together, from moments and objects and words of a father's life.

Farmers and pragmatists, hard-working people who made their way west from Kentucky through Ohio and Indiana to settle at last in southern Illinois, Lee Martin's ancestors left no diaries or journals or letters; apart from birth certificates and gravestones. This is one man's story of love and compromise as he separates from his family's history.

Describes the joys and anxieties of preparing for fatherhood in a setting as challenging as it is promising. This work features a story of two people exploring the unmapped territories of loss and grief and finding solace and grace in the mountains.

Whether pulled from the folds of memory, channeled through the icons of Greek mythology and Roman Catholicism, or filtered through the lens of pop culture, Sonja Livingston''s Queen of the Fall considers the lives of women. Exploring the legacies of those she has crossed paths with in life and in the larger culture, Livingston weaves together strands of memory with richly imagined vignettes to explore becoming a woman in late 1980s and early 1990s America.Along the way, the award-winning memoirist brings us face-to-face with herself as an inner-city girl-trying to imagine a horizon beyond poverty, fearful of her fertility and the limiting arc of teenage pregnancy. Livingston looks at the lives of those she''s known: friends who''ve gotten themselves into "trouble" and disappeared never to be heard from again, girls who tell their school counselor small lies out of necessity and pain, and a mother whose fruitfulness seems, at times, biblical. Livingston interacts with figures such as Susan B. Anthony, the Virgin Mary, and Ally McBeal to mine the terrain of her own femininity, fertility, and longing.Queen of the Fall is a dazzling meditation on loss, possibility, and, ultimately, what it means to be human.Sonja Livingston is an assistant professor in the MFA Program at the University of Memphis. Her first book, Ghostbread, won the Association of Writers and Writing Programs Book Prize for nonfiction.

Everything changes when Julie Riddle's parents stumble across the wilderness survival guide How to Live in the Woods on Pennies a Day. More than simply a memoir about family and place, The Solace of Stones explores Riddle's coming of age and the complexities of memory, loss, and identity born by a family homesteading in the modern West.

In this candid and moving memoir, John W. Evans articulates the complicated joys of falling in love again as a young widower. Should I Still Wish chronicles Evans' efforts to leave an intense year of grief behind, to make peace with the natural world again, and to reconnect with a woman who promises a life of abundance and charm.

Modern manhood is confusing and complicated, but Joey Franklin, a thirtysomething father of three, is determined to make the best of it. In My Wife Wants You to Know I'm Happily Married, he offers frank, self-deprecating meditations on everything from male-pattern baldness and the balm of blues harmonica to Grand Theft Auto and the staying power of first kisses.

Liz Stephens has come from Los Angeles to Utah for graduate school, and her brief stint working on a Taco Bell commercial is not much in the way of preparation for taking on the real West. In The Days Are Gods Stephens chronicles a move that is far more than a shift in geographical coordinates.

What is "identity"when you're a girl adopted as an infant by a Cuban American family of Jehovah's Witnesses? The answer isn't easy. You won't find it in books. And you certainly won't find it in the neighborhood. This is just the beginning of Joy Castro's unmoored life of searching and striving that she's turned to account with literary alchemy in Island of Bones.

Doing things by the book"" acquires a whole new meaning in Brandon R. Schrand's memoir of coming of age in spite of himself. The ""works cited"" are those books that serve as Schrand's signposts as he goes from life as a hormone-crazed, heavy-metal wannabe in the remotest parts of working-class Idaho to a reasonable facsimile of manhood.

Cartography of high literary order, plotting routes, real and imagined, and putting an alternate landscape on the map

Settled in what seems like a charmed life in San Francisco, a diagnosis of cancer and the betrayal of a lover shake Tracy Seeley to her roots - roots she is suddenly determined to search out. My Ruby Slippers tells the story of that search, the tale of a woman with an impassioned if vague sense of mission: to find the meaning of home.

Memoirs are as varied as human emotion and experience, and those published in the distinguished American Lives Series run the gamut. Excerpted from this series and collected here for the first time, these dispatches from American lives take us from China during the Cultural Revolution to the streets of New York in the sixties to a cabin in the backwoods of Idaho.

This is an unconventional memoir. A series of lyrical essays about life in a maddeningly complex family during the even more maddeningly complex fifties and sixties, it adds up to one woman's story while simultaneously reflecting the story of her times.

Although Yellowstone is America's oldest, most iconic, and most popular national park, it is perhaps, in W.D. Wetherell's words, "America's least-known best-known place." Detailed in the humorous, and lyrical language that has distinguished Wetherell's award-winning fiction, this introspective journey merges the fascinating story of Yellowstone's history and geography with the author's own story.

A tale of how one young man matures through the sometimes violent blessing of social change and finds himself - and a sense of purpose - through the loss of innocence and naivete, the Seattle of his youth, and his father.